Strange how much easier it is to plan next semester‘s course than to just finishing this week‘s grading. I was just giving myself a few minutes of surfing, honestly, just a moment, you know, only then I thought I’d just ever-so-quickly try to set up Liz Lawley’s MT courseware, and lo and behold it all worked and was really easy so of course then I had to start filling it with content and translating it into Norwegian and… I shouldn’t even admit that. My current students will start emailing me in protest. I promise, students, I’ll get a move on! Really!

I once heard a successful administrator announce his rules for getting things done in an after dinner speech. The rules went something like this:

  1. When you get to work in the morning, start by doing the thing you least want to do.
  2. Keep going.
  3. By doing this you’ll probably already have covered whatever has the shortest deadline but if not, do that now.
  4. Go home. Reboot.

I might have that wrong. Maybe it was do the dreaded thing first then do the things that have to be finished now. I wonder whether it’d work

5 thoughts on “got distracted

  1. steve

    Ha! I spent last night working on my fall syllabus and playing with Liz Lawley’s courseware, instead of finishing the final work of the semester.

  2. nick

    When you get to work in the morning, start by doing the thing you least want to do.

    I used to do that, until that sort of behavior conditioned me not to go into work anymore.

  3. Jill

    See, I knew there was a reason to not follow this advice!

  4. J. Nathan Matias

    Could work avoidance be a scheduling system itself? It seems to me that plenty of work happens during it, when channeled properly.

  5. Norman

    A careful selection of ancestors, combined with a little luck in which of them supplies the relevant DNA, can overcome all such problems.

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

Triple book talk: Watch James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me discuss our 2023 books

Thanks to everyone who came to the triple book talk of three recent books on machine vision by James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me, and thanks for excellent questions. Several people have emailed to asked if we recorded it, and yes we did! Here you go! James and Jussi’s books […]

Image on a black background of a human hand holding a graphic showing the word AI with a blue circuit board pattern inside surrounded by blurred blue and yellow dots and a concentric circular blue design.
AI and algorithmic culture Machine Vision

Four visual registers for imaginaries of machine vision

I’m thrilled to announce another publication from our European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project on Machine Vision: Gabriele de Setaand Anya Shchetvina‘s paper analysing how Chinese AI companies visually present machine vision technologies. They find that the Chinese machine vision imaginary is global, blue and competitive.  De Seta, Gabriele, and Anya Shchetvina. “Imagining Machine […]

Do people flock to talks about ChatGPT because they are scared?

Whenever I give talks about ChatGPT and LLMs, whether to ninth graders, businesses or journalists, I meet people who are hungry for information, who really want to understand this new technology. I’ve interpreted this as interest and a need to understand – but yesterday, Eirik Solheim said that every time […]