Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Re: “distracting little rituals”

In The Pale King, David Foster Wallace calls them “distracting little rituals” — ways to break up deskwork. Mine (from most to least frequent): checking my “stuff” (e-mail accounts and blog stats), making a cup of tea, playing the piano for a few minutes, choosing pens and pencils, removing files and folders from my Mac’s desktop, filling a seldom-used fountain pen.

What are your preferred forms of work-avoidance?

comments: 4

Elaine Fine said...

Writing blog posts, for sure.

Geo-B said...

NY Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader.

Elaine said...

Crosswords.

Mike said...

sharpening only slightly blunt pencils, scrawling notes/calculations/to-do lists in my notebook, and Google Reader, in roughly that order.