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?
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Re: “distracting little rituals”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Writing blog posts, for sure.
ReplyDeleteNY Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader.
ReplyDeleteCrosswords.
ReplyDeletesharpening only slightly blunt pencils, scrawling notes/calculations/to-do lists in my notebook, and Google Reader, in roughly that order.
ReplyDelete