2 January 2009 (6 Tevet 5769)
Although I like my work, including both teaching and research-shmesearch, especially here in Israel, I have never considered myself a workaholic. But in the past few months I find myself working like a workaholic in every sense of the word.
The amount of free time I have at my disposal remains more or less the same, but I feel as if time were shrinking as I become older; I remember being able to accomplish more with the same amount of time when I was younger. On the other hand, the amount of work I have and/or want to do has been growing constantly.
There are three things I allow myself to do in order to refresh myself: running in the morning, swimming before supper, and drinking wine during supper. But I have been so busy recently that I have been forced to run and swim less frequently. I am also afraid that I may soon be forced to drink less not only in quantity but also in frequency. Less physical exercise and less wine may leave me more time for work, but I feel that this might decrease my productivity. Nevertheless, the quantity of work I have to deal with is so great that I have no other choice.
What has started to really bother and depress me, however, is something else. Recently I have been wondering for what ultimate purpose, or to be more precise, for whom I am working like a workaholic. Until a few years ago I did not feel a strong need for a life companion with whom I can share my joy and sorrow of life, but I have been feeling such a need so keenly. I would like to know that I am working so hard not for its own sake but for some spiritually, if not necessarily intellectually, significant purpose, and for some significant other.
9 January 2009 (13 Tevet 5769)
There is one task I have been imposing on myself since I started teaching in the present workplace in October 2004. It is to teach a new elective course for graduate students every year. I have been fortunate to have all my proposals for new courses approved. In this way I could teach (and learn as a result) such diverse subjects as Hebrew and Jewish languages, Jewish onomastics, contact linguistics and language planning; this year I am teaching linguistic typology, and next year I will teach linguistic ecology as an elective course for graduate students. This is luxury for a teacher.
This self-imposed task has two purposes. The first is to diversify the curriculum at our department and hopefully introduce our students to those disciplines of general, Hebrew and Jewish linguistics that are new to them. And the second purpose is to learn for myself through teaching, as I have become convinced through years of experience that teaching something is the best way of learning it.
I propose those subjects that have interested me and have not been offered at our department. I had studied most of them either formally or by myself before I taught them, but I taught one subject (Jewish onomastics) while learning it by myself simultaneously, so naturally I learned more by teaching it than any other subject.
Of the above-mentioned subjects linguistic typology is probably the only one that I studied formally as a student. So I thought it would not be so difficult to prepare each lesson. But I have proved to be totally wrong. The main difficulty I face as a teacher is how to present structural diversities in various languages in a palatable manner to those who know only Hebrew and English without "drowning" them in the sea of languages unknown to them.
There are not many new things I learn about the subject through teaching, but I do learn something else - a lesson that it is often more difficult to teach something you thought you knew than something totally new even to you, as you are required to explain what you have taken for granted. For this reason I find myself spending far more time (often all my free time on weekdays) preparing each lesson this time than I did when I taught the other subjects I was less familiar with.
16 January 2009 (20 Tevet 5769)
I am so desperately in need of more time for my own work that I am asking myself which of my daily activities I can stop or reduce while keeping more or less the same degree of productivity (I write academic articles so slowly that I do not consider myself productive, but I want to keep what little productivity I have). I already know from my experience that simply having more time does not necessarily lead to more amount of work unless that additional time is equally "dense".
There are a few daily activities I can reduce, if not stop altogether, without becoming less productive. One of them is to receive less email messages in the first place by unsubscribing from certain mailing lists and web feeds and to spend less time checking email. I am well aware that this borders on addiction for me (like many other netizens).
On the other hand, there are several things I do regularly in order to keep my physical and mental health, which hopefully helps me keep my free time "dense" in turn, so stopping or reducing them may reduce my productivity in exchange for more time: 1) sleeping at least seven hours a day, 2) running several times a week in the morning, 3) swimming several times a week in the afternoon, 4) cooking lunch and supper by myself if I am at home, 5) drinking (red) wine daily, and probably also 6) writing this online journal once a week.
In the past I tried several times to sleep less at night, but then I always felt drowsy during the day and could not concentrate on what I had to do, so sleeping less cannot be a possibility unless I should find some magical formula that would enable me to sleep less while functioning equally productively. For the past several weeks I have been running, swimming and cooking by myself far less frequently. I have already noticed a negative change in the way I feel physically, though my body may look more or less the same externally; my mind is also bothered with more "noise", which running and swimming generally dispel. For these physical and mental changes I feel I can concentrate far less on my work though I may gain several hours a week. I could also save time I spend for cooking by myself by eating outside, but the problem is that those restaurants that serve what I consider healthy and does not make me feel physically bad afterwards are few and far between in Jerusalem (and probably in Israel), and it even takes more time to go there and come back than to cook by myself. As for drinking wine, I definitely have to stop it at lunch (except on Sabbaths and holidays), but I am afraid that if I stop drinking it altogether even at supper, I may become frustrated and less productive, as it is probably the only culinary pleasure I have.
In short, there are unfortunately few things I can stop or reduce in my daily life, which is already quite minimalistic, for the sake of more productivity. I can think of (and have already experienced several times), however, one thing that can enhance my productivity without my stopping or reducing any other daily activity, but the problem is that it requires someone else's "help" and at the present moment I have no one I feel like asking for it.
23 January 2009 (27 Tevet 5769)
[no update due to a busy schedule]
30 January 2009 (5 Shvat 5769)
[no update due to a busy schedule]