Off days

What do you do on days when, for one reason or another, it appears that you can make no progress on any of the projects you’re working on? Say, some equipment is broken or missing a component, and you’re waiting on a collaborator for another experiment, and your manuscript in progress is sitting on your advisor’s desk, apparently untouched.

There are a few different ways to deal, in roughly descending productivity order:
(a) Decide that you are deluding yourself if you think there is no way to move forward on projects. Fix whatever’s broken, find a workaround, borrow someone else’s equipment, think of a new experiment to do.
(b) Catch up on your reading pile. You know what stack I’m talking about.
(c) Work on the infrastructure or housekeeping projects that you always put off on “real” days because you’re too busy doing experiments to organize the tubing.
(d) Give yourself a well-deserved day off. Go home and do the laundry.
(e) Read the internet.

[For the faculty and TAs, there is also grading/prepping exams/preparing lectures. As a postdoc, though, I’m exempt.]

Obviously some of these coping strategies are more effective than others. Far too often I am an E. It’s just so easy. In my grad lab, because my advisor was not around very often, I would sometimes be a D, which doubles as a sort of mental-health day and usually lets me return the next day more excited to start experiments than E does. As a new postdoc with an omni-present advisor, however, D feels unadvisable.

With just a bit more energy, I ratchet up to a C, and busy myself with ordering chemicals we’re low on, prepping solutions, cleaning, etc. Usually I need either very strong motivation, or a colleague with some useful suggestions, to become an A.

I never, ever, achieve B.