Industry week 1: assessment

Franklin's explanatory motto for Industry is: "Lose no time.  Be always employed in something useful.  Cut off all unnecessary actions."

Look at that.  With its three (count 'em) logical absolutes (no time; always employed; all unnecessaries), it's a thing of beauty to me: an inhuman, uncompromising ideal, sure, but a powerful fantasy also.  For me it evokes an optimistic vision of what I might be able to achieve if I could regularly access an idealized, machinelike version of myself. 

The truth is, there have been periods in my working life during which I have almost realized this vision.  They occurred under short- and long-term deadlines.  The less interesting of these involve me grading for 12 or 15 hours straight, say, well into the wee hours of the night, with the tv on mute (to make me feel less isolated), ideally stuck on a channel with patterned images (so as not to distract me) – maybe on the choppy graphs of the weather channel, or the more engaging palette and lighting of CSI: Miami marathons.  I wind up sleeping for a few hours and teaching the next day.  Such all-nighters offer satisfying completions, but they aren't sustainable.  More importantly, they aren't even valuable in the longer term. 

Writing deadlines have a slower approach and a much bigger payoff.  When finishing a large project (articles, dissertation, book), I adopt longer-term versions of what I imagine Franklin conceives of here.  I have evolved taxing, but productive, daily schedules: two, and eventually three, multiple-hour writing stints per day; a daily bout of exercise to keep myself from imploding; a day off once a week, with grocery shopping and the week's only socializing.  Brief periods of daily rest are built into the schedule, primarily to enable its continuation.  That is, virtually all my pleasure during such a work period exists to serve the work.

Such monastic routines are increasingly hard to bear.  After I finish, I look back on them with a mixture of pride, awe, and a recollection of the mounting, agonizing desire they produce to complete them and emerge into a freer life.  They have produced my largest-scale and most intricate work, the research which is at the heart of my professional identity.  It's the hardest thing I do, since the earliest stages of writing have always been difficult for me and the later ones grueling and draining.

I've never been able to keep to such schedules for more than a few months.  I have a large writing project afoot now, and the Virtue Project was largely undertaken to facilitate it.  Thus far – about halfway through my first 13-week cycle of Franklin's virtues – I don't think I've been very successful. 

Part of this has to do with a strangely busy administrative season.  Mostly teaching-free though I may be, I have found myself attending daily meetings.  Arriving at home after these, I have trouble switching gears into a writing mode. 

But looking at Franklin's industry adage, my current days seem crammed with inexcusable, excessive periods of goofing off and delay.  Would the week's chart with its few blots I deem memorable lapses even be an adequate response?  I don't mark every time I fail to cut off an unnecessary action, each moment I "lose time." The singleness of purpose evoked by that adage seems to me to be Franklin's signature quality, and I haven't lived up to it.

For a while I've thought I might try to ratchet up the intensity of performance of the next 13-week cycle of virtues, and perhaps I need to start doing that sooner.  The writing won't wait.  Maybe it's time to return to monastic routines and a more intensely Franklinesque degree of scrutiny, in the interest of a more faithfully Franklinesque productivity.  Next week is officially devoted to Sincerity (more soon), but Industry is going to remain front and center for me.