Hard at Work ... and Sometimes Not

Hi all,

I realize it's been a year since I've posted, and I am sincerely sorry about that. What can I say, PhD life. I will try to catch up as quickly as possible. When I haven't been working, I have been out doing some pretty amazing things.

And now that I have just gone on about how much PhD students work (N.B. in Oxford, because we have to be different, we say DPhil students instead of PhDs), I want to spend a little time talking about how we Oxonians procrastinate. Not that I ever do that. Really. Ever. (⸮)

One of the many things that has struck me about Oxford students is not that we occasionally procrastinate (because everyone does that) but how we procrastinate. For example, think about the usual ways people procrastinate:

• Watch Netflix
• Clean the house ... again
• Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
• Get one more cup of coffee
• Play Tetris
• Bake

Ways in which Oxford DPhil students have actually procrastinated:

• Learn Morse code ... in an afternoon.
• Realize that you know very little about Stoicism. Proceed to read the works of Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius instead of just looking up the basics on Wikipedia.
• Take up knitting, crocheting, or embroidery.
• Learn how to make balloon animals. 
• Build a computer.
• Set about finding the fastest, most efficient way of solving a Rubik's cube.
• Write up a new computer program for computational geneticists, and then sell it off for a fair chunk of 'pints at the pub' money. Just for funsies. 
• Take a weekend off to hike the pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela. For 'research purposes', of course.
• Decide to come as Sabriel from Garth Nix's books to our next MCR bop. Instead of buying an in-the-bag costume from the local party shop, you sew and embellish your own tunic, create armored leggings, and mold your own bells out of urethane plastic casting resin. 
• Watch a documentary on the textile industry in 18th century Russia. Or Georgian home security systems. Or early 19th century bread baking. No, this is not remotely connected to your thesis. You were just curious.
• Researching the format and recommended texts for the mathematical tripos at Cambridge

And the kicker: my friend reported that in high school, he took up three extra exams during his A-levels (the equivalent to US AP subject exams) to procrastinate on studying for his other ones. He then proceeded to point out that by asking a few of my friends to tell me some of their procrastination stories, we were 'procrastinating by trying to remember all the ways we procrastinate so that [I] can procrastinate by forming a list of all our procrastination strategies.'

For a humorous and accurate article on thesis procrastination, check out this article from The Toast.