Team environments contain lots of activities (meetings, answering questions, reports, etc) which are quite tricky because they’re *sometimes* very valuable. And that makes it easy not to notice when you’re only doing them to hide when feeling aversion to tough creative problems.
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I’ve noticed that displacement activities are much more obvious when working alone. There’s no mailing list of questions to answer, so hiding often look more like surfing the internet, cleaning the house, etc. It’s much harder to accidentally convince yourself that that’s work!
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It’s funny: if I get into a good awareness state while in the middle of some tough creative work, I can feel a noticeable “baud rate” of aversive impulses, graspings for easy escapes, etc. Many times a minute! Usually can’t de-identify enough to see that.
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Like the past few minutes, while I’ve been intending to read some very dense 19th century psychology papers, I suddenly felt it was very important to write on Twitter about a totally unrelated topic. w̸̩͊h̴̻̔a̴̲̎t̴̼̔ ̵̝͘ả̴̧ ̸͕̿s̶̭͊u̴͔̽r̸͎͝p̵̖͂r̵̥̂i̶̻͆s̵̉ͅe̵̺͝
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Related: Was reading earlier Hamming's book. May or may not lead to interesting output (Braben's book did inspire a whole series of posts at Nintil!). Am I tricking myself into thinking that this is work just because I like the book or is it genuine work?
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The true answer depends on *why* you read it. (Are you dodging your core work and fooling yourself?) But given that your core creative work involves analyzing and writing about “the means of scientific production,” my priors would be pretty optimistic.
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