How I Structure My Day for Minimal Productivity and What You Can Learn from It

1. I wake up at 8, get ready and bike to work by 9.

2. I endure a 2 hour nonsensical department meeting.

3. I listen to terrible student excuses for late assignments.

4. I have about 17 minutes left for research before lunchtime, which I am expected to experience with my colleagues, as if we were in grade school. I stare at data from research paper, trying to remember what the paper was about.

5. I walk into a colleague's office to ask question about the latest theory on the topic, but we end up talking about how a full professor is refusing to work with a junior professor until they apologize for calling him mean.

6. I go back to office, try to write my paper, but seeing that I only have 9 minutes left before lunch, I open Vinted to waste them.

7. I find a used pair of Dolce & Gabbana shoes from some chick in Italy. Hot damn!

8. I console myself that my terrible salary still allows me to afford used designer stilettos.

9. I recall that academic life leaves no occasion for stilettos and fall into a deep depression.

10. I join my colleagues at our communal lunch table and refresh the latest news that was shared earlier at the nonsensical department meeting.

11. After lunch, I walk to the campus store to buy an energy drink, run into a colleague from another department and get stuck into an overly complicated explanation of his recent book.

12. I put on a Nixon mask for buying the energy drink at the local campus store to avoid being recognized by students. I don't have time to chat and they don't need to know how much chocolate I'm buying.

13. I return to my office to ingest sugar, guarana, and chemicals and write two sentences of my research paper.

14. I recall there's an interesting article about what Nixon wrote in the margins of his books and redirect my afternoon to reading someone else's interesting work instead of trying to do something myself.

15. About then, it's time to bike home and fire up Tinder to lie to strangers about what I do all day.

What you can learn from it:

• Time-blocking is a process that involves coloring rectangles in an Outlook calendar, but the topic-assigned-rectangles do not automatically correlate with the expenditure of time.

• Nixon was really a multi-faceted character.

• Academic life, though it bears resemblance to the job of surfer-bank-robber, is actually somewhat different in the day-to-day.