Abstracted Mind

The last few days have been a bit odd for me. After a hike at the close of Thanksgiving vacation, which primarily became a flurry of work, I lost nearly all motivation to get stuff done. Though there are pretty major deadlines looming ahead of me I just don’t feel like doing any of it.

Thinking over it, there are a lot of things that could be causing this. My parents, whom I haven’t seen for a year, are visiting from India. There is a major move coming up where my entire dorm will be moved to a different location.

You could say that I’ve been busy hanging out with my parents and preparing for the move, but that’s not really it. In actuality I seem to have had more time this week to get things done than the last few, yet at the same time I feel like I got less accomplished. I open up eclipse, I stare at it for a bit, and move on away. I go catch up on twitter, or watch some show on hulu. But I don’t find myself really wanting to anything.

Then I had a conversation with a friend last night. He told me that he had a meeting in one of the study rooms in our dorm. His entire team sat there for 45 minuets doing nothing. None of them could muster up any mental energy to move forward with their project. Then they moved to a different location not in the dorm and suddenly everything started moving.

His guess was that the room was just a killer for productivity. I thought about that for a bit. It’s a dingy old room, stacked full of old stuff and packing material provided to the residents for the upcoming room. It’s not clean, everything is wearing down, and the white ceiling light instead of making it bright and cheery place to work simply highlights how worn out the place is. Then I thought about it further and that’s what the entire dorm feels like. The doesn’t look like it has been maintained a single time since it was put up in the 50’s. That’s what my room feels like, and trying to get stuff done in there right now is asking for zero productivity.

That’s when I decided to try my hand at another place. So here I am at the library, where at the very least I have mustered up some energy to write a blog post. And now that I am done, maybe I’ll move on to actually working.