Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

If you want time alone to think, do something distasteful to your colleagues. They will leave you alone.

A few years ago I was in a job where we had a small refrigerator of soft drinks in the office. One thing that comes from such is that someone has to refill the refrigerator—almost daily in our case. I found myself often doing this.

I can be overly conscientious at times (a birth defect). Instead of putting warm soft drinks into the front of the fridge, I would pull the few cold drinks out of the fridge, put warm drinks in the back, and put the cold ones in the front. That way, if someone bought a drink, they would have a cold one. This little stocking exercise took ten or fifteen minutes a day.

I noticed something: no one spoke to me while I was doing it.

It seemed that they were embarrassed to see me doing the menial task while they wandered about doing nothing.

I looked forward to this stocking exercise everyday. I could move the drinks about quietly and think about my job. No one interrupted me. It was the only uninterrupted thinking time of the day. Wonderful.

I mentioned this to a friend, Jerry Weinberg, who is a noted author and consultant. He replied that he had done something similar while he was a college professor. He walked about the campus picking up trash and putting it into garbage cans. There was always plenty of trash on the ground, so he had all the quiet thinking time he wanted. No one interrupted him. They were embarrassed to do so because they weren’t picking up trash.

Quiet Thinking Time: If you want such, find a menial task that needs to be done but is distasteful to your colleagues. They won’t bother you while you are doing it. Stock the fridge. Clean the fridge. Pick up trash. Think with out interruption.