my future job involves taking labor samples from point a to point b in a huge university campus involving several buildings and there is a ton of downtime: I often see my future coworkers playing on their phones, buying coffee several times a day, talking or smoking out of boredom.
There are moments when every laboratory wants you at once but even then they take it easy and a person cannot be at two places at the same time.
I don’t know if it’s really going to be this relaxed but it really looks so.
I was thinking loading my smartphone with books, find a quiet place and read, learn something.
Instead of smoking I could stretch and do some easy pilates and yoga.
there’s always going several times to the toilet to have a seat and relax with nobody pestering you.
I don’t reckon I could study something for college, write a book or poetry or learn a foreign language, as I couldn’t concentrate.
what do you do in your downtime when you’re lucky enough not to have a supervisor micromanaging you?
so you can study stuff and do coursework but you gotta make it really easy to do accidentally. when I got a paper to write I would make a google drive folder with the project outline and a template for the paper including a reference sheet. I would lazily look up sources occasionally and add the pdfs to the folder and easybib / citation machine them into the reference section by doi. at that point it would be a matter of when the paper would get written, not if. the dopamine would just hit suddenly when I’m having an IBS shit at 2am and “oops. I wrote a research paper.” I accidentally wrote so many papers while shitting. one time I set all of it up and went to bed and turned out one of the group members was also ADHD because when I woke up she’d accidentally done the whole thing while I was asleep. 10/10 method.