Dr. Jennifer Groh

I get frustrated with myself.

It seems like it's, I don't know, I can't necessarily do it.

Sometimes I can, but I've let go of working efficiently as a goal in and of itself.

No, I've always had a problem with the Internet.

The phone is just the way in.

But the phone actually can be helpful to me because I can –

I can close all the tabs on my laptop and just have my phone be the way that I access the Internet, for example.

And that allows for like a kind of a mental and physical separation where I can kind of be like, OK, now I'm doing this.

OK, now I'm doing that and keep them keep them kind of separated.

I come out of the little mini internet break knowing what the next sentence needs to say.

With the hard stuff.

With the easy stuff, I can just, you know, do it, right?

But it's the sense of effortful cognition that takes its own time, and it just takes its time.

And I don't control that.

I do try to set myself up to allow the mental work to happen when I'm in the shower or in the car or whatever.

So, for example, if I'm going to work—

on a grant application with somebody and we're sharing the writing, and I know I can't start until I've had a conversation with the collaborator about who's doing what and what we think this grant is going to be about, I might set up that meeting when there's going to be downtime afterwards.

I did this just yesterday.

I had a meeting yesterday morning knowing that then I was going to be on an airplane for quite a while.

Knowing that without my having to do anything about it, the ideas are going to marinate.