The Mason Paradox...

Try and make sense of it...I dare you, just try...

So I get to work on Monday and the 7 people (myself included) who comprise the two cubes in which my "team" works have all moved desks. It appears that I forgot that the floor plan was moving to make everyone's life easier. However, as a result of this, I have now moved to the other cube...and am sat all on my own, with no one behind my, in a corner, with all of my "team-mates" in the adjacent cube, over a small partition.

This means that, at no time, can anyone see my computer screen without me knowing about it. It turn, this means that I can slack off at any time. For the last two days, I haven't started actually doing work until at least 10:00. That's a solid 90 minutes of not working. With no one to check up on me, I have little to incentive to complete my mind numbingly easy, yet quite time consuming tasks.

The paradox, however, is thus: My productivity has increased significantly. I am completing more of my work in less time, despite spending noticeably more time not working. How does this make any sense???

The way I see it, I no longer live in the fear of being caught slacking off. Before, I would get very little safe slacking off time, so whenever my supervisor left the room, I would take the opportunity to safely slack off and browse the web. However, this would often come at times when I was in the flow of working, or being quite productive. Therefore, I would be productively working on slacking off, then working slowly when I eventually got back to work, or be forced to try and work when I couldn't concentrate.

Now, however, whenever I get bored or tired or just don't want to work (when I'm being unproductive) I just start slacking off. Not only does this mean that I work when I'm at my most productive, but it means that I'm happier and more relaxed, because I'm not working when I don't want to be.

Based on this finding, I'm going to petition to my boss to get my own office. With that, there's no limit top how fast I could sort through documents or correct formatting errors in documents.

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you're putting off doing something way more important...keep up the good work.

Pete