Time waits for no man.
Today I discovered another virtue of the Faculty Initiative on Digital Identity: it provides deadlines. This is a truth I have long understood about writing, about the academy, and about myself: it’s really hard to produce anything worthwhile without a deadline to focus your thinking. When I’m productive, it’s because a deadline is looming, and when I’m unproductive, it’s because I have all the time in the world. The need to build out my digital identity forced me to undertake some (small) writing tasks that I might otherwise have put off. Today, I wrote a brief intellectual autobiography for my “Scholarship” page, a task that I had put some idle thought into but which I had never bothered to actually complete. The necessity of filling in that blank white page with something forced me to finally be rigorous in thinking about and writing down some of the unifying themes of my various scholarly projects. So if nothing else, the deadlines inherent in this initiative (as much as they seemed tediously quotidian to me yesterday) are forcing me to think more clearly.
