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15 October 2008

Alfred Marshall, apologist for blog readers

Like many people I know, I often find it hard to stay on task and avoid the temptations of the internet while I work. Email, blogs, news of financial meltdown -- I find myself turning to these distractions in between spurts of productivity, knowing that I would get more done if I just turned off the wireless and kept on task for longer stretches of time.

Well, those of us who have trouble giving up our blogs and other internet distractions may have an unlikely enabler in Alfred Marshall, the great economist. When he was seventeen, Marshall observed an artist who took a lengthy break after drawing each element of a shop window sign. As he later recounted, the episode shaped his own productivity strategy, towards something that sounds vaguely similar to my own routine:

That set up a train of thought which led me to the resolve never to use my mind when it was not fresh, and to regard the intervals between successive strains as sacred to absolute repose. When I went to Cambridge and became full master of myself, I resolved never to read a mathematical book for more than a quarter of an hour at a time without a break. I had some light literature always by my side, and in the breaks I read through more than once nearly the whole of Shakespeare, Boswell's Life of Johnson, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus (the only Greek play I could read without effort), a great part of Lucretius and so on. Of course I often got excited by my mathematics, and read for half an hour or more without stopping, but that meant that my mind was intense, and no harm was done.

Now, somehow I doubt that Marshall would consider the NYT op-ed pages to be "light literature" on par with Boswell, or that he would agree that watching incendiary political videos at TalkingPointsMemo.com qualifies as "absolute repose." But never mind that. Alfred Marshall told me I shouldn't work for more than fifteen minutes without distractions!

Posted by Andy Eggers at October 15, 2008 8:06 AM