The Guardian’s Anonymous Academic pleads with the universe (or at least deans) to “give us back our summers:”

time is not the same as pounds and pence. If I spend one hour a week working on a topic for a year, then that’s fifty hours. But the depth of understanding and the quality of the work achieved would be much greater if I could concentrate that time in one week, working on nothing but that topic. Lots of small pieces do not have the same value as a large block. Time becomes a sheet of blank metal, a bolt of fabric, or a rolled out dough (select your hobby as appropriate). It can be formed and shaped into new and wonderful designs and purposes. But every interruption takes a chunk out of that surface, and in the end all we’re left with is scraps with which to try and cobble together something meaningful.

It’s a fine point: for intellectual work, there can be a huge difference between hours stolen here and there, and sustained time spent immersed in a subject.

That’s not to say that when you’re writing you have to shut yourself in a garret. Even if you can’t figure out the mysteries of the universe during those half hours when you’re waiting for kids’ lessons to end, or on the train headed into work, you can check footnotes or do other small things that don’t require deep, sustained concentration. As psychologists of creativity would put it, not every part of a project is generative thinking; there’s a lot of evaluative stuff, too.

But, on the other hand, if you’re not generative– if you can’t sink into a project and really chew it down– there won’t have anything to evaluate.