Decorating My Own World

This term I often spend almost all day at home by myself on Mondays and Wednesdays.  M. teaches on those days and leaves for his commute relatively early and doesn't return until about an hour or so before dinner time.  I could easily justify spending the entire day in pjs or yoga pants, and sometimes I do spend all day in them, but most days I like to dress for myself even when I'm home alone.  I like to decorate my own world.  It also helps to give me a sense of a delineated workday  -- something that can often be a challenge for those of us in academia.

On these days, since I'm just dressing for myself, I typically wear my quirkier clothes.  Today I just wanted to feel pretty, and one of the prettiest prints that I own is on this little cotton dress from the Red Dress Shoppe.¹

1. Dress - Red Dress Shoppe (on clearance 2009)

Cardi - H&M (remixed)

Socks - Target

Sandals - Lumiani 

Necklace - Etsy (remixed)

Earrings - Gift (remixed)

Purse - "Prada" (remixed)

Unless we are in the classroom or holding office hours, the unstructured nature of our schedules can be both a good thing or a bad thing.  Our work and our projects are almost always in the form of drafts and rarely are they final.  There's always another book to be read, another experiment that needs to be run repeatedly, another source to check, another sentence that needs to be expunged, another idea that needs mulling over.  This can make it hard to stop the workday at 5pm or 7pm or 9pm or 1am sometimes.  I have tried over the past year or so to do work between 9am and 5pm, to start then and end then, to create some lines of demarcation between my academic life and my outside life.  This hasn't always been successful, but it's often working out, showering, and getting dressed that creates a divide between sipping coffee and puttering around on the internets and making substantial progress on those drafts.

When do you do your best work?  Is it from 9-5?  Is it during the night while the rest of the world is sleeping?  Do you ever dress just to decorate your own world?