My wife got me a lamp for Christmas.  Nothing fancy—just a floor lamp, with a reading light option.  It’s for my office.

Yes, I asked for the lamp.  I pointed out a model that fit my specifications (specifically: it was cheap), and I am really excited to have it!

That’s probably not a good sign for the general excitement level of my life, but whatever.

I decided my office needed a lamp for a few reasons.  First, I’ve got two options in my office, at the moment: (1) a giant, overhead, florescent light; or (2) a tiny desk lamp.

The florescent light is, well, florescent, so it’s not exactly kind to your eyes.  Or, you know, what you look like under it.  So that’s not ideal when I’m just in my office, doing work.

But the desk lamp is also not exactly inviting to students who need to talk to me.  So if I have that on, they’re less likely to stop by if they need me.  It probably feels a little weird to walk into a mostly-dark room to talk to someone.

So, I need something in between: something that lets me work without keeping at bay students who might need to talk to me.  Thus, the light.

But the second reason—and one more important for the nature of this blog—is that I think it can help me be a little more focused on my various tasks.

I’ve been thinking about the many different hats I wear in a given day: researcher, writer, administrator, teacher, and so on.  I often change in and out of these hats rather quickly.  It’s not a big deal when I am, say, writing an email to a 101 instructor and have to stop for a conversation with a student.  The switch back and forth there isn’t too challenging.

But when I’m writing, I can easily run into trouble.  Working myself into a writing groove is not easy, and I’m rather easily knocked out of it.  I think that a combination of lighting and noise (I got an app that makes various kinds of white noise) might help me focus (and, when necessary, re-focus) a bit better.

I’m thinking that I will have a combination for working on lifespan writing and working on WPA writing.  I’m not really in the office much before the week of the 6th, but I’ll give it a shot on that week and see how it goes.  If it works, it might be very helpful to my writing.  Or my frustration level.  Or both!  We’ll see.