BUY YOUR DISSERTATOR A TRAIN SET.

I've long been on record as favoring academicians having something to do when they walk away or are pushed away or have just had enough.

Now comes recent assistant professor Stephen Aguilar who discovers the values of having something else to do in the midst of achieving a reputation.

Hobbies are important. They allow us to express ourselves along dimensions that are not tied to work. I build, paint and play with war-game miniatures. I chose the hobby for very specific reasons. First, I am a nerd, and mini painting is a nerdy hobby with rich narrative elements that I can explore. More important, however, it was a hobby I knew I could grow into. When I started the hobby, I didn’t know the first thing about building small models, let alone painting them so they looked good on the table. That is why the hobby was ideal for me: I could grow into it.

As academics, many of us are always aspiring to learn and become better than we are at whatever we happen to be working on. Our training pushes us to find the boundaries of our disciplines and extend them. Rather than curb that tendency in my life outside of work, I’ve tried to channel it into my hobby. What can I build or paint today that is just a little bit better than it was yesterday or last week?

Give him time, he'll discover the value of building stuff that looks good when it runs.

He's got a productivity strategy that it's wise for people to develop, no matter their discipline, no matter what they're doing off campus (which can include raising kids or otherwise attempting to have a normal life).

I recommend that you identify a few colleagues in and out of your field to have lunch or coffee with on occasion. Find people who do not constantly talk shop, since having lunch to talk about work is essentially having a meeting proximal to food. Avoid that if you can, as lunches and coffees should be about getting to know the side of folks that are not written on their CVs or syllabi. (Of course, talking about work a little bit is fine, but you don’t want the entire interaction to be about work.)

This approach requires a bit of effort and some planning. Most people have schedules that limit how often they can meet socially with others, so you’ll probably need patience when trying to schedule such events. Recognize that some people either do not want to have lunch of coffee with you or, alternatively, are simply too disorganized to schedule such meetings. I find the former rare and the latter more common, but both have the same result of increasing rather than decreasing isolation. So be persistent, as appropriate -- you’ll find it worth the effort.

That's not a bad idea, although if you're meeting with people in other disciplines, talking about what you're working on can be productive, as those companions are intelligent people who might not know the ins and outs of what you're working on, and yet they can force you to better explain it.

I was fortunate in my first gig at Wayne State that we had a large enough industrial organization group to schedule weekly lunches to discuss a current paper, either one of our own, or something good in a recent journal.  Those guys made me look good enough that Northern Illinois made me an offer I couldn't turn down.

These days, though, having a critical mass of subject specialists who can conduct a mini-workshop like that is rare outside the largest departments.