I have said before that I like procrastinating (and I don’t think I am alone here). It is sometimes so difficult to keep concentrating when your mind is exhausted. A former tutor at Oxford told me once that one’s brain is a muscle and relentless exercising without well-timed breaks will only do more damage than good, like any other muscles in one’s body. One therefore has to find a balance between working hard and resting well so as to hit the optimal level of productivity. Recently, I discovered an interesting way to measure one’s productivity. I am a big nectar fan, and I have been using my nectar card to accumulate points for years. This explains why I use certain products/brands exclusively, like Sainbury’s, Expedia, Amazon, not that they are necessarily better than their competing brands (though they are very wide-ranging and competent- I have no complaints about them at all), but simply because they allow me to accumulate and use nectar points, as they are partners with nectar. I have been using this nectar toolbar on my browser, which allows me to accumulate nectar points for every Internet search I make (2 searches for 1 point, maximum 200 points per month). There are months in which I do not quite make 200 points (i.e. 400 searches), and I end up having to rush towards the end of the month typing in meaningless searches just to make 400 of them. Other times, however, I burst the search limit within the first few days of the month. Those are usually times when I am frantically busy researching and type in searches for scholarly references like mad. This month I hit 400 searches and earned 200 points by the 3rd May. You can imagine how busy I was (and still am-what a shame that the nectar points are capped at 200 per month, or else I would be a nectar millionaire…!). It is funny how the accumulation of nectar points provides a measure of one’s productivity.