Is a publishing professional with more than twenty years of

Chapter 15
turn Downtime 
into productive 
time

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141
I
f you were like most kids, you spent a lot of time waiting 
and wishing. 
On Mondays, you’d start waiting and wishing for Fridays.
About the time you got to school each day, you’d start waiting 
and wishing for recess, and then lunch, and then the magic hour 
of 3:00, time to go home. How much time did you spend staring at 
the classroom clock, which moved impossibly slowly throughout 
the day and even slower as 3:00 approached?
Along about Halloween, you started waiting and wishing for 
Christmas.  After  Christmas,  maybe  you  had  a  birthday  to  look 
forward to, otherwise there was baseball season, and once base-
ball season finally arrived, the wait for summer vacation would 
become all but intolerable.
After a few weeks of the endless, unstructured days of summer, 
you may have caught yourself feeling twinges of something that 
just might have been boredom. You might start wishing and wait-
ing for your family’s annual vacation, and long before you were 
ready, it was time to go back to school.
Then the cycle of waiting and wishing started all over again.