Thing To Do Today: skive.

Life is hard and life is earnest, every minute is unforgiving, a stitch in time saves nine, and...

...oh, for heaven's sake!

Sometimes there are just so much better things to do than work.

Sing a song, dance a jig, spot a bird, drink some tea, tell a joke, juggle, try on an old dress, do an image search for sloth on Google, recite a poem, doodle...

...and then come back to work with new enthusiasm.

Or, at least, much happier.

For the impossibly earnest amongst us (though if you've got this far and you're still impossibly earnest then I've failed, haven't I) then you could always shave the hair off, or remove the surface of, leather. That's called skiving, too.

But once you've got your leather, make yourself some dancing shoes, okay? Or perhaps a handbag, as long as it's just slightly too small to take a work-accessory of any kind.

Thing To Do Today: skive. The word which means to avoid work appeared mysteriously in the 20th century and no one knows from where, but the leather-shaving sense comes from the Old Norse skifa, and is related to the English dialect word shive, which means a slice of bread.