Oh deer! Are they wasting time again?

I’M PRETTY good at staying on task, but an efficiency expert would find plenty of examples of inefficiency — what most of us would call “wasting time.”

I’ll stop writing mid-sentence to check that e-mail that just pinged. I’ll walk down the hall to pick up a print-out I won’t need to look at for hours. I’ll make a special trip to a colleague’s office just to tell her about my latest experiments in baking. (The Dobos tort will not be repeated.) Another trip to respond in person rather than by computer to a colleague’s joke.

Sometimes I am wasting time — stalling because I just don’t feel like getting started on that next editorial.

More often, I’m giving my brain the breathing room it needs to get started on that next editorial, or to find that just-right word or that ending that ties it all together. It’s a magical process. I often can’t make it the full 40 steps to the printer before the idea hits; I pirouette and race back to my computer and type away until the entire column is written.

Even my workouts — perhaps especially my workouts — produce that little creative spark that staring at a computer screen can stifle. Rare is the week that I don’t write much of an editorial in my head — or identify the topic, the approach and the specific language for my next column — while I burn off calories.

This column is a case in point. I was on the elliptical machine reading my usual stack of news articles and reports when I came upon a story about the bill to restrict the use of deer contraceptives. My mind darted back to an e-mail someone had sent me that morning, bemoaning all the things our Legislature wastes time on — like deer contraceptives.

Boy do I hear that complaint a lot, I thought. (Not deer contraceptives; legislators wasting time on what the complainer considers trivial matters.)

But it’s not really a waste of time, my thinking continued. Not in the way people think.

Even if we could all agree which items are too trivial to deal with (and we can’t; deer contraceptives are extremely important to people whose neighborhoods are overrun by exploding deer populations; even designating the official state fried snack is important to some class of fifth-graders), the fact is that those items don’t actually keep legislators from dealing with comprehensive tax reform or finding a smarter school funding mechanism or shoring up the State Retirement System or reforming our sentencing laws. Most of these time-wasters take up literally a couple of minutes on the House or Senate floor, on top of maybe 10 minutes in committee and 20 minutes in a subcommittee. Sort of like my trips to the printer.

Yes, those minutes do add up. But even when trivialities eat up a lot of time, that — like my work-outs — often serves a productive purpose: It works as a political lubricant, giving lawmakers an opportunity to mill around and float ideas, think over the latest compromise that the other side has offered, devise a counter-offer, nail down just the right language.

At this point, in case my over-exercised brain has thought itself more clever than it actually is, I should note that the description of how my “time wasting” produced this column has become the column itself, which is about how what looks like time-wasting in the Legislature usually isn’t.

The apparent time-wasting is about creating not just physical but social and intellectual space, when legislators are all gathered together, to work through things informally. It’s about giving legislators who would never dream of agreeing on weighty issues an opportunity to find common ground. (Who knew both of us would feel that way about deer contraceptives?) Sometimes it’s about bringing levity to the process, allowing lawmakers to let down their guard and deal with each other as human beings rather than as political symbols.

Filibusters used to serve this purpose for the toughest issues —longtime senators tell me this was the main point of filibusters — back when the Senate had real filibusters, the kind where somebody talked until he couldn’t talk any longer, and he had to give up and let his colleagues take a vote.

Now, I’m not letting legislators off for avoiding tough issues. Most of the smartest bills never even make it to a subcommittee hearing. Even if one makes it all the way to the floor, a single senator can bring progress to a screeching halt, and the bill’s presence on the calendar will not be so much as acknowledged unless two-thirds of the senators vote to give it one of a few priority slots.

Many bills die not because they are actually oppsed by more than a third of the Senate, but because senators ration those priority slots. One day last month, for example, Sen. Wes Hayes put a statement in the Senate Journal explaining that while he supported a bill to stop 5-year-olds from driving ATVs, he voted against placing it in priority debate status because “I do not wish to block the Calendar with this Bill this late in the session.”

But when tough bills don’t get debated, it’s not because there’s no time. It’s because legislators don’t want to take them on, and that’s a problem in the House as well, just in a tougher-to-document way. What looks like time-wasting, on the other hand, often is about making it more possible — once legislators decide to do it — to actually get the hard work done. And we could do with a lot more of that.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.