How to prevent professor's life from being boring?

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien should have been widely known as an exceptional linguist but readers often prefer fantasy over academic papers, so here he is – the man who invented the world of hobbits and developed a language family, created two nearly completed languages and about 15 less developed languages, dialects, and codes. His daily activities were rather tedious and might look boring while J.R.R. Tolkien did not feel a bit like that. What’s the secret?