Academic Productivity

Just as a quick follow-up to this post, … there seems to be a narcolepsy drug that works really well for periods when you need a lot of concentration.

The drug name is provigil. The article is a pretty hard-core testimonial on its effect. There’s an interesting discussion here. The article seems to mention no negative side effects (other than making you eat less!) but in the discussion some people mention serious stuff like : “nervousness, insomnia, excitation, irritability, tremors, dizziness and headaches“.

Extremely productive company 37signals (authors of  Ruby on Rails) have a short but interesting post on workaholism. It seems that workaholics actually create situations that require more work. This makes sense. And there are plenty of opportunities to fabricate more work: focus on small, inconsequential details; say yes to things before you have finished what you are currently working on; have no idea how long it’ll take to finish your current project (this is a big one for programming), etc.

The problem is that many work environments actually encourage people to act the workaholic way (and look busy all the time). If your workplace is one of these, there’s little you can do.

I’m still not seeing any stats that prove that non-workaholics get more done than workaholics though

Following up on Jose’s musings on good and bad keywords for a productivity blog, I came across an interesting tool to visualize the evolution over time of aggregated social bookmarking tags for popular websites. It is actually a pretty old project called Cloudalicious created a few years ago by Terrell Russell (of ClaimID fame).

If you are a web metrics maniac like yours truly, you won’t resist plugging this tool into your favourite websites, so here’s the graph I generated for AcademicProductivity.com:


(source)

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“Math is hard; let’s go shopping!”

-hacked Barbie

Summary: It looks like the difficulties of measuring  productivity make people use common sense to give advice on how to improve it instead of actually attacking productivity as a hard problem that needs empirical study. But people do follow barely tested advice on productivity. They are either too busy to afford dismissing it, or too pragmatic to believe that we can reach systematic, scientific productivity techniques.

There is a current craze about productivity in many forms (sometimes disguised as personal development). At least 4 of the top 100 blogs in the blogosphere are about productivity (according to technorati’s authority: lifehacker #6; Zen Habits #41; lifehack.org #66 43 Folders #73). There’s a current craze about personal productivity and personal development. The best treatment I have read recently is Cal Newport’s Flak magazine article. 

In fact, lifehacking is a trend of the 21st century. The idea is to reduce the things that bother you in your life (or reduce the time it takes to complete them) while increasing the quality and quality of the experiences that you like. This is pretty intuitive, but is this a working definition of whatever personal productivity is? Hardly. Today, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack.

Hacks are by definition, unsystematic. Everything goes, as long as it works. This is the contrary to the incremental evolution of scientific thinking. Even though sometimes there are large changes in the form of paradigm shifts, most of the time progress is incremental and lineal.

The advantages are clear: one can build on the knowledge acquired by the previous generation.

But do we have the same incremental progress in personal productivity theories? If there anything remotely similar to a science of productivity? Should people follow only empirically tested advice about productivity?

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Hello everyone. Thanks very much for your great questions, and for having me here. Following are my answers, some thoughts on academic productivity, and some ideas from my consulting work with faculty. I hope you find them helpful.

Contents

• Background of the problem
• Answers to your questions
• Additional academic productivity opportunities

Background of the problem

What’s the problem? Your jobs are hard. Positions in academia are some of the broadest and most demanding I’ve encountered in my consulting. As my client Mary Deane Sorcinelli [1] points out in her Peer Review article Faculty Development: The Challenge Going Forward (PDF),

The set of tasks expected of faculty is intensifying under increasing pressure to keep up with new directions in teaching and research. Thus, for example, new faculty members may need to develop skills in grant-writing or in designing and offering online courses. Seasoned faculty members may need to keep up with emerging specialties in their fields as well as to engage in more interdisciplinary work.

Further, without excellent self-management skills, people face significant stress trying to achieve distinction as scholars, teachers, and campus citizens. They sacrifice work and life balance, and risk burnout - a big loss for both the academe and the faculty member herself. Fortunately, there’s plenty to hope for. Clients and colleagues have told me that adopting a method to improve productivity is one the best steps academics can take to improve faculty success.

Answers to your questions

Adopting a method without its taking over

As an academic, I have a lot of projects going at once and haven’t been able to maintain the action-based ToDo list over time. How can I keep the productivity process from becoming its own project taking over my time and attention?

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I while ago I designed a simple program to track how often I’m interrupted and to prevent myself from going into a ’shaving Yaks’ excursion every time I have to touch a browser.

The interruptron works by growing in size as your ‘unscheduled break’ (or procrastination escapade) elapses. It can cover your entire screen, so it’s hard to ignore. it also lets you save what you did and plot some basic stats.

It turns out people are actually using it. Even making videos about it:

I wasn’t very impressed myself when I released it to tell you the truth, but this little program seems to be a crowd pleaser. Another user asked for the source and is actually doing a rewrite. I was surprised when he told me about his background: he was the person responsible for the email engine of one of the most trafficked sites on the web. We’ll be working together and probably implementing more features, but don’t hold your breath.

Anyway, I didn’t announce it here in ap.com. Maybe it’s time to do it now.

How can you take advantage of the current craze about social media?

The fact is that many people use social media to  build a powerful reputation In any Industry. This article will focus on professional social sites (i.e., linkedIn, biznik) and not on the more leisure-based social sites (mySpace, facebook). Having said that, do not discard the more traditional forums and blogs; making posts in these can get you the same benefits than professional social sites, and they are often more targeted.

1 - Benefits are not immediate

Social networks will look like a supreme waste of time in the short term; the benefits are cumulative and slow. Andy Erickson (linkedIn) says:

For me, it’s sort of like having done all the preparation work for an emergency (fire drills in school, CPR certification) and then being grateful that you did when you finally need it.

This is also true for other forms of name-branding and visibility such as blogging. Having the attention of some people is a great currency that you never know when you are going to need.

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There’s an excellent discussion at news.ycombinator on why one should _not_ pursue an academic career. The post started with the ‘don’t become a scientist‘ article by Jonathan I. Katz that we commented before. What I find interesting is that ycombinator represents a population of very smart people (hackers and startup founders) who are not academics but most probably have had offers to go to grad school/take a postdoc, etc and declined them to start a new company.

Some members describe their experience as research programmers for big-name research groups, and it’s not pretty. Menloparkbum says:

Most of the people working there were like people working at any big, lame bureaucratic institution, only they had or were obtaining PhDs. Most of their time was spent surfing the web, sending email, and attending meetings. I have never worked anywhere else where people attended so many meetings.

User amichail says:

Don’t be misled by the promise of freedom in academia. It’s not like that at all. […]

Unless you get a faculty position at a stellar university (highly unlikely nowadays), the teaching will be depressing. And your research will suffer as a result since you will be in no mood to do it.

Also, unless you plan to do everything yourself for research, you will need to get some funding. But whether you get that funding depends on whether your peers — competitors actually — like what you plan to do.

Not much that we didn’t know here. But why are threads like this surfacing more often recently? Or is it just me who finds them everywhere? I don’t even log into the Chronicle forums because the numbers of complains (’I have no life’) there are depressing. This particular user group (Hackers and startup founders) are perfect examples of people who pick on new trends and evaluate what a market is offering. They seem to be all in agreement: steer away from an academic career.

What do you think?

The efficient academic google group has a thread on a really interesting problem. Any hack addressing this has a high chance of saving several hours per week for those of you who teach.

Given lecture material has three components:

1. Slides for digital projection (preferable PDFs rather than PowerPoint or Keynote)
2. Lecture notes to support what I need to say and remember
3. Lecture handout

I regularly update all three, but I am finding keeping all three in sync to be a bit tedious.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but what I am visualising is some sort of single document, where you  write the lecture handout. I could then update this with new information between presenting the lecture.

If you have a solution, drop by and post it there (or here!).

WordFlashReader has several advantages over the previously analyzed rapidReader: it’s open source, and written in perl. So it works under linux and windows at least. wordflashreader also highlights where you are reading, so one of the downsides of RSVP (disorientation) is mostly gone. Still, you lose the formatting when you read HTML or PDF… and the highlighting didn’t work very well for me. The way cursors change speed make it confusing (I’m too used to move around the document with cursor keys). One nifty idea is to go back one sentence with left control key.

As before, of you can test it out and post your thoughts for everyone to see, that’d be great.

Another option we commented before was spreeder.

I’m still looking for the holy Grail that makes my reading more fluid and effective. It looks like this is an interest that I share with many people according to the huge pile of books that amazon lists for ’speed reading’.

The new ap.com 2.0 is being out for a month now. Yay! But it seems that most users (yes, users, not readers) didn’t really take advantage of the new features.

The goal of ap.com 2.0 is to have more content for everybody. So what can you do to make ap.com 2.0 better? Simple. Start having fun. Did you know you can post (and everybody will see your post, if the editors like it)? There is a post describing how to make a post (hmm, I like recursion).

Comments now have new superpowers too. You can link to any page (where your own inventions lurk) and ap.com 2.0 will send you Google love. Most blogs have a ‘nofollow’ tag that tells Google not to leak juice. This is mostly done to fight spamming… but we trust you enough to let you operate at large. After all, you had to sign up for an account, so you must be human (are you?). Plus, we monitor comments closely. And this is all in line with our views on how to distribute credit in a fair way -and test soft-peer review ideas-.

You can have your own image on each post… although for that you need to upload one first at gravatar.com (takes seconds). This will help people recognize you. And did we mention it works on any blog on the entire intarweb? Still, most ap.com users don’t have a gravatar. Get one.

And where should you test your new shining gravatar? Why, on this thread about the interview with Mark Cornell. We have a few questions already, but the more questions, the meatier his response will be.

If you enjoy these kind of interviews, help us make them possible. And of course, feel free to invite some super-productive monster you know to be interviewed or to post some lifehacks he uses!

We will keep reminding you of new ap.com features until you use them or tell us to shut up already.

Oh, and by the way, this post took me 1:25. There’s very little time investment in posting a quick link or idea; you don’t really need to post a lengthy diatribe with references at the end (that’s for paper journals).

I always wondered how people see the academic world from outside. How do we gauge the interest of the general public on what academics have to say (on average)? One easy way to look at this question is to see the how often people will read an article that has the word ‘academic’ on it.

A proxy on what people read nowadays is digg.com. And the tool to see how often people digg academic posts is now available in Dan Zarella’s blog. Given a keyword, the tool will return data on the average number of links accumulated by stories popular on Digg that mentioned that keyword. This is done with 2007 data.

Well, behold what happens when you enter “academic”:

And compare it to what you get when you type “productivity”:

Why is this important? Well, on average, a single digg increases traffic by 0.10%. So a story that gets 3,000 diggs results in an increase in total traffic to the referring site by 300%.

So, from now on we are a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H productivity blog

From why that’s delightful, via omnibrain.

This is big. Harvard University has a new policy: make your scholarly articles available free online.

As Slashdot commenter hawk describes it:

The academic publishing industry is a dinosaur in desperate need of elimination. It charges tens of thousands of dollars per school for journals that would be more useful as web sites–, not and available several months earlier. As it exists, journals are for the benefit of the publishing companies, not the world at large, academia, or the authors. The economic model is that the faculty write, are paid nothing, and the libraries pay huge fees to the publishing houses.
Will the publishers react to open up? I doubt it; they can’t.
The *real* result of this will be top articles going to online journals, which will first rival and then displace the printed journals. This is a good thing for everyone except the publishing houses.

But what’s in it for me, the end user of the paper? First, faster review cycles. Second, my ideas will reach a wider target (those who are not affiliated with a powerful library and cannot access them otherwise). Third, the ideas will get there faster. Forget about the close to a year delay between accepted and printed. Seeing “In press” in the reference list may be a thing of the pass soon. Fourth, if everything is online (imagine a journal article with a ‘comments’ section, open to anyone), then soft peer review is even easier and more transparent.

Nothing of this should be news, most people have their articles online anyway… but it sometimes breaks the agreement you have with the paper journal. Now that a large university makes this practice a policy, we’ll see other universities follow up soon.

Do you need to write code in your academic work? Have you read someone else’s code? Did you just get  a code attachment with a warning like “this is a mess, I need to clean this up someday?”. Well, you are not alone. It seems that in the industry, telling someone that you plan to use code that comes straight from an academic makes them feel a drop of cold sweat down their backs.

American scientist has an article on these common practices that we have managed to avoid for so long.

I therefore started asking scientists how they wrote their programs. The answers were sobering. Whereas a few knew more than most of the commercial software developers I’d worked with, the overwhelming majority were still using ancient text editors like Vi and Notepad, sharing files with colleagues by emailing them around and testing by, well, actually, not testing their programs systematically at all.

I finally asked a friend who was pursuing a doctorate in particle physics why he insisted on doing everything the hard way. Why not use an integrated development environment with a symbolic debugger? Why not write unit tests? Why not use a version-control system? His answer was, “What’s a version-control system?”

The paper advocates the use of version-control, proper editors and IDEs, and unit testing. These three things are great practices, and in my experience we academics either don’t use them or had to learn them ‘on-the-wild’ after banging our heads on a wall. And it shows.

Our code could be tidier. The bad news is that this reputation seems not to be restricted to code tidiness.

The unqualified-reservations blog has a (long) post on how CS research in the academia is considered outside:

…anyone who’s not involved in CS research treats the products of this endeavor as if they were smallpox-infected blankets. Even when it is clearly - in my opinion - good, it winds up ignored. Because of the inescapable grant-related propaganda, it’s impossible to tell what’s good and what’s not.

The gist of his main point is that usefulness and relevance are almost inversely related to academic value. That gives academics the ‘freedom’ to write unmanageable code; as long as it produces a paper (and note that code is not provided with the paper) you are fine. A caricature: a guy invents a programming language (say python) that is used by millions included google. It has zero academic value. Another guy writes and obscure paper (or hundreds) on a topic that is irrelevant even to his mom. That second guy gets grant money, tenure. Sounds familiar?

This comes at a time when I’m very concerned about what people can do under pressure and how much they are willing to sacrifice for their careers. A friend in the tenure track (or the equivalent in the country she lives in) has lost two babies (natural abortion), probably due to stress. There are entire sections in the Chronicle sections describing the super-human efforts people make to achieve a small increase in academic performance. Having a decent social or family life seems like a luxury for more and more academics. Most people invest money and time in this endeavor in ways that are difficult to justify rationally (and we are talking about arguably the smartest sector of the population!).

Would you risk your health as well? Are you prepared to take mind-altering drugs?

Nature has an article on cognitive doping (here’s the direct link if you don’t want to jump through hoops to get it from your library). The topics has been covered in the blogosphere in different places: Shelley Batts, from the point of view of a grad student, says that taking cognitive-enhancing drugs is a no brainer.

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We have talked about Matt Cornell before on our post “Matt’s idea blog on GTD and Faculty Productivity“.

When I first found his blog, Matt mentioned that…

[He] would work with three self-selected early faculty members, coach them in the method, and hopefully give the director enough information to decide if the results merited a larger follow-on effort.

His latest blog posts have been covering interviews with productivity personalities (book authors and bloggers, as well as practitioners and consultants). His posts are consistently good, which is somewhat rare in the blogosphere.

I have talked Matt into being ‘interviewed’ here at ap.com. But instead of doing an audio interview as we did with Mark Forster, this time we want to stick to text. The advantage is that this time you can submit your own questions; he will read them and try to answer them. You are getting direct access to a consultant who has experience helping academics, so use it wisely.

In any case, this sounds like a fantastic opportunity to follow up on his work with academics. How well does GTD adapt to the academic world? Has he been able to measure performance before and after adopting GTD?

Use the comments on this blog post to send your questions. One question per comment; if you have several questions please post them separately.

In this post I’ll show you two easy ways to submit a post. Note: if you have blogged before, this explanation may be unnecessary.

First method: use the built-in editor on our site

I’ll assume that you could sign in/log in just fine. Then you should see a blue Wordpress page with several options. One of them says “write”. Yo can click on it, and by default it will take you to an edit box. You can start typing away. Make sure you are on tab “write post” and not “write page”.

As you see, the obvious WYSIWYG icons for formatting text are there. The only one you might not recognize is the one in between the picture and spell-check: that is the post splitter. For long posts, you may want to insert a splitter so people get the “continue reading this post” message. Like what you should see about here

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We are proud to announce the birth of Academic Productivity 2.0. Over the last months we have been brainstorming on how to improve the blog and we are happy to announce a number of important news.

New look

We have redesigned the blog and created a new logo: a delicate metaphor on how the academia transforms raw ideas into… more mundane, consumable things.

It took quite a lot of work to get the current look working (and we ended up making very conservative decisions!). Load times should have improved as we have removed some plugins that were slowing things down.

Open contributions

We thought it’s ok to write our own ramblings, but we’d like to read yours too.

Academic Productivity 2.0 introduces an open registration system (default role: “Contributor”). This will allow to open up the blog for contributions from our readers. Other blogs have done this, and since we have been receiving a lot of valuable suggestions from our readers, we think it’s time to create a community of contributors. If you have ideas/hacks you want to share, sign up as a contributor or log in < ?php wp_loginout(); ?>(see link on the right side).

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According to a study by research firm Basex recently covered by the New York Times, information overload will be the Problem of the Year in 2008, costing US companies up to $650 billion a year. The figure is supposed to be an estimate of the cost of unnecessary interruptions in terms of “decreased productivity and stifled innovation”. Recipes to fight email overload, in particular, have become a thriving business over the last few years: how to cope with the stress and lack of productivity caused by an ever-growing volume of email in your inbox?

While self-proclaimed gurus are selling on the Web their own ultimate solutions against email overload, Carolin Horn from DMI Boston has designed a clever visualization tool to represent unresponded email in your inbox. I find this idea way more effective than a million GTD techniques and I think Carolin and her coder collaborator Florian Jenett are onto something.

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