Academic Productivity

Prof. John Perry (Standford) might be onto something with his Structured Procrastination idea:

the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Source: Structured Procrastination

Now, if only someone came up with a way to use Structured Procrastination to increase productivity, that’d be a big hit. A recommended read.

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Some programs out there offer you the possibility of reading faster by avoiding eye movements and backtracking. The two most popular ones (web-based) are spreeder and  ZAP Reader.

Some links on the technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentat…
http://news.com.com/2100-1046_3-5785579.html
http://www.buddybuzz.net/rel/Web/index.html

The experience is jarring (as if reading online wasn’t hard enough on the eyes), but it does seem to decrease reading delays. Looks like spreeder’s also working on a login so you can track your speedreading progress.

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This is a review of toDoList, a free, open source program to organize your tasks. It is very flexible and configurable and has replaced my main organized, a program that I believed suited me perfectly.
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When we first discussed the idea of academic productivity blog, our first thoughts were about the irony of it - how would writing a blog about productivity increase my productivity? And we were blogging about productivity rather than working, surely we wouldn’t be best placed person to give productivity advice? If you really want to be productive, you should stop reading this and do some work. But if you are reading this, then it suggests that you want to be more productive. Being more productive is what this is site is about. Both for you and for us.
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