Academic Productivity

Are academics managing projects? The thesis of this post is that we academics are project mangers without formal training in project management. You ask for money to do a research _project_. If you supervise or mentor students until they get their PhD, you are managing a project. If you teach a class, you are managing a project. Do you see where I’m going?

When we read Dilbert, we think: “Oh, the industry world is crazy. The academia doesn’t work that bad”. That is true, but I’m sure there are things we can borrow from their world (e.g., trying to write down the process we follow to achieve some results, and try to improve it). This is what Berkun talks about in his book. For example, in the processes of writing your next article, which parts could be delegated? Did you ‘hire’ -make connections with- the right person to take the parts that could be delegated? When coming up with new ideas for future research, how do you select which ones to follow up and which ones to ditch?

Topics include:

• How to make things happen
• Making good decisions
• Specifications and requirements
• Ideas and what to do with them
• How not to annoy people
• Leadership and trust
• The truth about making dates
• What to do when things go wrong
• As you see, plenty of relevant sutff for academics here.

Berkun is:

an author, public speaker and consultant. He worked as a manager at Microsoft from 1994-2003, on projects including (v1-5) of Internet Explorer, Windows and MSN.

Berkun has written what could be the first project management book that doesn’t have a load of technical information on Gantt charts and related fashionable topics in the the industry. Even though project management seems to be a hot topic for the ‘Dilbert’ people of the industry, academics have taken little notice of this trend.

One thing that is missing from time management (TM) methods is how to decide which project to work on next. TM helps (a lot) with getting things done at a micromanagement level: An academic using a time management method will probably be more efficient getting to the right task at the right time.

One of the most interesting chapters is on ‘making good decisions’. Surprisingly, Berkun says that in the interviews he performed for this book no project manager used the formal methods of decision making that we teach in judgment and decision making (JDM) departments, so one has to wonder how much of the basic research gets to applied settings like this one.

A surprising fact if that, to get a paper out of the door, we probably use methods (processes) that have changed little since out PhD advisor passed them down to us. Are academic processes good? According to Berkun, good processes, accelerate progress, prevent problems, they make important actions visible and measurable, and people impacted by them are in favor of them. I’m sure we have some methods that are far from optimal.

In summary, an interesting read; while it’s not the first book that an academic would pick to improve her productivity, the intutitions and ‘no-nonsense’ recommendations in this book are valuable. Oh, and the writing is surprisingly good.

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One of the good (potentially great) things about on-line reference sites  is that it can put you in touch with those academics who share interests with you. This particulary true with CiteULike, which by design encourages co-operation, for example, it allows you to see who else shares a reference in your library.

The link belows is a tool which works out which users share the most articles in your CiteULike collection, and you can then cherry pick interesting articles from their collections.

I first found this on the shadow blog, who turned out to one of my neighbours!

The link is here:

Technorati Tags: citeulike - social networking - reference management

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Sometimes I get ill with information. It is hypertext sickness, and it can be a compulsive disorder. It seems my mind gets high on knowledge, and the knowledge is like a drug, stimulating some part of reptilian brain that gets rewarded for exploratory behaviour, and I get stuck in a addictive loop, like a rat pressing a lever that gives it cocaine.

Bouts of hypertext sickness might last hours, with the ultimate end of a racing brain, bulging eyes, feeling like you have fallen into the matrix, and you feel sick with information. The only solution is a cold shower and a lie down. I come back to the computer and am faced with the aftermath. 25 pdf’s open and 30 tabs on my browser. Too much is too much.

A bout of information mania can actually be productive, in leading to discoveries that wouldn’t have occurred if I had exercised a more reasoned and methodological approach to research. However, the good can get lost amongst the vast mounds of information that you might have discovered, and when you have an overdose of information it makes it harder to convert to knowledge.

In my last post, I discussed the double edged sword of technology for productivity, and how information load makes technology indispensable for managing that load. With information glut the problem is largely self inflicted, and the solutions don’t all rely on technology.

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Matthew Cornell at Matt’s idea blog has just posted a piece on a pilot study he is running that seems very relevant:

I recently completed a small pilot funded by the office of new faculty development at a large university. I approached the director to see if there was interest, and to figure out a way to test the effectiveness of the Getting Things Done methodology for new faculty. We came up with an informal program in which I 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.

The faculty were professors from three very different departments - Nursing, Japanese, and Communication Disorders - and each had different styles in how they managed themselves at their work. One thing they all shared, however, were the common challenges facing new faculty, who essentially act as entrepreneurs. For example, they have to:

• Obtain grants for research,
• Plan and perform original research,
• Advise and guide students,
• Teach classes (prep, grading, etc),
• Provide service to the community, etc.
• all the while working to get tenure (there’s a reason it’s called the “tenure track“)

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One other thing that hasn’t changed . . . There are still people who make the transition into a new job quickly and relatively painlessly, and other people with similar experience/credentials who go months or years without these same nibbles. I credit the difference to two things: 1) How the person felt about their expectations of success, and 2) How far they strayed from their computer.

Dave Jensen, Moderator at scienceCareers  has this interesting post on how bombarding people with new communication channels (e-mails etc) won’t work better than face-to-face or any other traditional means. Networking seems to be fashionable, with books like Ferrazi’s Never eat alone getting really popular. Is it really the case that academics do no not pay much attention to email networking? Do you really need to get away of your computer to keep your contacts alive? I find this surprising considering how multi-authored papers have grown with the use/abuse of email. But of course, looking for a job may be a different thing. Is really a phone call better?

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MINDLESS SIGNIFICANCE TESTING

Decision science news has a post on hypothesis testing that I find relevant.

Some well-made points grow old while no one pays attention to them. One of the most embarrassing for social science is its categorical perception of p-values.

Tender of kindred Web site Andrew Gelman and Hal Stern have an article whose name says it all: The Difference Between “Significant” and “Not Significant” is not Itself Statistically Significant.

Link to The Difference Between Significant and Not Significant is Not Statistically Significant

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Are academics managing projects? The thesis of this post is that we academics are project managers without formal training in project management. You ask for money to do a research _project_. If you supervise or mentor students until they get their PhD, you are managing a project. If you teach a class, you are managing a project. Do you see where I’m going?

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Delliwin, and the mac alternative DelliMac, are a chimera: tags and folder structure at the same time. If you thought that tags are nice, but missed the more traditional dropbox-style way of accessing your bookmarks when stored in a browser, this is for you. If you are off-line at times, and wish you had your del.icio.us plugins with you, this is a solution. If you never thought there is a point in having your bookmarks in del.icio.us and never used your account much, this may change that behavior.

I’m sure Dario and Shane will write more about the advantages of social bookmarks; in any case, there are resources that you use and are not convenient to keep in the more ‘academic’ format of a reference manager.

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There is an invited post over at lifehack.org by Michael Leddy, an English professor who recommends that we should divide major actions (such as “write term paper”) into smaller, more doable tasks (NAs in GTD’s parlance). I think this could be a good read for students, and even for academics; Most of us keep this partitioning into smaller tasks “in our heads”; making it explicit and dumping it into paper might help with things such as time estimation… a consistent problem I have is that I never know how long I will need to finish a paper. This is one of the reasons I posted before that we need to decompose tasks to be able to track progress better.

Technorati Tags: reading, writing, best practices, time management, project management

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Boice presents an attractive title that gets good reviews at Amazon. I guess these come from writers that have been relieved from writers block and are terribly grateful to the author. Blocking is probably the emphasis of the book. For non-blocked writers the offering is less tempting. The techniques presented for people who write fluently already are a bit obvious. Review below.

What is covered

The book has 4 main sections, and a large appendix with tests plus an annotated bibliography.

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In a previous post I presented some considerations on the impact of online reference management (ORM) tools on one’s productivity. I haven’t mentioned yet another major advantage of using social software for managing references: the possibility of using dynamically generated feeds to track things you are interested in.

We already reviewed some potential uses of feeds for academic purposes (read more from shane and jose). In this article I focus on the use of flexible feeds in ORM tools as a strategy to discover recent and valuable references.
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