Academic Productivity

It’s about time to introduce one of the central features of this blog. We plan to interview what I once called “Productivity Monsters”: people who, one way or another, have an outstanding productivity in their fields.

Originally, the idea was to interview Academics only and to measure their productivity by using some proxy such as impact of their ideas or raw number of papers per year. However, this definition would leave out time management Gurus, and we agree that if they have created such a cult online, they must have very interesting things to say to Academics. As you see, the criteria to define productivity monsters are not clear, but, like any other monsters, you know one when you see it. What do they do differently? Other than working a lot, of course. Are there any kind of techniques that can improve anyone’s output? We will ask them and try to retrieve and filter their knowledge in the form of interviews. The interesting things is that most academics don’t really write about how to improve your academic production… only occasional chats with their grad students around the water cooler revolve around this topic!

On the other hand, time management Gurus do write about productivity!

It’s a pleasure to introduce our first academic productivity interview with Mark Forster.

Mark Forster is a time management and life coach expert whose works are best known in th e United Kingdom, who brings some fresh new concepts to time management.

To give you an idea of his recognition in Great Britain, Mark Forster newest book – Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management – is ranked #214 in sales at Amazon UK. The Observer recognized Forster as one of Britain’s top ten life coaches.

Mark’s interview is pure content. You will find:

1. Why people drop off time management systems
2. Why having a day with no long blocks of time available (e.g., if you have to teach a class at 12 and another at 2:00) may actually work in your favour
3. Why you should write down any task before doing it

etc.

This is stuff that nobody has treated (that I have seen at least)! And that’s saying someting considering the sea of GTD blogs out there.

The interview is 51 minutes long and 58Mb (it’s worth the large download).