Academic Productivity

This is a short book that one can read on a flight (I did), but it packs a lot of good advice. Silvia is sick of ’self-help-like’ books on writers block, etc., and it shows. He writes from the point of view of a seasoned author, and shows quite a lot of ‘being there, done that’ advice in both publishing papers and books. If you are planning a book, the last chapters are the best advice I could find on book planning; he even discusses how to negotiate with your publisher.

So what are the basic recommendations?

- Writing is hard, so there isn’t much of a point trying to find a method to ‘make writing easy’.

- Write on schedule, and in a very consistent manner. Try to create a habit.

- Track your productivity (He uses a SPSS file where he inputs number of words typed per day, and whether he achieved the goal for the day). Tracking is a favorite of mine: it’s surprising how worrying little you get done on a day that feels like you have worked a lot. Tracking will tell you this. It’ll help you planning better: how many words can you write a day, on average? Well, if you have stats, you can say.

- don’t let yourself fall into what he calls ’specious barriers’. For example: “I’m waiting until I feel inspired” or “I need to do some more analysis first.”

- Use social pressure: create an agraphia group with friends/peers, and get together so you can feel ashamed if you didn’t write what you said you would.

The book clearly lives out to its ambitious title. It demystifies productivity (which is always a good thing), and it’ll probably make you laugh outloud… which is more than what I can say about most books that try to do that for you.

Of course, there are chapters that deal with style. Don’t skip those; they are probably the funniest.

This is probably the best book on the topic I have found. Highly recommended.

PS: Paul cites a whole lot of books that look really interesting.

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I have been using Microsoft Word for 12 years, but having just written a 75,000 word document, I feel I am just starting to learn how to use it properly. MS WORD is open to abuse and I guess that many, if not most, of its users don’t get the most out of the program. In this article I share some tips for non-expert MS WORD users that have garnered from my recent experiences of WORD.

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From The Efficient Academic Google group. LyX, the WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX is getting better and better (although I don’t use it; once you are familiar with LaTeX, it’s faster to just write code). For those who may not know it, LyX is :

a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. It is released under a Free Software / Open Source license.LyX is for people that write and want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, ‘finger painting’ font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. In the background, Prof. Knuth’s legendary TeX typesetting engine makes you look good. 

Technorati tags: latex, lyx, editing, typesetting, document, academic productivity, outliner

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This is another nifty trick that makes me think faster and feel more “in the flow”. If you look at what a person does when reading or writing a document, a good chunk of the time she is just trying to reposition the cursor, or otherwise move around.

Did you know that you can change the speed the cursor moves around in the screen? Well, not directly from the OS interface (at least in windows). But you certainty can using a little autoHotKey program called fastNavKeys from Skrommel.

This program runs in the tray, and will let you change the buffer time for keypresses; it can get ridiculously fast. It’s very good to scroll rapidly to the line you need to see/edit. Very handy when reading pdfs or editing manuscripts, and of course programming. Just try it and you will see how much faster you can make the cursor move. You can of course change the speed of other keys, such as delete.

I never thought possible how much better one can *think* by just having faster navigation keys.

Note: it’s addictive. If you are stranded using a computer that doesn have fastNavKeys it’ll feel as if everything is slow motion around you.

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