Academic Productivity

Kevin from CiteULike wrote in to let us know that they introduced a number of new features. Beside some new user-oriented features (e.g. an editable profile and the possibility to create a blog), the most interesting additions are those that extend group functionality.

Using an online reference manager to share a reference pool among members of a team or project is a brilliant idea, but the previous implementation of groups in CiteULike was pretty poor. The recent upgrade addresses some issues of the previous version and introduces interesting new functionality that should make team-based use of a reference pool snappier and more usable.

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Most time managing programs out there use to-do list, and most of us just have trouble completing them. There’s no bullet-proof approach, but the Zen habits blog has a list of possible kick-starters:

Have you gotten good at organizing your tasks in a to-do list, but have trouble actually executing them? You’re not alone. (…)

Unplug. The biggest distractions come from connectivity. Email, feeds, IM, Twitter, phones. Unplug from these connections while you’re working on your single task.

Baby steps. Don’t think in terms of having to tackle an entire work day, or an entire list of stuff to do. That’s overwhelming.

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I have recently found that Calvin has moved his email newsletter into a new blog format. Calving is an accomplished MIT student who has published two books (!) on productivity for students: How to Become a Straight-A Student and How to Win at College. His blog has categories such as  Student Productivity and Study Tips with good advice for undergrads and grad students, although honestly, I think even higher-ups in the academic food chain could benefit from these tips.

Example posts:

Monday Master Class: Downgrade the Importance of Writing in Paper Writing

Dangerous Ideas: Sorry Paul Graham, I Think it Does Matter Where You Went to College (Watch out for his “dangerous ideas series”! He is trying to be provocative, and doing it well!)

A highlight of this blog is the educated comments it gets:

There is a world of difference between the questions that are thought out by someone else (the teacher), for the purpose of measuring someone other’s (the student’s) understading of a subject, and the questions that someone (the enterpreneur) has to first figure out are meaningful and then answer him/herself.

We haven’t talked about productivityhacks before because it was more oriented to undergrads, but this is not a good enough reason to deprive ap.com readers from excellent content. I think the actual social divide in the academic world is more like those who worry about getting grades, and those who don’t. This make a huge difference in how your life is organized. Grade-seeking people have their schedule done for them (they know for sure when they’ll need to study like crazy and when they can relax). They normally have lots of social support, since classmates have exactly the same schedule -and they are a legion-! The other side of the divide is for people who people who have to make their own schedule (sometimes, imposing it on others), and can suffer social isolation since their peers do not have the same time constraints, and there are few of them.

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If you have followed ap.com for any amount of time, you have realized that I really like Paul Graham’s ideas. He has just published an essay where he uses data from his Y! combinator to prove that having a degree from an elite university does not increase your chances of being successful when going for a startup. He argues that the ’startup test’ is a lot more useful to infer a person’s value than the tests that she needs to pass to e.g., getting good grades during high school or getting accepted in a prestigious college: “a high school record that’s largely an index of obedience”. I agree. I think his logic is impeccable.

This new essay just adds on his idea of “prestige is just fossilized brilliance”. Elite institutions capitalize on prestige, but it is not clear -at least from Paul’s analysis- that prestige converts well into real-life success, which I guess is what companies try to hire for. I think academics fight for prestige (clearly, money is not the currency they fight for!). And I think prestige is the wrong thing to look for!

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How can a music playing program be a time saver? What does this have to do with productivity? Well, background music prevents me from getting bored and drift into distractions. Music may shield you from noises and attention-grabbing events around you. I think music helps me reaching flow when writing/programming.

I will assume that at some point you have taken the time to rip your music collection into your HD, and that you have decent tags. Changing CDs or vinyl is just too distracting. If your tags are a mess, there are lots of tutorials on the web to get them under control. It’ll be worth the effort. At the end of this post, I’ll show you what could be the fastest method with the least human intervention.

(Note: I have talked about how managing music and academic paper collections are similar here; See also ‘noise for academics‘ by Shane).

The problem is that having background music has a cost.

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