Academic Productivity

There are several dedicated packages to typeset a curriculum vitæ or a resume in LaTeX, such as europecv or ecv. For some reason I’ve always found these solutions not flexible enough to suit my needs. This is why I opted for a standard (article) class as a basis for my CV.

Some TeX distributions such as XeTeX allow you not only to benefit of the advanced typesetting features included in LaTeX, but also to use in your documents expert fonts such as Hoefler Text, Adobe Minion, or Adobe Garamond Pro and to edit TeX sources in your native (Western or non-Western) writing system.

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We have posted before about speed reading. Note that this term encompasses many different methods, some of which are based on dubious claims (see wikipedia article). The method I’m talking about is rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), i.e., saving time by avoiding saccadic movements. I really didn’t get much use of it, because when I tried it I found the interaction with my favorite program too cumbersome.

However, I still think that the idea or RSVP holds a lot of promise. I have found a better program, called rapidReader6. It has a 30-day demo. It solves many of the problems that this technique has, although not all.

Instead of listing my impressions, I’d like to see yours. Can I ask you to download the trial, and read one paper with it (try to make it from the beginning to the end)? You will find many shortcomings, but please keep going, and post them here so we can discuss them. Did you read the article faster than before? What made you lose focus?

For example, the fact that formatting is lost (Am I reading a heading, or a footnote?), and that figures and equations are lost (damn, I have to go back to the original document!) is troublesome. Sometimes, when reading a pdf, it picks header and footer as main text. One trick: convert from pdf to word (adobe acrobat does that) and then point rapidReader to the word doc; it usually fixes it).

I’m really interested in knowing what your impressions are.

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Dr. Pychyl has an interesting podcast series on procrastination. Is procrastination related to certain personality traits? Taxes and other aversive stuff: Why do we put it off? Give them a try if you are interested in those questions.

The main difference between these podcasts and the heaps of information that are available on the web about procrastination is that this comes out of a psychology lab.

If you find a good resource (even peer review ed ones ) on procrastination, please post it here.

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 We academics should be obsessed with the amount of stuff that we write, and it could be that one bottleneck of our output is simply the speed at which we type. We have provided some tools to help you write faster (see our review of an autocompleter here), but actually audio could be a very good tool to get your ideas into a more manageable form, which could be text or it could be simply an audio file. For example, it’s very, very easy to do a brain dump using audio. You just start talking about the idea that you just had and try to put it in a way that sounds reasonable that you go to other people, play it, and they will understand what you are saying.

In that sense, it is a lot better to use audio because you speak at a speed that is a lot higher than your typing speed. 

Actually this post has been dictated into Audacity, which is a free software that I use for dictating. One of the things that mainly changed my mind and made me try dictation was Peter Fisher’s Podcast series; Peter Fisher is a professor at MIT, and he has a series of Podcasts on Academic Productivity. I seriously would recommend his stuff in my review here; I think he has plenty of very valuable advice in his Podcasts. But anyway, I want to go through the advantages of using audio as a means to take your ideas down to paper at the same time.

The first advantage is that audio forces linearity on you. When I write text, I can jump freely around; I can go to the introduction, then add to the end of the paper; I can work on the Methods section, go back to the intro, then back to Method and so on. This is not something that you can do with audio; you really have to start from point A and run all the way to point Z. This could be an advantage or it could be a disadvantage, but for short ideas like a Blog post or just a quick note, this should be an advantage.

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NOTE: this post and the following are part of an experiement I’m conducting with dictation and delegation. You may find that my writing style is different (more conversational?). I want to know if that bothers you, if you perceive it as a quality dropping. Let me know in the comments!

-Jose

This is my review of ‘The Myths of Innovation’ by Scott Berkun. If you have been following academicproductivity.com  for any amount of time, you know that we really like Scott Berkun’s books. We have reviewed his former book called, ‘The Art of Project Management’  (TAPM). I think this book is important for anyone who is aiming for a good output in academic productivity because the book tries to

answer a very important question, which is ‘how can I be more innovative?’ Since innovation is an important part of science, I think this is an important book to read.

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NOTE: Thanks Terri Yu (Yale) for submitting this resource to ap.com.

UPDATE: Terri has posted on his blog a collection of notes on the Fisher Files, sequence II. This is a fantastic resource overall, more so if you prefer reading over listening.

The Fisher files is a weekly podcast that focuses on being ‘thoughtful’ -call it strategy- by connecting small actions with larger aims. In the words of the author:

In a single day, we perform over two hundred small tasks: dial a phone, sharpen a pencil, open the computer, begin to type a paragraph. How do we connect all those small task to the larger aims of our lives? Are we even aware of what the larger aims of our lives are?

I have thought more and more about making and maintaining the connections between the large and small. Sometimes, these connections just fall apart for me and I find myself doing useless and irrelevant things. Other times, some connections are there and strong and I have an almost spiritual sense of mindfulness. The way the connections help me translate large aims to small tasks is not so much about productivity as they are about relevance.

Peter is a GTD practitioner, although not all the techniques described in the GTD book were useful for him -and I suspect not all are applicable to academics.

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Note: this is a contributed post by Cal Newport. If you like this, check his study hacks blog for more. If you have an interesting idea that supercharges your productivity and want to share it with our community, feel free to send it to us using the contact form. We’d certainly want to hear it!

-Jose

I’m a graduate student. A fourth year PhD candidate at MIT, to be precise. And I have an annoying habit. Whenever I get a chance to collaborate, chat, or hang around with successful professors in my field, I like to find out about their work habits. In doing so, I’ve discovered the following two trends:

1. The best young professors carve out a day each week to do nothing but research. This prevents the administrative nonsense that dominates their early professional lives from bringing their research momentum to a complete stop.
2. The best, distinguished, older professors — those who have earned light teaching schedules and have paid their dues on enough committees that in their final years before retirement can begin to untangle themselves from these obligations — isolate administrative nonsense to a small number of days. They might even, for example, have a single day each week to take care of this crap, and then spend the other four thinking big thoughts.

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