Academic Productivity

We have talked about Matt Cornell before on our post “Matt’s idea blog on GTD and Faculty Productivity“.

When I first found his blog, Matt mentioned that…

[He] 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.

His latest blog posts have been covering interviews with productivity personalities (book authors and bloggers, as well as practitioners and consultants). His posts are consistently good, which is somewhat rare in the blogosphere.

I have talked Matt into being ‘interviewed’ here at ap.com. But instead of doing an audio interview as we did with Mark Forster, this time we want to stick to text. The advantage is that this time you can submit your own questions; he will read them and try to answer them. You are getting direct access to a consultant who has experience helping academics, so use it wisely.

In any case, this sounds like a fantastic opportunity to follow up on his work with academics. How well does GTD adapt to the academic world? Has he been able to measure performance before and after adopting GTD?

Use the comments on this blog post to send your questions. One question per comment; if you have several questions please post them separately.

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In this post I’ll show you two easy ways to submit a post. Note: if you have blogged before, this explanation may be unnecessary.

First method: use the built-in editor on our site

I’ll assume that you could sign in/log in just fine. Then you should see a blue Wordpress page with several options. One of them says “write”. Yo can click on it, and by default it will take you to an edit box. You can start typing away. Make sure you are on tab “write post” and not “write page”.

As you see, the obvious WYSIWYG icons for formatting text are there. The only one you might not recognize is the one in between the picture and spell-check: that is the post splitter. For long posts, you may want to insert a splitter so people get the “continue reading this post” message. Like what you should see about here

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We are proud to announce the birth of Academic Productivity 2.0. Over the last months we have been brainstorming on how to improve the blog and we are happy to announce a number of important news.

New look

We have redesigned the blog and created a new logo: a delicate metaphor on how the academia transforms raw ideas into… more mundane, consumable things.

It took quite a lot of work to get the current look working (and we ended up making very conservative decisions!). Load times should have improved as we have removed some plugins that were slowing things down.

Open contributions

We thought it’s ok to write our own ramblings, but we’d like to read yours too.

Academic Productivity 2.0 introduces an open registration system (default role: “Contributor”). This will allow to open up the blog for contributions from our readers. Other blogs have done this, and since we have been receiving a lot of valuable suggestions from our readers, we think it’s time to create a community of contributors. If you have ideas/hacks you want to share, sign up as a contributor or log in < ?php wp_loginout(); ?>(see link on the right side).

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According to a study by research firm Basex recently covered by the New York Times, information overload will be the Problem of the Year in 2008, costing US companies up to $650 billion a year. The figure is supposed to be an estimate of the cost of unnecessary interruptions in terms of “decreased productivity and stifled innovation”. Recipes to fight email overload, in particular, have become a thriving business over the last few years: how to cope with the stress and lack of productivity caused by an ever-growing volume of email in your inbox?

While self-proclaimed gurus are selling on the Web their own ultimate solutions against email overload, Carolin Horn from DMI Boston has designed a clever visualization tool to represent unresponded email in your inbox. I find this idea way more effective than a million GTD techniques and I think Carolin and her coder collaborator Florian Jenett are onto something.

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Having recently completed a PhD, I will share with you three indispensable nuggets of advice for how to get the monster vanquished: use hard deadlines, soft deadlines, and the Martini Method. With a small amount of imagination these can be applied to any large project.

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