Academic Productivity

In my last post, I looked at how intended learning outcomes (ILOs) can help focus your work and improve your productivity. Specifically, we saw how ILOs can be written to mesh with longer term goals, clarifying your immediate priorities and guiding interim assessments. This post will consider the last point: how ILOs can contribute to evaluations of your productivity.

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It’s now September and with the turning of the leaves comes the start of another academic year. After more than 20 years of conditioning, I still see this as the true start of the new year so rather than wait until January, I tend to make my productivity resolutions now. But even if you prefer to wait until the snow flies, you’ll know that pausing to reflect on your past achievements and future goals is an important part of being productive.

I want to introduce the idea of intended learning outcomes (ILOs) as a template for planning your productivity. Planning is a key part of the Getting Things Done (GTD) system but it’s perhaps an overlooked one. I think part of this problem is that it can be difficult to coordinate plans over the various recommended time horizons: career, 5 years, this year, this week, etc. ILOs help overcome this obstacle by clearly defining what you hope to learn and over what period.

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Just a quick note to mention Ubiquity. It can be ‘quicksilver for firefox’ but it goes a lot further I think. It takes a very refreshing view to repetitive tasks we all do and renders them obsolete. For example:

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to.  You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed.  This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task.  And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful  reviews only links to them.

What I find impressive is the clarity of thought that could detect this as boring, repetitive and build a tool that obviates it. I’m not using Ubiquity (nor Firefox as my main browser) but this makes me consider switching.

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In an impressive display on coherence, Merlin Mann (43Folders) declares moral bankruptcy of the ‘productivity Pr0n’ cult. This is something I have discussed before on ap.com (post: rethinking life hacks).

Merlin has declared he wants a new direction for 43Folders; it was harming people more than helping, since the time readers spent on the blog was taking them dangerously away from their goals. I like his new motto:

Ask yourself: Why am I here right now instead of making something cool on my own? What’s the barrier to me starting that right now?

Will Merlin succeed? Or will he be captured by the gravitational field of cheap self-help advice? We will have to wait until the next episode of 43Folders: the saga.

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A reader writes:

“Dear Academic Productivity,

After having finished a phd project, I am starting a new research project together with a colleague. As a collaborative project requires, well, collaboration and coordination, I wonder if you or perhaps your readers happen to have any good advice, both on best practices and concrete suggestions for web-based collaboration tools.

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Google is going to release in the coming hours what looks like a revolutionary new entry in the browser arena: Google Chrome. The GUI design and engineering effort behind Google Chrome looks impressive. What is more, Chrome is going to be released under an open source license.

In spite of the sugary rhetoric (“it’s in our interest to make the internet better”– yeah, thanks Google), is this going to be the ultimate Firefox killer? And how will this affect the landscape of open source development altogether?

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Precisely two years ago, Shane posted our first mission statement. Simple and ambitious as it was, that post pretty much sums up why we are still here.

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For most academics, the standard reference management software is EndNote. It lets you keep track of all the journal articles, books, web sites, etc. that you have read and might want to cite in your papers, integrating easily with Microsoft Word to create properly formatted citations and bibliographies.

But what do you do if you use LaTeX not Word to write your papers? Traditionally BibTeX comes to rescue. It uses a formatted plain-text file to store references and with the custom-bib and natbib packages, creating citations and bibliographies is fairly painless. You can even use a graphical editor like JabRef to help manage your BibTeX database.

However there can be problems when collaborating with people who use Word. How do you share your BibTeX references with EndNote users or vice versa?

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