Academic Productivity

Jose posted an article last week about one person’s PhD experience, highlighting many of the common difficulties encountered when doing what’s largely a self-directed research project. There are loads of books about how to finish a PhD that expand on these questions – of supervisors, organizing your time and so on – but I’ve found that their advice can be frustratingly abstract. When I started my PhD I couldn’t help but wonder “yes but what should I do RIGHT NOW?”.

One useful trick I discovered was to set myself regular assignments. If you’re coming to a PhD from an undergrad or Masters level degree, chances are you’re more used to having teachers give you tasks rather than setting off into uncharted waters on your own. What’s more, you’ve got a big mountain of work sitting in front of you labelled ‘lit review’ and it can be hard to know where to start.

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My typical day can be divided roughly into thirds: part administration, part analysis/thinking, and part reading. And while I like the new ideas that come with reading, it can be awfully tedious at times. Who wants to spend all day plowing through a big stack of papers and books, especially now that it’s summer? So while this title may be a bit jokey, I’m going to share some serious tips for how to speed up your reading of the most time-consuming materials: books.

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Nick Cohen has a provocatively titled piece in today’s Observer, “No one wins in modern-day academia”, examining the shortcomings of the Research Assessment Exercise.

If you’re a UK academic, you’ll know all about the RAE which, as it says on the tin, is an exercise to assess the quality of a department’s research and consequently determine future levels of government funding. My experience with this so far has been quite limited. In my old department, we measured success through policy influence, not journal publications, and my current work is just starting to yield results. But even if you are an active participant in the RAE, the question still remains: is this really the best way to assess our overall effectiveness and success? Academic life is about more than just research: we are also teachers, administrators and professional community members.

So setting aside the official funding role of assessment for the moment, I’d like to ask an open question. How do you evaluate your own success as an academic? (And as a relevant corollary, how does this affect how you choose to spend your time?)

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Even if you’re not familiar with the daily life of an academic, chances are you will have heard the expression “Publish or perish”. In my (limited) experience, it’s not as bad as it sounds since people who end up in academia tend to have lots of ideas and like to share them with other people. In this case, writing a paper may be a bit time-consuming but it’s really just an extension of the brainstorming you do all the time. However the problem comes when trying to keep track of your various ideas. It’s very rare that one project finishes neatly before the next begins and so a person needs a way of keeping tabs on multiple projects at once.

The approach I’ve been using is borrowed from an engineering firm I used to work for. (more…)

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