Here are a few posts that other readers recommend you check out:
Ok, this is just a quick, relaxing post.
In your view who is the academic most likely to accidentally eradicate human life?
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Following up on Jose’s musings on good and bad keywords for a productivity blog, I came across an interesting tool to visualize the evolution over time of aggregated social bookmarking tags for popular websites. It is actually a pretty old project called Cloudalicious created a few years ago by Terrell Russell (of ClaimID fame).
If you are a web metrics maniac like yours truly, you won’t resist plugging this tool into your favourite websites, so here’s the graph I generated for AcademicProductivity.com:
(source)
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“Math is hard; let’s go shopping!”
-hacked Barbie
Summary: It looks like the difficulties of measuring productivity make people use common sense to give advice on how to improve it instead of actually attacking productivity as a hard problem that needs empirical study. But people do follow barely tested advice on productivity. They are either too busy to afford dismissing it, or too pragmatic to believe that we can reach systematic, scientific productivity techniques.
There is a current craze about productivity in many forms (sometimes disguised as personal development). At least 4 of the top 100 blogs in the blogosphere are about productivity (according 
to technorati’s authority: lifehacker #6; Zen Habits #41; lifehack.org #66 43 Folders #73). There’s a current craze about personal productivity and personal development. The best treatment I have read recently is Cal Newport’s Flak magazine article.
In fact, lifehacking is a trend of the 21st century. The idea is to reduce the things that bother you in your life (or reduce the time it takes to complete them) while increasing the quality and quality of the experiences that you like. This is pretty intuitive, but is this a working definition of whatever personal productivity is? Hardly. Today, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack.
Hacks are by definition, unsystematic. Everything goes, as long as it works. This is the contrary to the incremental evolution of scientific thinking. Even though sometimes there are large changes in the form of paradigm shifts, most of the time progress is incremental and lineal.
The advantages are clear: one can build on the knowledge acquired by the previous generation.
But do we have the same incremental progress in personal productivity theories? If there anything remotely similar to a science of productivity? Should people follow only empirically tested advice about productivity?
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I always wondered how people see the academic world from outside. How do we gauge the interest of the general public on what academics have to say (on average)? One easy way to look at this question is to see the how often people will read an article that has the word ‘academic’ on it.
A proxy on what people read nowadays is digg.com. And the tool to see how often people digg academic posts is now available in Dan Zarella’s blog. Given a keyword, the tool will return data on the average number of links accumulated by stories popular on Digg that mentioned that keyword. This is done with 2007 data.
Well, behold what happens when you enter “academic”:
And compare it to what you get when you type “productivity”:
Why is this important? Well, on average, a single digg increases traffic by 0.10%. So a story that gets 3,000 diggs results in an increase in total traffic to the referring site by 300%.
So, from now on we are a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H productivity blog 
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Do you need to write code in your academic work? Have you read someone else’s code? Did you just get a code attachment with a warning like “this is a mess, I need to clean this up someday?”. Well, you are not alone. It seems that in the industry, telling someone that you plan to use code that comes straight from an academic makes them feel a drop of cold sweat down their backs.
American scientist has an article on these common practices that we have managed to avoid for so long.
I therefore started asking scientists how they wrote their programs. The answers were sobering. Whereas a few knew more than most of the commercial software developers I’d worked with, the overwhelming majority were still using ancient text editors like Vi and Notepad, sharing files with colleagues by emailing them around and testing by, well, actually, not testing their programs systematically at all.
I finally asked a friend who was pursuing a doctorate in particle physics why he insisted on doing everything the hard way. Why not use an integrated development environment with a symbolic debugger? Why not write unit tests? Why not use a version-control system? His answer was, “What’s a version-control system?”
The paper advocates the use of version-control, proper editors and IDEs, and unit testing. These three things are great practices, and in my experience we academics either don’t use them or had to learn them ‘on-the-wild’ after banging our heads on a wall. And it shows.
Our code could be tidier. The bad news is that this reputation seems not to be restricted to code tidiness.
The unqualified-reservations blog has a (long) post on how CS research in the academia is considered outside:
…anyone who’s not involved in CS research treats the products of this endeavor as if they were smallpox-infected blankets. Even when it is clearly - in my opinion - good, it winds up ignored. Because of the inescapable grant-related propaganda, it’s impossible to tell what’s good and what’s not.
The gist of his main point is that usefulness and relevance are almost inversely related to academic value. That gives academics the ‘freedom’ to write unmanageable code; as long as it produces a paper (and note that code is not provided with the paper) you are fine. A caricature: a guy invents a programming language (say python) that is used by millions included google. It has zero academic value. Another guy writes and obscure paper (or hundreds) on a topic that is irrelevant even to his mom. That second guy gets grant money, tenure. Sounds familiar?
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This comes at a time when I’m very concerned about what people can do under pressure and how m
uch they are willing to sacrifice for their careers. A friend in the tenure track (or the equivalent in the country she lives in) has lost two babies (natural abortion), probably due to stress. There are entire sections in the Chronicle sections describing the super-human efforts people make to achieve a small increase in academic performance. Having a decent social or family life seems like a luxury for more and more academics. Most people invest money and time in this endeavor in ways that are difficult to justify rationally (and we are talking about arguably the smartest sector of the population!).
Would you risk your health as well? Are you prepared to take mind-altering drugs?
Nature has an article on cognitive doping (here’s the direct link if you don’t want to jump through hoops to get it from your library). The topics has been covered in the blogosphere in different places: Shelley Batts, from the point of view of a grad student, says that taking cognitive-enhancing drugs is a no brainer.
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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.
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.
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.
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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This is a temporary post; it will be deleted soon. It’s intended for people who read ap.com between the night of Fri Nov 2nd and the evening of Sat Nov 3rd AND for those who subscribe to ap.com using RSS feeds.
We have been working really hard on a lot of new features these last few weeks. We like to call this project ap.com 2.0. We had an internal draft that was bouncing back and forth. It’s an announcement with all the new features that will be released soon.
The way we share this document is by posting it as a draft (wordpress, the software that runs ap.com, has this nifty document category). A draft is something that is not ready for public consumption.
What happened yesterday is that I edited the announcement draft with windows live writer (WLW), and saved the changes. Well, guess what. WLW defaults to public, so if you edit a draft and save the corrections, it saves it as public (I basically hit the shortcut S+ctrl+P and never even thought of checking).
The result is that the announcement when public long before we were ready (as you can see, ap.com still looks the same). I have returned it to draft status, but some people may have read it and could be wondering where all these things we mentioned are. Notoriously, RSS subscribers may still have this post in their feed (nothing I can think of can fix that).
This is a public apology for this premature announcement. We are still working on the new features (some may still take a while). I hope you understand, and I’m sure you will like the changes once the dust settles. Sorry about having kidnapped your attention unnecessary.
-Jose
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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 foc
uses 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:
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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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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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From Pascal Cavalier’s blog, I got a pointer to a nice article on Thesis time management. Looks like I’ll have to check this Canadian online-magazine on Higher Education in the future:
Perhaps what is most daunting about writing a thesis is realizing that if you want to be an academic, this is a good introduction to the rest of your career. Writing proposals, grant applications, journal articles and books will be a significant part of your life from here on. Gaining the skills to be a productive and prolific writer is key to success as an academic. That means making writing part of everyday life.
Wrestling your writing to the mat, By Käthe Lemon.
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Good writing is a skill. I’m not saying I have it, and remember, this is a blog post, maybe the fastest form of writing and reading ). As a skill, it requires practice. And, as Graham says, “Writing doesn’t just 
communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.”In fact, writing posts like this one is helping me to review and polish ideas I didn’t know I had about writing till this very moment. I’ll start with the most obvious, and will get more subtle/interesting as the list grows.
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The Chronicle has an interesting piece: “Is Your Spouse Hurting Your Career?”:
in some “mixed marriages,” with no malice or sabotage intended, the nonacademic partner’s behavior or ideas can undermine or even cripple the scholar’s career — because of mutual ignorance and mistaken assumptions. And in those cases where the relationship is failing, the academic’s work can be but one collateral casualty of a wider war.
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I recently completed a small pilot funded by the office of new faculty development at a large university. I approached the director to see if there was interest, and to figure out a way to test the effectiveness of the Getting Things Done methodology for new faculty. We came up with an informal program in which I 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.The faculty were professors from three very different departments - Nursing, Japanese, and Communication Disorders - and each had different styles in how they managed themselves at their work. One thing they all shared, however, were the common challenges facing new faculty, who essentially act as entrepreneurs. For example, they have to:
- Obtain grants for research,
- Plan and perform original research,
- Advise and guide students,
- Teach classes (prep, grading, etc),
- Provide service to the community, etc.
- all the while working to get tenure (there’s a reason it’s called the “tenure track“)
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MINDLESS SIGNIFICANCE TESTING
Decision science news has a post on hypothesis testing that I find relevant.
Some well-made points grow old while no one pays attention to them. One of the most embarrassing for social science is its categorical perception of p-values.
Tender of kindred Web site Andrew Gelman and Hal Stern have an article whose name says it all: The Difference Between “Significant” and “Not Significant” is not Itself Statistically Significant.
Link to The Difference Between Significant and Not Significant is Not Statistically Significant
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