Academic Productivity

I while ago I designed a simple program to track how often I’m interrupted and to prevent myself from going into a ’shaving Yaks’ excursion every time I have to touch a browser.

The interruptron works by growing in size as your ‘unscheduled break’ (or procrastination escapade) elapses. It can cover your entire screen, so it’s hard to ignore. it also lets you save what you did and plot some basic stats.

It turns out people are actually using it. Even making videos about it:

I wasn’t very impressed myself when I released it to tell you the truth, but this little program seems to be a crowd pleaser. Another user asked for the source and is actually doing a rewrite. I was surprised when he told me about his background: he was the person responsible for the email engine of one of the most trafficked sites on the web. We’ll be working together and probably implementing more features, but don’t hold your breath.

Anyway, I didn’t announce it here in ap.com. Maybe it’s time to do it now.

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WordFlashReader has several advantages over the previously analyzed rapidReader: it’s open source, and written in perl. So it works under linux and windows at least. wordflashreader also highlights where you are reading, so one of the downsides of RSVP (disorientation) is mostly gone. Still, you lose the formatting when you read HTML or PDF… and the highlighting didn’t work very well for me. The way cursors change speed make it confusing (I’m too used to move around the document with cursor keys). One nifty idea is to go back one sentence with left control key.

As before, of you can test it out and post your thoughts for everyone to see, that’d be great.

Another option we commented before was spreeder.

I’m still looking for the holy Grail that makes my reading more fluid and effective. It looks like this is an interest that I share with many people according to the huge pile of books that amazon lists for ’speed reading’.

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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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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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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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 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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Kevin from CiteULike wrote in to let us know that they introduced a number of new features. Beside some new user-oriented features (e.g. an editable profile and the possibility to create a blog), the most interesting additions are those that extend group functionality.

Using an online reference manager to share a reference pool among members of a team or project is a brilliant idea, but the previous implementation of groups in CiteULike was pretty poor. The recent upgrade addresses some issues of the previous version and introduces interesting new functionality that should make team-based use of a reference pool snappier and more usable.

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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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I have been using Microsoft Word for 12 years, but having just written a 75,000 word document, I feel I am just starting to learn how to use it properly. MS WORD is open to abuse and I guess that many, if not most, of its users don’t get the most out of the program. In this article I share some tips for non-expert MS WORD users that have garnered from my recent experiences of WORD.

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From The Efficient Academic Google group. LyX, the WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX is getting better and better (although I don’t use it; once you are familiar with LaTeX, it’s faster to just write code). For those who may not know it, LyX is :

a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. It is released under a Free Software / Open Source license.LyX is for people that write and want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, ‘finger painting’ font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. In the background, Prof. Knuth’s legendary TeX typesetting engine makes you look good. 

Technorati tags: latex, lyx, editing, typesetting, document, academic productivity, outliner

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This is another nifty trick that makes me think faster and feel more “in the flow”. If you look at what a person does when reading or writing a document, a good chunk of the time she is just trying to reposition the cursor, or otherwise move around.

Did you know that you can change the speed the cursor moves around in the screen? Well, not directly from the OS interface (at least in windows). But you certainty can using a little autoHotKey program called fastNavKeys from Skrommel.

This program runs in the tray, and will let you change the buffer time for keypresses; it can get ridiculously fast. It’s very good to scroll rapidly to the line you need to see/edit. Very handy when reading pdfs or editing manuscripts, and of course programming. Just try it and you will see how much faster you can make the cursor move. You can of course change the speed of other keys, such as delete.

I never thought possible how much better one can *think* by just having faster navigation keys.

Note: it’s addictive. If you are stranded using a computer that doesn have fastNavKeys it’ll feel as if everything is slow motion around you.

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This post is an ode to Google Scholar (GS). GS has a major advantage against expensive institution only academic search engines in that is free, which makes services indispensable to independent scholars wishing to get some access to research literature when they don’t have an institutional subscription. However, even though I personally have institutional access to indexing services like Web of Science and Scopus, I still prefer GS for the majority of my searches, and in this post I will explain why.

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Have you considered the productivity loss associated to a disastrous computer crash (where you cannot retrieve any of your files)? HDs do die, and it is really time-consuming to get back to a working state.

Anyone who regularly works on more than one computer and needs access to the same set of files will benefit from using a syncing tool. The following scenario is pretty common but not efficient:

You are working on a desktop computer and a laptop at home, as well as on a desktop computer at your office. You routinely copies your Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, and other files over to USB flash drives, carry them between your home and workplace, and manually copy every file over to its appropriate directory within My Documents (or whatever home dir you use).

But Sometimes you get things wrong and clobber a newer version of a file with an older one, sometimes you move a file into the wrong place and ends up with duplicates that you must compare by hand, and sometimes you lose a chunk of her valuable work data when one of your computers’ hard drives crashes.

Most people don’t have a backup strategy in place. Everybody has colleagues that have had some kind of disastrous data loss, but somehow they think that their computer is immune to adversity, thieves, and hardware failures.

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I am PC bound, but my MAC jealously was aroused when I spied a new freeware app  “skim”:

Skim is a PDF reading and note-taking app for Mac OS X that is designed to make reading research papers and manuals better. Just like in Preview, you can search, scan, and zoom through PDFs, but you also get some custom features for your workflow…

I read about it on this blog.

Technorati Tags: skim - pdf - pdf management - pdf reader

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There is a nice pdf reader comparison  at donationcoder.com. Since most academics rely on pdf quite a lot, choosing the right tool may save a lot of time and frustration.

The idea here is to have a tool that opens up as fast as possible, uses as little memory as possible, and lets you move around the pdf conveniently with the best rendering quality.

Some of the tools are obscure (great finds!). Most of them are tiny compared to the standard Adobe Reader, but do suffer quality- and feature-wise.

Adobe Reader 8 has the nicest quality of text, it is beautifully crisp; but even with the speed increase of version 8, the program is still something of a monster.

Foxit is very well known as the freeware alternative, it is not the smallest application of those tested, but it does use the least memory; however, the quality of its output is by far the worst!

Adobe’s new comer Digital Edition is still in beta, and has some annoyances (no custom install, all files added to library) but it is a fraction of the size of its big brother. Sadly the render quality does suffer; though not as poor as Foxit all the other applications tested produced more legible text.

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Firefox integrated reference manager Zotero (which I have posted previously about here) put out a new version last week. Highlights include inpage HTML highlighting and annotation, improved search, autorenaming of PDF’s, and integration with MS Word (Pc and MAC). No sign of online social bookmarking, but its on the horizon. The changelog is here.

The continuing usefulness of Zotero is enhanced by a growing number of “scrapers” designed for various on- line article repositories, reference databases and libraries. This year brought Sciencedirect and others (for a full list see here). What this means is that on compatible sites, you see a little icon on the address bar. Clicking that automatically stores the reference with abstract, the HTML article, and the PDF (if there is access), and it will automatically name the PDF (e.g. author-date-truncated title). Zotero allows easy i-tunes like virtual folder organisation, and tagging. This makes Zotero not only a superb reference manager, but a way to manage your PDF collection. Now, for any academic PDF I find on the web, I store it via the scrapers with minimal effort, or if found outside those sites (e.g. an author’s website) I grab the reference from google scholar (which is Zotero compatible), then download the PDF as a “snapshot” and associate it with the reference. You can also link to, or copy into the zotero system, PDF’s from your file system. There don’t seem to be any good applications out there for managing PDF collections, so Zotero could be the one to fulfill that need.

Technorati Tags: zotero - pdf management - pdf - reference management

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The “beyond my mind” blog has a post comparing different academic search engines. The author also describes his search strategy:

The way I search for scientific articles is pretty simple. Say I have a problem to solve that was assigned by some course teachers or my research supervisor. I mark some keywords and Google for them. If I don’t find any relevant information I use combination of those keywords or use alternative keywords adapted from the search results. Once I start getting some keywords that produce relevant results in Google, I pass it to Google Scholar. Sometimes I go to some other subject specific search engines to search using those keywords

I use Web of Science, because it can track cited articles. This is also present in google scholar, but somehow I don’t find it as reliable. I tend to sort by citations, and pay attention to the top few papers only. I guess if most people do like me, there must be a snowball effect going on here, with a ‘rich gets richer’ situation.

Search engines are measured using precision and recall. This is of course relevant, but sometimes more mundane measures are interesting too. The basic unit for productivity evaluating search engines should be something like “time (or clicks) needed to get both the full text and the reference to your hard drive”. Here, small inprovements in usability like going from 21 to 16 clicks to achieve your goal can save quite a lot of time, since we academics use search services so often.

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