Academic Productivity

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:


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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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