Summary: I didn’t like the book, and won’t go into detail here; instead I marvel at how many people read, believe and act on things that are completely unsubstantiated by any evidence. But that only shows my naivety: it seems that most of the world outside science -and some inside- works that way.

Who is Steve?

Steve Pavlina is a top-100 blogger and a personal development guru. He has done several impressive things like majoring in Math and CS in three semesters, trying polyphasic sleep for 6 months, and testing several extremely demanding changes on his habits like eating raw food only. 

In my view, the field of personal development feels scam-ridden. It preys on people who may not have the strongest will. So the title "Personal development for smart people" feels tonge-in-cheek (Oxymoron?). I’m sure many readers, with an empirical bias, may be bothered by all the new-agey chat out there that passes for advice (with no solid evidence backing it up). Now, is Steve different? Is this book better? The answers are no, and ‘maybe, I don’t know what else is out there’.

Problems with his method: Who in the academia should be doing Steve’s job?

One thing that bothers me is that Steve’s book uses no references whatsoever. He claims to have read most self-help books, but does not acknowledge any specific ideas from them. If all the ideas in the book are new and his, then I’m very impressed -I wouldn’t know-, but that seems unlikely. Again, I’m sure self-help books are all like that; making reference to other people’s ideas in a way you can track them down, as sensible as it sounds, remains a signature of the academia.

In the same way, Steve rarely uses links on his blog, unless he is advocating a product or a person.

Which should be a red flag. Still, the guy is tremendously likable because you can see that his intention is to help people, and that he is honest about that.

Someone in the academia should be doing the work that Steve does, but more systematically.

Who is this group? Social psychology? I have no idea. My first reaction is that I’d feel ashamed of being part of that group. Loads of taxpayer money, hordes of grad students, and entire institutions protecting them… and they got their ass kicked by a guy with a blog. Maybe it’s not the academia’s fault.

Another people that should be ashamed is religious organizations, but I won’t sidetrack the discussion in that direction.

Take any of Steve’s topics. For example: does polyphasic sleep produce an overall increase in productivity? If this turns out to be the case, it would make all the sense in the world for policy makers to advise entire nations to encourage people to be polyphasic sleepers. That would remove the social awkwardness of being a polyphasic sleeper (the reason Steve quoted for him to stop!).

I have not checked the literature on polyphasic sleep. I’m sure there’s work on this. But I’m also sure nobody has made the same impact as Steve converting people to polyphasic sleep.

Also, nutritionists should take note on how a single person can switch the food habits of a large group of people by blogging.

This may sound terribly negative, as if we academics were playing some zero sum game with bloggers and other influentials (in fact, Steve advices against this mentality, and encourages thinking in terms of abundance). But isn’t it sad when academics spend entire lives working pretty much every hour they are awake, and nobody cares? For an academic, chances of changing society at a scale Steve does are slim. Very slim.

I may sound like an ‘academic absolutist’, who believes that nothing out of the academia has any value. Far from it; if you have followed this blog, you know we are critical of the academia and are disgusted by several common practices in it.

But wouldn’t it be good if more non-academics actually cited where their ideas come from? Note: this doesn’t imply all good ideas come from academics, and I’m trying to fish citations for them. If anything it’d make the reader’s life easier if he decided to master the topic he is reading. With more people writing content for others (that never gets revised or filtered properly, thanks to the wonders of self-publishing and the Internet), I’d love to see more use of citation. It doesn’t have to be compliant with any of the standards (APA, Chicago, etc): just tell me where you got your idea from so I can investigate more if I want to.

The basic question that keep popping in my mind and the book fails to address: "How do you know what you know?"

Take any claim. For example : "Many people set goals and then assume the path to reach them will require suffering and sacrifice. This is a recipe for failure." Why? If we know something about expertise is that it is acquired through deliberate practice and that is not a pleasant thing to do. Playing scales on a piano, training a repetitive move that is key for your sport, memorizing chess openings etc are all key for success on those activity. And they are ‘suffering and sacrifice’.

If I can find a counter argument in a few seconds, the claim is not backed by any kind of evidence, and there’s no reference I can look for to satisfy my curiosity, my bullshit detector buzzes. Sorry.

Not that citation is the panacea, either. Most people I know agree that 90% of the published papers they read are horrible. Peer review (the traditional variety) is crushing innovation and make science look like a political game. But still… why are most bestselling books missing the most basic form of referencing where their ideas come from?

And one could count the millions of readers that Steve has as evidence that his stuff is good. But can it be that there are millions of people whose bullshit detectors are not in the same category as ours?

Should we aim to educate people so they look for better indicators of authority? And what are those indicators of authority? This is the question we’ll address in a future post.

Sara Lloyd has published a manifesto on the way knowledge is distributed today.

In an ‘always on’ world in which everything is increasingly digital, where content is increasingly fragmented and ‘bite-sized’, where ‘prosumers’ merge the traditionally disparate roles of producer and consumer, where search replaces the library and where multimedia mash-ups -not text- holds the attraction for the digital natives who are growing up fast into the mass market of tomorrow, what role do publishers still have to play and how will they have to evolve to hold on to a continuing role in the writing and reading culture of the future?

This is important since the publishing industry somehow determines how academics allocate their time. If you can communicate your ideas in a way that fits the current standards, you may get them to spread farther.

Another interesting point is how the development of the text itself and the writing and editing process is now often ‘open’: there are ‘beta’ books on the net, and readers, ‘debug’ chapters as soon as the author releases them. This is a fantastic model that could leave professional editors out of the equation and speed up publishing in general. But then, do you really need the paper version of the book when all is said and done? Do you need to make a trip to the library to get it?

Oh, and by the way, Adobe acrobat 9 is out and now you can embed flash (i.e., video) in it. This makes possible to create a book that contains talks; or 3D rotations of a complex data visualization. Yet another reason to pay attention to fully digital book distribution.

Mark McGuinness has collected a bunch of his best post into one free ebook. It works well as an overview of what is ‘common practices’ in time management nowadays.

He also posted some more resources here.

» Time Management #8: Resources BoDo: Business of Design online » Blog Archive

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.

One note though; you may be working on a very basic area of knowledge, and you or may not even consider that your work could produce any applied results. It is true that this book considers innovation in a way that is closer to invention: that is, a finished product that somebody can use. If you are not in the ‘applications possible’ group, I still think that it is a good book to read for you, just because it’s going to treat topics that are important for you people doing basic research.

One of the points of the book is that an idea is not an invention, unless you can actually implement it and get something ‘out there’ with your idea. Berkun covers several inventors like Edison, who produced quite a lot of work in terms of ideas and patents, but they only implemented and managed to produce inventions for a few of them. I think this is interesting, because in today’s world most ideas can be implemented with minor costs, for example in software. You can quickly put together a prototype for a software project, even though it may not be the best implementation, to test your idea.

I think this condition of contemporary science separates it from other conceptions that are captured in history books: there,  inventions are difficult tasks. For example, if you wanted to create an apparatus, something that flies for example, the initial costs are very high. But nowadays, most ideas can be implemented in software (debatable, I know, but the space of ideas that can be tested as software is large thanks to people spending most of their waking time on a computer). This is great because software doesn’t have such a high cost for starting the production of something like a plane or a machine that can fly, when nothing like that existed.

I think this is a much better book than the previous one about project management, even though the first one was absolutely great. And Scott himself is surprised because this book being a lot better is not selling more than TAPM. Although this is a wider topic it didn’t outsell the previous book. This is one of the mysteries of writing a book. Berkun has been giving talks about this book and promoting it any way possible for a few months (!).

One of the interesting ideas that I got from this book is that finding a problem, and delimiting what your problem is, is actually more important than solving the problem. Berkun’s example is Newton. He spent quite a lot of his time chasing a completely unsolvable problem: He tried to find the philosophical stone that could turn lead into gold, which is a useless, unproductive scientific problem. I wonder how many of our areas’ hot topics right now will be looked down a few years from now, assimilated to the search for the philosophical stone. All this time that Newton spent trying to solve that problem was completely wasted. Berkun also quotes Einstein, who arguably spent 19 days out of 20 trying to define the problem instead of solving it.

I will cover the main ideas chapter by chapter.

Chapter One is called, “The Myth of Epiphany.” What Berkun says is that there is no such a thing as an ‘Aha!’ moment, a great crazy idea that solves everything. He advocates that work is all that it takes to get to good ideas, which is probably a very comforting thought. In that, he agrees with Paul Silvia, whose book we just reviewed. Paul says that we ,as scientists are not writing poems, we are not writing literature, so we don’t have to wait for inspiration. Our work is sort of easier to schedule and we don’t depend so much on inspiration, which is a great.

Chapter two goes against the myth of our understanding the history of innovation. So Berkun says that we actually don’t understand the history of innovation, and it is not easy to just look back at history and see which innovations have been a success and why. The example he uses is the printer by Gutenberg. Gutenberg didn’t reach fame until well past his time. Unlike Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he was not considered an important figure in history until pretty late in life; its just due to chance that we keep some information about his personal life, for example.

The history of the printing press is actually a very good example of how much implementation matters. You can have the most wonderful idea in the world, but if you don’t implement it, then nothing really happens. In the case of the printing press, the Chinese had invented movable type long before Gutenberg, but Gutenberg was lucky enough to actually implement it and get it to the point where it was popular enough and effective enough, to actually make him some money. But the point is that, you don’t have anything until you have an implementation – a working implementation. So, the success of the printing press in Europe is due to Gutenberg, not to the Chinese, who actually invented the printing press.

Chapter Three is called ‘There is a method for innovation’. Berkun says that we actually don’t have method of innovation;  we chase something completely different and we serendipitously reach an innovation. Sometimes the great innovators are chasiing wealth and money (i.e., Edison). Some other times it’s necessity or curiosity. There are plenty of factors that can affect whether you reach an innovation or not. Berkun lists some challenges for innovation: you need to find a problem, then you need to develop a solution, then build something, and those three are completely important for academics. Then the next few are more about actually implementing your idea and reaching the public.

Another interesting idea of this chapter is that the probability of innovation is really small, just because it is a combination of all the factors that he lists before.

So, assuming that you have a 50% chance of succeeding at each of these challenges, which is a pretty generous assumption, you need to combine all those priorities, so if you have 0.5 priority of succeeding on eight steps, then the total chance of succeeding is well actually pretty much like 0.39%; that is, less than one percent.

Chapter Four, “People adopt new ideas.” Berkun says that this is completely wrong; people have to be pushed away from this status quo before they start liking something new. One example is electricity; when electricity was first introduced, nobody thought that it was solving any problem. So, the main issue was, ‘No one will want this’. Of course, being unprepared for this, the first electric chair was built to demonstrate that electricity had uses.

Another interesting point that Berkun makes is how innovations diffuse. After realizing that it is very difficult to implant any knowledge in a field, Berkun points out five factors that are important. One is the relative advantage of the new idea compared to the status quo. Two is compatibility – how much effort is required to transition from the current thing to the innovation? Three, complexity;  find out if you need learning to apply the new idea, if so then people are not going to do it. Four is Trialability, that is, how easy it is to try the innovation? And fifth is Observability; how visible are the results of the innovation? The more visible, the easier it is for people to adopt the innovation.

Chapter Five is about the Lone Inventor. Berkun says that there is no such a thing as a lone inventor, that any new invention is just the end of a change of smaller inventions, and most things are actually invented by teams. For example, NASA didn’t put a man on the moon by just using the talent of one single person, it’s was a  huge team who actually achieved this.

Chapter Six, “Good ideas are hard to find”. So, this is yet another nail in the coffin of how important implementation is. Good ideas are a dime a dozen, so what you really need to do to prove that your idea is good is to implement it and compare it with other ideas, and prove that it is a better idea IF it provides a better solution to the problem.

One important point here is that finding good ideas can be done by very different ways. Figure 6.4 is actually a graph of how people find ideas. So this was our recent survey of over 100 self-identified innovators in various fields, and interestingly most people, about 70% say that they look for areas in different fields from their own, this is actually key: so next lunch break, go to the cafeteria with people from a different department

Chapter Seven, “Your boss knows more about innovation than you”, we’d want to skip this one. We have no boss to speak of .

Chapter Eight, “The best ideas win”. So, this is a kind of, a mix here between moral and ethics and how people are used to movies in which the good guys always win and so on. What Berkun proves here is that this is actually not true. For example, Beta was a much better video format than VHS, and VHS won. For example, the QWERTY keyboard design was actually uncomfortable for everybody typing but it’s winning over other designs like the DVORAK alternative. Just because it was designed so the typing machines won’t jam. Another example is Metric systems, like the European Metric system compared to the American system of foot, gallon, mile. Actually the United Kingdom is using this system supposedly now, although most people still use the old one.

Chapter Nine, “Problems and solutions”, it’s again about the point I made before, how finding a problem is more important than solving the problem or it should take a lot more time than actually solving it.

Chapter Ten is “Innovation is always good”. Here, Berkun shows some examples where innovation wasn’t always good. For example DDT actually always terminates on plagues but it ended up being an ecological disaster; same for some inventions like automobiles made by the Internet because we had spent a lot of  wasted time reading stupid things.

One last thing that I wanted to say about this book is that it has a very innovative way doing references. It has an annotated bibliography and it has also a ranked bibliography; that is, Berkun ranked books he used by how many ideas he took from each of them. This is actually a pretty interesting idea that we academics should  explore.

This is a short book that one can read on a flight (I did), but it packs a lot of good advice. Silvia is sick of ‘self-help-like’ books on writers block, etc., and it shows. He writes from the point of view of a seasoned author, and shows quite a lot of ‘being there, done that’ advice in both publishing papers and books. If you are planning a book, the last chapters are the best advice I could find on book planning; he even discusses how to negotiate with your publisher.

So what are the basic recommendations?

- Writing is hard, so there isn’t much of a point trying to find a method to ‘make writing easy’.

- Write on schedule, and in a very consistent manner. Try to create a habit.

- Track your productivity (He uses a SPSS file where he inputs number of words typed per day, and whether he achieved the goal for the day). Tracking is a favorite of mine: it’s surprising how worrying little you get done on a day that feels like you have worked a lot. Tracking will tell you this. It’ll help you planning better: how many words can you write a day, on average? Well, if you have stats, you can say.

- don’t let yourself fall into what he calls ‘specious barriers’. For example: “I’m waiting until I feel inspired” or “I need to do some more analysis first.”

- Use social pressure: create an agraphia group with friends/peers, and get together so you can feel ashamed if you didn’t write what you said you would.

The book clearly lives out to its ambitious title. It demystifies productivity (which is always a good thing), and it’ll probably make you laugh outloud… which is more than what I can say about most books that try to do that for you.

Of course, there are chapters that deal with style. Don’t skip those; they are probably the funniest.

This is probably the best book on the topic I have found. Highly recommended.

PS: Paul cites a whole lot of books that look really interesting.

There has been some buzz on the blogosphere about a new book “the 4 hour work week” by Tim Ferriss. I haven’t read the book and am not sure I will, but from the descriptions I have read it appears he has useful things to say about time management. His focus in on effectiveness and highlights Pareto’s principle – 80% of the value of what we do comes from 20% of what we do. His advice is to cut out the unessentials in our lives and focus on just those things that add the most value. He encourages batching of tasks, and blocking out distractions. Some suggestions include the very sage advice to check your email only twice a day, something I often intend to do but have trouble sticking with. There is a useful post here about putting some of these ideas into practice. Another useful point is he suggests asking yourself three times a day whether you are actually being productive, or just being busy – performing a crutch activity, that is avoiding the task that you really should be doing but feels overwhelming or unpleasant.

What I found particularly interesting was that it drew my attention to a name for a concept that I was aware of but didn’t have a name for: Parkinson’s Law. Parkinson’s law states “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”, and Ferriss emphasises that a task will also swell in perceived complexity and importance in direct proportion to the amount of time you allot to it. Parkinson’s law was first discussed in terms of how a manager should assign tasks to subordinates, but it has profound implications for self time management. For academics, a lot of the work we do is defined by our own time deadlines, and we often have a reasonable amount of freedom in deciding when a given task must be done by. Procrastination is one corollary of Parkinson’s law. Have you ever met someone who is bad at managing deadlines, but says that they work best when leaving things to the last minute? The deadline pressure encourages them to focus, block out distractions, and become highly productive. They get a lot done in a short period of time, which without a deadline would have taken them forever to do.

The solution to Parkinson’s law is obvious – limit the amount of time you have to do tasks. I don’t know the specifics of Ferriss’s solution but the method that I have seen employed by highly productive academics is that for every hour of your working day, you have a clear idea of what you have to accomplish in that time. In addition, they have tasks that follow which are contingent about completion of work in the preceding time period. And if you setting up these mini deadlines in conjunction with fixed items in calendar (meetings, talks etc) it gives you a hard landscape in which to help enforce deadline pressure.

One problem in this suggestion is that any estimation of how much time a task will take you also face Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law…

Are academics managing projects? The thesis of this post is that we academics are project mangers without formal training in project management. You ask for money to do a research _project_. If you supervise or mentor students until they get their PhD, you are managing a project. If you teach a class, you are managing a project. Do you see where I’m going?

When we read Dilbert, we think: “Oh, the industry world is crazy. The academia doesn’t work that bad”. That is true, but I’m sure there are things we can borrow from their world (e.g., trying to write down the process we follow to achieve some results, and try to improve it). This is what Berkun talks about in his book. For example, in the processes of writing your next article, which parts could be delegated? Did you ‘hire’ -make connections with- the right person to take the parts that could be delegated? When coming up with new ideas for future research, how do you select which ones to follow up and which ones to ditch?

Topics include:

• How to make things happen
• Making good decisions
• Specifications and requirements
• Ideas and what to do with them
• How not to annoy people
• Leadership and trust
• The truth about making dates
• What to do when things go wrong
• As you see, plenty of relevant sutff for academics here.

Berkun is:

an author, public speaker and consultant. He worked as a manager at Microsoft from 1994-2003, on projects including (v1-5) of Internet Explorer, Windows and MSN.

Berkun has written what could be the first project management book that doesn’t have a load of technical information on Gantt charts and related fashionable topics in the the industry. Even though project management seems to be a hot topic for the ‘Dilbert’ people of the industry, academics have taken little notice of this trend.

One thing that is missing from time management (TM) methods is how to decide which project to work on next. TM helps (a lot) with getting things done at a micromanagement level: An academic using a time management method will probably be more efficient getting to the right task at the right time.

One of the most interesting chapters is on ‘making good decisions’. Surprisingly, Berkun says that in the interviews he performed for this book no project manager used the formal methods of decision making that we teach in judgment and decision making (JDM) departments, so one has to wonder how much of the basic research gets to applied settings like this one.

A surprising fact if that, to get a paper out of the door, we probably use methods (processes) that have changed little since out PhD advisor passed them down to us. Are academic processes good? According to Berkun, good processes, accelerate progress, prevent problems, they make important actions visible and measurable, and people impacted by them are in favor of them. I’m sure we have some methods that are far from optimal.

In summary, an interesting read; while it’s not the first book that an academic would pick to improve her productivity, the intutitions and ‘no-nonsense’ recommendations in this book are valuable. Oh, and the writing is surprisingly good.

Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management Is the latest time management book by Mark Forster. Do it tomorrow (DIT) presents some very innovative ideas that are surprisingly simple.

Mark Forster is a time management and life coach expert whose works are best known in the United Kingdom. To give you an idea of his recognition in Great Britain, DIT is ranked #214 in sales at Amazon UK at the time of this writing. The Observer recognized Forster as one of Britain’s top ten life coaches.

The title of the book comes from one of the central ideas: to create a buffer between the time a task is born and the time we action it. Forster’s advice is to ‘Collect all your lncomlng work during one day and deal with it in one batch the following day.’ This simple thing can help us to rescue our day from the influence of random interruptions. Forster also recommends not taking a single action without writing it first. The logic behind these two recommendations is a distinction between what he calls the reactive vs. rational brain. During our day, some tasks are not done at all because the ‘reactive brain’ puts in a lot of resistance. Most people would be familiar with this kind of resistance: ‘I really, really need to finish that paper… but let me check my mail once more’. Although the rational brain knows the importance of completing a task, the reactive brain just ‘doesn’t feel like’.

The reactive brain is not smart, so Forster proposes we should ‘cheat’ on it. For example, saying to yourself  ‘ok, I’m not going to finish the paper, but I’ll just put the folder on top of the table’ is sometimes enough for the reactive brain to feel relieved and for us to actually start witting!

The idea of an automatic vs. controlled mode of processing is present in current cognitive science, popularized by books such as for example Stanovich, K. E. (2004). “the robot’s rebellion” and Slovic et al’s (2002) ‘‘affect heuristic’’ notion: Purportedly rational judgment is often influenced by gut feelings (there is a large collection of judgment and decision making heuristics that work just bypassing the ‘logical’ system. These are only examples of evidence for the ‘reactive brain’ and rational brain’ distinction that Forster makes.

However, there is another heuristic that goes against the premise that ‘the rational brain knows better and the guts feelings should be avoided’. In one of his other books called ‘Get everything done’ (GED), Forster recommends to do the action that we resist the most. The idea is that this gut feeling signals the things that are the most important. I find this a bit of a contradiction.

Many people seems to be  complaining around how much it takes to keep a time management system running (although they mostly refer to the current geek’s favorite, ‘get things done’ -GTD-, which is all the craze in productivity blogs around). I  think this Forster system has great potential to become a next craze in that it is several orders of magnitude simpler than GTD. DIT is simpler in that there is no need to keep record of importance, energy levels, contexts, etc. It also delimits when your job is done (which is important if you want to have a life).

Now is this a book that I would recommend to academics? As long as academics have to deal with deadlines, papers, emails, conflicting goals, and procrastination like any other mortal, the answer is yes!

DIT is not a book on project management, or on how to select which project to work on next. This topic is well covered by other books, such as Berkun’s ‘project management’ that I will review soon. But DIT is filled with surprisingly simple advice to increase your effectiveness in dealing with your day-to-day task. I’ll probably write more about it… but I’ll ‘do it tomorrow’

Technorati Tags: time – management, – productivity, – goals, – book – review

References:

Slovic, P., Finucane, M., Peters, E. & MacGregor, D. (2002). The affect heuristic. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds) Heuristics of intuitive judgment: Extensions and applications. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Stanovich, K. E. (2004). the robot’s rebelion: finding meaning in the age of Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.