Academic Productivity

In the last month or so (sorry, we haven’t posted in a month!) I’ve been reading on and thinking about attention economy. I think it is the right paradigm to connect the different bits and pieces of productivity knowledge (we could call them hacks) floating around on the ‘net.

I could write a long intro to the attention economy ideas and how they affect the way we process information AND make decisions… but I have written a series of 4 posts on attention economy and I’d better redirect you there. So, ideally, before you continue reading this post you should have at least skimmed that series, and you should be comfortable with it.

The question I want to address on this post is this: Are we rational about how we allocate attention? This is an important topic because attention allocation to different scientific topics can make or break your career.

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Dan posted in his blog that he had managed to get seven papers out in the open literature in January. I had to interview him.

AP.com: How do you manage your daily workload?

Dan Navarro: A lot more pragmatically than I used to. I put an hour or so aside each morning to cover the miniature administrative rubbish - it’s not really enough time to do it properly, but I’ve started to realise that most of it doesn’t matter very much, so I can cut-and-paste a lot of things (Incidentally: never throw away a good piece of bureaucracy-speak, like a research profile or a course description. You can reuse it about 10 times before anyone starts to care). I tend to do intellectually heavy things throughout the morning and into the early afternoon. I tend to take a bit of a siesta in the late afternoon - I don’t sleep, but I do switch off a bit (sometimes I do paperwork). I find this makes it easier to do something useful in the evening.

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I receive from Itiel Dror (Southampton) the announcement of a relevant call for paper for a special issue of Pragmatics & Cognition, focusing on learning technologies:

Learning technologies have been taking an increasing role in almost all learning environments. They are used in a variety of informal and formal educational environments, from early years to university level and throughout adulthood, as well as in many commercial, industrial, and governmental settings. With the greater use of learning technologies it is critical to better understand how they interact with human cognition. Both in terms of how they may facilitate and enhance (as well as hinder) learning, and also in terms of how they affect the way we learn and acquire information, and the nature of cognition.

The full call for papers is available here.
(Deadline for submissions: 30 June 2007)

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