If you’re not already aware of the excellent TED conferences and talks, I would strongly recommend going to their site and having a poke around. There are some fascinating people and ideas featured but be prepared to spend a bit of time: most of the content consists of 18 minute video talks.

One of the best ones I’ve seen recently is this talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of a “journey of self-discovery” type novel which is being made into a movie with Julia Roberts. To be honest, from that description, I probably would have skipped it but I’m glad I did watch it: it’s thought-provoking and in places very funny.

She discusses the idea of “genius” and how the pre-Enlightenment concept of attributing outstanding works of art to divine inspiration/intervention (literally, “having” a genius) contrasts with the modern notion that such works come from within the individual (“being” a genius). “Having” a genius helps the artist maintain distance between themselves and their work, deflecting blame from the self when things don’t go so well and keeping one modest when work is well-received. As she says, it helps avoid the depressive thoughts that make one want “to start drinking gin at 9 o’clock in the morning” and generally helps promote creativity.

What do you think? Sounds pretty reasonable to me and a useful construct for digging one’s self out of rut.

I’m sure everyone here is familiar with drafting. It’s a very  demanding activity, and my feeling is that there are no proper tools out there. Word is clearly not a good drafting tool, and raw latex is not much better. I particularly use onenote, but it’s not without its problems (I work under linux too, and there the closest solution I could find is to use rightnote under wine).

Surprisingly enough, the Office team has a website to request feedback, and they seem to use it (!). This is a way to talk to the developers directly, something I missed when using microsoft products for a long time. So if you have a pet peeve, go post it there. Here’s mine:

In long docs view only a section at a time

Navigating a long doc is awful for drafting. The toilet paper metaphor doesn’t work, human working memory cannot keep track of location of ideas that way. Onenote shows a much better metaphor, where one idea/section is its own tab. This idea agrees with the programming maxim "a function should use a screen at the most. If it doesn’t fit a screen, it’s too long". writing text is not programming, but it’s close: many ideas organized in a logical way, with dependencies.

So the proposal: In long docs, view only a section at a time. This could be draft mode, or a checkbox for any mode.

Btw, outline mode is not what I mean. Apart from being ugly as hell, it shows all other sections folded. I mean a completely crear screen with just the section you are working on.

It sorta can be done now, by using a master document and making each section a subdocument… but it’s not very agile. I rearrange sections a lot. Having each subdoc as another window separately is confusing.

I’m curious to hear what your tricks are for drafting. I’m surprised that things like onenote don’t get more attention in this community. They do take quite a lot of mental effort out from writing for me.

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.

Economics uses the assumption that Agents are rational and, thus, markets are efficient.

But we dedicate disproportionate attention to small decisions compared to large ones, and this  does not fit with the rationality assumption:

I have long taken it as ‘given’ that we typically spend too much time and trouble over trivial monetary decisions (such as, whether to get a 4Gb or 2Gb iPod) but not enough on momentous ones (stocks or shares?  this house or that one?). Then when I come to actually make this claim in a written document I realise I have no evidence other than my own convictions, and after some time spent with Google scholar I have not come up with any.  If anyone knows of any relevant research please let me know.

(Daniel Read on the judgment and decision making [JDM] mailing list, Vol 97, issue 5)

There’s very little empirical work studying both psychologically and economically relevant variables simultaneously. Attention is a psychological variable, and return of investment is a concept from economy… and

If, as Goldhaber proposes, we can expect attention to work as currency, then we can calculate a Return of Investment (ROI) for attention.

Assume that attention can be converted to value, and that this happens over time. This is a good assumption: if we pay attention to fitness, our health improves; if we pay attention to [insert hot topic in your area here] you get publications and prestige (that may attract attention to you!).

ROI can be used to select a field of study. Everyone has a ‘hunch’ on what field will be the most productive in the short and long term. But are these intuitions accurate? Do people really switch fields according to their estimated ROI? The answer is… absolutely not. Most people I know picked their field either by whim or by accident, not by design. There are those ‘careerists’ who have the talent of picking only the hot topics (and they thrive in the current ecosystem!). But even those tend to focus on the short term (pressured by tenure-track demands etc) and their production, although impressive on paper, may have questionable long-term impact.

Here we see the effect that Daniel Read pointed out on the JDM mailing list: We don’t really spend much time pondering which line of work we’ll follow; everything feels much more like serendipity. However, small decisions, like which iPod to buy, may take a good chunk of our time.

Prestige, again, may in a way work like printed money does in our current ‘academic’ economy -which is, indeed, an attention economy!-. In previous posts, I have defended the idea that academics work for, and get paid in, prestige (not money). The role of prestige is to certify that the carrier has value, that paying attention to her will give us a good ROI. This explains why Google puts more weight on academic sites (i.e., getting one link from an academic site will do more for your pagerank than a link from a site with the same visits, but from the non-academic world).

The problem is that prestige doesn’t have all the same properties as money. It cannot be quantified, for once. This causes bizarre situations when committees have to evaluate candidates for a faculty position, or when they have to decide who gets the grant.

Online, the amount of attention each page gets is easily quantified, though. You can display google pageRank for each page you visit (that little green bar in the google toolbar, if you installed it in your browser). Google pageRank is an approximation to how ‘worthy of attention’ a page is.  Our previous post on soft peer review capitalizes on this idea: one can measure how much attention an idea is getting (in the form of a paper) by using citations (classical, slow) or bookmarks in sites such as citeUlike or Connoctea (new, yet to be fully used, fast, dynamic).

But if attention works as currency, and attention can be measured -if only approximately-… How can we calculate a Return of Investment (ROI) for our attention (or an approximation thereof)? I don’t think I have a good answer; citations and google pagerank are the most obvious answers, but I think you will agree that there’s more to it that just those.

A rational agent should maximize the amount of attention that her work would get. That is, for each hour of your work time, how much attention are you getting?

Then, the economics concept of investment works too: there are some activities that can lead to quick publications, while other are more long-term. Publish-or-die policy enforces results, and then many researchers are discouraged to pursue ‘big ideas’ (that are a long-term investment). They must be riskier too, so the changes of getting no ROI (no publication after a lot of work) are high. What is the right balance between high-risk, high-yield activities (you know which ones those are in your field!) and the off-the-mill paper-churning ideas that get you by? What’s your ‘saving power’? Can you afford to ‘spend’ attention on big ideas? Are you starved, and you really need to pump up the short-term?

These are interesting questions that came out of the initial assumptions: (1) Attention is the scarce resource. (2) The academia’s currency, prestige, is attention (fossilized attention according to Graham), (3) Attention can be measured, if only approximatedly, and then (4) you can calculate and ROI for your attention investments.

Let me know if you find this approach useful.

Thanks for your attention

-Jose Quesada

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.

AP.com: How do you prioritise?

DN: Mostly by looking at next week’s deadlines, and by thinking about the probable consequences of missing them. Invariably, there’s more deadlines than I can meet, so I start thinking about who I can afford to ignore for a while. What I notice, though, is that I end up clustering everything. For instance, at any given point in time, there’s usually several biggish admin things to do, none of which is actually urgent (note that this isn’t the opinion of the university administrators, but they tend to think that admin is the core business of a university anyway, and are hence untrustworthy). So I tend to ignore all of them, focusing on the core domains of research and teaching, until there’s a big enough admin pile for it to be worth spending a half day on. The clustering approach tends to be useful for me, because I don’t switch gears easily.

AP.com: How do you schedule your time and use calendars?

DN: I once spent a lot of time trying to come up with a complex management system using various different software packages, but found that none of them helped, and a lot of them actually got in my way. So I’ve gone back to a low-tech pencil and paper diary, and I work on the assumption that everything that I need to care about is in the diary. Any meetings not written in the diary don’t exist, as far as I’m concerned. Again, what I try to do is cluster the meetings as tightly as possible to avoid getting trapped (my favourite trick is scheduling a meeting with a student immediately after the nominal end of a committee meeting – so I’m forced to leave when the paperwork says so), and to stay in the same “headspace”. Whenever possible, I try to keep one or (if I’m lucky, two) days a week meeting-free. However, what I’ve learned is that I can’t tell anyone which days I’ve cleared up. Otherwise someone will inevitably try to insert themselves into that slot, since no-one else values my time as much as I do!

AP.com: How do you plan for the future and manage ongoing projects?

DN: In the big picture, very poorly. I seem to be unable to strike the right balance between long-range ideas and short-range projects. Perhaps as a consequence of the hyperbolic function for intertemporal discounting, I keep neglecting long-term projects in favour of short-term payoffs. At a local level, I think I do somewhat better. For me, what seems to be optimal is letting the environment do the work. The directory structure on my computer reflects the various collaborations that I’ve got going on – when one part of the project is completed (usually after a publication) I move it to a chronologically-organised archive. Any follow-up work starts a whole new set of files. Paper-writing files are usually kept separate from the research project files, since writing tends to involve a somewhat different way of thinking. So every time I open up my computer, it shows me the structure of what I’m working on. In terms of tracking the tasks associated with the projects, I let my email account do the work. Spam aside, my email is triaged. There’s the “immediate respond (or ignore) and archive” category, the “it sits in the inbox because I should probably look at it” category and the “this is actually important, but requires effort” category (which sits in the poorly named “current” folder). The net result is that the “current” folder tends to consist only of those emails that correspond to various research tasks and the occasional teaching or admin thing that requires me to think. Since the emails have good metadata – names, titles and most importantly, dates – it tells me everything that I’m supposed to be working on. Better yet, it’s robust. Because when something slips through the cracks, I invariably get a follow-up email. For the most part this works, but in the long run, the thing that I need to get better at is translating a single long-range project into a collection of short-range ones, to avoid neglecting the big picture. For my most recent grants (which tend to describe the long-range stuff), I’ve started doing this, and they’re working out much better than some of the older ones.

AP.com: How is your work influenced by goals?

DN: I really don’t know. I’m not sure if I have any goals that aren’t boring, pragmatic ones (make sure I finish the grant obligations, etc) or vague, useless ones (new stuff interests me). It’s kind of pathetic, but true, and after asking a range of other people about this, they seem to agree that I’m remarkably free of any explicit goals. That said, it’s interesting to note that again the environment can be made to do most of it for you – my “big goals” don’t actually exist anywhere in my head, but they do get bundled into grant applications, so there are some implicit guidelines that I’ve laid out for myself that way.

AP.com: How do you store and remember new information?

DN: Dunno. I don’t use any particular strategy on this one, so it’s all down to the mysteries of semantic memory.

AP.com: How do you write papers?

DN: Depends on who’s in charge. When I’m not leading the project, I’ll tend to follow orders, doing bits and pieces here and there to try to help out. When it’s my baby, almost every paper starts from a collection of figures that I think are interesting (in a particularly egregious example, one of my cogsci submissions this year manages to cram 11 figures and a table into a 6 page paper). Sometimes I’ve got chunks of relevant text I can cut and paste into the paper too, but other than that it tends to come together by writing bits and pieces to go with each image. The one thing I don’t do is try to figure out the big picture immediately. It rarely comes together like that until the very end.

AP.com: How do you deal with procrastination and manage deadlines?

DN: Pragmatics again. Since I always underestimate the amount of time something requires (a packing and unpacking effect, I guess…) there’s always a bit of a late night scramble to finish things by the deadline. However, since that tends to drain me pretty badly, I usually try to reward myself with some guilt-free procrastination for the next few days. Also, unless there’s some clear reward involved (e.g., refereed conference proceedings, grant dollars), I tend not to bother too much about actually meeting the “deadline”. I think only about half of my paper reviews come in on time, and that’s never seemed to stop the action editor (a) complaining but (b) sending more papers for me to review. Most of them I tend to let it slide for a week if need be. Finally, I tend not to worry that much about procrastination. I spend half my weekends reading, or playing around with data, or just plain thinking about research ideas. So what if I decide to play computer games on Monday? Research productivity comes in clumps – some days you’re shit hot, and other days you might as well be at the beach. The big thing for me is making sure that no-one gets in the way of those productive moments, and allowing myself to go have a beer when my brain is MIA.

AP.com: What motivates you to get out of bed in the mornings?

DN: Coffee. My interest in the higher things in life doesn’t kick in until about 9:15…

AP.com: What is the hardest challenge in being productive in the academic world?

DN: In general, I couldn’t say. I suspect there’s some big individual differences here. I know some people who are unproductive because they never bother to write up the work they’ve already finished, others who get paralysed by the inability to narrow a topic down, and others who can’t manage to stay on top of the endless barrage of teaching commitments and pointless administrata. But for my money, it’s striking the right balance between exploration and exploitation. If you don’t spend enough time exploring new territory, it’s easy to end up in a corner, and you don’t find new collaborators. Without new ideas and new people to work with, your research program dies (or worse, becomes boring).  However, if you don’t exploit your strengths, your rate of publication drops, which affects your research income. Without money and status, you can’t grab the best students or attract industry partners etc, and your research program dies. As an example – my advice to grad students looking for postdocs is to try to find one in your “second area”. If you go to your strongest area, you don’t learn enough new material and can’t bring many novel things to the lab. If you go further down than your second strength, you’ll take too long getting up to speed in your new environment to be truly productive. In general though, it’s hard to stay in the sweet spot. I think I tend to make both mistakes at times.

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)