This single Graham’s post explains more about productivity than most entire blogs on the topic out there. It was a revelation to me. Any day that has more than two non-clustered events  becomes wasteful automatically. It’s like your mind can anticipate the futility of trying to get in the zone only to get kicked out of it by a meeting. This also explains why the typical ‘maker’ (a postdoc, or grad student working close to the data) tends to gravitate towards late nights work stunts, whereas professors rarely do. In fact, one big difference between professors and grad students is the number of meetings they have to endure… Can you be a maker and a professor? If so how do you do it?

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

Just a quick one to highlight The False Prophet. S/he presents a list of reasons why things don’t get done, together with Preventive measures and solutions.

This is quite a finding. Example:

4. Distraction (…)

Preventive measures
When you commit to a project, set a daily/weekly schedule. Consistent time-structure is what gets projects done that last longer than the excitement of inspiration. Working on the project first thing in the morning is one way to head off distraction.
Set up your own status meetings, just as with “dependency”, since, in a way, you are depending on yourself to deliver. Having a regular status meeting with a friend (say, in a phone call) can keep you on track.
See “attention overload”, below.
Solutions (to be used after you’ve gotten distracted)
The 5M method. Note the time. Think of a tiny task that you think you can complete in five minutes. Give yourself an hour to do it. You can do the task right now, and then slack off. You can wait until five minutes are left in the hour and then rush. Odds are, once you do this tiny task, you’ll feel different. You’ll have some momentum. Your brain will now be returning to the work you want to do instead of the distraction. Or perhaps not. You can still slack off the rest of the hour if you prefer. A deal’s a deal.

He also has an interesting post on ‘how to fix grad school’. I like the way he presents arguments, and then tries to shut them down.

False Epiphany» Blog Archive » Incompletion: 15 Causes and Solutions

This comes at a time when I’m very concerned about what people can do under pressure and how much they are willing to sacrifice for their careers. A friend in the tenure track (or the equivalent in the country she lives in) has lost two babies (natural abortion), probably due to stress. There are entire sections in the Chronicle sections describing the super-human efforts people make to achieve a small increase in academic performance. Having a decent social or family life seems like a luxury for more and more academics. Most people invest money and time in this endeavor in ways that are difficult to justify rationally (and we are talking about arguably the smartest sector of the population!).

Would you risk your health as well? Are you prepared to take mind-altering drugs?

Nature has an article on cognitive doping (here’s the direct link if you don’t want to jump through hoops to get it from your library). The topics has been covered in the blogosphere in different places: Shelley Batts, from the point of view of a grad student, says that taking cognitive-enhancing drugs is a no brainer.

Reader Tritc, in her comments section, wrote:

why would reducing study time be a bad thing? Wouldn’t we all love to have that extra productivity or extra hours of sleep rather than stare at the same page in a textbook, chugging coffee, stressing out, and barely keeping our eyes open? Has anyone considered that is might be unethically NOT to make something available that would reduce the time and effects of stressful all-nighters, if it increased productivity? Or unethical NOT to give it to tired doctors, who otherwise would be more prone to medical mistakes?

Dave Munger, asks whether it’s cheating to do cognitive doping, and seems to conclude it’s not.

There are some impressive testimonials from users. Take comment 19 on this Chronicle thread:

I won’t lie: I’ve got a secret weapon and I know it. Do I feel guilty about it? Absolutely not.

This is a person who is happy to have some condition that enables him to get the drug that gives him superpowers.

Finding the roots: too much work or just a particularly bad kind of work?

I think part of the problem is that many tasks we have to do are NOT easy to delegate.  have no stats, but the proportion of academics with an administrative assistant must be ridiculous compared to even the lower cast of professionals in any other industry. How often do you find yourself doing  things that only you can do? If you were a millionaire, which tasks would you pay people to do for you? My guess here is that there aren’t that many. This could help explain the incredibly high workload of academics worldwide, and the psychological pressure they experience.

Farne says:

My real concern with anti-fatigue drugs is that when they become commonplace there will be no choice- anyone NOT working 15 hours each day (‘cos you don’t need to ‘waste’ time on sleep anymore) will be a poor choice for an employee.

Not a happy thought, in times when the academic life may seem too demanding already!

Janet D. Stemwedel (whose nom de blog is Dr. Free-Ride) thinks that …

Even if cognitive enhancers had the potential to shift the standings in the competitions between students and between scholars to a dramatic degree, should we say that there’s a problem with the use of these drugs — or instead with the way the system is set up? Is it more unfair that some professors use a drug that gives them the mental energy to grade papers until 3 AM, or that the workload on professors is such that they have to stay up grading papers until 3 AM in order to have time to meet the obligations of their job?

Ethics

Imagine that you refuse to take any drugs, but a colleague who is up to his eyeballs in cognitive-enhancing drugs and competing with you for some resources (grant money; a better position, etc) leaves you in the dust. Would this make you change your view? Would you be able to ‘blow a whistle’ on this behavior at all (considering these are legal drugs)? Increasing the productivity threshold overall doesn’t benefit anyone. Just look at what is happening in professional sports; there, doping seems to be the norm, and athletes are risking their health and career in the long term.

Plus, drug taking may have consequences on the way societies work. From the Nature article:

There have been debates over the potential of such drugs to decrease or increase disparity in society. Even today many people benefit from their financial status to obtain a better education and nutrition that in turn can enhance brain power. Thus, the potential for cognitive enhancers to increase disparity in society would seem unavoidable.

Stemwedel thinks that we shouldn’t consider the academic endeavor a competition.

Even if cognitive enhancers had the potential to shift the standings in the competitions between students and between scholars to a dramatic degree, should we say that there’s a problem with the use of these drugs — or instead with the way the system is set up? Is it more unfair that some professors use a drug that gives them the mental energy to grade papers until 3 AM, or that the workload on professors is such that they have to stay up grading papers until 3 AM in order to have time to meet the obligations of their job?

The bright side of life (necessary reference) is that you may actually find something great that helps humanity while you are souped up on a high. The Nature article asks “Wouldn’t you maybe agree to become addicted to crack if you were going to be able to cure cancer?”

My position

I don’t take any kind of drugs because I don’t want my performance to be dependent on external factors. I don’t smoke, don’t drink, and don’t even use coffee. Now, if there’s one resource I can use in cases of extreme necessity, it’s mate. The high is similar to coffee, but without the jittering, headaches, and occasional visits to the WC. It’s also a lot easier to administer the right dosage: with coffee you either order one and drink it before it gets cold, or you don’t; with mate, you drink small sips, and you stop when you feel like.

This is really popular in South America, but not in EU and North America (that I can tell). It’s drank socially. You need a metal straw and hollow calabash gourd. This makes you look like you are carrying a small comic-like hand grenade on your hand and adds to the overall freak-out effect when you enter a common area with your mate the first time.

Poll

Do you use any cognitive-enhancing drugs?

> View Results
PollDaddy.com

Having recently completed a PhD, I will share with you three indispensable nuggets of advice for how to get the monster vanquished: use hard deadlines, soft deadlines, and the Martini Method. With a small amount of imagination these can be applied to any large project.

Perhaps the most important determiner when a PhD gets finished is the HARD DEADLINE. While hard deadlines are supremely important, giving advice to have one is somewhat pointless, since they are also a factor that you have little or no control over. The main hard deadline is that which your institution has determined your maximum amount of time allowable for completion of your PhD. At my institution, this was four years. And without fail, graduate students would be frantically printing their thesis the day before this deadline for binding and submission. Other frequent constraining deadlines are when your money runs out, or the start of a new job. While these aren’t quite as constraining as the ultimate deadline, life can be made considerably difficult if you are left with writing your PhD when starting a new job, or when you cannot afford to pay your rent. As any normal human being knows, deadlines are important for many reasons. One of which is Parkinson’s law: which stipulates that the time you take to complete a task is strongly determined by the time you have to complete that task.

Deadlines which you have more control over are SOFT DEADLINES. These are those deadlines which you determine yourself. One advantage over hard deadlines is that you can choose how many of them and when they occur. The disadvantage is that the consequences of failing to meet them are usually not severe, and can be safely ignored. One solution to their softness is to create real consequences from deadlines. The method of doing this will depend on your personality, and whether you are best driven by the carrot or the stick. Perhaps the most common method in a PhD is externalisation of the deadlines by forming a contract with your supervisor. Many supervisors will set deadlines to their students, but if you do not have a supervisor that does this I would urge you to engage your supervisor in the process of setting soft deadlines. I had an arrangement in the later stages of writing up my thesis to have a piece of work for him to read every week or second week (depending on the size of the work), which helped immensely. You may not like these deadlines, but I believe they are essential, following Parkinson’s law, amongst other reasons.

What I call the Martini Method is named after an anecdote I once read about the novelist Anthony Burgess (of Clockwork Orange fame). Burgess was a very productive writer, which is attributed to a system where he would force himself to write a 1000 words a day, 365 days a year. When he had completed his word count, he would relax with a dry martini, and enjoy the rest of the day with an easy conscience, and normally in bar. A friend of mine’s version of the Martini Method was to come into the office everyday, and not allow herself to leave until her word target had been reached. Most days she left before 5pm, though on occasion she would stay as late as 6 or 7. She would also set herself mini Martinis, such as allowing herself an ice cream in the summer once she had hit half her daily word count. Though we started at the same time, she finished her PhD a lot earlier than me!

A PhD is a huge project, which has to be largely self managed, and its size can lead to anxiety which leads to procrastination as a coping mechanism. If you spend a few days without working on your PhD, anxiety or guilt can build up, which consequently make it even harder to get started, and days can easily turn into weeks without meaningful work being undertaken. The Martini method also encapsulates the well known idea that a large project needs to be split up into small chunks, and quantifies those chunks into specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time bound goals (what management books call a SMART objective).

The Martini Method works by the carrot, which personality psychologists have generally have found to be more effective than the stick. 1000 words is an arbitrary number, and you might find it too much or two little, but I think that somewhere between 500-1000 to be optimal. Writing a 1000 words a day doesn’t take into reviewing and editing time. What I used to do was to start the day with the editing of the text written on the previous day. This makes for an easier way to get started, as editing existing text is less cognitively daunting than starting afresh, and warms up the mind for the writing to come.

The new version of MS word makes word counting much easier – when you select text it shows you the word count at the bottom. One tool that can be used to stick to a daily habit is the chain method. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld marks a cross on his calendar every day, and aims to create an unbroken chain of crosses. Online daily goal tracker and habit maker Joes Goals now implements the chain method, which could be used instead of a paper calendar if you are that way inclined.

Tags: deadlines – phd – burgess – martini method – parkinson’s law – time management

I have recently found that Calvin has moved his email newsletter into a new blog format. Calving is an accomplished MIT student who has published two books (!) on productivity for students: How to Become a Straight-A Student and How to Win at College. His blog has categories such as  Student Productivity and Study Tips with good advice for undergrads and grad students, although honestly, I think even higher-ups in the academic food chain could benefit from these tips.

Example posts:

Monday Master Class: Downgrade the Importance of Writing in Paper Writing

Dangerous Ideas: Sorry Paul Graham, I Think it Does Matter Where You Went to College (Watch out for his “dangerous ideas series”! He is trying to be provocative, and doing it well!)

A highlight of this blog is the educated comments it gets:

There is a world of difference between the questions that are thought out by someone else (the teacher), for the purpose of measuring someone other’s (the student’s) understading of a subject, and the questions that someone (the enterpreneur) has to first figure out are meaningful and then answer him/herself.

We haven’t talked about productivityhacks before because it was more oriented to undergrads, but this is not a good enough reason to deprive ap.com readers from excellent content. I think the actual social divide in the academic world is more like those who worry about getting grades, and those who don’t. This make a huge difference in how your life is organized. Grade-seeking people have their schedule done for them (they know for sure when they’ll need to study like crazy and when they can relax). They normally have lots of social support, since classmates have exactly the same schedule -and they are a legion-! The other side of the divide is for people who people who have to make their own schedule (sometimes, imposing it on others), and can suffer social isolation since their peers do not have the same time constraints, and there are few of them.

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.