Hello everyone. Thanks very much for your great questions, and for having me here. Following are my answers, some thoughts on academic productivity, and some ideas from my consulting work with faculty. I hope you find them helpful.

Contents

• Background of the problem
• Answers to your questions
• Additional academic productivity opportunities

Background of the problem

What’s the problem? Your jobs are hard. Positions in academia are some of the broadest and most demanding I’ve encountered in my consulting. As my client Mary Deane Sorcinelli [1] points out in her Peer Review article Faculty Development: The Challenge Going Forward (PDF),

The set of tasks expected of faculty is intensifying under increasing pressure to keep up with new directions in teaching and research. Thus, for example, new faculty members may need to develop skills in grant-writing or in designing and offering online courses. Seasoned faculty members may need to keep up with emerging specialties in their fields as well as to engage in more interdisciplinary work.

Further, without excellent self-management skills, people face significant stress trying to achieve distinction as scholars, teachers, and campus citizens. They sacrifice work and life balance, and risk burnout – a big loss for both the academe and the faculty member herself. Fortunately, there’s plenty to hope for. Clients and colleagues have told me that adopting a method to improve productivity is one the best steps academics can take to improve faculty success.

Answers to your questions

Adopting a method without its taking over

As an academic, I have a lot of projects going at once and haven’t been able to maintain the action-based ToDo list over time. How can I keep the productivity process from becoming its own project taking over my time and attention?

There are a number of issues here. First, you’ve stated exactly the irony that busy and successful people face when addressing the challenges involved. I believe a serious commitment to self improvement over time (including reading great resources like this site) is absolutely required. Keep in mind that each person will need an individualized productivity method, either a variation of existing ideas (see examples below) or a hybrid, both combined with techniques learned from experience and self-discovery. Second, regarding the process, there’s no way around giving it the appropriate amount of attention. I suggest treating it like an experiment. Make it an explicit project (with actions) and try different approaches. But try them one at a time, with a minimum of a few weeks each. Unfortunately, making changes like this is very difficult for many of us [2]. To keep it from overshadowing everything else, I distinguish between two approaches to adoption: “One Big Push” (spend a short number of highly focused days getting into the system) and “Small Steps” (a Kaizen-like [3] piece-by-piece process). Either can work, and both have pluses and minuses. I strongly suggest a combination of starting with a two-day “intensive” (mine is described here), followed by longer-term coaching (ideally over a period of months), with periodic check-ins/refreshers over time. Finally, regarding your to-do list I’d need to hear specifics about what’s going on. However, there are two common obstructions: poorly thought out actions, and poor execution: Poorly thought out actions: There’s a saying, “Most to-dos can’t actually be done.” Make each task small enough to accomplish in one sitting (say 60 minutes [4] or less), specific, and concrete. Importantly, make sure they’re independent of anything else. This means you might have to work backward through a chain of dependencies to decide the actual next step. For example, planning or gathering prerequisite information or tools might be necessary. A good test: Actions are usually “little” verbs, such as “call,” “email,” or “order.” (As opposed to projects, which are “big” verbs.) Poor execution: This is a large topic. For now I’ll just say your list of items should be attractive (things you want to do or must do), and important to your goals. Changing your list over time to match this is part of a longer term process. Books like Koch’s The 80/20 Principle and Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek might help your thinking around this.

The tension between productivity and creativity

As a budding academic myself, an interesting tension is finding a balance between being organized and relatively low-stress (via, for example, GTD style methodologies) and also being obsessive, and non-productive, when searching for a break through idea. It seems that a lot of professors are either one or the other: organized, and middle of the road, or crazy but brilliant. What are you thoughts on striking that balance? Any lessons learned from your GTD for faculty pilot program? I love the question. Here are a few thoughts. First, I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I suspect there are big opportunities for improvement on either end of the spectrum. On the “organized-low-stress” end, we’re asking whether being on top of all our work limits our creativity. I believe the opposite is true. My personal experience is that I had a very unexpected intellectual awakening after structuring my life, which led to quitting my job, changing careers, and becoming self-employed (I am compelled to share it). Here’s what I think is happening. Beyond simply getting more efficient (i.e., smoothly handling everything coming into your life), is that we are making room for our natural intelligence and creativity to shine. With apologies to Marilyn Paul, it’s hard to make a breakthrough when you can’t find your brain In other words, the noise and pace of “our modern hyper-kinetic lives” [5] shuts down what Klein [2] calls the higher functioning of the cerebral cortex (the region in the head most susceptible to stress). This takes us to your other end, “crazy-brilliant.” Again, from Klein,

The prefrontal cortex can simply shut off large regions, and the executive function [6] suffers. This makes it hard to keep our priorities straight when we are under stress and to filter out unimportant matters. We become scatterbrained, fighty and reckless.

To me that’s starting sound like what you describe. I wonder: Are there additional breakthroughs being held back? Is it possible to do this same level of work with less effort? And what does the rest of this person’s life look like? There’s a real risk of working all hours, sleeping less, not exercising, spending less time with loved ones, and being distracted when we are with them. But hey, that’s just a lot of words. Don’t take my word for it. Try a method yourself, and see if the results offset the (initially off-putting) work. Feeling better is ultimately the best motivator.

Number one tip

What would be the number one tip/strategy an academic could use to be more productive? Heh heh heh. This is a great question, and one I ask when learning from the top people in my field. Sadly there is no single tip – it’s a process, and starting people on the road is an important part of what I do. Yes, this is avoiding answering; read more in my post The ultimate productivity tip. But to be a bit more helpful, I suggest spending some time thinking about your top one or two challenges, and starting with those. For some, just getting an effective filing system working is a big improvement. Adopting the “One Big Push” approach? Start with just the things on your desktop. Email? Get in the habit of emptying your inbox, and clear some of your backlog. For the former, start applying the “5Ds:” Do, Delete, Delegate, Defer, and Deposit (file). Regarding the latter, move all emails that are older than two weeks (say) to a new “Archive” folder, and empty out what’s left – this is often the “hottest” stuff. Finally, for any inbox (paper, voice, email) get into the habit of processing, not checking. Commit to emptying every time you touch your inbox (i.e., starting your email program). This is very different from the method most people use, what I call PUS (Process, UN-process, and Skip to the next)

Productivity methods

Could you recommend other systems or methods besides GTD, or is GTD the best thing since sliced apple pie for academics? Since starting my self-defined “M.S. Personal Productivity,” I’ve looked at a number of good systems. David Allen’s GTD [7] has been a big influence, and has has collected some of the best ideas from the last few decades. But it has its limitations, including being considered too complex, too process oriented, too hard to adopt, and too brittle. Some others worth looking at: Mark Forster’s Do It Tomorrow (my interview with Mark is here), Chris Crouch’s Getting Organized (interview here), Sally McGhee’s Take Back Your Life! (interview here), and Kerry Gleeson’s The Personal Efficiency Program (look for my interview with him soon).

Social networking for academics

You have been using social networks (i.e LinkedIn) as an important way to stay connected and find new clients. There seems to be two kind of people: those who swear by the new social networks, and those who claim that the end is near and that they are a supreme waste of time. I was surprised finding some highly productive academics in facebook . Can you tell us your views on this? Another fun question. I think the role of networks like LinkedIn is becoming increasingly important for all kinds of work. Why? Because forming connections and nurturing relationships is crucial to making progress in what we do, no matter our jobs or fields. I love this “formula” from Networking Tips from the White House:

Life = The people you meet + What you create together

(You can read more of my tasty morsels from the Ideamatt self help formulary.) Think of the work you do, and how crucial your relationships are. Nothing – from publishing to teaching to service to research – stands alone. Regarding on-line tools in particular, I know many faculty who use them effectively – just search LinkedIn for “professor.” The key is to nurture and grow your relationships, and to be of use to others. (This is a favorite topic of mine. You may enjoy How to help people.) I’d suggest you start growing your online network right away, and treat it like a garden; plant seeds and you’ll eventually see results. Consider joining LinkedIn, think about inviting everyone you currently know and collaborate with, and add new people as they come up, for example at conferences, workshops, and while on sabbatical.

Crazy hours and the price of success

Is it possible to become a successful academic without working crazy hours? My point being – there is a limit to how far being more efficient or productive will get you. And the more successful you become, the more work that typically entails, and bigger your next action list becomes. Great points. First, the impact of becoming more efficient certainly has limits. For example, it can’t gain you more time, and it can’t get rid of work for you. There will always be too much to do, and as you point out, the more successful you get, the more overloaded your plate will be. However, a good system can help restore balance. How? First, you become more efficient in using your time – you make simultaneous progress on multiple projects, you make more principled choices of what to do in the moment, and you make good use of those small “between” moments (e.g., between classes, while traveling, or during a lull in office hours). This improved use of your attention results in feeling more satisfied in the day’s accomplishments, which makes it easier to justify going home on time and not taking work home. In my experience, however, getting on top of your work has a much broader effect. Because you get a more comprehensive view of everything you’ve taken on, you’ll see your limits more clearly and start making difficult choices like turning down low-value work, and renegotiating projects that aren’t in line with your (possibly new) goals. These choices can bring your workload back down to more reasonable (and appropriate) levels.

The relationship between being productive and enjoying life

Why do you think people want to be more productive (instead of sipping pina colada on the beach)? Because there’s an important portion of the internet posting about productivity (and people love it)! First, there’s definitely a “productivity trap” in which we get bitten by the bug and pulled into it a bit obsessively. Ditto for tools – getting the latest, slickest, most powerful tool is a distraction. So yes, those of us who are susceptible to this must be careful. However, your question goes to the main point of what it means to be productive. To me the idea is to do the most important work, with the least amount of effort, so we can spend more time doing what we love. This is different from the common time management myth of quality vs. quantity, which is really just an excuse for a dysfunctional work-life balance. Instead of squeezing more work out of already overloaded people (i.e., increasing the quantity of time spent working), I think the goal is to spend quality time working (by being effective), and quantity time at home. Thanks again for having me here.

Additional academic productivity opportunities

Here are a few additional academic-related resources you may find useful.

• Department Chair Online Resource Center: Time Management for More Effective Results
• Randy Pausch’s time management resources, including this huge list of tips from one of his talks.
• Transferable Skills And Portable Careers gives their perspective on the importance project management skills:
  

  In academia, you have to manage your research so you’re competitive for the next funding round. In industry, you have very tight timelines, and you have to manage your project so you can meet those deadlines.

• In Scientists At Work, Time Management, you’ll find a variety of tips.

About the author

Matthew Cornell, M.S., is a former NASA engineer, and one of the few consultants in New England specializing in modern personal productivity techniques. He works with smart people who are overloaded by their own success. The author of many articles on self-management/productivity, personal growth, and creativity he is available for individual and group consulting, workshops, and presentations. His clients include NASA and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and resides with his family in Western Massachusetts. http://www.matthewcornell.org/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewcornell http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/ (soon to move to http://www.matthewcornell.org/blog/)

References

• [1] Associate Provost for Faculty Development, Director, Office of Faculty Development, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
• [2] For some neat ideas about why our ~100,000 year old brains have trouble with focus and modern life, you might enjoy The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity by Stefan Klein.
• [3] For an introduction to this approach, I suggest the book One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way.
• [4] Opinions on the ideal block time vary, and certainly depends on the person’s style and current level of focus throughout the day (and week – we are not machines, so adjust as needed). Some common numbers: Peter Drucker suggest 90 minutes, which Kerry Gleeson likes (see The Personal Efficiency Program), and 96 minutes from applying Pareto to an 8 hour day (see Koch’s The 80/20 Principle). (Regarding the latter, trust me: I’ve found many people don’t fully understand the ideas without reading it. Simple example: the two numbers needn’t sum to 100. Buy it and read it.)
• [5] This is what Edward Hallowell calls it in CrazyBusy.
• [6] He defines executive function as the ability to formulate plans, based on working memory. It has a flaw although; working memory is fleeting and fills up quickly.
• [7] Unless you’ve been seriously out of touch, you’ll have heard about Allen’s work. Just in case, here’s the book: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

The new ap.com 2.0 is being out for a month now. Yay! But it seems that most users (yes, users, not readers) didn’t really take advantage of the new features.

The goal of ap.com 2.0 is to have more content for everybody. So what can you do to make ap.com 2.0 better? Simple. Start having fun. Did you know you can post (and everybody will see your post, if the editors like it)? There is a post describing how to make a post (hmm, I like recursion).

Comments now have new superpowers too. You can link to any page (where your own inventions lurk) and ap.com 2.0 will send you Google love. Most blogs have a ‘nofollow’ tag that tells Google not to leak juice. This is mostly done to fight spamming… but we trust you enough to let you operate at large. After all, you had to sign up for an account, so you must be human (are you?). Plus, we monitor comments closely. And this is all in line with our views on how to distribute credit in a fair way -and test soft-peer review ideas-.

You can have your own image on each post… although for that you need to upload one first at gravatar.com (takes seconds). This will help people recognize you. And did we mention it works on any blog on the entire intarweb? Still, most ap.com users don’t have a gravatar. Get one.

And where should you test your new shining gravatar? Why, on this thread about the interview with Mark Cornell. We have a few questions already, but the more questions, the meatier his response will be.

If you enjoy these kind of interviews, help us make them possible. And of course, feel free to invite some super-productive monster you know to be interviewed or to post some lifehacks he uses!

We will keep reminding you of new ap.com features until you use them or tell us to shut up already.

Oh, and by the way, this post took me 1:25. There’s very little time investment in posting a quick link or idea; you don’t really need to post a lengthy diatribe with references at the end (that’s for paper journals).

We have talked about Matt Cornell before on our post “Matt’s idea blog on GTD and Faculty Productivity“.

When I first found his blog, Matt mentioned that…

[He] would work with three self-selected early faculty members, coach them in the method, and hopefully give the director enough information to decide if the results merited a larger follow-on effort.

His latest blog posts have been covering interviews with productivity personalities (book authors and bloggers, as well as practitioners and consultants). His posts are consistently good, which is somewhat rare in the blogosphere.

I have talked Matt into being ‘interviewed’ here at ap.com. But instead of doing an audio interview as we did with Mark Forster, this time we want to stick to text. The advantage is that this time you can submit your own questions; he will read them and try to answer them. You are getting direct access to a consultant who has experience helping academics, so use it wisely.

In any case, this sounds like a fantastic opportunity to follow up on his work with academics. How well does GTD adapt to the academic world? Has he been able to measure performance before and after adopting GTD?

Use the comments on this blog post to send your questions. One question per comment; if you have several questions please post them separately.

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.

One other thing that hasn’t changed . . . There are still people who make the transition into a new job quickly and relatively painlessly, and other people with similar experience/credentials who go months or years without these same nibbles. I credit the difference to two things: 1) How the person felt about their expectations of success, and 2) How far they strayed from their computer.

Dave Jensen, Moderator at scienceCareers  has this interesting post on how bombarding people with new communication channels (e-mails etc) won’t work better than face-to-face or any other traditional means. Networking seems to be fashionable, with books like Ferrazi’s Never eat alone getting really popular. Is it really the case that academics do no not pay much attention to email networking? Do you really need to get away of your computer to keep your contacts alive? I find this surprising considering how multi-authored papers have grown with the use/abuse of email. But of course, looking for a job may be a different thing. Is really a phone call better?

It’s about time to introduce one of the central features of this blog. We plan to interview what I once called “Productivity Monsters”: people who, one way or another, have an outstanding productivity in their fields.

Originally, the idea was to interview Academics only and to measure their productivity by using some proxy such as impact of their ideas or raw number of papers per year. However, this definition would leave out time management Gurus, and we agree that if they have created such a cult online, they must have very interesting things to say to Academics. As you see, the criteria to define productivity monsters are not clear, but, like any other monsters, you know one when you see it. What do they do differently? Other than working a lot, of course. Are there any kind of techniques that can improve anyone’s output? We will ask them and try to retrieve and filter their knowledge in the form of interviews. The interesting things is that most academics don’t really write about how to improve your academic production… only occasional chats with their grad students around the water cooler revolve around this topic!

On the other hand, time management Gurus do write about productivity!

It’s a pleasure to introduce our first academic productivity interview with Mark Forster.

Mark Forster is a time management and life coach expert whose works are best known in th e United Kingdom, who brings some fresh new concepts to time management.

To give you an idea of his recognition in Great Britain, Mark Forster newest book – Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management – is ranked #214 in sales at Amazon UK. The Observer recognized Forster as one of Britain’s top ten life coaches.

Mark’s interview is pure content. You will find:

1. Why people drop off time management systems
2. Why having a day with no long blocks of time available (e.g., if you have to teach a class at 12 and another at 2:00) may actually work in your favour
3. Why you should write down any task before doing it

etc.

This is stuff that nobody has treated (that I have seen at least)! And that’s saying someting considering the sea of GTD blogs out there.

The interview is 51 minutes long and 58Mb (it’s worth the large download).