Academic Productivity

We have posted before about speed reading. Note that this term encompasses many different methods, some of which are based on dubious claims (see wikipedia article). The method I’m talking about is rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), i.e., saving time by avoiding saccadic movements. I really didn’t get much use of it, because when I tried it I found the interaction with my favorite program too cumbersome.

However, I still think that the idea or RSVP holds a lot of promise. I have found a better program, called rapidReader6. It has a 30-day demo. It solves many of the problems that this technique has, although not all.

Instead of listing my impressions, I’d like to see yours. Can I ask you to download the trial, and read one paper with it (try to make it from the beginning to the end)? You will find many shortcomings, but please keep going, and post them here so we can discuss them. Did you read the article faster than before? What made you lose focus?

For example, the fact that formatting is lost (Am I reading a heading, or a footnote?), and that figures and equations are lost (damn, I have to go back to the original document!) is troublesome. Sometimes, when reading a pdf, it picks header and footer as main text. One trick: convert from pdf to word (adobe acrobat does that) and then point rapidReader to the word doc; it usually fixes it).

I’m really interested in knowing what your impressions are.

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Dr. Pychyl has an interesting podcast series on procrastination. Is procrastination related to certain personality traits? Taxes and other aversive stuff: Why do we put it off? Give them a try if you are interested in those questions.

The main difference between these podcasts and the heaps of information that are available on the web about procrastination is that this comes out of a psychology lab.

If you find a good resource (even peer review ed ones ) on procrastination, please post it here.

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 We academics should be obsessed with the amount of stuff that we write, and it could be that one bottleneck of our output is simply the speed at which we type. We have provided some tools to help you write faster (see our review of an autocompleter here), but actually audio could be a very good tool to get your ideas into a more manageable form, which could be text or it could be simply an audio file. For example, it’s very, very easy to do a brain dump using audio. You just start talking about the idea that you just had and try to put it in a way that sounds reasonable that you go to other people, play it, and they will understand what you are saying.

In that sense, it is a lot better to use audio because you speak at a speed that is a lot higher than your typing speed. 

Actually this post has been dictated into Audacity, which is a free software that I use for dictating. One of the things that mainly changed my mind and made me try dictation was Peter Fisher’s Podcast series; Peter Fisher is a professor at MIT, and he has a series of Podcasts on Academic Productivity. I seriously would recommend his stuff in my review here; I think he has plenty of very valuable advice in his Podcasts. But anyway, I want to go through the advantages of using audio as a means to take your ideas down to paper at the same time.

The first advantage is that audio forces linearity on you. When I write text, I can jump freely around; I can go to the introduction, then add to the end of the paper; I can work on the Methods section, go back to the intro, then back to Method and so on. This is not something that you can do with audio; you really have to start from point A and run all the way to point Z. This could be an advantage or it could be a disadvantage, but for short ideas like a Blog post or just a quick note, this should be an advantage.

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NOTE: Thanks Terri Yu (Yale) for submitting this resource to ap.com.

UPDATE: Terri has posted on his blog a collection of notes on the Fisher Files, sequence II. This is a fantastic resource overall, more so if you prefer reading over listening.

The Fisher files is a weekly podcast that focuses on being ‘thoughtful’ -call it strategy- by connecting small actions with larger aims. In the words of the author:

In a single day, we perform over two hundred small tasks: dial a phone, sharpen a pencil, open the computer, begin to type a paragraph. How do we connect all those small task to the larger aims of our lives? Are we even aware of what the larger aims of our lives are?

I have thought more and more about making and maintaining the connections between the large and small. Sometimes, these connections just fall apart for me and I find myself doing useless and irrelevant things. Other times, some connections are there and strong and I have an almost spiritual sense of mindfulness. The way the connections help me translate large aims to small tasks is not so much about productivity as they are about relevance.

Peter is a GTD practitioner, although not all the techniques described in the GTD book were useful for him -and I suspect not all are applicable to academics.

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Note: this is a contributed post by Cal Newport. If you like this, check his study hacks blog for more. If you have an interesting idea that supercharges your productivity and want to share it with our community, feel free to send it to us using the contact form. We’d certainly want to hear it!

-Jose

I’m a graduate student. A fourth year PhD candidate at MIT, to be precise. And I have an annoying habit. Whenever I get a chance to collaborate, chat, or hang around with successful professors in my field, I like to find out about their work habits. In doing so, I’ve discovered the following two trends:

1. The best young professors carve out a day each week to do nothing but research. This prevents the administrative nonsense that dominates their early professional lives from bringing their research momentum to a complete stop.
2. The best, distinguished, older professors — those who have earned light teaching schedules and have paid their dues on enough committees that in their final years before retirement can begin to untangle themselves from these obligations — isolate administrative nonsense to a small number of days. They might even, for example, have a single day each week to take care of this crap, and then spend the other four thinking big thoughts.

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Most time managing programs out there use to-do list, and most of us just have trouble completing them. There’s no bullet-proof approach, but the Zen habits blog has a list of possible kick-starters:

Have you gotten good at organizing your tasks in a to-do list, but have trouble actually executing them? You’re not alone. (…)

Unplug. The biggest distractions come from connectivity. Email, feeds, IM, Twitter, phones. Unplug from these connections while you’re working on your single task.

Baby steps. Don’t think in terms of having to tackle an entire work day, or an entire list of stuff to do. That’s overwhelming.

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The Chronicle has an interesting piece: “Is Your Spouse Hurting Your Career?”:

in some “mixed marriages,” with no malice or sabotage intended, the nonacademic partner’s behavior or ideas can undermine or even cripple the scholar’s career — because of mutual ignorance and mistaken assumptions. And in those cases where the relationship is failing, the academic’s work can be but one collateral casualty of a wider war.

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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…

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 Mike Kaspari has a detailed piece on procrastination. The basic ideas he proposes to break procrastination streaks are solid advice. For example he proposes to start with a burst of timed activity (even if it’s just a 5 min burst). He recommends writing a list of reasons why we are not doing that important task (and looking at how silly they are). An interesting one is that he advocates getting together with your buddies to do a “writing fest” before going to lunch, and use social pressure to get some writing done.

Link to 5 ways of breaking the procrastination habit « Getting Things Done in Academia

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I just found an excellent paper:

BIAS AND ACCURACY IN ESTIMATES OF TASK DURATION

Author(s): JOSEPHS RA, HAHN ED

Source: ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND HUMAN DECISION PROCESSES 61 (2): 202-213 FEB 1995

From the abstract:

When asked to estimate the duration of various academic-type tasks (e.g., the time needed to complete a writing assignment, solve a series of problems, or read a manuscript), subjects demonstrated a marked tendency to trade accuracy in favor of minimizing cognitive effort in their selection of planning strategies. This tendency resulted in a drastic underestimation of the time required to complete the task.

This might be well known for all academics (most people I know underestimate time needed to complete an assignment).

Reading estimates are particularly bad, and this could easily be solved by tracking (automatically) how long it takes you to read each article (extremely easy if you read them off the screen).

It seems that improving your estimation skills can take you a long way. Currently I’m trying to construct a todo list with all steps that a project needs till completion (using the granularity ideas previously mentioned, and the program toDoList with time estimation visible next to each task). Hopefully I won’t be late for my next deadline, which is in 15 days!

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Here is my attempt at a general strategy for managing time. I define productivity operationally here by measuring it in terms of publications (of course, this definition may have critics).

The central point is that your time at work can be divided into productive and unproductive time (see graph), and that both are important; however we should try to maximize the productive time.

The graph may be biased towards the kind of work I do (modeling and experimental cognitive science); other disciplines may not have some of the activities, and the partitioning of your time may well be very different, so feel free to make your own graph with relevant tasks.

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Matthew Cornell at Matt’s idea blog has just posted a piece on a pilot study he is running that seems very relevant:

I recently completed a small pilot funded by the office of new faculty development at a large university. I approached the director to see if there was interest, and to figure out a way to test the effectiveness of the Getting Things Done methodology for new faculty. We came up with an informal program in which I 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.

The faculty were professors from three very different departments - Nursing, Japanese, and Communication Disorders - and each had different styles in how they managed themselves at their work. One thing they all shared, however, were the common challenges facing new faculty, who essentially act as entrepreneurs. For example, they have to:

• Obtain grants for research,
• Plan and perform original research,
• Advise and guide students,
• Teach classes (prep, grading, etc),
• Provide service to the community, etc.
• all the while working to get tenure (there’s a reason it’s called the “tenure track“)

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Are academics managing projects? The thesis of this post is that we academics are project managers 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?

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According to a definition wikipedia, RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is “a simple XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites. Using RSS, webmasters can put their content into a standardized format, which can be viewed and organized through RSS-aware software or automatically conveyed as new content on another website.”

Basically, RSS pushes content to you, making it possible to be up-to-date in pages that change constantly. With RSS one saves the time of actually visiting the page and looking for changes, since we get an update only when there is one.Why is it important for academics? There are many uses of RSS in this context, but we will talk about two today

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I posted here about some advantages of reading papers off the screen. However, most people find the very thought of reading off the screen almost unconceivable. In this post I’ll try to show some usability tricks that will help you make the transition (or at least give it a try!).

Part of what I’m going to use here is obtained with the help of an scripting language. called AutoHotkey (AHK). This is probably one of the most useful things you can install in a windows machine.

I’m using the 30-day trial of adobe acrobat 8, but all the tricks and keyboard shortcuts should work on acrobat 7 as well.

an example of how the window looks after pressing F8 and F9 to remove taskbars

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"Write down everything" is one of the premises of most time-management systems (at least in GTD and DIT). The importance of the concept of "getting things out of your head" is obvious. As David Allen says, "your head is a good place to have ideas, but not to hold them".

This is great also because it it makes you conscious of what you what to do, protecting you from random factors. For example, if I write down ’mail pic to friends’ instead of jumping to that task in an impulse immediately after I have come up with it, I may be able to finish the task I was doing.

But writing everything down has at least one disadvantage: we need to stop doing whatever we are doing to actually find our trusted medium and write it!

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Do we know if time management systems work? By time management systems, I mean the absolutely  mainstream GTD and the newer “Do it tomorrow” (DIT). This post points out the fact that we have no conclusive data.

We could guess that people who start a blog to praise the wonders of GTD should cont as evidence of it being effective. A quick search in technorati renders quite a few bloggers singing the virtues of GTD.

And it’s not only the numbers. Blogs that focus on time management (e.g., Lifehacker is ranked the 15th blog in the blogosphere  43folders, the 109th) are really high in popularity.

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Internet Marketers (IMs) have an advantage over other professions: they have pretty detailed statistics to use as feedback. For example, they have as indicators hits, time between buys, length of their customer lists, and ultimately… the money they make! They check these statistics daily.

Musicians are punished horribly when they fail performing a passage, not only by their peers but when practicing alone, by their own musical sense jumping in disgust!

In other professions, for example academics, we don’t get such a direct feedback. We may get feedback by how many papers we get published a year, but this is too coarse of a measure, and it only comes in yearly.

We may also consider our rate of success getting funding, but this is again a coarse measure, since we apply to at most dozens of grants in a lifetime.

In teaching, we may get a more direct feedback in that students are normally very expressive and their faces reflect how well our current lecture is doing. Yearly evaluations are also evidence of our performance. But nothing this immediate and direct is available when, say, you are writing a paper.

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Agenda at once (AAO) is one more program to handled todo lists and calendar (known as personal information managers -PIMs-). The main difference is that in this one these two components are integrated and displayed simultaneously. You may be familiar with the day scheduler (yellow in the screenshot) if you have used outlook. The interesting thing about this program is that combines the hierarchical outliner (classical todo lists) with the calendar/scheduler view. You can drag and drop tasks from one to another, and that makes it easier to allocate times.

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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.
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