Academic Productivity

"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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Prof. John Perry (Standford) might be onto something with his Structured Procrastination idea:

the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Source: Structured Procrastination

Now, if only someone came up with a way to use Structured Procrastination to increase productivity, that’d be a big hit. A recommended read.

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This is a review of toDoList, a free, open source program to organize your tasks. It is very flexible and configurable and has replaced my main organized, a program that I believed suited me perfectly.
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