Academic Productivity

This is another nifty trick that makes me think faster and feel more “in the flow”. If you look at what a person does when reading or writing a document, a good chunk of the time she is just trying to reposition the cursor, or otherwise move around.

Did you know that you can change the speed the cursor moves around in the screen? Well, not directly from the OS interface (at least in windows). But you certainty can using a little autoHotKey program called fastNavKeys from Skrommel.

This program runs in the tray, and will let you change the buffer time for keypresses; it can get ridiculously fast. It’s very good to scroll rapidly to the line you need to see/edit. Very handy when reading pdfs or editing manuscripts, and of course programming. Just try it and you will see how much faster you can make the cursor move. You can of course change the speed of other keys, such as delete.

I never thought possible how much better one can *think* by just having faster navigation keys.

Note: it’s addictive. If you are stranded using a computer that doesn have fastNavKeys it’ll feel as if everything is slow motion around you.

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If you were happy to find that the new Office 2007 equation editor is a lot more like LaTeX, and that equations didn’t look as bad in Word as before, think again.

Microsoft is pushing a proprietary markup language (OOXML) that clashes with what Nature and Science own typesetters use, so they will simply reject the paper. This might be a good time to read Dario’s own ode to the beauty of LaTeX.

• Leading journals reject Word 2007 files - ZDNet UK
• Wikipedia: OOXML

Technorati tags: typesetting, latex, math, markup, OOXML

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From Pascal Cavalier’s blog, I got a pointer to a nice article on Thesis time management. Looks like I’ll have to check this Canadian online-magazine on Higher Education in the future:

Perhaps what is most daunting about writing a thesis is realizing that if you want to be an academic, this is a good introduction to the rest of your career. Writing proposals, grant applications, journal articles and books will be a significant part of your life from here on. Gaining the skills to be a productive and prolific writer is key to success as an academic. That means making writing part of everyday life.

Wrestling your writing to the mat, By Käthe Lemon.

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Good writing is a skill. I’m not saying I have it, and remember, this is a blog post, maybe the fastest form of writing and reading ). As a skill, it requires practice. And, as Graham says, “Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.”In fact, writing posts like this one is helping me to review and polish ideas I didn’t know I had about writing till this very moment. I’ll start with the most obvious, and will get more subtle/interesting as the list grows.

1. Get your relevant Manual of Style. (e.g., Chicago/APA). APA wants you to buy it in book form, but I think this is one of the resources that should be online.
2. Get Oliver Strunk’s elements of style. It’ll recommend some rules of thumb that may well be obvious (e.g., avoid passive voice. Reduce the use of adverbs to a minimum) but overlooked. There have been several editions, and the older ones can even be found online.

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Ok, I think this is a class-A hack. This may be one of the biggest timesavers I have found in recent years.

This might be obvious, but if you spend a lot of time writing, then any number of keystrokes that you save, as small as it might seem, will result in large time savings.

A word autocompleter is a program that learns what you type most often and suggests it in real time while you are writing. I’m still wondering why this kind of functionality doesn’t come with the OS, because it is really straightforward to implement and useful beyond words. Some of you who have used unix shells or text editor are used to completing words by just pressing a key (tab is my favorite). Well, guess what, you can have that anywhere, not only on the shell: you can have completion in a word processor while writing papers. Of course, it’s handy to fill textboxes in any browser and write emails.

Some may think that saving a few keystrokes is not necessary a big time saver and that they type fast enough. Well, believe me, you haven’t tried one of these programs!

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Psychologist Henry L. Roediger III gives some excellent advice for reviewing journals papers (two word summary: be nice!). Though a psychologist, his twelve tips should have applicability for all academic disciplines. An excerpt from his introduction follows:

Many critical skills needed for becoming a successful academic are typically not taught in graduate school, at least not in any formal way. One of these is how to review journal articles. Few students coming out of graduate school have much experience reviewing papers, and yet, at least for those students continuing on in research, reviewing is a skill that will be increasingly critical as their careers develop. In fact, being a good reviewer can greatly help a career. If a young psychologist becomes known as an excellent reviewer, he or she may be selected as consulting editor, then associate editor, and then perhaps the primary editor of a journal.

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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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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.

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Ok, I think this is a class-A hack. This may be one of the biggest timesavers I have found in recent years.This might be obvious, but if you spend a lot of time writing, then any number of keystrokes that you save, as small as it might seem, will result in large time savings.A word autocompleter is a program that learns what you type most often and suggests it in real time while you are writing. I’m still wondering why this kind of functionality doesn’t come with the OS, because it is really straightforward to implement and useful beyond words. Some of you who have used unix shells or text editor are used to completing words by just pressing a key (tab is my favorite). Well, guess what, you can have that anywhere, not only on the shell: you can have completion in a word processor while writing papers. Of course, it’s handy to fill textboxes in any browser and write emails.Some may think that saving a few keystrokes is not necessary a big time saver and that they type fast enough. Well, believe me, you haven’t tried one of this programs!  (more…)

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On the recent Google group The Efficient Academic, there was a short discussion about the best music to study to. Obviously this is a matter of personal choice to what kinds of music creates a calm relaxed focus state of mind. Most people find that non vocal music is the least distracting. Favourites of mine are classical, with artists like Bach and Mozart, Chopin and most baroque period work. I also like to listen to droney ambient, such as Brain Eno and Stars of the Lid - and often leave a Pandora radio station with “artists similar to” them (if you haven’t tried Pandora I highly recommend trying it out). Internet radio station Dronezone on Soma.fm is also excellent for this kind of “music”.

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Have you used wikis as a mean of collaborative work with colleagues? Have you been frustrated by the current implementation, thinking that some ideas are just hard to put into wiki format? Gerhard Fischer, at the University of colorado, Boulder, has received a grant to improve existing wiki technologies for academic use. From the article:

The proposed research will create environments that go beyond existing Wikis (being primarily focused on hypertext) to permit the integration (not just attachment) of other forms of media ranging from movies and animations, to sharing of datasets, to the creation and utilization of social network information to support community interaction, to conceptual mind-mapping media.

I’m really interested in how several researchers collaborate on the same topic. Currently, most people I know simply email back and forth a word document with ‘track changes’ enabled (which can get messy after a few iterations). Not many people write papers using a ‘wikified’ document, and this could partly be just because hypertext (and all the symplified wiki markup languages) are not appropriate for the task. I wonder if the new additions would change current practices much (I’m really curious about the integrated mindmapping part).

Link to O’Reilly Radar > NSF Looking for a Better Wiki

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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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There is an invited post over at lifehack.org by Michael Leddy, an English professor who recommends that we should divide major actions (such as “write term paper”) into smaller, more doable tasks (NAs in GTD’s parlance). I think this could be a good read for students, and even for academics; Most of us keep this partitioning into smaller tasks “in our heads”; making it explicit and dumping it into paper might help with things such as time estimation… a consistent problem I have is that I never know how long I will need to finish a paper. This is one of the reasons I posted before that we need to decompose tasks to be able to track progress better.

Technorati Tags: reading, writing, best practices, time management, project management

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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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"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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This topic will be retaken here at ap.com often. For a start, here is a quick post on advantages of reading pdfs off the screen

You can do searches. Do you know where the paragraph you are looking for is? If you remember a word, you can find it easily.

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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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