Academic Productivity

My typical day can be divided roughly into thirds: part administration, part analysis/thinking, and part reading. And while I like the new ideas that come with reading, it can be awfully tedious at times. Who wants to spend all day plowing through a big stack of papers and books, especially now that it’s summer? So while this title may be a bit jokey, I’m going to share some serious tips for how to speed up your reading of the most time-consuming materials: books.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is there a simple explanation for why some people pick up demanding activities (such a career in science) while some others are happy watching television most of their spare time?

Maybe it’s as simple as this: boredom is aversive to everyone, but people differ on when they get so bored they need to do something about it or their head will explode. Let’s call this the boredom threshold. So let’s play with the naive theory that people with a low boredom threshold do science (or art, or some other complex, demanding activities). And let’s assume that mainstream jobs (i. e. those that apply existing knowledge instead of living at the bleeding edge) can get away doing the same things over and over again. This is a caricature, but bear with me.  

Some job descriptions value resistance to boredom. Of course, that’s not in the contract, but it’s implicit. And the humility it takes to take such a job is not only accepted, but encouraged in Western society. It’s almost getting to a point where the trait could suffer natural selection (if our standards lasted a few million years ). There are more boring jobs than interesting jobs (i.e., interesting jobs are in the ‘long tail’ of a power-law distribution). People willing to accept a boring job have thus more chances of being employed. More so, most jobs have some boring part, so a caricature of a person that would only take non-boring jobs and would quit as soon as something boring comes up would be kicked out of the gene pool.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Cohen has a provocatively titled piece in today’s Observer, “No one wins in modern-day academia”, examining the shortcomings of the Research Assessment Exercise.

If you’re a UK academic, you’ll know all about the RAE which, as it says on the tin, is an exercise to assess the quality of a department’s research and consequently determine future levels of government funding. My experience with this so far has been quite limited. In my old department, we measured success through policy influence, not journal publications, and my current work is just starting to yield results. But even if you are an active participant in the RAE, the question still remains: is this really the best way to assess our overall effectiveness and success? Academic life is about more than just research: we are also teachers, administrators and professional community members.

So setting aside the official funding role of assessment for the moment, I’d like to ask an open question. How do you evaluate your own success as an academic? (And as a relevant corollary, how does this affect how you choose to spend your time?)

Google will host large scientific datasets at http://research.google.com. That is, of you have a dataset that is requested constantly, now you can ‘open-source’ it and let google take the server load. Wired has this covered.

For those not seeing the point in having open, portable data, this presentation (Making Massive Datasets Universally Accessible and Useful) is a good an explanation.

How do you ship a large dataset to google? Well, they send you hard drives in a suitcase!:

(Google people) are providing a 3TB drive array (Linux RAID5). The array is provided in “suitcase” and shipped to anyone who wants to send they data to Google. Anyone interested gives Google the file tree, and they SLURP the data off the drive. I believe they can extend this to a larger array (my memory says 20TB).

Sara Lloyd has published a manifesto on the way knowledge is distributed today.

In an ‘always on’ world in which everything is increasingly digital, where content is increasingly fragmented and ‘bite-sized’, where ‘prosumers’ merge the traditionally disparate roles of producer and consumer, where search replaces the library and where multimedia mash-ups -not text- holds the attraction for the digital natives who are growing up fast into the mass market of tomorrow, what role do publishers still have to play and how will they have to evolve to hold on to a continuing role in the writing and reading culture of the future?

This is important since the publishing industry somehow determines how academics allocate their time. If you can communicate your ideas in a way that fits the current standards, you may get them to spread farther.

Another interesting point is how the development of the text itself and the writing and editing process is now often ‘open’: there are ‘beta’ books on the net, and readers, ‘debug’ chapters as soon as the author releases them. This is a fantastic model that could leave professional editors out of the equation and speed up publishing in general. But then, do you really need the paper version of the book when all is said and done? Do you need to make a trip to the library to get it?

Oh, and by the way, Adobe acrobat 9 is out and now you can embed flash (i.e., video) in it. This makes possible to create a book that contains talks; or 3D rotations of a complex data visualization. Yet another reason to pay attention to fully digital book distribution.

Even if you’re not familiar with the daily life of an academic, chances are you will have heard the expression “Publish or perish”. In my (limited) experience, it’s not as bad as it sounds since people who end up in academia tend to have lots of ideas and like to share them with other people. In this case, writing a paper may be a bit time-consuming but it’s really just an extension of the brainstorming you do all the time. However the problem comes when trying to keep track of your various ideas. It’s very rare that one project finishes neatly before the next begins and so a person needs a way of keeping tabs on multiple projects at once.

The approach I’ve been using is borrowed from an engineering firm I used to work for. Read the rest of this entry »

Anna Kushnir has an interesting letter to Wired where she describes how the proportion of women to men went from 7:1 in grad school to 1:7 in senior academic positions.

What is causing this switch? The comment section has a bunch of hypotheses. Worth a look.

Paul Graham does it again. It’s great when you have a mind used to solve problems with simple solutions applied to time management. The more everyday problems hackers manage to solve (this time without use of fancy technology), the better for all of us.

The basic idea is simple: just make your body aware that you are wasting time. It’s even more radical than my interruptron idea of having a time counter growing in size as a function of wasting time.

I can find at least two problems with this idea. Or maybe I’m just trying to rationalize that I don’t want them to pry ‘my precious’ internet from my tired fingers

1. Software updates. I find that I quite often have to do a ’sudo aptitude install’ or some such. At least a couple of times a day. Same for programming languages’ packages. It’d be a pain to switch on the internet for that, plus it’d be tempting to leave it on.
2. Mail. I often have a quick idea and fire off an email to someone who may need to know or do something about it. My mail reader is integrated with my browser and sending a new mail is just one shortcut away. Again, a bit of a pain to move to a different computer to send a mail.

Still, the advantages are huge. Having no interruptions whatever online? Sounds great. In fact, when I’m really feeling like I need to get something done, I retire to a library with no wireless (and hopefully a comics section to fill scheduled rest time).

I’m interested in this method (2nd computer for internet only) enough to give it a serious try, say a full month.

It’d be great if more people wanted to join a trial, so we can do some n>1 testing on whether this works overall or not. It’d be also great to have some accountability (i.e., people knowing that you are doing this trial, so you feel ashamed if you are not following the rules). The problem is that productivity measures will have to be subjective: i.e., at the end of the month, do you feel you have gotten a lot done? More than any other month while you were online at all times?

What do you think?

PS: there’s a full thread commenting the article here.

Just as a quick follow-up to this post, … there seems to be a narcolepsy drug that works really well for periods when you need a lot of concentration.

The drug name is provigil. The article is a pretty hard-core testimonial on its effect. There’s an interesting discussion here. The article seems to mention no negative side effects (other than making you eat less!) but in the discussion some people mention serious stuff like : “nervousness, insomnia, excitation, irritability, tremors, dizziness and headaches“.

Extremely productive company 37signals (authors of  Ruby on Rails) have a short but interesting post on workaholism. It seems that workaholics actually create situations that require more work. This makes sense. And there are plenty of opportunities to fabricate more work: focus on small, inconsequential details; say yes to things before you have finished what you are currently working on; have no idea how long it’ll take to finish your current project (this is a big one for programming), etc.

The problem is that many work environments actually encourage people to act the workaholic way (and look busy all the time). If your workplace is one of these, there’s little you can do.

I’m still not seeing any stats that prove that non-workaholics get more done than workaholics though

Following up on Jose’s musings on good and bad keywords for a productivity blog, I came across an interesting tool to visualize the evolution over time of aggregated social bookmarking tags for popular websites. It is actually a pretty old project called Cloudalicious created a few years ago by Terrell Russell (of ClaimID fame).

If you are a web metrics maniac like yours truly, you won’t resist plugging this tool into your favourite websites, so here’s the graph I generated for AcademicProductivity.com:


(source)

Read the rest of this entry »

“Math is hard; let’s go shopping!”

-hacked Barbie

Summary: It looks like the difficulties of measuring  productivity make people use common sense to give advice on how to improve it instead of actually attacking productivity as a hard problem that needs empirical study. But people do follow barely tested advice on productivity. They are either too busy to afford dismissing it, or too pragmatic to believe that we can reach systematic, scientific productivity techniques.

There is a current craze about productivity in many forms (sometimes disguised as personal development). At least 4 of the top 100 blogs in the blogosphere are about productivity (according to technorati’s authority: lifehacker #6; Zen Habits #41; lifehack.org #66 43 Folders #73). There’s a current craze about personal productivity and personal development. The best treatment I have read recently is Cal Newport’s Flak magazine article. 

In fact, lifehacking is a trend of the 21st century. The idea is to reduce the things that bother you in your life (or reduce the time it takes to complete them) while increasing the quality and quality of the experiences that you like. This is pretty intuitive, but is this a working definition of whatever personal productivity is? Hardly. Today, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack.

Hacks are by definition, unsystematic. Everything goes, as long as it works. This is the contrary to the incremental evolution of scientific thinking. Even though sometimes there are large changes in the form of paradigm shifts, most of the time progress is incremental and lineal.

The advantages are clear: one can build on the knowledge acquired by the previous generation.

But do we have the same incremental progress in personal productivity theories? If there anything remotely similar to a science of productivity? Should people follow only empirically tested advice about productivity?

Read the rest of this entry »

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

I while ago I designed a simple program to track how often I’m interrupted and to prevent myself from going into a ’shaving Yaks’ excursion every time I have to touch a browser.

The interruptron works by growing in size as your ‘unscheduled break’ (or procrastination escapade) elapses. It can cover your entire screen, so it’s hard to ignore. it also lets you save what you did and plot some basic stats.

It turns out people are actually using it. Even making videos about it:

I wasn’t very impressed myself when I released it to tell you the truth, but this little program seems to be a crowd pleaser. Another user asked for the source and is actually doing a rewrite. I was surprised when he told me about his background: he was the person responsible for the email engine of one of the most trafficked sites on the web. We’ll be working together and probably implementing more features, but don’t hold your breath.

Anyway, I didn’t announce it here in ap.com. Maybe it’s time to do it now.

How can you take advantage of the current craze about social media?

The fact is that many people use social media to  build a powerful reputation In any Industry. This article will focus on professional social sites (i.e., linkedIn, biznik) and not on the more leisure-based social sites (mySpace, facebook). Having said that, do not discard the more traditional forums and blogs; making posts in these can get you the same benefits than professional social sites, and they are often more targeted.

1 - Benefits are not immediate

Social networks will look like a supreme waste of time in the short term; the benefits are cumulative and slow. Andy Erickson (linkedIn) says:

For me, it’s sort of like having done all the preparation work for an emergency (fire drills in school, CPR certification) and then being grateful that you did when you finally need it.

This is also true for other forms of name-branding and visibility such as blogging. Having the attention of some people is a great currency that you never know when you are going to need.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s an excellent discussion at news.ycombinator on why one should _not_ pursue an academic career. The post started with the ‘don’t become a scientist‘ article by Jonathan I. Katz that we commented before. What I find interesting is that ycombinator represents a population of very smart people (hackers and startup founders) who are not academics but most probably have had offers to go to grad school/take a postdoc, etc and declined them to start a new company.

Some members describe their experience as research programmers for big-name research groups, and it’s not pretty. Menloparkbum says:

Most of the people working there were like people working at any big, lame bureaucratic institution, only they had or were obtaining PhDs. Most of their time was spent surfing the web, sending email, and attending meetings. I have never worked anywhere else where people attended so many meetings.

User amichail says:

Don’t be misled by the promise of freedom in academia. It’s not like that at all. [...]

Unless you get a faculty position at a stellar university (highly unlikely nowadays), the teaching will be depressing. And your research will suffer as a result since you will be in no mood to do it.

Also, unless you plan to do everything yourself for research, you will need to get some funding. But whether you get that funding depends on whether your peers — competitors actually — like what you plan to do.

Not much that we didn’t know here. But why are threads like this surfacing more often recently? Or is it just me who finds them everywhere? I don’t even log into the Chronicle forums because the numbers of complains (’I have no life’) there are depressing. This particular user group (Hackers and startup founders) are perfect examples of people who pick on new trends and evaluate what a market is offering. They seem to be all in agreement: steer away from an academic career.

What do you think?

The efficient academic google group has a thread on a really interesting problem. Any hack addressing this has a high chance of saving several hours per week for those of you who teach.

Given lecture material has three components:

1. Slides for digital projection (preferable PDFs rather than PowerPoint or Keynote)
2. Lecture notes to support what I need to say and remember
3. Lecture handout

I regularly update all three, but I am finding keeping all three in sync to be a bit tedious.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but what I am visualising is some sort of single document, where you  write the lecture handout. I could then update this with new information between presenting the lecture.

If you have a solution, drop by and post it there (or here!).

WordFlashReader has several advantages over the previously analyzed rapidReader: it’s open source, and written in perl. So it works under linux and windows at least. wordflashreader also highlights where you are reading, so one of the downsides of RSVP (disorientation) is mostly gone. Still, you lose the formatting when you read HTML or PDF… and the highlighting didn’t work very well for me. The way cursors change speed make it confusing (I’m too used to move around the document with cursor keys). One nifty idea is to go back one sentence with left control key.

As before, of you can test it out and post your thoughts for everyone to see, that’d be great.

Another option we commented before was spreeder.

I’m still looking for the holy Grail that makes my reading more fluid and effective. It looks like this is an interest that I share with many people according to the huge pile of books that amazon lists for ’speed reading’.

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).

I always wondered how people see the academic world from outside. How do we gauge the interest of the general public on what academics have to say (on average)? One easy way to look at this question is to see the how often people will read an article that has the word ‘academic’ on it.

A proxy on what people read nowadays is digg.com. And the tool to see how often people digg academic posts is now available in Dan Zarella’s blog. Given a keyword, the tool will return data on the average number of links accumulated by stories popular on Digg that mentioned that keyword. This is done with 2007 data.

Well, behold what happens when you enter “academic”:

And compare it to what you get when you type “productivity”:

Why is this important? Well, on average, a single digg increases traffic by 0.10%. So a story that gets 3,000 diggs results in an increase in total traffic to the referring site by 300%.

So, from now on we are a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H productivity blog