Academic research tips productivity tips, tricks and hacks for Academics (2015 edition) _ Academic research

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I ' m a pre-tenure professor and the father of a special needs child. My final year in grad school, I juggled writing me dissertation, hunting for academic jobs and working on two start-ups.

Wasting time isn't something I have been able to afford in years.

Read below for a write-up of the time-saving tips and tricks I ' ve accumulated on the last few years.

If you have tips about your own, please send them my way!

Contents

Jump to:my philosophy:optimize transaction costs. Don ' t work from home. Eliminate temptation to waste time. Salvage dead time with technology. Get rid of your TV. Taming email. Work from a laptop. Use a calendar system. Turn off Instant Messaging. Minimize collaboration costs. Use a citation/paper-management system. Procrastinate productively. Exercise productively. Iterate toward perfection. My philosophy:optimize transaction costs

Distilled into empirically-wrought principles, my high-level advice is:reduce-transaction to costs in engaging Behavior. Erect transaction costs to engaging in counter-productive behavior. Minimize opportunity cost. Do what ' re best in doing, and partner with specialists while you need to do something else. [This are the hardest principle for engineers to accept. We feel that if we can do something, we should.]

In short, mold your, the path to least resistance is the path of maximum productivity.

People are surprised I tell them I ' M lazy.

I don ' t try to change the fact that I ' M lazy:i exploit it.

I try to make sure which the laziest thing I can do in any moment are what I should be doing. Update:managing Willpower

Years after I wrote the "This" article, I discovered a book that provided a basis for my philosophy in Soun D Psychological Science,willpower:

The book surveys the literature on the "Self control".

Deliberating shaping the past of least resistance optimizes the use of willpower. Anecdote:pull-ups

In my I-new professor, I wanted to start doing pull-ups, so I attached a portable pull-up bar to the door OU Tside our bedroom.

Every time I passed by, the transaction cost of a pull-up is near zero, so I did some.

Moreover, I didn ' t have to remember to do pull-ups, because I saw the pull-up bar all.

One day (for reasons unknown) The bar is taken down and placed on the floor. The bar lay on the floor for months, and I didn ' t does another for pull-up.

It would haven taken about ten seconds to re-install the bar, but I is often in a rush, and that ten seconds had become a Transaction cost. [Update:i ended up developing and implementing a least-resistance approach to both weight loss and gaining strength/ Muscle.] Don ' t work from home

Home is full of distractions.

Academics have flexible schedules, which makes it all of the more important to force yourself to go into work day.

Invest in making your work-space a comfortable, productive, enjoyable place to be:move the books into your your. This is a forcing function more than anything else. It's hard to does work at home and references are at work. Get an ergonomic office chair. Nothing beats the Aeron chair. Get a high-quality ergonomic keyboard. I highly recommend thekinesis advantage:decorate your work-space. Make it a fun where. Eliminate temptation to waste time

[You may want to the I blog post on the deliberately crippling technology to boost productivity.]

In graduate school, I developed a online online-news-reading addiction.

I read Everything:media sites, forum sites, voting sites, blogs, etc.

My default behavior as I wasn ' t doing something else became to reflexively type CNN.com, reddit.com or boingboing.net in to my browser.

To the stop losing time to this sites, I started blocking access to them completely through redirecting them in my/etc/hosts file .

But, inevitably, I ' d want to check the news for a big story, so I ' d unblock a site, and I ' d fall quickly ing addiction. As always, learning moderation is key. Three techniques have helped me manage the habit:restrict access to optimal hours. My brain are slowest in the morning and I get home from work around 6pm-7pm. I used to use Leechblock for Firefox, STAYFOCUSD for Chrome and wastenotime for Safari to limit browsing time-wasters to E Xactly these time periods.

Lately, I ' ve taken this to a extreme:permanently blocking all time-wasters in my laptop. After withdrawal symptoms subsided, it ' s been great. Dump polling as a web-surfing style. Polling Web sites for updates is inefficient and habit-forming. The May check a site is with no updates, but in the 101st check, you get a news nugget, and the habit gets Reinforc Ed.

Psychologists know that randomly rewarding a subject for a behavior behavior leads to the strongest conditioning, with the Longest period to extinction then the reward is removed. (It takes months to break the habit on mindlessly pounding out your favorite URLs even once they ' re blocked.)

Use RSS and Google Reader Digg reader to funnel all of the sites in the a single stream. With an RSS aggregator, you can tear through all your regular sites in a fraction of the "time", once a day. Subscribe to Dead-tree newspapers. I skim the print version of the Wall Street jounal every morning, and a pick up a copy of the New York times on campus for Reading in the afternoon.

When breaking a browsing habit:prepare for withdrawal symptoms. I found myself tempted to circumvent me own blocks on a hourly basis I-I-i-put them in place.

Utilize every anti-circumvention feature available at the A, and slowly disable, them you ' ve ' once. Salvage dead time with technology

Life are full of dead time:waiting in offices, waiting in airports, waiting before a lecture, waiting on the bus. Dead time adds up.

Fortunately, there are low-transaction-cost devices which make it easy for a academic to be productive the moment dead Ti Me begins:ereaders like the Kindle, smartphones and tablets.

Carrying around a thin tablet holding all of the "the", papers you have read (and the ones, want to read) salvages OT Herwise wasted time.

Storing these papers in the cloud makes access easy.

For cloud storage, I really like Copy's simple interface, generous free spaces and fair-sharing policy.

These devices reclaim a lot of the dead time with productive reading, particularly peer-reviewing for conferences and journals .

For extended reading on the IPad and use the accessibility controls to invert "display to" black. Your eyes'll thank you.

For "pruning" a inbox while waiting, I find this Mailbox app is especially efficient. Get rid of your TV

I noticed leaving the "TV on" background could sap productivity all long. With sites like Hulu, Netflix and ITunes, you don ' t really need a cable bill anymore.

I don ' t Miss TV at all. Taming email

Email dominates working time in many fields and academia is no exception. I ' ve spent considerable effort in taming the Hydra this is email.

To avoid missing no mail, all the my email accounts forward into a commongmail account, so I have only one place to check.

It has become critically important to have access to all the My mail while traveling and offline the so I ' ve ended the up using of Flineimap and Notmuch to create a searchable archive the all in my email.

I even uploaded eight years of email history to GMail so it would all is quickly and easily.

I Use the Mailbox app on my iPhone to quickly prune email.

On me laptop, I use the console-based mutt for answering email efficiently. Being able to use a efficient text editor like Vim or mutt for processing email are critical to maintaining email THROUGHP Ut.

My Offlineimap + Notmuch + Mutt set up follows the guideline set up by Steve Losh.

I also created a guideline for academic email practices.

Once email reaches a critical volume, it ' s important to disable notifiers.

Restrict email to a few specific hours of the "day" and answer in bulk. Don ' t repeat yourself:use a blog to "Reply to public"

If you find yourself giving a common answer to different questions or answering the same question, it's time to Convert the answer into a blog post.

For more on the ' Reply to public ' strategy, and I article on efficient academic blogging. A Note on encryption

If You "care about privacy" but ' re sending or receiving anything over email sensitive without it with encrypting Hing like PGP, you are doing it wrong.

If you are have sensitive email (or any sensitive information, really) on your laptop, and I ' re not encrypting your DRI ve with strong encryption and a good password, ditto. Properly encrypting your data is the only way to keep it safe from prying eyes.

I use pre-emptive encryption for the same reason I wear I seatbelt:i hope I ' m never glad I used it.

For more, read My primer on encryption. Work from a laptop when choosing a laptop, optimize size and battery life for mobility; Maximize hard-drive space. Use a server for number-crunching. Get an external keyboard, mouse and monitor. Big second monitors boost productivity. Make your laptop your centralized the data store to avoid synchronization. While I still had a desktop, I exported my home directory over NFS from my laptop to my desktop. SAMBA or AFS works about as a. Use your laptop as your primary hard drive, and backup your in a laptop basis. The Apple ' s built-in time Machine software makes backing and completely automatic. Buy a separate power adapter for every location where to regularly use a laptop. Use a calendar system

As a graduate student, life is simple enough this I could keep what I had to does and all of the major in my head. As a professor and a father, my schedule are packed with a random assortment of appointments and places to. My wife and I synchronize our calendars using Google Calendar.

Synchronizing Calenders takes the coordination overhead out of staying organized this rushed are to prone. Turn off Instant Messaging

Instant messaging technology is great, but it makes it too easy to being interrupted, and in, interruptions are fatal To good. The people that actually need is in touch with you can call, SMS or email. Minimize collaboration costs Running A's is a lot like Running as small. Make it real by branding your group:give it a name. (Like u combinator!) If you ' re working a project, give the project a product name or a code name. Exploit collaboration tools for writing papers. CVS is the old standard. subversion  (SVN) has been accepted across many. Tools like SVN and CVS allow multiple people to work on the same document simultaneously. Most of the time, it can integrate changes without asking the user what to do when two people the modified file. Set up a virtual dedicated server to run services (SSH, email, shared disk, Web sites, forums, wikis, SVN) for your resear CH Group. I recommend whatever the CheApest Plan On linode.com is for this purpose. Use a citation/paper-management system

In grad school, I managed a BibTeX file by hand. Whenever I started working on multiple projects with multiple people, this system would the start to collapse, and my BibTeX f Ile would get out of sync. Fortunately, there are great citation-management tools to automate more of the hassle now. I ' ve tried mendeley, zotero and citeulike. Of those three, I prefer citeulike:citeulike supports importing citation information automatically from many existing sci entific databases. CiteULike does the best job of accurately importing citation information. CiteULike makes group collaboration easy. CiteULike BibTeX files for a user or group can be pulled to urlon the command line with tools Like wget. CiteULike exports in plaintext, I can freely move or collaborate with another citation-management system Like bi Bdesk. procrastinate productively

If you must procrastinate, try to procrastinate on something with a later deadline rather than something frivolous. I often spend the day before a submission deadline working on my next paper or grant proposal.

If you can ' t bring yourself to procrastinate on work, try procrastinating on meta-work like trying out things from the ACA demic productivity Blog. Exercise productively

It took me a while to appreciate the power of exercise in boosting creativity. Now I wonder how I ever made a discovery without it.

It took longer to figure out I to prevent exercise from becoming a trade-off with respect to work or leisure.

They key is in dropping of the cost to engaging in exercise so low this whenever I needed a short break, even for a minute, I could fill this break with a quick set of exercises:i turned me office into a small but complete.

The piece of equipment is still my most frequently used, I most versatle and my most compact, I to pound adj Ustable Dumbbells:

On average, I probably work out minutes each week, but those, minutes are harvested from what used to is time spent Pondering at my desk.

Now, I ponder while lifting weights.

I don ' t have a explanation for why lifting heavy weights gives creative, boosts it works. I ' ve written separate articles on melding "least resistance approach with weight loss and with gaining STRENGTH/MUSCL E. Iterate toward perfection

Treat perfection like a process, not the achievable state. Perfectionism is crippling to productivity. I ' ve known academics that can ' t even start projects because of perfectionism. I know some academics that defend their lack of productivity by proudly proclaiming themselves to be perfectionists. I ' m not so sure one should is proud of perfectionism. I don ' t do it ' s bad to wantperfection; I just it ' s unrealistic to expect it.

The metric academics need to hit are "good enough," and after this, "better than good enough," if time permits. Forget that word perfect exists. Otherwise, one can sink endless amounts to a project long after the scientific mission is accomplished. One Good-enough paper that got submitted is worth a infinite number of perfect papers that don ' t exist.

The publication structure of computer science even rewards the iterative process, as I ' m sure it does to other fields a S. Mold an idea until it ' s well-formed; Provide some examples and motivate intuition; If there ' s time, do preliminary empirical validation. Send this to a workshop to get feedback on The idea. Also, keep in mind this workshops are meant for preliminary, not preliminary. A workshop paper still has to be a complete, well-written paper. If The idea is looks like a good one, empirically validate it and firm up the theory. Send this to a good conference. [In Computer science, RPT are based on good conferences rather than good journals.] If enthusiasm for the "idea", write the journal article a year or how later, when you ' ve had the distill NCE and the impact of the work.

To achieve a iterative work-flow, make iterations easy:once you know your ' re going to did something, start on it right awa Y:create a blank document file, create a blank presentation file, start drafting the email (with To:field blank). Then, if at any point in the future, your ' re moved to work on it, the transaction cost of doing a little more work is near- Zero. Work on a project whenever you ' re moved to Work on it. Don ' t pay attention to deadline ordering unless it ' s a n-day project, and only nfree days are left. Related posts parsing BibTeX into S-expressions, JSON, XML and BibTeX Travel hacks Tips for Work-life balance NS for grad students resolutions for programmers end artificial to boost scarcities boost productivity Ipple Your Technology Console productivity hack:exploiting Task frequency

From: http://matt.might.net/articles/productivity-tips-hints-hacks-tricks-for-grad-students-academics/