Productivity tips, tricks and hacks for academics (edition)

Productivity tips, tricks and hacks for Academics (edition) Contents

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1. My philosophy:optimize transaction costs.
2. Don ' t work from home.
3. Eliminate temptation to waste time.
4. Salvage dead time with technology.
5. Get rid of your TV.
6. Taming email.
7. Work from a laptop.
8. Use a calendar system.
9. Turn off Instant Messaging.
10. Minimize collaboration costs.
11. Use a citation/paper-management system.
12. Procrastinate productively.
13. Exercise productively.
14. Iterate toward perfection.

My philosophy:optimize Transaction costs

Distilled to empirically-wrought principles, my high-level advice is:

1. Reduce transaction costs to engaging in productive behavior.
2. Erect transaction costs to engaging in counter-productive behavior.
3. Minimize opportunity cost. Do-what-you ' re-best at doing, and partner with specialists if you need-do something else. [This was the hardest principle for engineers to accept. We feel if we can do something, we should.]

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

People is surprised when 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, the laziest thing I can do at any moment are what I should be doing.

Update:managing Willpower

Years after I wrote the first version of this article, I discovered a book that provided a basis for my philosophy in Soun D Psychological Science,willpower:

The book surveys the literature.

Deliberating shaping the past of least resistance optimizes the use of willpower.

Anecdote:pull-ups

In my first year as a 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 pull-ups.

Moreover, I didn ' t has to remember to does pull-ups, because I saw the pull-up bar all the time.

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

It would haven taken about ten seconds to re-install the bar, but I am 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 Stren Gth/muscle.]

Don ' t work from home

Home is full of distractions.

Academics has flexible schedules, which makes it all, and important to force yourself to go into work every day.

Invest in making your work-space a comfortable, productive, enjoyable place to be:

1. Move your books into your work-space. This was a forcing function more than anything else. It's hard-to-do work at home when references is at work.
2. Get an ergonomic office chair. Nothing beats the Aeron chair.
3. Get a high-quality ergonomic keyboard. I highly recommend Thekinesis Advantage:
4. Decorate your work-space. Make it a fun place to be.

Eliminate temptation to waste time

[Want to see my blog post in deliberately crippling technology to boost productivity.]

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

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

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

To stop losing-these sites, I started blocking access to them completely by redirecting them in my /etc/hosts file.

But, inevitably, I ' d want-to-check the news for a big stories, so I ' d unblock a site, and I ' d fall quickly back into my read ing addiction. As always, learning moderation is key. Three techniques have helped me manage the habit:

2. Restrict access to optimal hours . My brain is slowest in the morning and after 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 exactly these time periods. 
   
   Lately, I ' ve taken the-to-an extreme:  Permanen tly  blocking all time-wasters on my laptop. After withdrawal symptoms subsided, it ' s been great.
4. Dump Polling as a web-surfing style . Polling Web sites for updates are inefficient and habit-forming. You may check a site in the Times with no updates, but on the 101st check, you get a news nugget, and the habit Gets rei NFORCED.&NBSP
   
   Psychologists know randomly rewarding a subject for a behavior behavior leads to the strongest Conditioning, with the longest period-extinction when the reward is removed. (It takes months to break the habit in mindlessly pounding out your favorite URLs even once they ' re blocked.) &NBSP
   
   Use RSS and google Reader  digg Reader  to Funnel All of the sites you read to a single stream. With an RSS aggregator, you can tear through all your regular sites in a fraction of the time, once a day.
6. 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 my own blocks on a hourly basis after I first put them in place.

Utilize every anti-circumvention feature available at first, and slowly disable them once you ' ve ' detoxed. "

Salvage dead time with technology

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

Fortunately, there is 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" and the "papers you ones to read" want 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 space and fair-sharing policy.

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

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

For "pruning" a inbox while waiting, I find and the Mailbox app is especially efficient.

Get rid of your TV

I noticed leaving the TV on with the background could sap productivity all day 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 is email.

To avoid missing any mail, all of my emails accounts forward into a commongmail account, so I has only one place to check.

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

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

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

On my 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 repeatedly, it's time to Convert the answer into a blog post.

For more on the ' Reply to public ' strategy, see my article on efficient academic blogging.

A Note on encryption

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

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

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

For more, read my primer on encryption.

Work from a laptop

1. When choosing a laptop, optimize size and battery life for mobility; Maximize hard-drive space. Use the a server for number-crunching.
2. Get an external keyboard, mouse and monitor. Big second monitors boost productivity.
3. Make your laptop your centralized data store to avoid synchronization headaches. 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 well.
4. Use your laptop as your primary hard drive, and backup your laptop on a weekly basis. Apple ' s built-in time Machine software makes backing up completely automatic and transparent.
5. Buy a separate power adapter for every location where you regularly use a laptop.

Use a calendar system

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

Synchronizing Calenders takes the coordination overhead out of staying organized that the rushed is prone to avoid.

Turn off Instant Messaging

Instant messaging technology is great, but it makes it too easy to be interrupted, and in science, interruptions was fatal To good. The people that actually need-be-in-touch with your can call, SMS or email.

Minimize Collaboration costs

1. Running A is a Running as small business. 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.
2. Exploit collaboration tools for writing papers. CVS is the old standard. Subversion (SVN) has been accepted across many academic disciplines. 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 who does when the people modified the same file.
3. Set up a virtual dedicated server to run services (SSH, e-mail, shared disk, Web sites, forums, wikis, SVN) for your resear CH Group. I recommend whatever the cheapest plan on linode.com are 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 start to collapse, and my BibTeX f Ile would get out of sync. Fortunately, there is great citation-management tools to automate much of the hassle now. I ' ve tried Mendeley, Zotero and CiteULike. Of those three, I prefer citeulike:

1. CiteULike supports importing citation information automatically from many existing scientific databases.
2. CiteULike does the best job of accurately importing citation information.
3. CiteULike makes group collaboration easy.
4. CiteULike BibTeX files for a user or group can is pulled from a Urlon the command line with tools like wget .
5. CiteULike exports in plaintext, so can freely move or collaborate with another citation-management system like Bibdesk .

procrastinate productively

If you must procrastinate, try the 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 the figure out how to prevent exercise from becoming a trade-off with respect to work or leisure.

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

The first piece of equipment is still my more frequently used, my most versatle and my most compact, my ten to the Pound adj Ustable Dumbbells:

On average, I probably work out of minutes each week, but those minutes is harvested from what used to be 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, but it works.

I ' ve written separate articles on melding the least resistance approach withweight loss and with gaining strength/muscle.

Iterate toward perfection

Treat perfection like a process, not a 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 think it ' s bad to wantperfection; I just think it ' s unrealistic to expect it.

The metric academics need to hit are "good enough," and after that, "better than good enough," if time permits. Forget that word perfect exists. Otherwise, one can sink endless amounts of time to a project long after the scientific mission was 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 in other fields as W Ell.

1. 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, workshops is meant for preliminary, and not preliminary papers. A workshop paper still have to is a complete, well-written paper.
2. If The idea looks-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.]
3. If enthusiasm for the idea was high, write the journal article a year or so later and when you ' ve had time to distill the Esse NCE and the impact of the work.

To achieve a iterative work-flow, make iterations easy:

1. Once you know your re going to does something, start on it right away:create a blank document file, create a blank presentat Ion file, start drafting the email (with To:field blank). Then, if at any of the "The Future", you ' re moved-to-work on it, the transaction cost of doing a little more work is near- Zero.
2. Work on a project whenever your ' re moved to work on it. Don ' t pay attention to deadline ordering unless it's an n-day project, and only nfree days is left.

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Productivity tips, tricks and hacks for Academics (edition)