Here at Grad Hacker, we feel that simply being productive is not enough. What good is your inner, clandestine, productivity, if your bosses, colleagues, and you yourself don't really know the extent of just how unbelievably productive, busy, stressed, in a rush, and important you really are? For these, reasons, each weekend we will provide you with a tip on how to act productive.
Let's be honest, productive people get a lot of email, so they have to check it. How could they not? They're productive, so everyone wants a piece. These people often have scores of project they're working on simultaneously (think triple digits), each one producing multiple emails a day that need immediate checking and responding, and they're handling each one better you will probably handle any single project in your whole life. But don't feel bad, feel productive! Check your damn email already.
Most of us check email whenever we feel like it, respond whenever we feel like it, and somehow seem to make it through life with this level of mediocrity. Productive people, on the other hand, feel a deep sense of urgency, and can express this through digital communication like it's going out of style. These are the people that make others say to their friends, "Look at this, he responded to this email in 5 minutes," or "Woah, I sent this at 1am and she responded by 1:30!"They check email at work, at home, on dates, in bed, on the road, driving, biking, jogging, at the movies, at the beach, when they are in front of you and get to the counter at the burrito place that already has a long line. Bottom line is, they check that shit. If you want to be productive you should too. How do you know how often is enough? If you got to the end of this post without checking your email at least once, you're not checking it enough. Go back and try again.
Some good ways to increase your daily email checking: when you're stuck on a difficult project, go check your email; when you really don't want to work on something with a deadline, go check your email; when you get to work in the morning, definitely start by checking your email; when you have that awkward 20 minute break between events, go check your email. You get the point.
Here at Grad Hacker, we feel that simply being productive is not enough. What good is your inner, clandestine, productivity, if your bosses, colleagues, and you yourself don't really know the extent of just how unbelievably productive, busy, stressed, in a rush, and important you really are? For these, reasons, each weekend we will provide you with a tip on how to act productive.
Ah spring break. Sun, skin, MTV video cameras, uninhibited drinking of alcohol. This is what spring break is about - if you're lazy.
We all know the truth about spring break: it's a time to finally get some research done. Maybe you've heard that before, maybe you've ignored it, maybe you're grossly unproductive. But one thing, however, is for sure: even if you don't work through the entirety of spring break telling people how hard you worked all break long is a sure way to increase your perceived productivity. Of course, being productive is an important part of acting productive, and actually working through spring break while everyone else is having unbridled sexual escapades that they won't remember, is encouraged. But we understand that everyone slips up once in a while, that's why we think the most important part about spring break is to prepare for the "how was your break?" conversations, regardless of how hard you worked:
First, make a list of things you got done over the break, review the list (email us, we'll help you with your list at no charge). Try to include items that your friends have been trying to do themselves for a long time but haven't "got around to" doing.
Second, have at least one event in mind that you were invited to attend but skipped out on to ensure you aren't perceived as a loser. Multi day events in tropical locations are encouraged. Mentioning the event was attended by very attractive and rather out-of-your-league peers is very strongly encouraged.
Third, what should be a fundamental skill if you've read any of the tips in this series, always start the conversation off by asking about their break was, mentioning how you wish you could say the same, and expressing a resigned acceptance that it was so much more fun than yours.
Finally, if there is one person you have this conversation with, let it be your boss. Your boss is probably not cool enough, attractive enough, nor lazy enough, to have spent spring break at some tropical location, they were probably working too, but expected that you weren't. But you were, and you should say so. Or you weren't, but you should still say so. Set yourself apart from your peers and tell your boss. Happy Spring Break.
Here at Grad Hacker, we feel that simply being productive is not enough. What good is your inner, clandestine, productivity, if your bosses, colleagues, and you yourself don't really know the extent of just how unbelievably productive, busy, stressed, in a rush, and important you really are? For these, reasons, each weekend we will provide you with a tip on how to act productive.
What did you do this past weekend? Hang out with friends? Drink alcoholic beverages? "Oh but I did a little bit of work on Sunday morning" you say. Unacceptable. Who do you think you are, Cal Newport? Stop being lazy, start being productive, work the entire weekend.
Productive people don't have weekends. Weekends are when the office is quiet, there are no classes if you are a student or professor, the phones aren't ringing, the email volume takes a dip, so why would any sane, productive person waste this time gallivanting around town when they could be making progress on the million projects on their plate? Don't get me wrong, you can do that, it's your life, just don't expect to be productive at the same time.
Now, in the vain of the How to Act Productive series, I must add the final ingredient to acting productive by working all weekend long: tell people what you did over the weekend. You need people to know how productive you were over the weekend. You need to inspire them. Last week I mentioned how you must carefully slide your lack of sleep into conversations to preserve some social tact. Such rules seemlessly extend into this week. Don't start by talking about your productive weekend, ask about their lazy weekend first: "So what did you do this weekend." "Oh it was awesome, we took the boat out on Saturday, the weather was beautiful, hung out for a while, hit up this party in the evening. Then on Sunday..." "Oh, that must have been nice, I was here working the whole time." Oh yes.
So towards the end of this week, when you start to think about what you'll do this weekend, ask yourself this simple question: Am I a productive person?
On its website, Zotero is described "is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources." Even though it’s been out for a while, I somehow didn’t run into it until a few months ago. I’ve used it for a while and have switched over from using Endnote because I like it that much, below is my review.
Here is my two sentence review of Zotero: If Evernote and Endnote had sex and made a baby, Zotero would be that baby. It would then outdo its parents in so many ways.
If that is all you need to know, go ahead and try it out, it's free for crying out loud. Otherwise, here is my longer review organized in list form of my opinions of its features. The part about Evernote in my two sentence review is about how Zotero can do more than just manage research articles, but I can’t write about everything (that’s what it’s website is for) so this review will just be about using Zotero to manage research papers.
1. Autofind - This is perhaps the coolest thing about Zotero. Zotero recognizes when you're looking at a summary, abstract, citation, and/or list of articles and puts a little icon next to the url. When you click on the icon, it automatically stores the citation information for that article in the database. My experiences with this feature have been pretty damn good. I'm in the natural sciences, so results in other fields may vary, but in the databases that I use, and most surprisingly at the vast majority of individual journals' websites, Zotero knows when I'm looking at an article. It isn't perfect though, and it can be annoying when you're cruising along and just want to store a citation and move on and Zotero doesn't recognize it. I've had this problem when checking who cited a given paper in Web of Science. But overall, this is a positive feature and a hell of a lot faster than exporting to Endnote. Which leads me to...
2. It Lives in Firefox - An absolute plus. Firefox is where I find articles, often look at the pdf of articles I've found, find other articles related to a given article I'm reading, so it only makes sense that my database of papers also live in Firefox. When you click on the icon in the address bar, the whole world doesn’t stop for Endnote to startup and you don’t have to click 5 other screens to allow Firefox to download the file, pick the library, etc. It just pulls up a little “Saving item…” tab in the bottom corner of the Firefox window, does its business, and removes the tab. The whole process, when working properly (which is the vast majority of the time) takes maybe 10 seconds. You do have to be careful about which folder you left highlighted in Zotero, because it will automatically save citations into that folder. I find this more of a plus than a minus though, because often I’m searching for a bunch of articles about one research subject, so I can just keep clicking the icon in the address bar and Zotero will keep saving citations right where I want them.
3. Folders – Does Endnote have folders inside a given library? I don’t think so, but maybe. Is it useful and fast enough for me to have known about? Evidently not. The folders and subfolders list is extremely useful and a breath of fresh air. Research papers aren’t emails. Throwing them all in one folder and searching for them is often not the best way to find what you’re looking for. You also seem to be able to place a given entry into more than one folder, which rocks. Drag, drop, drag, drop. Ooooh, it’s easy.
4. Tags – If folders aren’t enough for finding the articles you want, you can also add tags to papers, which work exactly like Gmail labels. Personally, I find that since I can place an entry into multiple folders already, tags aren’t particularly useful. But I use this occasionally. For example, when I’m doing a search on a given subject,it’s often convenient to keep adding entries to the list, but mark the especially pertinent ones as “to read” via a tag and go back and make sure I read all of them later. I wish I had learned this trick earlier because it’s one hell of a time saver. I’ll write more about this and other opinions about doing literature searches later.
5. Search as you type – Awesome. The search function of Zotero is so convenient. It’s fast, and it’s built, unobtrusively, right into the little screen. Endnote’s search worked well for me too, but it brought up a second screen and results didn’t show up as I typed; minor details, I know, but I’m just listing what I like here.
6. Notes – Oooh this is convenient. I’ve started to keep all of my notes and summaries of papers in Zotero in the notes option. It’s right there with the paper always. Besides actually taking notes on the paper though, the fact that the notes are included in searches means that I can type a list of “keywords” or random ways that I remember a paper into the notes to increase my chances of finding it later. Why not use tags or folders for this? Because often the ways I, and many others, remember a paper is through odd characteristics like: “that one paper by those British guys”, “the one with the blah blah technique in it”, “the one with that blah blah figure in it”, etc. I don’t want those random thoughts about every paper to have their own folder or tag, that’s ridiculous.
7. Importing from Endnote – So, if you’ve been using another reference software, how easy is it to switch? Good question. I used Endnote, so that’s all I can talk about. I went through their method of importing my references from Endnote and it worked with one weird quirk: it turned all kinds of Endnote keywords of some sort into tags, which is really annoying. So now I have all these tags that I don’t want and I don’t know how to delete all tags at one time, so I’m just not using tags much, eh, oh well. Otherwise the papers seem to enter just fine.
8. Citing as you type – I haven’t written a paper using Zotero for citations and don’t plan on it because my colleagues, and most importantly, my adviser, don’t use Zotero, so collaborating on a paper requires that I still use Endnote for that. I don’t forsee that being a problem though because the papers we write have maybe 20 or so citations max, and I can export them as RIS and make a little Endnote library for that particular paper. Maybe I’ll use Zotero for citations in a paper when I have to write the dissertation. I’ll let you know.
9. Free – Endnote costs money, this doesn’t. How do you beat that?
10. Open Source – Zotero is actively being worked on, which means bugs and kinks, and compatibility issues are constantly being fixed. This is a huge plus. Think Google; it responds to users’ requests by constantly improving its products, that’s so useful.
Overall, I’m quite happy with Zotero, and I find myself saving more papers than before and doing literature searches a lot faster and a lot more efficiently than before, which is a plus. Recommended.
Here at Grad Hacker, we feel that simply being productive is not enough. What good is your inner, clandestine, productivity, if your bosses, colleagues, and you yourself don't really know the extent of just how unbelievably productive, busy, stressed, in a rush, and important you really are? For these, reasons, each weekend we will provide you with a tip on how to act productive.
If you think you can be productive and sleep well, you've got another thing coming. Busy people don't sleep. How could they? They're too busy. If you want to be a productive, important person you need to start losing sleep. More important than just your sleeping patterns, however, is your reputation around the office. You don't want people to think you're a lazy, 8-hours a night sleeper. You want them to know just how much you haven't slept in the past week or year. So you need to tell them. Often, it can be awkward simply inserting a sentence about your lack of sleep mid-conversation. So you must learn to be adept at more subtle tricks: "Yeah, that really was a good game last night, so what did you do afterwards?" "Went to bed" "Oh, that must have been nice. I was up till 4 working on the TPS reports." "Really? Wow..." You see, your lack of sleep impresses and inspires people. Maybe your friend will think twice the next time she plans on simply going to bed after the game.
A more advanced trick is to cite multiple-day averages instead of just a single night. Why? Because many people lose sleep every once in a while, but really important people don't sleep on a consistent basis. You need have these numbers on hand for when someone else tries to seem harder-working than you. Often, inserting a little sympathy in your phrasing can really make you sound like a winner: "Man, on Tuesday, I was up till 4 working on the TPS reports." "Oh, I hear you, that must have been rough. I've slept maybe 20 hours in the past week." "Total?!" "Yeah, total." "Woah..."
So this week, try to work more and sleep less. But if that's hard, don't worry about it, just make sure you tell people how little you've slept.
Here at Grad Hacker, we feel that simply being productive is not enough. What good is your inner, clandestine productivity, if your bosses, colleagues, and you yourself don't really know the extent of just how unbelievably productive, busy, stressed, in a rush, and important you really are? For these, reasons, each weekend we will provide you with a tip on how to act productive.
Walking fast is slowly becoming a lost art form (except maybe in certain parts of New England). As our level of affluence grows to a point where we can spend time at work reading about how to work more efficiently on the internet from other people that are writing about it instead of actually working, we find that simple things like walking from point A to point B have really lost their sense of urgency. Today you observe people leisurely taking strolls at work instead of really going somewhere with a sense of purpose. Document printed? Okay, I'll stroll over to the printer, maybe grab some coffee on the way, chat with Jon about the game, take a nap, who knows. So with their hands in their pockets thumbing through loose change, their heads down watching their feet drag, and a soft tune whistling from their lips, they walk around, listlessly, from printer to coffee machine, from Jon to Jan, from unproductive to really unproductive.
This is most people, but not all people. In every organization you have a few, the really productive ones, that walk fast. These people are getting things done. Period. How could they not be? Look at how fast they're walking. These people are at the printer before the document has finished printing. They're heads are up. They're going somewhere. Often a slight frown or scowl is on their face as they walk that reminds everyone they're in deep thought, troubled by the enormous quantity of problems they solve every day.
They have no patience for waiting. If the microwave is full at noon, they can often be seen looking around to see what slow feet-dragger is using it and intends on wasting their time by showing up a minute after their food is done. Often they will return at 12:30 when the lunch crowd has subsided. Or, if they are really hungry, or more likely have a meeting in 10 minutes, they will keep their hand on the door-open button for the last 3 to 5 seconds and immediately open the door, take out slow-person food, and start heating theirs.
God forbid there be slow-walkers in front of them when they're in a tight hallway or corridor. Fast-walkers don't have time for "excuse me". Maybe, just maybe, they have time for a grunt, heavy breath, or other humanly sound that let's the other people know there is a fast walker around...but not for long. Before the feet-draggers know what happened, they are gone. That is fast-walking. That is productivity.
So this coming week, try to keep your head up, put a slight scowl on your face, and walk fast. Don't hide your inner productivity. Display it. Your boss will love you for it.
Guess what my answer is to the title question. Guess, I dare you.
You got it:
@No.
Is it a sin in the GTD community to speak ill of contexts? Maybe. Will I ask for forgiveness? No. Below are my reasons.
First, a caveat: if you are a businesswoman or man that on any given day is at a desk, your computer without internet, your computer with internet, a plane, running errands, on the phone, or in Denver, Colorado looking for that one restaurant you liked the last time you were in Denver, Colorado; if you actually have 14 people you need to call right now; if you really have 107 projects on your plate that all have their associated next actions; if you have a bunch of pressing agenda items you need to bring up immediately upon seeing each of 7 different people, then, read no further, this post and basically anything else I will ever write on this blog is and will be of no use to you. Go get things done. And add "Buy Maalox" to @errands.
Now for grad students and the like that are still reading. Here are my reasons:
Reason #1: You're not even close to the person described in the caveat. If you're a student that's not simultaneously running 3 businesses, and raising 2 kids, and constantly on the road, forget it. Let's go context by context through some classics. I promise I will admit when there are potentially useful contexts:
@computer: When are you not at your computer nowadays? Or how many times have you been in a context where you're really pressed to get things done but don't have your computer, and really can't stand looking through all those tasks that involve a computer? I seriously can think of zero situations like this. If you can, and I'm not being facetious, let me know. But I think it's safe to say that when grad students (or anyone reading this blog) are working they have a computer next to them or are in a very clear context where it's obvious what they need to do (e.g. lab doing a measurement, library doing homework, etc.)
@computer-internet/nointernet: Are you really on a plane this much? Please. Anywhere other than a plane and you have internet. If you don't, and you need it, you may want to switch schools/jobs.
@phone: Don't even start. I haven't met one student that needs this list.
@agenda-Dr. Phil: Compared to the three above, this has slightly more use, but I still don't think it's necessary nor practical. I used to keep this list in my "central" location for all my lists for my when I saw my adviser next and I never used it. Chances are, there are fewer than 2 or 3 people in your life whose time is so valuable that you need to make a list like this for when you're with them. But more importantly, important things to bring up with people, like research collaborators in a meeting can be made impromptu in preparation for a meeting, stored as general questions in a lab notebook, or listed in a questions slide at the end of a summery-of-current-progress PowerPoint. I found research related questions for my adviser were most conveniently written into the PowerPoint slides I was showing him, or my lab notebook for that project, but not in some list management software or device. Next to my grocery list and personal next actions.
@home: This is a potentially useful context, but I think it's a disguised way of just separating your lists into work and personal. If you do that already you have no use for this context.
@email: This is useful under one and only one circumstance: if you've become so disciplined as to check your email only a few scheduled times a day, then by all means make a list of the email you need to make when it's scheduled email time. But if you have Gmail open all the time and you're still writing @email in front of tasks, an alarm should be going off inside.
@errands: This is by far the most useful context, but, let's be honest, this list has nothing to do with GTD or David Allen, it's a shopping list for crying out loud! It's been around for so long, everyone uses it, and if it makes you feel more productive to put an @ in front, so be it. I'll admit it, I still call this list @errands out of habit.
Do I advocate keeping all next actions on a single list? No. I think it makes total intuitive sense to list things by project. But if you have only a few tasks anyways, by all means, put them on a single list. I probably could but don't choose to because I think in terms of projects and sit down to work on one project at a time. And if I recall correctly, David Allen even mentions in the book that if you have 20-30 next actions total, you can feel free to keep them on one list.
So what do we have left? A list of important tasks for each project, perhaps separated into work and personal, and a shopping list.
End of list of reasons.
I want to close by saying that I'm not just trying to start a fight. I have sincerely found that these contexts are simply unrealistically complicated for grad students, and to tell you frankly, for most people whose main jobs and main sources of stress involve work done in an office or any other single setting.
GTD's most important principle is keeping your mind clear. If I forget to tell Nate that he still owes me 5 bucks the next time I see him, I don't stress and it doesn't stay on my mind. If I forget to buy butter when I'm at the grocery store, I don't stress and it doesn't stay on my mind. But the large project that involves simply sitting down, closing Gmail and Facebook, and getting it done, will stress me out and will stay on my mind if I spend the day ticking off all kinds of less important tasks on my list. That task should be on your list, and as I've said before, I advocate it being only one of very few other items on your list for a given day. Forget labeling tasks by context and focus on getting that big monster task done and you're on your way to real stress-free productivity.
Photoby: Soctech
