The Best of How I Work

This blog now has over a hundred entries, and there won't be too many more. It's basically served the purpose I hoped it would, which is to capture the working processes I was customizing for myself, mostly derived from David Allen's Getting Things Done but also a few other sources (and also to serve as a kind of release valve so I didn't bore people with this stuff in conversation) The problems in my life that this level of tactic can solve are pretty much solved. Which I'm delighted about; it's a happy reason to be wrapping this up! So right here is the place to put links to the good stuff for anyone who might stumble upon this blog. I've broken them into two categories:

The essentials of my personal system, things I've figured out that I make use of almost every single day:

PROJECTS AND TO-DO

The Project List: How to Be Like the Memento Guy

Making a Super-effective To Do list

The Weekly Review

The Zillion Folder Filing System

5 Things To Do When Starting a New Project

"I Have Decided"

The Ropebridge Method for writing projects

CITATION MANAGEMENT

My Citation Management System: The Basics

My Citation Management System: Read

My Citation Management System: To Read Someday/Maybe

EMAIL

Mastering Your Email

Mastering My Email REVISED

EVERY OTHER PART OF LIFE

The Minimum You Need to Know about Negotiation

Cleaning Cycles, or, Filth Wizard No More

My Photo System: Archive and Souvenirs

Another (Probably Better) Approach to Backup

Souvenir Folders, Pouches of the Past

Saturdays Are Off

The Joy of Outboxes

How Much Money Do I Have? The Concept of Discretionary Income

Breaking Bad Web Habits with Privoxy

Anti-procrastination: "(10+2)*5"

And then some posts I'm just proud of and that I think are useful (or at least interesting):

Achieving Your Goals the Lee Marvin Way

How To Run A Brainstormer

Computer Dollars: Why to always Upgrade instead of Buying New

How to Sell Yourself in a Letter

Never Wait

How to Memorize a Poem

How to Ask for, and Listen to, Feedback

How to Conduct a Super-search

Magpieing: How my collectors work

Can you call on doozer power?

Fiery Inspiration from Teddy Roosevelt

I Heart My Draft

Sleep On It

I've discovered something about myself that is very simple but very
powerful: problems get easier when I sleep on them. If I'm feeling
hopelessly stuck on something, I won't necessarily feel like that when I
sit down to work tomorrow, and must remember that and not despair. I think
this because of what creativity researchers refer to as incubation - the
thinking that happens when you're not working hard at it, while you're
walking around, taking a shower, doing your morning routine, etc. Also it
could be related to how my brain rehearses things during REM sleep - I'm
certainly better at presentations if I've had a sleep after memorizing it
and rehearsing it.

However it works, good reason to start as early as possible so as to allow
a good number of sleeps as I bang away on a problem. What's important is
to keep focus on just one major problem at a time, over a few days, and to
put in the work to get really and truly stuck on it - stuck hard. Only
then will this process get to work. Next, go to bed.

10 online apps for scheduling a meeting online

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/09/the-top-ten-apps-for-scheduling-a-meeting-online.php

I've tried Doodle at least, and it worked pretty well!

Achieving Your Goals the Lee Marvin Way

At the library the other day I randomly picked up the book Get Up: A
12-Step Guide to Recovery for Misfits, Freaks and Weirdos by Bucky
Sinister. Though I've never had a drug or alcohol addiction, it turns out
to have lots of wisdom about living in general, told in entertaining, no
bullshit style. I especially liked his discussion of setting goals and
pursuing them, using the movie Point Blank as illustration:

"In this film, Lee Marvin is after $93,000 that was his share of some
unspecified heist. What stood out for me was his use of a step method to
get his money back. He calmly yet violently moved from one step to the
next in the quest to retrieve the money owed him.

We have two main lessons to learn from this: Be specific in your
goal-making, and be ardent with each step. Marvin doesn't look to get any
more than a specific amount. He's not interested in getting $100,000, he
wants what's coming to him. His resolve goes no further than what he needs
to do for that part of his journey."

Bucky Sinister goes on to talk about how asking "What would Lee Marvin
do?" helped him get through the horrible process of getting back into
school as a 35 year old 4th year dropout, and eventually getting work that
would earn him $40,000 a year. He resolved to do something on this quest
every day, whether it be a short phone call, or filling out a form. No
matter how complicated and intimidating the subgoal, he tackled it step by
step. After all, Lee Marvin started his quest with "nothing but one
address of one person who was slightly involved in the old caper. He went
from there, step by step, to figure out what he needed to do."

Clearly the really hard part is setting the right kind of goals, molding
them out of the amorphous blob of wants and fears for the future that are
always floating around inside my head. This is something I struggle with a
lot. Some of the subtle things I think make the Bucky Sinister type of
goal different than some of my past attempts:

-the specificty, to the level of what kind of car you want, what *colour*
it will be, the exact amount of money you want. That way when you achieve
it, you *know*. The specifics can be adjusted over time, but there's
motivational value in making yourself *see* what a goal will look like, in
great detail, when it is finished, *feel* what it will feel like. Some of
the decisions in visualizing it are arbitrary of course, but I think
there's power in making those decisions.

- There shouldn't be too many at a time. Even three might be too many.

- Each big goal has a smaller goal in front of it, blocking it from view
and from my mind, that I can start on *right now*, and that when done
will get me closer. Something that shouldn't take more than a few weeks.

- Sometimes thinking really big, like decades-long. Bucky talks about deciding that 10 books is a good lifetime's work for a writer like him, and getting started on the first one. Get Up was the second.

- At the same time, not setting deadlines for them (except, of course, death). Deadlines can be discouraging to me, at least if I take them too seriously (here we're talking about projects that don't have actual deadlines). If you keep going after each small goal steadily, a little bit every day or week, the rate doesn't matter that much.

- Still it's good to have automatic, indisputible metrics of your progress. For instance Mr. Sinister can count how many books he's written. A friend set up an automatic script to update the number of words in his thesis file on the front page of his website every day. Making every smaller goal have a very specific end state, so that you're very clear when it's done (and can celebrate!) is a big part of that.

There's more great stuff in here, for instance about using your inner
hustle monkey for good and how you need to nurture all four aspects of
your personality symbolized by members of the A-Team (this is not your
everyday self-help book) but I'll stop for now.

Huh, almost convinced myself watching point blank is my most important
next step...

The Cult of Done

I printed this poster out and put it on my wall:

I love the spirit of this because of its emphasis on *finishing* projects
so that you can move on to the next. I don't really understand #1 or #11,
but I like all the others, even the ones I semi disagree with.

In text format:

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing
what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if
you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea
done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things
done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you
right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a
ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

How to Nap

I've discovered naps! (when I told this to a female friend she rolled her
eyes and said, "every man I know says that at some point. What is it with
men and napping?") When my head is drooping down to the keyboard, instead
of forcing myself to go on I have a nap on our great lab minicouch,
and leap up 20 minutes later as my watch alarm goes off, totally
refreshed.
It's all thanks to these tips my man Jim sent, source
http://longevity.about.com/od/sleep/a/napping_tips.htm

* Nap Time: Prime nap time is from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., when your
energy level dips due to a rise in the hormone melatonin at that time of
day.
* Darkness: Use a face mask or eye pillow to provide daytime darkness and
make your nap more effective.
* Not Too Late: Napping within three hours of bedtime may interfere with
nighttime sleep.
* Quiet Place: Assure that you will not be disturbed for the duration
of your nap.
* 30-Minute Maximum: When taking a nap longer than 30 minutes, you run the
risk of heading into deep sleep, which will leave you feeling tired and
groggy. Naps as short as 1 to 2 minutes could be effective for some
people.
* Set an Alarm: You will eventually train yourself to nap for the
amount of time you set aside. Until then, set an alarm or ask someone to
wake you up.
* The Caffeine Nap: Some people claim that drinking coffee and then taking
an immediate nap works well. The caffeine kicks in somewhere between 10
and 20 minutes, waking them up. They feel extra energy from both the nap
and the coffee. Researchers in Japan found that subjects using a caffeine
nap rated highest in decreased sleepiness and increased productivity when
compared to subjects taking a nap and washing their face, or taking a nap
and being exposed to bright lights.

One more thing I like about naps: as my conscious mind releases, I often
have bizarre, dream-like thoughts, which I love - it's a surreal break in
the middle of a mundane day, like an episode of The Office had a few
minutes of Yellow Submarine spliced into it.

Mastering My Email REVISED

Since I wrote the post about Mastering Your Email, I've made a significant
change to my system. It's to do with that problematic email folder
Deferred, where I would put things that I couldn't deal with in a few
minutes. It kept getting bigger, and causing more subliminal anxiety.

I've eliminated that folder, in favour of *actually* dealing with every
item in my inbox as I process it. If it really is going to take more
effort, I add a to-do item for it. Which means I have to have my palm
pilot every time I process my email, which is a good thing. Sometimes the
email itself contains stuff that I will need for the to-do item, but not
afterwards (I would have no reason to file it away for reference). For
that I've created a folder called TS, for temporary support. (I also now
use this instead of Deferred for my harddrive system and physical paper
system)

This has been a big improvement, because it now means that only my todo
lists have to be tamed and managed, and not the contents of Deferred as
well. It also means I decide what actual action needs to be taken as soon
as I encounter the email.

Making a Super-effective To Do list

One of the things that absolutely sold me on my Palm pilot (vs paper
solutions) was the way it keeps todo lists, with things disappearing off
the list with a satisfying strikethrough. It makes it possible to keep
ongoing todo lists, that you never lose and just continually update. So
that's the first thing, but here are some other helpful practices I've
figured out over the years to make it work.

First, to have multiple todo lists, organized by location/ability to carry
them out. The idea being you can look at the list and see only things you
can take action on right here and now. So, using task categories, I have
one for home and one for office, and one for internet, that is, things I
can do anywhere I have a net connection (so also home or office). Then I
have one for Call - you wouldn't believe how effective it is to go down a
list calling all the numbers on there one after the other, like when
you're walking someplace, especially if you store the number as part of
the todo. Others are Downtown, Groceries, Library, and Anywhere, which is
great for those things that I just need to brainstorm or figure out with a
pen and paper, for instance during a boring lecture.

I also just last week figured out a really good way to use the priority
system that Palm has built in. Basically I divide todo items by urgency
and importance. It goes

1: Needs to be done today or tomorrow. Really urgent!
2: Should be done within the next few days, somewhat time sensitive.
3: Important to my work or to the smooth running of my life, should get
done within a week or two
4: Not important to get done, but fun or interesting, or may pay off way
down the line. Like a website someone sent me to check out.

Especially having that 1 category has helped with not doing the thing that
causes anxiety, which is storing important tasks in your head. I come into
the office and check my Palm first thing to see if there are any 1 items
that I have to tackle the second I sit down.

I haven't found a use for the due date feature - it doesn't really apply
to the way I think about todo items.

Finally, the most important thing to keep them working and not gummed up
is to frequently review all the todo lists, checking off things you've
done and things you no longer intend to do, and trying to do something
with the items that just stay on the list forever. They might need
to be changed into simpler, more concrete tasks, or - and this happens to
me a lot - it's not really a todo item, in the sense of a concrete,
physical task, but rather a project, that will take multiple steps, and
should go on the project list instead.

The Joy of C Projects

One of the great things about a project list is that it lets you keep a
hold of little, less important projects (C priority on the ABC priority
system), and be just as persistent (if you want) about those as about the
big ones. Without ever putting these front and center and using up my
attention or high quality thinking time, just by doing one little next
action after another - pick up this thing at the store, take this thing to
the office, write this person an email, brainstorm about this - all of a
sudden I find it's done, even if it took *many* of those steps. This gives
me a neat little sense of efficacy, frees up a slot for a new
always-wanted-to project, and can have unexpected and nifty consequences.
Here are a few examples of things I've made happen, seemingly without
trying, and t hese are just the nonacademic ones:

* Found some awesome podcasts
* Built two new shelves to repair a bookshelf
* Learned tree identification at the local arboretum
* Bought a nice overcoat
* Developed a routine for cleaning my apartment
* Organized a bowling night and a Vincent Price film marathon
* Made a present for a clinical psychology PhD friend that was two stamps,
one that said SANE and one that said INSANE
* Started a garden
* Memorized all 10 verses of Desolation Row

Many of these may sound trivial, but they brought me pleasure and really
required very little extra time or attentino, basically just extra clock
cycles I wasn't using anyway. (it's amazing how often something will just
show up that will suddenly help you with one of the projects that have
been on the list for a while) And committing to projects and finishing
them can lead to many great consequences, even if at times you don't
really know why you're doing them (besides "it's on the list" - again like
the memento guy) For instance making the bookshelves taught me about all
the resources that are available at home depot, which could be useful
later on. And there was a call for submissions at a community art center
for a show on the theme of bob dylan, and having memorized and thought a
lot about Desolation Row I put together a performance about it which went
over really well. Which just goes to confirm my belief, which is also the
theme of a favourite book Son of Interflux by Gordon Korman, that the most
satisfying and fruitful way to spend leisure time and money is not on
simply amusing yourself, but on projects - especially ones that enlist the
help of other people.

The Project List: How to Be Like the Memento Guy

At the heart of my life as a productive person is my list of projects. I
define what goes on the list pretty strictly, after David Allen's Getting
Things Done: a project is any kind of change in the world that I want to
make happen, that takes more than one simple step, and the list are the
projects that I am currently *committed* to making steady progress on. So
I draw a line between those active projects and ones that I might want to
do somewhere down the line - which go in a list called Someday/Maybe.
Those ones I don't have to worry about at all, unless I want to move it
over to the project list. In my conception projects should take between 20
minutes and 3 months to finish, and between 3 steps and like 200.

I store projects as memos in a special category on my palm pilot. I like
this because each memo can then hold my thoughts or info about the project
(project support), like if I do a little web research I can paste it in.
Most importantly is when deciding on what the next action is for a
project, I put that in there (as well as on a todo list) One of the
biggest mistakes people make with a todo list is to put things on there
that are really projects: that require not one physical, easily defined
action, but a complicated chain of actions, or a series of tricky
decisions.

My friend in psychology has designed a scale to test people on how
persistent they are and how much they resist giving up, and the amazing
thing to me watching my own behaviour is how using a project list has
drastically increased my persistence, such that I would probably score
higher on her scale now. I can avoid a project for a while, but unless I
take it off the list it's going to be there staring me in the face - it's
not going to be swept under the rug. It's like being the guy in Memento -
rather than keeping all the projects in your head at once, which is
stress-inducing, you can count on those words (like the tattoos) to prompt
you about what you could be/should be working on. I have about 40 projects
that are currently active (though only a handful of "A" projects, see the
ABC prioritizing system) - there's no way I could keep those in my head.
Like the Memento guy it makes me feel relentless and driven: I *will* keep
calling until I reach someone who can fix the problem; I *will* keep
thinking about this issue until I make a breakthrough. No more pushing it
to the back of my mind and hoping the issue will go away (which in the
case of positive opportunities, it is certain to do). Well less anyway.

For a project list to stay useful it has to be constantly pruned and
updated so that it continues to match that definition. I make myself do
that at least once a week, during the weekly review. There's a few tools I
use to make sure things on the list still match that definition. For
instance if I notice I havent moved on a project for a long time, that
might be a sign that I should simplify it - making it more immediate and
concrete - or break it into smaller projects. Or maybe I can't make
progress on it now, in which case it goes on the Projects - Suspended
list, and I put something before it that says when it's on ice til ("Til
April", "Til x gets back to me"). Or maybe I realize I just don't want to
commit to it now, in which case it goes to Someday/Maybe. Finished or no
longer relevant projects get taken off the list.

I now think of tons of things as a project, from revising a paper to
furnishing my apartment to teachinig myself a statistic to deciding where
to go for salsa lessons. It's an enormous help for planning my time, seems
to genuinely make me more effective, and also gives me a great feeling of
satisfaction when I can finish one off.

See also 5 things to do when starting a project

Mastering Your Email

The ideas in this post are from a combination of David Allen's Getting
Things Done,
http://www.43folders.com/izero
and my own trial and error. One caveat is that I usually never get more
than 100 messages a day; more strategies are probably necessary if you do.

Email is a great place to start trying to amp up your organization, and in
particular to start training yourself to use an inbox. The most important
thing about email is not the program you use or the way your folders are
organized, but your daily processes of dealing with mail.

My inbox is always empty or nearly empty, and that's because of a shift in
mindset I made at one point, between thinking of it as "dealing" with
email and "processing" email. With "dealing with it" my inbox grew into a
huge, anxiety-provoking heap. Now when I check my inbox (way too often), I
zoom through all the new messages one by one - the image I think of is a
ninja, deflecting throwing stars as they come at him - until it's empty
again. How to achieve that is what the rest of this entry is about.

The most important principle is the 10 second rule: if it can be dealt
with in 10 seconds or less, do it, and if it can't, then move it somewhere
else - be *disciplined* about processing your inbox from top to bottom
without stopping to engage with a message. So that means making a snap
judgment about every email as you go through it: delete it, fire off a
quick reply, file it for reference, or put it someplace for more thought:
the Deferred folder, about which more later. The big thing is to take as
much quick action as possible the first time you read it, so you never
have to look at it again. I think of it as sucking all the juice out of
each email, and putting it in other parts of your organizational system.
Don't use your email as a reminder system; use your reminder
system as your reminder system. You should try to have all these
things instantly accessible while processing email, and use them:
- Calendar/day planner for setting up appointments and checking when you
can make appointments for
- A place to record things you might or might not want to go to (i.e. Maybe events)
- Contact list, if someone sends you their phone number etc
- To do lists
- Project list
- Someday/maybe lists, for book or movie recommendations etc
- Inbox folder on your harddrive to download attachments to, to be filed
later (like in your weekly review)

As you can see, emptying your inbox goes best when you've got all the
other aspects of your system working well (especially the calendar and
todo lists) But if you're still getting that under control I think this
approac of emptying the inbox will help regardless.

So now most of the emails that require you to take some action have been
dealt with. Some you can delete now, others you may want to refer back to
in the future: you are keeping them for reference. For that I use Zillion
folder filing, which has as its principle that you should never worry
about creating a new folder on the spot to handle even a single item, as
long as they are organized alphabetically. It took me a little while to
get happy with the way I used these folders; at first I filed by project
or topic, like for instance pigeonresearch. But that was a lot of work,
and there were problems like if an email was about two different topics
(there may be a solution for this in google mail technology, tagging or
some such).

Instead now my folders mostly represent groups of people: one for
correspondence relating to each class that I'm in and each that I TA, one
for toastmasters, one for administrivia from the department etc. There's a
few other folders for special purposes, like one called eventinfo which
has details about events (more than will fit into a calendar entry), and
one called spam for particularly entertaining spams. Basically it's
grouping by why I am keeping it (I don't organize by date or sender name,
because that's pretty easy to search or sort by). Of course many emails I
want to keep purely for sentimental reasons, and those go into a folder
called personal. Over time, personal has become the folder where I throw
anything that doesn't fit neatly into one of the others, and that seems to
work ok. Personal is the only folder I put a lot of effort into backing
up.

All in all there's 100 folders, which is definitely manageable both in
Pine and web-based email. Within-folder searches have saved my butt many a
time.

Now there's the last part of my system, the one that still inspires a
small amount of dread - though minor compared to how much my enormous
inbox used to. And that's the Deferred folder, where I chuck email I can't
deal with in less than 10 seconds. Only after my inbox is empty do I go
back and look into these. I try not to let it hijack my day, especially if
it's just writing a reply to a fun note (this is why you will sometimes
hear back a few days or a week or a month from sending something - but
hopefully you will always hear back). Yeah this is the hairy one, and I
have to make sure that despite some psychological resistance I open it up
on a regular basis (at *least* once a week) and see what's there, see what
I can make progress on, and make sure nothing that has a deadline
approaching. I think in an ideal theoretical system, there would be no
need for a Deferred folder but a todo list would replace most of the need
for it. But in practice thats just too cumbersome for me. I can say that
*eventually* everything is dealt with; it does turn over, and almost none
go back more than 2 months, plus its never more than 25 items - and that's
including friends' funny youtube links, and journal article alerts. As a
rule of thumb it shouldn't be more than one page.

So the 10 second rule, not using email as a reminder, zillion folder
filing, the personal and Deferred folders. With all these tricks and
techniques, I now feel like I have my email well in hand, which is
especially important when the student questions or participant
signups start flying.

Computer Dollars: Why to Upgrade instead of Buying New

Oh man did I come close to buying that computer. Three days in a row I
visited the apple store website, and click through all but the final
screen to purchase it - just doing research on what the whole package
would cost, I told myself. There's a certain kind of consumer lust that
apple fanatics are a particular victim of, but I think everybody with a
computer has felt this, how great it would be to start afresh with the
instant gratification of a shiny new, fast system.

My friend snapped me out of it. He pointed out $2000 is a large amount of
money, for something I probably didn't need that much. In fact if I put a
small fraction of that money towards upgrades, I could be very happy with
my 6-year-old computer which I use for modest purposes (such as blogging).
With computers especially, waiting to buy a new one is almost always
better. *Always* better? I protested. But then when would you ever buy a
new one? Well eventually, but it's important to know just how much a
new computer dollar spent now will cost you; or alternatively, how much
money you can make by holding off on buying a computer for another year.

I looked at laptops at the $1299 US price point, one which apple is fond
of and which my modest dream computer (before the bells and whistles) was
at. I compared it to the specs on the mac laptop selling for the same
price that was available 2 years earlier, to see how much more bang for
your buck you get. (note that apple has fairly messed up pricing, partly
because of exploiting aforementioned consumer lust, so the exact values
will be quite different for PCs, but I'll bet the story by and large the
same) These are both 13" intel core 2 duo MacBooks. In two years the same
money buys you twice as much hard drive space (from 80 gigs to 160) and
twice as much RAM (1 gig to 2). The clockspeed has not increased, but the
Speedmark 4.5 overall benchmark (courtesy MacWorld magazine) has gone from
185 to 195, a 10% increase assuming a ratio scale (actually I thought it
would be more - it seems after going to Intel and adding a second
processor dramatic speed gains are harder to come by - but who knows when
the next big jump will be?) Finally, it's gotten lighter, from 5.2 lbs to
4.5, a 13% decrease, and with a nifty aluminum unibody construction.

So the same amount of money buys dramatically more built-in goodness. But
it came home to me when I looked at it a different way: If, in January
2007, I had shelled out the money for a computer as good as the $1299 two
years later, how much would it have cost me? A roughly comparable computer
of the time, according to the speed tests and the ram and hard drive, was
the 15" MacBook pro with 2.33 gigahertz. This computer cost $2499, $1200
more than the 13" 2 gig model. You could say some of that goes to the
larger size of screen, but on the other hand it had a 40 gig smaller hard
drive than the $1299 2009 macbook, and it was also more than 20% heavier.
Let's knock off $300. By holding out for 2 years, its like you've earned
$900-worth of computer. Take $250 worth of upgrades it might take to keep
you content with your old computer over that period, it's still like
earning $650 on $1300 that you put aside. A 50% return over 2 years,
which is like a compounded yearly interest of 22%. I don't know anything
about investment, but that seems good. (note that another thing you
might draw from this is that it might make sense when buying a new mac to
get a low-end model, and then soup it up with 3rd party components)

There's lots of other issues I'm ignoring, like resale value (I have never
sold promptly enough for the resale value to be worth anything) and the
math will be totally different for the PC world possibly leading to
different conclusions, but this exercise has led me to think it's *always*
worth souping up your computer before buying a new one - and for PCs,
where you can actually replace the CPU, maybe it virtually *never* makes
sense to buy an all-new computer.

Alert Me to Anything New in My Area

This is a followup to the previous post about hearing about new scientific
articles in your area as they appear through an RSS feed or email alerts.
What gives me even more of a thrilling feeling of omniscience than alerts
for new issues of journals in my field, is a feature in ScienceDirect
called Search Alerts. If you create an alert for a text string signifying
your sub-specialities, any time *anyone* publishes an article on them in
any of the 2500 journals on sciencedirect, you will get an email. It's
like being a bigtime crime boss with ears and eyes everywhere.

Trollope on the Daily Task

I was looking up that great "spasmodic hercules" quotation, and found this
wonderful passage around it, in Anthony Trollope's autobiography. It
describes how he wrote a bunch of novels despite having a more than
fulltime job as postmaster general. Because I am fascinated with details
of how any successful creative person works, and love this passage for how
it confirms that a good system will cleverly take into account your
emotions, I reproduce a huge chunk of it, at the cost of the pithiness
that should be the virtue of the blogger over other writers:

--

There was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the
publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office. I was
free to be idle if I pleased. But as I had made up my mind to undertake
this second profession, I found it to be expedient to bind myself by
certain self-imposed laws. When I have commenced a new book, I have
always prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried it on for the
period which I have allowed myself for the completion of the work. In
this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so
that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the
record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and
demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be
supplied. According to the circumstances of the time,--whether my other
business might be then heavy or light, or whether the book which I was
writing was or was not wanted with speed,--I have allotted myself so many
pages a week. The average number has been about 40. It has been placed as
low as 20, and has risen to 112. And as a page is an ambiguous term, my
page has been made to contain 250 words; and as words, if not watched,
will have a tendency to straggle, I have had every word counted as I
went. In the bargains I have made with publishers I have,--not, of
course, with their knowledge, but in my own mind,--undertaken always to
supply them with so many words, and I have never put a book out of hand
short of the number by a single word. I may also say that the excess has
been very small. I have prided myself on completing my work exactly
within the proposed dimensions. But I have prided myself especially in
completing it within the proposed time,--and I have always done so. There
has ever been the record before me, and a week passed with an
insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so
disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.

I have been told that such appliances are beneath the notice of a man of
genius. I have never fancied myself to be a man of genius, but had I been
so I think I might well have subjected myself to these trammels. Nothing
surely is so potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force
of the water drop that hollows the stone. A small daily task, If it be
really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. It is the
tortoise which always catches the hare. The hare has no chance. He loses
more time in glorifying himself for a quick spurt than suffices for the
tortoise to make half his journey.

I have known authors whose lives have always been troublesome and painful
because their tasks have never been done in time. They have ever been as
boys struggling to learn their lessons as they entered the school gates.
Publishers have distrusted them, and they have failed to write their best
because they have seldom written at ease. I have done double their
work--though burdened with another profession,--and have done it almost
without an effort. I have not once, through all my literary career, felt
myself even in danger of being late with my task. I have known no anxiety
as to "copy." The needed pages far ahead--very far ahead--have almost
always been in the drawer beside me. And that little diary, with its dates
and ruled spaces, its record that must be seen, its daily, weekly demand
upon my industry, has done all that for me.

There are those who would be ashamed to subject themselves to such a
taskmaster, and who think that the man who works with his imagination
should allow himself to wait till--inspiration moves him. When I have
heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn.

Don't Break the Chain!

Jerry Seinfeld, at least in certain periods, wrote comedy in a disciplined
way every day. He allegedly uses this technique which I read about here:
http://lifehacker.com/software/motivation/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret-281626.php
Every day when he completed his writing quota he would cross off that day
on the calendar. If he felt like skipping it one day, he would tell
himself, "don't break the chain!" meaning don't make gaps in the sequence
of marks on the calendar, and keep growing those chains as much as
possible.

So far I'm just repeating another blog, but what got me excited about this
technique when I read it is that it is something I've been looking for for
a while, a perfectly balanced motivator. Reward and punishment systems (at
least when self-administered) don't work for me, because I already feel
crappy when I let myself down and can't bear to actually exact the
punishment or deny the reward on top of it. The seinfeld technique
combines a very mild punishment and a very mild reward, which in fact are
just reminders of my own resolution to myself.

You don't need to buy a calendar for this; if you start a new document in
Word, there's an option to download templates off the web, and if you do
a search for "calendar" there are files with pages for the months of the
year that you can print off and put, along with a pen, in a place where
you can reach it from the place you'll be doing this thing.

Tonight I really didn't want to do my 1 hour nonrequired reading that I
have resolved to do every evening; but by repeating to myself, "don't
break the chain", and also something that Anthony Trollope apparently
said, "A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of
a spasmodic Hercules," I made it.

Using RSS to Stay Hyper-Current on the Literature

Another tip from Liz, who writes that it has "allowed me to be almost more
on top of the literature than my supervisor (in terms of finding articles,
anyway)" :

"Ok, so the first step is to turn on your RSS feed reader of choice (I use
google reader, because I check it obsessively for non-academic reasons).
Then, you can do a little bit of research and most journals that publish
online have feeds of the articles that come out as soon as they're
available online.

For example, Journal of Vision (which I believe is online-only) has a feed
link on their website. Vision Research I had to get through ScienceDirect.
I have four journals on my list (JOV, VR, IEEE: PAMI, and JOSA) and I get
2-4 new articles to check out per day. Usually this means skimming the
title and deciding I don't care/don't understand any of the words (I'm
looking at you, JOSA). However, I have found several gems and it's fun to
get them hot off the presses, so to speak. If the abstract (delivered to
my feed reader) is promising, I just download the pdf and enter into my
extremely efficient reference management system.

If you find some way to automate the reading part, let me know :P.

PRO TIP: If you don't already, use your feed reader to subscribe to
something fun like a comic (or five). That will keep you checking it on a
regular basis and comics won't derail you for long."

A good one! I experimented with using google reader for this for a while,
but I tend to use it exclusively for fun stuff - so I can avoid getting
into the habit of checking it during work time. Instead I have been using
email journal alerts, which also works really well, and there's one for
almost every journal (ScienceDirect can cover a few, and then others send
out their own). Whenever a new issue comes out I instantly get an email
with the table of contents, and like Liz I quickly scan it and only read
the abstract of a few, and then add even fewer to my Someday/Maybe reading
list. However at the moment I have a little backlog of those emails in my
Deferred folder (more about my email system in a future posting) so maybe
it's worth considering Liz's method, and interspersing the casual blog
entries with the science headlines.

By the way, if you read any blogs whatsoever regularly, google reader is a
must. It's one of those things that a friend said, "oh my god, you're not
using it?" and I was initially irritated and skeptical but then had to
admit he was right.

How to Sell Yourself in a Letter

This is something I have agonized a lot over in the past, so I was glad to
run across two pieces bearing on it in the last little while. They're both
inspired by looking through real letters that people sent, hoping to sell
themselves to the writer, so this is based on something.

Screenwriter Alex Epstein (Bon Cop, Bad Cop) wrote about emails he got
from people applying to be his intern:
http://complicationsensue.blogspot.com/2008/12/job-applications.html
"First, the most effective letters focused on how you can help me. I want
this to be a good fit for you, but my primary focus is on what qualifies
you to do the job well. What are your qualifications? What are your
skills?

Second, the best letters tended to be shorter. I know this is your shot at
the job, so you want to put it all in there. But a really well crafted,
well-thought out half page impresses more than a page with everything in
it. Anyone who's looking to hire you wants to know that you can
prioritize. What's the most important thing you have to say?

Third, the most effective letters were unapologetically positive. Never
diss your lack of experience or the quality of your work or talk about
your doubts. Almost any letter you write to a stranger is partially a
sales letter. Sell yourself to the person you're writing to. Why give me
reasons to doubt you?"

This second article is by some prominent screenwriters (behind Disney's
Aladdin among other things), about how to write a query letter, which is a
letter you send trying to entice people to read your script and turn it
into a movie.

http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp38.Breaking.the.Ice.html

They write about the many mistakes you can make when writing a query
letter, but I find it more efficient to start by looking at someone
who has best practices (that was the one piece of advice my brain managed
to retain from a personal talk by Jeff Bezos we got as amazon.com intern)
He writes about the subtext that's present in even a short query letter,
and how often letters have the wrong subtext.

"The subtext we most hope to find -- beyond that great film idea in the
text, of course -- is:

'Here I am. I'm serious. I'm capable. I'm talented. I know the
business, and I'm ready to do this job.' "

Then they give a real example of such a letter (that manages to be "warm,
easygoing, straightforward, professional, funny, present the image of a
person that we'd like to meet and work with, all while staying on topic,
and be short, yet compelling"). Some excerpts, with their comments in
square brackets:

"I have very much enjoyed reading your Follywood columns and would like to
take you up on your kind offer to help promote a great script."

[This is a good start. A clear declaration of intent. It's
been personalized a bit -- the writer has read the Wordplay articles from
back in the old days on America Online.]

After the plot description:

"This is not my first stab at writing. A previous screenplay -- OK but
not great -- is currently under option by The Kaufman Company, Citadel
Entertainment (HBO) and another screenplay was a finalist in the Writer's
Film Project run by the Chesterfield Film Company."

[A nice bit of humility here, with the 'OK but not great' line. Subtext:
"I'm a nice guy. I'm not a nutcase." That subtext needs to be there, and
he's found a good way to do it.]

"Sun Dogs is by far the best thing I have ever written. I would like to
get it made -- and made as well as possible."

[This is a nice way to show confidence. Not a claim that the script is the
best script in the world, just the best thing he's ever done.]

(Jane Espenson has similar counterintuitive advice on her blog at one
point: "I'm big believer in high expectations. Tell people that what
they're about to read/see/taste will be wonderful and they'll tend to
perceive what they expect to perceive. This is why, every time I turn in a
script I proudly announce it's the best thing I've ever written.")

And the ending:

"In this spirit, I am searching for an agent to represent it. Any help
you can give me would be very much appreciated."

[A nice send off -- he's just someone who has a great idea and wants some
help, any help, in bringing the idea to life...Overall, there's a
no-nonsense professional feel to this letter.]

Finally, he signs it with the informal "Cheers", though it has the proper
formal letter stuff at the top and bottom.

You can read the whole query letter here
http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp38-xtras/wp38x.Sun.Dogs.html

From these essays, I conclude that these things are important in a letter
selling yourself:

- Signs that you know who it is you're writing to and are selling yourself
on the basis of their self-interest
- Prose that is concise and polished
- Avoids phrases that read awkwardly stiff or formal
- Communicates a bit about where you're coming from and a select few of
your most impressive concrete credentials
- No negativity (unless it's important for showing you're not a nutcase)
- Besides that, a general air of realistic confidence, expressing
the sense that you really believe in what you are selling and expect
that others, if not them, will want to snap it up.
- Crisp and polite openings and closings, not lengthy or grovelling.

Never Wait

A condensed version of this article from a website about screenwriting,
and written by Terry Rossio (behind the scripts for movies such as Aladdin
and Pirates of the Carribbean).

http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp44.Never.Wait.html

You shouldn't wait.
Not for anything.
Ever.
Commit these two words to heart, now:
Never wait.
Not only is life short, windows of opportunity are shorter.
What can you do about it?
Never wait.
Not only is life short, it's actually getting shorter.
Never wait.
Successful people don't wait. They don't get stalled on one step, one
issue, one project. They continuously go about the problem of creating
value. They're not interested in struggling and waiting, they're focused
on doing.

Waiting less isn't about becoming more intense, or rushed; it's about
finding an optimum flow. Look at the sky. That thing up there is a
continuously changing spectacular work of art, and it just doesn't get
enough attention. You're not waiting when you stop to smell the roses.

Waiting -- the innocent little sucker is a tiny little bundle of death.

Please don't be one of those writers who 'hope.'

Fuck hope.

I don't ever want to be a hopeful, I want to be a professional.

To have a career is like running a series of marathons end to end. You
can't thrill or despair every few yards; another few minutes and the
entire landscape will change completely, anyway.
Don't live on hope.
Hoping is way too much like waiting -- and you know the rule on that.

How to Take the Mystique out of Published Writing

Here's a trick to inspire you in writing: take some piece of writing that
looks impressive, such as a Nature article, use the text select tool
(assuming it's a pdf) and copy it into a Word document. Format it Times
New Roman double-spaced, 12 point. Suddenly your own prose doesn't sound
so far away from what the published professionals are writing. And it's
a good way to start the work of dissecting and reverse engineering a style
of article published in a specific publication so you can get in there
yourself.

I first figured this out when I started writing articles for the arts
section of the student newspaper. I would email them in, and then I'd be
startled to see how authoritative they looked when beautifully set out in
Quark XPress and printed on newsprint. I remember shortly thereafter
reading a Globe and Mail arts article, I believe it was a review of Stuart
Little 2, and mentally transposing it back into an email from its neat 1
1/2 inch column. It was some badly written, weak-ass crap! I was greatly
encouraged.

The Minimum You Need to Know about Negotiation

I recently sold my old iPod shuffle online, and when I went to meet the
purchaser I was all set to show her the unit and discuss price, but she
met me with an outstretch hand containing the money. I was prepared to
negotiate, so I was surprised and thought this was a tactical error on her
part. But I think I understand.

Of course there are lots of reasons why she might not have wanted to get
into it. But one reason is that she might have thought like I used to
think about negotiation: that it is some kind of begging, or
favour-asking. Since I read this book, The Mind and Heart of the
Negotiator by Leigh L. Thompson - the book which may turn out at the end
of my life to have benefitted me in measurable, monetary terms more than
any other book - I now know that negotiation is just rightful exercise of
your real power. And that is the power to walk away. (if you absolutely
can't walk away, if you *have* to make a deal right then and there no
matter how bad it is for you, then it's not a negotiation, and all you've
got is begging or asking for a favour)

A negotiation actually benefits both partners, because a failed
negotiation means both people lose out. If she had held out for a lower
price money, I would have either had to go with it or walk all the way
back to my office with no more money and maybe wait another few months for
someone else to respond to my ad. Much better to have the money in hand.
So that's power that she had.

The major way to increase your power in a negotiation is with information,
in particular negotiation about alternatives to making this agreement.
Nowadays with the internet this is very easy. So I sold it to her for $35
- I did a quick search on apple store and found you can buy a brand new
second-gen iPod shuffle for $55 directly from them, under warranty,
shipping in 1-2 days. She could have pulled out that fact to explain why
she needed a lower price from me to make it worth her while. That's what I
did, successfully, when negotiating for my replacement to that iPod
Shuffle (though I was foiled, as I talk about later) Doing that kind of
research is called finding a Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement
(BATNA).

Also thinking about the other person's BATNA could help. She must have
noticed I'd been listing it for over 6 months. At this point my
alternatives were to keep it for myself as an inadequate backup in case my
nano ever broke, or giving it to a lower-tech friend for free as a
present. So I might have been willing to go down as low as $15. But it was
important that she not know that.

That value of $15 was what is known as my reservation price, the price
below which it makes sense for me to walk away. As you can see it comes
directly out of my BATNA. So these are the theoretical dynamics of
negotiation: Both parties have a reservation price, which is unknown to
the other. They go back and forth making offers until the price falls
within the zone between their reservation prices, at which point they make
a deal (if there is no zone like that, the deal fails). Both parties
benefit, no one is being exploited. The game consists of trying to pick a
price that is in that acceptable range, but as close to the other person's
reservation price as possible. That's why you should never reveal your
reservation price, the absolute most you're willing to pay for something
or least you're willing to give it away for. My buyer made that mistake
when she wrote in her email, "I can pay $35, I can't go any higher!!"
Assuming that really was her reservation price, I was happy to have it. So
figure out your own reservation price going into it, but don't reveal it.

Making offers and counteroffers is the only real move in a negotiation;
the rest should probably be ignored. For instance people may whine and
moan about how much they paid for the thing they are selling - that
doesn't matter unless they make a counteroffer. Also saying "that's my
final offer" should probably be taken lightly, just go ahead and make your
counter offer. Never make a concession, a second offer, until the other
person has responded to your most recent offer. The Thompson book says
that studies have concluded that the person who makes the first offer does
not have any consistent advantage - unless the other person makes the
mistake of using that as their primary information about how much it's
worth. I think that's what happened with my buyer: I just checked my
facebook listing, and it was for $50, which was even more optimistic than
I realized. She thought knocking off $15 was a good deal, whereas I
probably would have gone for knocking off $35 (though I wouldn't have been
happy about it). Go for the absolute price, not how much off (though of
course I make that mistake all the time at the supermarket)

Something you can do to increase your power in a negotiation is to improve
your Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement. Besides finding out more
information, you can also start discussions with other people about how
much they're willing to give you. That's why you sometimes hear about
actors lining up offers for movies they don't really intend to do, just to
get into a better negotiating position to demand more money for the movie
they really want to do.

Another way to help your negotiation, for both parties, is to throw in as
many extra issues as possible, especially ones that matter more to one
party than to the other. For instance, if she was having trouble making up
her mind about a particular price, I was prepared to bring out the iPod
protective cover I had and add it to the deal. It would be almost
worthless to me no longer owning the iPod, but potentially valuable to
her. So if she then went for it, we would both win. The book uses the
example of negotiating for a salary, throwing in as many things as you
can. For instance vacation time might be something that is not too costly
to the company, but very valuable to you. Be creative in brainstorm as
many extra dimensions to the deal as possible.

You're probably thinking about how there are ways you can be dishonest in
your negotiation, particularly with regard to your reservation price,
pretending it's lower or higher than it is and not accepting an offer in
that zone of acceptability. And this was my other big misconception about
negotiation, that it was all about trickery and outsmarting the other
person. Almost every single negotiation I've seen in a movie or on tv
falls into that category. But in practice almost all of the thousands of
negotiations that happen each day are in good faith. The book explicitly
cautions you against trying to be sneaky, saying that it very often
backfires and you should concentrate on properly exercising your real
power.

The number one thing Ilearned through trial and error after I read this
book and was fired up about negotiating was *never negotiate unless the
other person is in a position to make a binding agreement*. Not a verbal
agreement. In practice, that means either negotiating right at the point
of making the exchange, or where some kind of legally enforceable contract
can be authenticated. I learned this when I was negotiating for an iPod
nano via facebook messaging. The seller bitched and complained but agreed
to the price. Then I never heard back from him. This happened again when I
negotiated for a whiteboard for the lab over the phone with what turned
out to be the teenage daughter of the owner of the laundromat, who refused
to give it to me for that price when I turned up to claim it. Another
important lesson: never make the mistake of negotiating with someone who
doesn't have the decision-making power. All this doesn't mean you
shouldn't communicate with the person before you start the real
negotiation - in fact depending on how big a one it is, it's a great idea
to build rapport and learn as much about them as possible. The important
thing is to not make any concessions before the negotiation begins, and
try not reveal anything that could help them guess about your own
reservation price. Which can take many tricky forms, but in particular
avoid revealing: how bad you want it, time limitations, what your
alternatives consist of. (of couse all the better if you can find out that
information about them) Best to be opaque and general when the
conversation verges on the deal itself, though enthusiastic about the
prospect of the deal.

Since it is not at all inherently dishonest, I think it always makes sense
to try to negotiate, unless there's a strict rule against it. Especially
for things that you're inclined not to buy because they seem overpriced.
You can always say, honestly, it's not worth it for me at that price, but
I'll give you X dollars right now for it. Now I'm surprised when people
aren't willing to negotiate: did you really list as your first offer your
final offer? Don't you have any optimism that people might pay more than
the absolute minimum price you're willing to sell it for? (have you
noticed that in this country, explicit negotiation is mostly only part of the
daily lives of people on the very low end of the socioeconomic status scale, drug dealers and other underground economies, and the very high end, CEOs and movie stars and
government ministers? Could it be that disdain for negotiation,
considering it not respectable, is a uniquely middle class phenomenon?)

Of course there are going to be cases where for whatever reason you don't
negotiate as hard as you could, that is, you refrain from exercising all
the power you have. One last tip I heard which makes a lot of sense: if
you can possibly get someone else to negotiate on your behalf (i.e. an
agent), that's better. Even though you're perfectly within your rights,
you could imagine some lingering frustration from them over not getting
the price they first wanted, and I can see how that would be best directed
at someone else if you're going to keep working with that party.

Mark B. Kristal's Suggestions for a Basic Research Career

It's rare that I encounter advice that's pitched at exactly the right
level for where I'm at in my life/career. This is such advice, and struck
me as excellent.
http://www.psychology.buffalo.edu/essay.shtml

Here are the best bits that I took away from it, in case this is taken
down:

--

* Establish an independent line of research as early in your career as
possible. If you can, do so even as a graduate student. Avoid the graduate
student's trap of thinking up experiments in other researchers' programs
that the other researcher has missed. Of course these are useful studies,
but do not form the basis of one's own independent line of research.
* Be problem-oriented, not technique-oriented. Use a variety of
techniques,
methods, and orientations -- whichever are necessary to solve the problems
at hand. Remember, technology comes and goes, but the underlying
questions are the meat of research. It is depressing to go to poster
sessions at the big conferences year after year and see the same questions
being asked over and over with different, more .cutting edge. techniques,
presented by people enamored of the techniques rather than the research
problems. If technology is so costly, in terms of equipment, learning
time, and other resources, how does one avoid the trap of becoming
technique oriented? The answer: collaborate.
* Think beyond the next publication, or even the next grant proposal. Take
the long view; look at the big picture. In other words, bite off a piece
of question that may take a decade, or even a career to answer. There is a
major difference between the scientist that wonders how to break the
question into appropriate sized grant proposals, and one who wonders how
to expand the question into a grant proposal. Furthermore, commit yourself
to your question; given the time and energy it takes to answer an
appropriate sized research question, pursuing a series of unrelated
research questions in parallel rather than in series is often a sign of
dilettantism.
* If you do basic research, keep your eyes open for applications of your
findings.
* Don't expect answers; expect more questions. Daniel Lehrman used to tell
us that a good experiment will raise more questions than it answers.
Perhaps non-scientists find this aspect of science strangely frustrating.
However, the lack of a final solution distinguishes the scientist's quest
from the engineer's.
* Never stop asking questions.
* Choose a problem that excites you. It should excite you so much that you
can't sleep. It should excite you so much that when someone asks you the
time, you blurt out your research topic.
* Strive for elegance in research. The elegance of an experiment is in
the quality of the thinking and the cleverness of the approach to
answering the research question, not in the complexity of the design or
the sophistication of the methods. Often, the most elegant experiments are
simple, low-tech attacks at the heart of the problem. Study classic
research in your field and appreciate the logic and thought that went into
it. All too often students nowadays ignore older research because it isn't
available online, or dismiss it for using old-fashioned techniques. There
is much wisdom and cleverness in some of those old papers. Reading them,
learning from them, and citing them, is real scholarship.

Work Break Programs

I have trouble remembering to take breaks and adjust my posture etc while
I'm working on the computer. Fortunately there are lots of programs that
can help with that. I'm currently using a simple, free, unobtrusive one in
the office called Big Stretch:

http://www.download.com/Big-Stretch-Reminder-Program/3000-2129_4-10844515.html

but there are many, many options for PC, both commercial and not. As usual
the options are a little more limited for the mac, but I found a nice one
called Coffee Break Pro X, which is both easy to use and full of smart
features and customization options - for instance it can actually lock
down your screen for a period of time to force you to take a break.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16684

It costs $20 to buy it, but I found it to be worth it.

More Lessons from Barack Obama

A few quotes I found enlightening from a NY Times piece, "Barack Obama,
Forever Sizing Up":
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/weekinreview/26kantor.html?ref=politics&pagewanted=all

On how he's run meetings since he worked at the Harvard Review:
"Everyone contributes; silent lurkers will be interrogated. (He wants to
'suck the room of every idea,' said Valerie Jarrett, a close adviser.)
Mention a theory and Mr. Obama asks how it translates on the ground. He
orchestrates debate, playing participants off each other -- and then
highlights their areas of agreement. He constantly restates others'
contributions in his own invariably more eloquent words."
(it goes on to say he then goes away and decides, with the decision
sometimes a surprise to the people at the meeting)

On time to think:
"As a community organizer, he spent his evenings filling journals, trying
to sort out the day's confusion. During his seven years as a state
senator, he used the time driving between Springfield and Chicago for
contemplation; when staffers suggested that a candidate for the United
States Senate should have a driver, Mr. Obama resisted, saying the driver
might intrude. Hence Mr. Obama's fluster when he misses his daily gym
time. 'That's when he can get his mind straight,' said Jim Cauley, his
campaign manager in the United States Senate race."

On how he uses planning:
"Mr. Obama resists making quick judgments or responding to day-to-day
fluctuations, aides say. Instead he follows a familiar set of steps:
Perform copious research. Solicit expertise. (What delighted Mr. Obama
most about becoming a United States senator, he told an old boss, was his
access to top scholars: he was a kid in the Princeton and Stanford candy
shops.) Project all likely scenarios. Devise a plan. Anticipate
objections. Adjust the plan, and once it's in place, stick with it. In
part, this approach explains how Mr. Obama won in the primaries: he
exploited the electoral calendar and arcane differences in voting methods,
and while Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton continually tried out new
messages, Mr. Obama modified his only slightly, even when some supporters
urged more dramatic change."

Don't ask yourself "what's my passion?"

This is one of the most important posts I've ever read, and I may look
back some day to find it has changed my life. I'm excerpting it here so I
don't lose it.

http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/2008/10/why-it-might-no.html

----

I'm paraphrasing, but in part Dan Pink answered, "I never ask myself
'What's my passion?' That question is too huge. It's not helpful."

I think that's absolutely correct. One of my happiness-project resolutions
is to "Think big," but sometimes you can paralyze yourself by asking big,
unanswerable questions.

When someone asks me for career advice (and I've been known to volunteer
this advice, even unasked!), I say, "Do what you DO. What do you do
already, in your free time? Try to do that as your job." In my case,
although as a Supreme Court clerk I surely had one of the most fascinating
jobs for a lawyer, on the weekends, I was writing a book. This was a
helpful clue as to a profession I might enjoy. I have a friend who always
felt guilty in law school, because he was wasting so much time playing
video games; after graduation, he gave up a prestigious clerkship to work
for a - you guessed it - video game company.

A friend told me that she was going to try to get a job as an editor of a
women's magazine like Vogue. "Do you read those magazines?" I asked in
surprise. I'd never seen her read anything like that. "Nope," she said. I
didn't say anything, but I wondered - would she be good at helping to
create those magazines, if she never chose to spend her time reading them?

It can be hard to identify your "passion," but you can identify what you
did last Sunday afternoon. "Do what you do" is useful because it directs
you to look at your behavior, rather than to your ideas - which can be a
clearer guide to preferences. It's not possible for everyone, but to have
work that is play, and play that is work, is a very, very happy state.

How to Choose a Thesis Topic (according to Joan Bolker)

Author of "Writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day" (notice
that her opinion of the importance of topic choice contradicts the other
two authors):

* "Writing a dissertation is very much like being in a long-term
relationship: there are likely to be some very good times and some
perfectly dreadful ones, and it's a big help if you like what you've
chosen...If you choose your topic wholeheartedly, the writing process can
be a wonderful opportunity for pleasure"
* Choose a topic that's really going to matter to you: "follow your
curiosity, and, if you're lucky, your passion"
* Think and write about all the projects you've been involved with so
far, remember which were most fun. Do they have something in common?
"which sort of undertaking best suits how you like to work" Also what kind
of research you find most interesting to read.
* Find a model of a doable thesis for you
* Use advisor as a sounding board, especialyl about eventual job
search strategy in a topic
* One way to help choose a topic after you've done a fair bit of
groundwork: "Imagine finishing your dissertation and holding it in your
hand. Try naming it; play with titles that are clearly too outrageous, and
see which one most delights you." write them down
* Be writing every day all the way along, about ideas, what you've
read, problems, etc

How to Choose a Thesis Topic (according to David Steinberg)

From the author of ""How to complete and survive a doctoral dissertation".

* Excitement about the topic not that big of a factor in success,
since all dissertations run into similar sets of difficulties
* Essential questions:

Is it researchable?

* "One must be virtually certain that the data for the dissertation
will be available and accessible when the candidate comes around to the
collection phase of his project."

Especially timing is important, eg staff turnover rescinding access to a
population

Does it make a contribution to the field?

* "dissertation-as-too-little" or "dissertation-as-magnum-opus"
syndromes (magnus opus will come in 20 years)
* Just have to think & write about it, as well as talk to everyone

Is it original?

* What you should be looking for is daylight: after studying the
literature, and scope and ambition of other recent theses, "do I find a
hole, a gap, a missing link that my topic can contribute to plugging,
bridging or forging?"
* Again, talk to all faculty, like a travelling salesman
* Don't worry very much about being "scooped"
* Topics rarely come by chance for real: "topics almost always come
out of extensive soaking in the literature and prior research of one's
field, and are traceable consequences of that immersion"
* Expansion of a master's thesis from a dissertation not really an
easier option
* Never pick a topic with the assumption that a particular faculty
member is going to be there all the way through! It must stand on its own
* As much as possible, discuss dissertations that appeal to you with
their authors. They're almost always willing to share their time and
dissertation experience, esp within the first couple of years (often
noticeably more helpful than faculty)
* Be cautious of opportunities to use spin-off data - what if the
grant is cancelled or the faculty member leaves?

How to Choose a Thesis Topic (according to Robert L Peters)

It's that time now to return focus to my thesis. Hence it's helpful to get
a little perspective. Here's my notes from "Getting What You Came For: the
smart student's guide to earning a master's or phd"

---

* Don.t just worry about it, .ideas are generated by intellectual
cross-fertilization and the process of problem-solving. To find a topic
you must dive into research, discuss the ideas that interest you with as
many people as possible, and write about the subjects as much as you can..
* Start as soon as possible, you never know when a hint in a class etc
will come your way. Ask professors for suggestions, examine course
reading. Whenever you come across anything interesting ask yourself,
.could this be a dissertation?.
* PhD at least is original research which means to do at least one of:

1. uncover new facts or principles
2. suggest relationships that were previously unrecognized
3. challenge existing truths or assumptions
4. afford new insights into little-understood phenomena
5. suggest new interpretations of known facts that alter our view of
the world around us

* Think thesis question. A question intriguing enough to take a year
to answer. Begin with a major question, develop subordinate questions that
help you answer it, and plan and refine along the way research to answer
these questions.
* There are thousands upon thousands of thesis topics that will work
great for you, so it.s easy to find one if you search actively.
* Think of yourself as an apprentice - .At this stage, you aren.t a
great master who will find the secret of the universe. Originality does
not have to be spectacular, but can expand on existing research. People
hiring probably looking for dependable specialists who are well trained by
good mentors.
* If your advisor chooses the project, check it out by the criteria
below. But many advantages if you are working on the same overall endeavor
as your advisor

Don.t worry if nothing interest you

* .interest develops from immersion and activity. Luckily, people have
an amazing ability to become interested in almost anything once they are
working on it

Get perspective by reading theses and articles

* Use the best as models. Note aspects of. Go to other universities
theses.
* Start reading through journals in your field for possible topics

Phone research

* Speaking briefly to the top people in the area, asking to recommend
names. [Is this polite now? What is the best way to contact people in the
area?]

Start a research project

* best way to generate ideas is to be involved in an ongoing research
project

Use your professors

* Ask all of them

1. What are the hot areas in the firld?
2. What were the best theses written during the past few years?
3. Do they have projects associated with their research that could be
good theses?

Start a topic file

* Throw all ideas into one folder, then after a while start to have
folders for each possible topic as you flesh them out. Thoughts, notes
taken on discusssions with professors, relevant journal articles. Review a
few minutes each week so the search stays in the forefront of your mind.

Crteria for evaluating potential thesis topics
Does sufficient background information exists?

* do a lot of research on this (phone, computer)

Is the topic narrow enough?

* Be as specific as you can, easier to broaden a narrow topic

Has it been done already?
Is it tractable?

* Will it work in terms of the practicalities? Make sure every part is
possibile.
* Consult a statistical expert (power issues).
* How long will it take?
* Is it fundable? A good idea to do preliminary research to show that
it.s possible...
* Is it hot? find out this by talking to profs and reading current
journals.
* Avoid fields full of theoretical controversy.

Criteria that might affect your chances of getting a job.

1. Allow you to show off your background knowledge of the field
2. Focus on a narrow enough topic so that you can become the expert
3. Provide a springboard for future research

Start Writing immediately.

* "Writing is the best way to initiate, organize, and extend ideas."
* Start by doing a adetailed evalutation of each topic for

1. financial support
2. interest to you
3. extendability after completion
4. controversy
5. time to complete
6. "hotness"
7. advisor's enthusiasm
8. Closeness of topic to advisor's research
9. depth of existing research
10. duplication or uniqueness
11. narrow focus
12. tractability, including availability of research subjects or
materials, existence of preplanned experimental methods, degree of
methodological difficulty, and simiplicity of statistical design.

* For each topic under serious consideration, write an outline thesis
proposal: ask the major research questions, outline experimental or
reserach steps. This is good for showing to advisor and other for
comments, since it's specific.
* Live and breathe your topic to the point of being annoying. Talk to
everyone. Get immersed in planning. Draw in reserachers outside your own
university.

Maybe Events

When deciding whether you can do something on a given day, you have to
look at not just what you have to do, but what you might want to do that's
going on that day. This is tricky if you adopt, as I have, the GTD notion
that your calendar should be used only to block off time that you're
actually committed to, like for meetings and classes etc, thus defining
hard edges to the landscape of your flexible time (that is available to be
managed). I discovered creating "no time" calendar events on the days
where something is going on is really useful for this. I prefix these
"Maybe Events" with an "ii" (the easiest letters to enter on a palm
pilot). That's to distinguish them from other no time notes, like when I
have library books due. Now when I see a poster or get a facebook invite
to something coming up, like a concert or talk or party I'm not sure
about, I add it to that day as a maybe event, making sure to include the
address, time, and cost - all factors that could influence whether I
decide to go for it. To plan my weekday or weekend, I look at the entry
for that day, with all the maybe events stacked up at the top (7 for this
weekend alone) and sort it out.

Advice to a Young Scientist by Ron Weisman

I recently benefitted from the best "how to be a scientist" talk I've
heard since I hit graduate school (and started trying to be a scientist),
from the colourful, distinguished animal behaviour researcher Ron Weisman,
who I'd met before but never had much contact with. The advice that
follows is very specific to science, and some of it only applicable within
psych. To start, here are my notes and key excerpts from the paper he
published on the subject,

Weisman, R. G. (2008). Advice to young behavioral and cognitive
scientists. Behavioural Processes, 77(2), 142-148.

(he's working on a book)

- The most desirable approach is to begin with extensive observation of a
behavior in nature, move ahead to laboratory research, and then return to
nature to ensure that you have it right.
- My advice is to use as many tools as necessary to discover and explore
nature's secrets. [but think collaborators]
-You should not design your observations and experiments to test only one
hypothesis at a time. You should be testing as many alternative hypotheses
as there are ways for your experiments to come out. Think ahead about what
an experiment's possible outcomes might mean. If an experiment has only
two possible outcomes, one that renders it interesting and publishable and
one that renders it problematic and unpublishable, you have not designed a
good experiment. Anticipate the possible outcomes of an experiment and
tinker with the design until each of at least three possible outcomes has
a distinct and orderly explanation.
- Reviewers like to ask direct questions, such as, "Why did you do your
study in the way you describe?" For example, if your groups differed in
both pretreatment and treatment phases, a reviewer is very likely to ask
why you attribute the effect to the treatment phase. Reviewers also like
to ask about alternative explanations of your results. At the design
stage, you need to consider and sketch out possible outcomes so that you
can anticipate even an astute reviewer's alternative hypotheses about your
results. To conduct first-class research, you must consider and handle all
or at least most of the reviewers' possible questions well before
conducting the research.
- If you have waited eight or more weeks, you need to write the editor
politely requesting an action letter. Some authors have waited a year or
even two - don't join them. After 12 weeks, inform the first editor that
you are withdrawing your manuscript and submit your article to a second
journal.
- Once you have the editor's action letter and the reviews, read them
quickly, then put them away for a couple of days to let the heat go out of
them. No one likes criticism, and reviewers are critics, so the heat you
feel is unavoidable. However, don't wait more than a couple of days to get
back to your article as you have a lot of time and sweat in the
submission. The revision should be the highest priority item on your list.
Get the article and the reviews back out on your desk and begin to
organize the reviewers' comments under the topics the editor asked about.
Print out copies of the action letter and reviews, and work from the
copies to make an outline of your revisions and your cover letter for the
editor.
- Respond to reviewers' comments incisively and succinctly....Try to
answer in just a few words or at most in a sentence tucked into the
paragraph from which the comments arise. Beware of protesting too much:
never insert a paragraph, or worse yet an entire page, into an article to
answer a reviewer's comment. Sometimes it is best to paraphrase a
reviewer's comment, then either agree that it is an issue for further
research or point out how your research has already handled it - all this
in a line or two. If you must directly disagree with a reviewer, make it
as tactful and convincing as possible. Editors are rightfully biased in favor
of their reviewers. Bury your disagreements with reviewers deep in the
cover letter well after many instances of willing change.
- Every resubmitted article needs a cover letter; it should be highly
organized, carefully written, and keyed directly to the text of the
article by page and line number.
- Never make uninvited changes to your article
- You must be prepared to handle objections and I counsel you again to
give in as often as possible.

And some non-overlapping notes from the talk he gave, unfortunately not
capturing any of his very entertaining delivery. Love his approach to
drafting papers!

- Success in science requires a combination of luck and fire in the belly.
(if you can do a whole experiment without once looking at your data, you
might not have the fire)
- Not only must you have luck, but you must know when you've been lucky.
- Causation questions:
Proximate - mechanism
Phylogeny
Ontogeny
Ultimate - functional adaptation
You should be constantly thinking about all of them.
- Don't compare everything with everything. Base tests on the designs,
otherwise lose power.
- Stats secrets: if unequal variance, you can do two separate analyses. If
you can get invariance of p values over tranformations (e.g. to rank
order) you don't need normality.
- In-school proposals are for chumps and robots (robotic committees). Do
the shittiest job possible. The person who knows what to do well enough to
write a well-detailed proposal has already done the research. Proposals
for money are a different matter.
- Positive controls are critical: they let you falsify.
- Get and keep your participants' attention: prompts, rewards, whatever.
- How to write a paper: in this order: 1) methods, 2) figures, 3) results
to explain the figures or table, also at least outline the discussion. 4)
Intro (never use proposal intro) 5) finish discussion. Then revise the
whole article with linking and concluding sentences.
- Stick questions and summaries about your results in another file on
another monitor as you write, which becomes the discussion.
- Intro prepares the reader for the methods, results and discussion.
Prepare the reader all the way along for the conclusion.
- The writing scientists do is like brick laying, it's not like carving
marble.
- Memorize about 20 pages of Strunk & White.
- Make strong claims (not "it seems") - you will still get cited even if
you're wrong.
- Suck up to editors and reviewers at meetings and elsewhere. Helps if
they can put a smiling face to a name
- Pick a journal that publishes work like what you've done. Also pay
attention to impact factor. If rejected, try sending it to a better
journal.
- You must respond quickly and forcefully to the invitation to revise and
resubmit. Don't wait more than a couple of days to get back to your
article. Top priority.
- Revise & resubmit means they'll porbably take it.
- Cover letter to editor: "Reviewer 1 asked us to relate our work to
Jones's 2008 article, we now do so on line xx, page xx." Nothing more.
- Write a thesis as 3 or 4 papers stapled together.
- For postdoc, pick the best universities and the best supervisors, in
that order (for name recognition). Begin early and suck up big time. Write
professors directly and ask about their work. But think through your
questions and keep them simple. Get your supervisor to help. Remember:
it's impossible to overflatter academics.
- You go where the good job is (even the gates of hell)
- When you're hired, always bargain for more money.

How to Memorize a Poem

Last year, just a little too late for the fall, I took up the task of
memorizing John Keats To Autumn. Why? I don't know. But I love the poem,
and I love having it memorized. Now I am endeavoring to learn a turgid
piece of prose for the Andrina McCulloch Public Speaking Competition, and
I am reminded of some of what I learned in that process. Here's some steps
and principles that were very effective for my brain:

- First, break it into chunks to learn separately, by general topic or
gist. I copied the poem into a word file, and added a double paragraph
break every time I felt a slight change of topic. This could happen after
several lines, or in the middle of a line.

- Next, make sure you understand the literal meaning of every word, and
every sentence, in the text. This gave me lots of unexpected rewards for
To Autumn, and made me realize I hadn't ever listened to it that closely.
For instance the line "where small gnats mourn among the river sallows", I
realized I had mentally interpolated "river shallows", like the shallow,
muddy part of the river. When in fact "sallow" is an old word for willow
tree! That makes a totally different image, which I find prettier.

- Beyond just the literal meaning, strive to get a vivid, specific mental
image of what each part is referring too. Google images is really useful
to this. For instance "barred clouds":
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2368/2327983768_194f6c7692.jpg?v=0
and until I found an image, I couldn't picture fruit hanging on "vines
that round the thatch-eves run" Of course it doesn't need to be an
accurate image, in fact it's probably better if it's an absurd one. The
important thing is to make a decision about what it means. I even drew a
little map for the second verse, deciding where I thought the granary was,
the half-reaped furrow, the brook, and the cider press. It should be an
extremely clear and complete picture, as striking as
possible, and accounting for every single non-abstract noun. Think not
just vision, but sound, touch, taste, and smell. I really don't take the time
to form mental images while I'm reading usually, but it's so
important for remembering.

- The whole basis of my learning it was to assume that no word was there
by accident, each word was absolutely essential and changed the meaning a
lot. So that played a part in the images I constructed. I tried to
exaggerate it so that every adjective and verb choice would seem even more
necessary, like "to swell the gourd", I pictured a squash inflating like a
balloon. (it reminds me a bit of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote":
this approach to memorization is almost like setting you up to feel like
you are writing the poem yourself from scratch, and each word that comes
next is just the most obvious to capture your meaning) Try to get yourself
into the emotional headspace of the poem at each point, and greatly
exaggerate that too.

- Beside every chunk I wrote a couple of words trying to capture what that
part was about. For instance "sunset clouds" beside the chunk "where
barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day and touch the stubble plains with
rosy hue". The idea is to always be adding more and more funky structure
and meaning to the poem.

- If you have trouble remembering the order of the chunks, the ancient
"method of loci" works amazingly well. I know because I used it to
memorize the order of the 10 verses in bob dylan's desolation row. You
take your route to school, or some other route you know incredibly well,
and you attach each chunk subsequently to a landmark along that route.
While I was learning Desolation Row I literally taped verses to trees,
lampposts, and garbage cans. Then you can mentally trace the route, and it
will give you the order with perfect ease and certainty. It's even easy to
recite the chunks backwards: just mentally walk the route in reverse!

- Finally, there doesn't seem to be any substitute for drilling: going as
far as you can, or as good as you can, before referencing the source paper
again. After awhile I could drill myself without the piece of paper, just
saying it to myself, out loud or silently.

It takes a surprisingly long time to get every word right, but it's not
particularly hard work, and it's already brought me a lot of pleasure.
Once in a while I'll just recite it to myself while I'm washing my face or
riding my bike, like a mantra, enjoying making the mouth-shapes for the
words. I'm glad I have it this autumn, and hope I didn't learn it too old
to not have it for every autumn from now on.

Keep Your Exhaust Pipes Clear

I just emptied my office garbage and recycling, as I do every single
friday. I think this is one of the most important things to help with
having a tidy, organized environment: always having your garbage and
recycling within arms reach, and almost all the time less than 50% full.
If they're more full than that, my brain starts to generate subconscious
resistance to putting things in there; if I have to force it down onto the
heap, I am more likely to absent-mindedly put my kleenex or whatever on my
desk (getting up and emptying it as needed would be even worse, for the
large disruption of flow) If there's not a regular, well-defined set of
processes taking garbage and recycling from your hand to out of the house
or office, crap will build up at the different stages, ultimately leading
to clutter and paralysis right where you don't want it, like sewage
backing up. When it's working good on the other hand, in the middle of a
work flow you can just reach over and instantly eliminate some piece of
clutter from your space and your mind, forever. So even when other
cleaning jobs fall by the wayside, I empty those wastepaper baskets like
clockwork!

A Few More Quotations about Feedback

Giving your opinion of their opinion extends the conversation, makes them
too invested in putting their mark on the script, and it commits you
mentally to changes you may later realize aren't really what you want. You
should be in receive mode, not implement mode, at this point. Flip the
switch back from "listen" to "do" after the conversation, and after you've
had time to let it all sink in. - Jane Espenson

Don't confuse asking for your friends and colleagues' advice with
listening to unsolicited advice. Input from fellow artists is always
great, and it never dilutes your vision, because you only need to listen
to the helpful stuff. - Patton Oswalt

Cleaning Cycles, or, Filth Wizard No More

Ok so I haven't fully tried this one out, but I'm excited about the
idea and so I want to get it down.

I am a slob, but I want to fake not being one. My plan is to use my own
likes and quirks, well documented on this blog, to make sure all those
cleaning jobs get done, and regularly. And to do that with hardly using
any willpower at all - I need 99% of that for my work. And not guilt
either.

Basically how it's going to work is that I made a master list of jobs, and
I've divided them into categories by how often I need to do them. So in
the end each job has its own period, in days and weeks. I will program a
reminder into my palm pilot to repeat at that period, and whenever one
pops up it's going to become a top priority todo item until I actually do
it.

The other important part is that I am writing out *exactly* what each job
involves, in as many steps as it takes, just like the cleanup sign I saw
posted behind the counter at the Tim Hortons. Lazy and easily defeated, I
like to know when a job will be done; exactly what it will require; and to
have very simple concrete steps I can follow. Here's an example of one:

Washing the Floor
NEED
All-purpose cleaner

SUGGESTED TIME
Just after tidy, sweep-up. Monday evening.

STEPS
- Fill up bucket of water in bathtub halfway, with suggested amount of
all-purpose cleaner
- All chairs and other objects in bedroom onto bed
- Put everything onto couch, in bedroom or in hall (or bathroom). Shoes
onto table, move table.
- Mop livingroom and kitchen
- Spot clean any kitchen bits that weren't gotten with paper towels or
washcloth
- Empty bucket and refill, with detergent
- Mop bedroom
- Let dry for 1 hour, dump out bucket
- Put everything back

ESTIMATED TIME 30 mins + 1 hour to dry + 10 minutes returning objects

NOT
under bed
Too far under desk

ALTERNATIVE TECHNIQUES
None (yet)

And so on, for all the jobs.

Further decisions I made to make this system work:

* Cleaning is separate from tidying. Too often my ambitions start to
snowball, and then I will abruptly lose energy in the middle, which is why
I've had a tesselation of clothes on my bedroom floor (that used to be in
my closet, which I was cleaning out) for the last 5 days. So I can e.g.
wash the floor without actually tidying up, by putting everything into a
huge pile. And then even redistributing it on the floor afterwards if I
wish.

* I will stagger the first time I am doing each of these jobs, so as they
repeat they will tend not to pop up in the same weeks.

* If I do a job earlier than expected, I don't reset the counter, but get
to wait till the next scheduled time, so a bit of a break from that job.

* I am not telling you the length of the cycles, because some of them may
be embarassing. The purpose is to start out with easy, long cycles, and
then tighten up as I find I can actually do it. Even so all the
frequencies are much, much higher than my old, shame-based system.

* I will decide on some things that I won't clean, ever, until I move out
or there is a royal visit. This is mostly a list of things that I won't
clean underneath or behind.

* Also, I don't have to do any cleaning that's not on the list.

* I won't sweat it if things don't get perfectly clean, as long as I carry
out the steps. I hate how there are a few little particles even after I
mop (at least the way I mop), but it's still a big improvement over non
mopping.

* All these records I'm keeping in electronic form, so I can continually
modify them with experience. In particular tricky cleaning jobs like the
stove drip pans, I might try one method one time and switch to another
another time, until I find one that works for me. The knowledge is
cumulative and stored not in my head, so I don't ever have to think about
cleaning supplies when I'm not doing the job.

If this works out, I will still be the guy who, at any given time, can't
be sure that his t-shirt is jam free, but whose apartment is fit for
company - with a 15 minute head start, and a certain amount of
closet-cramming.

Steps for Creating Publication-Quality Figures Using Matlab 7 and PowerPoint (2003 edition)

As with the Excel method, my objective here is to be able to make changes
to the data or the presentation of the data without redoing huge amounts
of fiddly work or presenting figures which are no longer accurate
representations of the data. My particular goal is to never again find
myself shifting around the spacing of axis ticks and tick labels in a
graphics program by hand.

First, in Matlab:
- Get the figure looking as close to how I want it as possible. Since
Matlab figures are generated once and not linked to their data, it is best
to generate every aspect of the figure, down to fonts etc, from a script.
Ideally going all the way from the raw data spit out by your experiment
program to the nicely formatted end result. There's a command File ->
Generate M-file that could probably speed up the process of making these
scripts.

- Sizing in the ballpark of what you want in the end. Again the things
that are easily to do in powerpoint:
* Extra bits of text
* Extra graphics applied to it
* Any other tricky modifications or overlays
* Combining different figures (though if arranged in a strict grid, use of
subplot may be easier)

- Copy the figure to the clipboard in Enhanced Metafile format. Normally
Edit -> Copy Figure would do that automatically. But in most cases you
will not want to do that. As I discovered, although it is stored in a
vector format on the clipboard, the default command discards some of the
data in your figure. Specifically any more data than is needed to draw the
data at screen resolution. So if you have smoothly changing lines in your
figure that you want to print nicely, use instead this command:

print -dmeta -r600

It's exactly the same as doing Copy Figure, but only discards data below
the 600 dpi resolution. (note that exporting directly to an EMF file and
then importing seems to have this exact same problem)

Then in PowerPoint, follow most of the same steps as pasting an Excel
figure:
- Make a slideshow with 8 1/2 x 11-shaped slides, and dotted lines
indicated the maximum width for the figures

- For each figure, go to Paste Special, and choose Picture (Enhanced
Metafile). This seems to make a difference. Place the figure approximately
where it should go.

- Ungroup each (saying yes to converting to a microsoft office drawing
object), then ungroup again. For figures with multiple axes, you may have
to ungroup a third time.

- To resize the graph (while keeping all the axis ticks and tick labels in
place), select just the data area and the axis tick labels, not the axis
titles or legend, and group, then resize. I sometimes had to move around
the axis titles a bit, and for the matlab imports, sometimes the axis
tick labels.

Finally, on a test print two issues came up with both matlab and excel
generation of plots: both had lines making up the axes that were too thin,
so don't forget to change that (possibly in the source), and there was
also a hairline drawn around the entire figure (for some goddamn reason)
so make sure to ungroup and delete that box.

Steps for Creating Publication-Quality Figures using Excel and Powerpoint (2003 edition)

This is of fringe interest, and soon to be invalidated technology
probably, but I'm damned if I'm going to figure this out again.

First, in Excel:
- Autogenerate the figures in Excel based on my data. (use a previous
figure I made as a template if there's one that applies, that

- Important: Right click the middle of the chart, go to Format Chart Area
-> Font, and uncheck Auto scale. That way I can choose the font once,
and it won't change every time you resize the chart!

- Get it looking exactly the way I want, with the exception of:
* Extra bits of text
* Extra graphics applied to it
* Any other tricky modifications or overlays
* Sizing only in the ballpark of what it needs be. It looks like it's
actually easier to match the sizes of multiple plots to each other in
powerpoint, because you can enter in the dimensions of objects numerically.

Now in Powerpoint:
- Make a slideshow with 8 1/2 x 11-shaped slides, and dotted lines
indicated the maximum width for the figures (I'm submitting to Perception,
which uses 1.675 inch margins for figures, including all the text
associated with them.) Easiest if I put the dotted lines into a master
slide, so it automatically shows up in any new slides I create. Also a
good idea to turn on Snap objects to grid (which you can define the
spacing of), and Display grid on screen, in View -> Grid and Guides.

- Copy each figure to a separate slide from Excel, placing it
approximately where it should go

- Ungroup each (saying yes to converting to a microsoft office drawing
object), then ungroup again. This gives me the ability to fiddle with each
element of the figure individually. Moving multiple at once, and the Align
object commands are particularly handy at this point.

- To resize the graph to fit the area, select just the data area and the
axis tick labels, not the axis titles or legend, and group, then resize.
I sometimes had to move around the axis titles a bit.

Complicated! But fast once I got the hang of it, and allows for the most
important aspect of all: small changes, to the data or the formatting of
the graph, without doing everything all over again.

Your Home From Home

I got back from a conference in London this week, where my shabby little
dorm room let me try out a principle I thought up the last time I was
staying away from home. At that time I noticed my bed & breakfast room was
a horrible mess, after only 2 days, and I was having trouble finding
stuff. I realized there's only one solution to that for me - the same
exact solution as for me at home. And that's attention to flow, and
processes. I realized I should set up a mini version of my home system
whereever I am, *even if only for one night*. I already know how to use
it, and so it's just a matter of setting up each of the components. And
here is that minimal set:

* A place for clean clothes
* A place fpr dirty clothes
* A clothes chair for the ones that don't fit either category (see the
limbo laundry entry)
* An inbox (for when I come home from a day at the conference and want to
just dump stuff - in this case it was just the corner of my desk)
* A garbage and/or recycling within easy reach.
* An out box - a location I put stuff that I want to remember to take the
next day.
* A "going home" out box. This is the only element that is special to the
away from home scenario. Here I put stuff I don't need to think about till
it's time to go home.
* A "temporary support" location, for things that I will need to make use
of for short-term projects.

These show that I'm now definitely leaning towards the "take everything
out of your suitcase right away" side of the issue. In about 15 minutes,
once all those things were in place, my UWO dorm apartment was a
functioning helpful organism, just like my home and office (well they are
that some of the time)

One additional thought I just had: if you're remembering various things
you want to pack a few days before a trip, why not toss them in your open
suitcase? It's taking up space anyway, might as well use it as a bin -
then the distance to move the stuff before you repack will be particularly
short.

Colour Coding to Help Intense Reading

A great contribution from friend and fellow grad student Liz Arsenault:
--
Our lab holds small journal club meetings once a week where one member
leads a discussion on an article of interest. Everyone reads the article,
but only the presenter has any obligation to be very familiar with it.
When I am preparing to present an article, I like to underline the points
of discussion in colour-coded felt-tip pen and highlighter.

The procedure is way too intensive and time consuming for articles that
just need to be skimmed, but I've found it very helpful when I need to
know an article inside and out.

1) I colour code premises, methods, results, people, terms, and
definitions*. This allows me to quickly locate the answers to things that
can slow down discussion like misunderstandings on the finer points of the
methods, clarify terms/acronyms, etc.

2) Colourful felt tip pens are something I find motivating. It's fun to
do, and it's fun to look at.

3) It makes the amount of work you've done obvious to your supervisor ;).
Anyone can underline anything that looks like a declarative statement in
pencil. When it's in a lot of colours, it's clear you've done your
homework.

4) Reading looking for these sorts of information makes me approach an
article in an appropriately analytical frame of mind. Unfortunately, I
can't read science as easily as a novel.

5) Tracking people (authors, big citations) makes it possible to build an
understanding of which people work together championing which sorts of
ideas, and reminds me to look at author webpages to look for other papers
I might find relevant.

6) I'm trying to work out how to go through all my term and definition
highlighting to build a personal glossary of my area of study, and this
should also help me to detect when people use same terms to indicate
different things or when they use different terms to indicate the same
things (the latter happens a LOT between psychology vision papers and
computer vision papers).**

Granted, there are major headings for results, methods, conclusions in
most articles, but often some of these things are phrased most succinctly
in the abstract or results in the discussion, etc.. Plus, when you're
flipping through several pages (as long as you aren't colour blind),
looking for pink pen is a lot quicker than skimming looking for the
"methods" heading.

I will let you know of my other brilliant processes as they develop ;).

Take care, Liz

* Order of importance:
1) terms
2) premises
3) results
4) methods
5) people
6) definitions
... the lower priority elements get dropped depending on how quickly I
want to process the article.

** A psychological benefit of doing this is seeing yourself highlight
fewer and fewer terms as you become more proficient in an area of study.

How Obama Used Feedback

From a fascinating New York Times profile a few days ago:
(one question: what does "favoring a hand on the shoulder" mean?)

--

"You don't go from being a community organizer to running for president in
15 years unless you have a lot of ambition," said Paula Wolff, a Chicago
Republican and a mentor. "He likes to listen carefully, and naturally you
assume that's very smart of him."

If there is an art to seeking advice, Mr. Obama holds a master's degree.
He favors a hand on the shoulder, a whisper in the ear. In 1996, when he
pondered a race for the Illinois Legislature, Jean Rudd, a mentor in the
foundation world, took him to lunch with a prominent lobbyist. The
appetizers had no sooner arrived than the lobbyist framed the question:
Why would a Harvard-educated lawyer want to step into a hellhole like
that? You'll leave your wife behind, you.ll be in the minority party,
you.ll be treated like dirt. Mr. Obama chuckled and asked questions. The
lobbyist later became an adviser.

Abner J. Mikva, the former judge, asked Mr. Obama, fresh out of Harvard,
to apply as his clerk. Mr. Obama declined, preferring to labor as a
community organizer. But, characteristically, he later befriended the
older man.

The judge recognized his talents, but oh that speaking style. Too many ers
and uhs, too Harvard and not enough South Side. Mr. Obama did not argue
the point; he began paying attention in church. [to learn public speaking]

--

By contrast, in a jawdropping interview on Fresh Air Scott McLelland
revealed that Bush hates to have opposing viewpoints from his own
represented in his advisory groups, and never reads opinion pieces he
doesn't agree with.

Life Advice from the Last Lecture

"Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic
cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a
packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, 'Really Achieving Your
Childhood Dreams,' Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice
to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo
(it's about 1 hour and 15 minutes, and enormously engaging and moving)

Much more than the time management lecture, these notes are no substitute
for watching him. Partly that's because what might seem like flat
aphorisms are just the punchline to rich stories from his career. And
partly because what really strikes me is the metadata: the context, the
manner of speaking, the life itself. My reaction was, this is a nerd made
good. Unlike some of us analytically-minded guys who are attracted to
computer science like he was, he reached outside himself, to find what are
the really important things that make up a life. And over and over he
defines it in terms of human relationships - technology is a secondary
(though important) player. There are three major things he shows off, that
I am currently trying really hard to incorporate into myself, and wish I
had started long ago: Appreciating people, being positive, and defining
and expressing who you are so strongly. Right at this moment, would I be
able to express so strongly who I am and what I'm about, what my story is,
if I suddenly had my own opportunity to give a Last Lecture? What an
inspiration.

---

Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want
things. They're there to stop the *other* people

Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. You've got to get the
fundamentals down, or else the fancy stuff won't work.

When you screw up and no one's bothering to correct you anymore, that
means they've given up.

When you do something young enough and train for it, it just becomes a
part of you.

Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.

It's very important to know when you're in a pissing match. And it's very
important to get out as quickly as possible.

That's one of the reasons you should all become professors: It's because
you can have your cake and eat it too.

Course called building virtual worlds: 50 students from all different
departments. (art, design, drama, and CS) Randomly chosen 4 person team,
change every project ("three new playmates"), two week projects, 5 per
semester.

What to do when they completely blow you away on the first project? "That
was pretty good, but I know you can do better." You don't really know
where the bar is, and you're doing them a disservice by placing it
anywhere.

ETC curriculum: "5 small projects followed by 3 big projects. All of your
time is spent in small teams, makin' stuff."

Project-based curriculum
Intense, fun student experience
Field trips!

Alice: "Millions of kids having fun while learning something hard. And
that's pretty cool. I can deal with that as a legacy."

He painted stuff all over his bedroom walls. To anybody out there who's a
parent, if your kids want to paint their bedroom, let them do it.

"Randy, it's such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because
it's going to limit what you're going to be able to accomplish in life."
What a hell of a good way to word "you're being a jerk."

Particularly with middle school girls, if you present it as a storytelling
activity they're perfectly willing to learn to program computer software.

Decide if you're tigger or eeyore
Never lose childlike wonder
Help others

How to get people to help you
- Tell the truth
- Be earnest (I'll take an earnest person over a hip person any day,
because hip is short term but earnest is long term)
- Apologize when you screw up
- Focus on others, not yourself

Get a feedback loop, and listen to it. When people give you feedback,
cherish it and use it.
Show gratitude.
Don't complain, just work harder
Be good at something, it makes you valuable
Find the best in everybody. It might take years, but people will show you
their good side.

[the lecture is ] not about how to achieve your dreams - it's about how to
lead your life.

Wonka :: "Do you know what happened to the boy who got everything he ever
wanted?"
Charlie :: "No, what?"
Wonka :: "He lived happily ever after."

--

Finally, from his equally moving (and much shorter) commencement address
at Carnegie Mellon this May:

You will need to find your passion. Many of you have done it, many of you
will later, many of you will take until your 30s and 40s. But don't give
up on finding it. Because then all you're doing is waiting for the reaper.
Find your passion, and follow it, and if there's anything I've learned in
this life, it's that *you will not find your passion in things.* And you
will not find that passion in money. Because the more things and the more
money you have the more you will just look around and use that as the
metric, and there will always be someone with more. So your passion must
come from the things that fuel you from the inside... that passion will be
grounded in people. It will be grounded in relationships with people, and
in what they think of you when your time comes.

My Citation Management System: Refinements

Unlike the system I talk about in the 3 previous blog postings on citation
management, these are things that are out there on the fringes of my
system, stuff I'm still tinkering with.

--

* My someday/maybe reading list was getting too long and intimidating, so
I started putting in a fake entry at the end of every month to divide it
into manageable monthly chunks. So may just passed, I created a new blank
reference in there with the title "2008 MAY" so all references I added
between the start of may (designated by "2008 APRIL") are nicely
delineated.

* My physical paper management system, which predates my general filing
system, was breaking down. I keep papers in hanging files by topic area.
If I were starting all over again I might use Jim's system of putting them
in manila folders by first author name in alphabetical order, but it's
nice to be able to scoop up a whole handful of a particular type of paper,
and hanging folders are much more sturdy. That's the problem though,
some are bulging. (though like with my manila folders, I make sure to have
plenty of empty ones within arms reach, so I can create a new one on the
spot) A couple of embarassing incidents of not being able to find a paper
made it clear I need to do better in indexing my printed-out papers.

I created a new field called Filed under, where I enter in the heading on
the tab for the hanging file it's in. What really makes this work, makes
it quite practical to (eventually) go through all my hanging files and
enter the Filed under in the corresponding citation entry in my Read
database, is a neat feature of endnote called Term lists. With just a
few minutes poking around in help and menu items, I figured out how to
make it so I would only have to type the first letter of a hanging file
name, and the rest of it would pop up in the field, just like it works for
author names in endnote.

So now whenever I have a few minutes when I have absolutely nothing else I
could be doing, I grab a couple of my hanging files and make sure all the
papers have entries in my databases and have their Filed unders filled in.
I also sort the papers in each hanging file by first author. So now (for
the ones I've done anyway), it's a snap to go from the citation entry to
the physical paper.

* Sometimes in doing a lit search I run across papers that are completely
irrelevant to my research but have too good titles to let slip away
forever: "A triangular theory of love" "Does Aerobic Exercise Decrease
Brain Activation?" I can stop myself from reading them on the spot by
throwing them into a new database I made called Interesting.

* By painful experience, I can easily read a paper and then have
absolutely no recollection of it just a couple of months later. Therefore
though it's cumbersome, I *must* keep notes on the papers I read, at least
if I'm ever going to go back to them. I tried many different ways to do
it, some electronic, some paper, but the best thing so far involves using
endnote again. In the Research Notes field, I type in what I call the
Gist. This is as few words as I can type to encompass everything I would
want to refer to this paper for. Sometimes that's a lot, including lots of
experiment details. Sometimes it's one sentence. However it almost never
looks anything like the abstract: first of all its in my own language
("...therefore, they say, feature integration theory is whack.") and
second it's what I got from the paper that was new and semi-surprising,
not everything that was in there. So it's customized to me and my
interests.

This takes effort for each paper that I read (though it doesn't mean I
have to read at the computer: I tend to jot brief notes at the bottom of
pages with a pen that I can then mindlessly transcribe into the system
later) but ultimately it saves a great deal of tiresome effort. Recently I
had to review an area (rapid visual categorization) and I was almost shed
tears of gratitude realizing I had filled in the gists for all 3 of the
key papers, and so would not have to even glance at the originals, let
alone read them through. A job that could have taken 2 hours (assuming
total amnesia, which is far from impossible) instead took 15 minutes.

Of course this means my endnote Read database is even more precious and
needing of being backed up.

* Somethign that goes great with entering gists in EndNote is creating
custom output styles to help generate neat reports on groups of papers.
It's easy to make a bibliographic list in APA format, just by selecting
multiple citations and choosing Copy formatted. But now imagine the power
of being able to create an output file with all those citations *plus
their abstracts*. This is easy to do: just make a copy of say APA 5th
style, go to Output styles -> open reference manager (this is all EndNote
X specific), click to edit your style, go to Layout under Bibliography,
and in "End each reference with" click Insert Field and add the Abstract.

I created another one based on APA 5th called Gist Output, which lets me
see the gist info that I've entered. It's particularly great for seeing
output in the preview pane when I select a reference in the window. Rather
than using the Layout mechanism, I changed the Bibliography templates
directly. So it looks like (this is for the Journal Article entry)

Author. (Year). Title. Journal.

Research Notes

(with title in boldface, and journal in italics) The disadvantage is that
you have to repeat those changes for all the different reference types you
might want to use.

Hacking output styles is great, because it lets you quickly and easily
output sheets of info, including gists/abstracts, for any subset of papers
you want. You could print out pages with all the abstracts from Trends in
Cognitive Science for a year, a great way to skim the literature. You
could choose two or 3 to have in gist form for an important meeting. Etc.

Time Management from a Professor with Three Months to Live

I've been tremendously inspired recently by a lecture by the
computer science professor Randy Pausch called the Last Lecture - which it
almost literally is, since he is dying of pancreatic cancer. But before
putting up some of his life advice from that, even more core to the
purporse of this blog is a wonderful talk he gave about time
management, also after he was diagnosed (skip the first 8 minutes of
introductions):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5784740380335567758&hl=en

Here are my notes from watching this, mostly to jog my own memory, but if
you don't have time to watch the whole talk you might be able to get some
ideas out of it. But I just wrote down a few of the items of maximum
surprise to me - you will probably pull different things out of it, so its
well worth watching, and fun too. One gratifying aspect is that he's
obviously absorbed Getting Things Done - its telltale signature shows up
in a couple of places.

---

If you're going to have to run with people who are faster than you, you
are going to have to find the right ways to optimize the skills you do
have.

I think it's very dangerous to focus on doing things right. It's more
important to think about doing the right things. If you do the right
things adequately, that's much more important than doing the wrong things
beautifully.

You can always change your plan, but only once you *have one*!

On a to-do list, do the ugliest one first.

Do the important/due soon items first - but then, instead of doing the
unimportant/due soon items next, do the important/not due soon items next.

Touch each piece of paper once.

Have multiple monitors. "I could go from 3 to 2, but I could not go back
to 1." (compares to working on a airplane foldout tray) Left monitor is
todo list, middle is email inbox, right monitor is calendar. Then just one
project on the desk.

Use a speakerphone for when you're placed on hold.

Stand during phone calls (so that they will be brisk). Start by announcing
goals for the call. "I have 3 things I want to talk to you about." Trick
for getting off the phone: "I'd love to keep talking, but I have some
students waiting." Don't call people when you have work you're avoiding;
for the same reason, call people before lunch and at the end of the day so
they have a motivation not to chat for a long time. Headsets are a good
idea too so you can do other things.

Write physical thank-you notes, not just for obvious things like gifts.
Put a stack from the dollar store on your desk.

I can't live without post-it notes.

Don't put comfy chairs in your office, except for yourself. He put folding
chairs in his office against the wall, so conversations would be standing
unless he graciously opened one.

Gentle "no"s: "If nobody else steps forward, I will do this for you"
Moving: "Hmm, that sounds like an 8 person job. If you give me the names
of 7 other people, I'll do this for you."

Find your creative time and defend it ruthlessly. Spend it alone, at home
if you have to. Find your dead time, schedule meetings, exercise, stuff
where you don't need to be at your best.

Find ways to make interruptions shorter and less frequent: emails rather
than phonecalls. His phone routes to a message that says "please send me
email" When someone interrupts you, say first of all "I'm in the middle
of something right now." or "I only have 5 minutes" (followed by "Well I
said at the beginning I only had 5 minutes and I really have to go now")
For people who don't leave, you get up, you walk to the door, you
compliment them, you thank them, and you shake their hand. If they still
don't get the hint, just go through that doorway yourself. Clock on the
wall, so you're not checking your watch.

Time journals. Monitor yourself in 15 minute increments for between 3 days
and two weeks. Update every 1/2 hour, not at end of day. Categories on
graph paper, make ticks. What am I doing that I could delegate, what don't
I need to do, what could I do more efficiently, how am I wasting someone
elses time.

For time that is hard to deal with, like a 1 hour block between classes,
make up a fake class: Go to a specific place in the library with your
books.

The time to aim for is right before the deadline; right at the deadline
has a lot of unnecessary costs (e.g. fedexing it). Make up a fake
deadline. Two reasons for procrastination: I'm afraid I'm going to be
embarassed because I don't do it well, and I'm afraid I'm going to fail at
it.

The right way to delegate: give them authority with responsibility. Give
them everything they're going to need: budget, time, etc, so they don't
have to keep coming back. Always do the ugliest job yourself. SPECIFIC
thing to do, SPECIFIC date *and* time, and a SPECIFIC penalty or reward,
for THEM. Delegate until they complain. Underdelegation is a bigger
problem. Followup meetings with two-line emails restating stuff (like
agreements). Give them objectives, not procedures. Tell people the
relative importance of various tasks. Dodge upward delegation: don't learn
how to do selected things.

Meetings should have an agenda (if there's not an agenda I won't attend),
never more than 1 hour. Someone designated the scribe, in one minute write
down what was decided and delegated, and email it out to everyone ("one
minute minutes")

If the person hasn't responded to email in 48 hours, it's ok to nag them.

When on vacation, have a message that says either "call this guy to get
your problem solved" or "call me back when I get back." It's not a
vacation if you're reading email.

Turn money into time at every opportunity. Hire people to do things.

Never break a promise, but renegotiate if necessary (before the deadline).

Most things are pass/fail. It doesn't have to be that good.

How to Ask for, and Listen to, Feedback

"If you recall, my basic advice on this topic is to listen to notes
without reacting negatively in the moment and to think about the ideas
underlying the notes. When you approach your rewrite, you'll find ways to
supply what the reader found lacking or correct what they found
out-of-tune that you will never find if you bristle and bridle when you
first hear their reaction, or if you react to the 'letter' of what they're
saying without making sure you understand the 'spirit' of it."
- Jane Espenson, screenwriter on Buffy, Firefly, Gilmore Girls, The O.C.,
and Battlestr Galactica

Unaided experience is a poor teacher, I heard that somewhere and it's
true. What is the most important kind of aid I need in shaping myself into
the scientist I want to be? Feedback. If you have any personal ambitions
to get good at something, you have an enormous hunger for feedback. Here
are some tips for obtaining the kind you need, of maximum helpfulness.

* Wording. Here are some ways you could word a request for feedback, in
ascending order of your likelihood of getting it: "Pretty good, huh?" "Did
you like it?" "What did you think of it?" "What were the good and bad
things about it?" "What's something that worked for you, and what's
something that didn't work so well?" "I'm thinking of making some changes.
What are some things I could change to make it better?"

* Facial expression. Keep your face mostly relaxed and intent, maybe
nodding once in a while. Don't smile in response to things you like,
because then it will be obvious when you don't like things by the lack of
smile.

* Make it clear you are looking for *feedback*, not encouragement. Convey
that you're not going to get discouraged, you're going to keep going with
the project, no matter what they say. It can't touch your ego, one way or
another.

* *Under no circumstance* argue or make excuses - people will see that as
a sure sign you're not taking it as feedback but as judgment, since you're
arguing your case. Of course you might be sitting there thinking "this
feedback is idiotic." But don't let on.

* Ask questions (again not looking for reassurance) to clarify and to show
you're taking it seriously. Ask about specific parts you want feedback
for. Ask either/or questions, trying not to bias them towards one side or
the other in your wording: like "Did you want to see more of this
character or less?"

* Teach the difference between feedback and judgment. I
don't care what you thought of it overall, if you thought it was good or
bad: just tell me your reactions to different parts, and any ideas for how
to change it to make it better.

* At the same time, don't necessarily ask them for solutions (definitely
don't complain about how hard those problems will be to solve).
Their thoughtful reactions are what is most useful. In tv writing
terminology, people might say that some aspect of the script "bumps" them
- gives them a bad reaction, even if they can't articulate why. Here's
Alex Epstein, another successful screenwriter whose blog I love:
"All feedback is useful, if you know how to use it. If someone has a
problem, there is probably something wrong with your script, though it's
not always what they think is the problem. But most people's suggestions
on how to fix your script are crap."
The only people who can really help with how to fix it most of the time
are people who are good at the exact task you are toiling at. Those people
are gold.

* Tell them what level of feedback you want. If a friend is kind enough to
read a piece of writing and give notes, I'll be frustrated if they're
proposing sweeping changes to the theme and structure when it's well past
the point where that's possible. Conversely, if they're picking up on
typos when it's an early proof-of-concept type draft, that's also
annoying. So let them know your expectations.

* Finished stuff is more fun to read than something really messy and
preliminary, something to think about.

* Remind them to also mention things they reacted positively to, if
they're the type to zero in on the problems and just jump all over them
the whole time. Hearing what worked is useful, and it definitely helps me
to (secretly) feel better afterwards. (in toastmasters, where I learned
most of this stuff, we sometimes use a formula for feedback called the
"sandwich technique": start with specific positive points, put in a few
(not too many) points of improvement, then finish with some more specific
positive points)

* Coach them to talk in terms of specifics rather than generalities.

* Ultimately the best feedback you will get are from relationships you
will build over a period of years. It takes time to make people believe
that serious feedback of a particular nature is really what you want, that
you're not thin-skinned. And also that it will be worth their while, both
by seeing that they have a tangible effect on the final product (maybe),
and by showing that they are earning the right to your own high quality,
sensitive, kindly, thorough feedback. So it becomes an escalating ladder
of trust, going back and forth between you and these most valued of all
peers. (as a side note, giving unsolicited feedback is usually a bad idea,
risks being rude and condescending. So solicit feedback!)

* Say thanks!

My Citation Management System: To Read Someday/Maybe

(see previous entries for other parts of this system)
This is an endnote database that I throw references into as I hear about
them, that I might want to read (someday, maybe). What's the motivation
for going to the trouble of looking them up and putting them in the
database? Well first of all it's not that much trouble - if you can import
citations off the web it's fast, much faster even if you can import from
ISI Web of Science directly within endnote. Secondly, it means its then
searchable, including metadata like the abstract and keywords. So you're
in a mood for a face perception paper, you can find all the ones you've
been planning to read. Third, you don't have to look it up again when
you've read it, you can just move it over to Read. Finally, you don't have
to actually find the citation if you don't want to: you could just make a
new one and toss in the author and year, and it will still be useful as a
marker that you ran across this paper once.

I don't use this for lit searches, where I'm reading intensely in some
area, but rather for those papers that pop up just outseide of my current
reading area but could be very important later on. What would you read
next if you were suddenly handed a bunch of time that could only be used
for reading?

A couple of refinements: I added a field called "Read For" so that months
down the line I could remember just why the heck I meant to read it in the
first place. I put just a few words in, like "Recent massive review of
visual search" or "Contextual cueing in a nautral context, maybe relevant
to virtual creatures", like a tiny sales pitch to my future self. I
set up the Read Someday/Maybe database to be sorted by record number, that
is the order it was added to the database, so more recently added showed
up on top. This worked well with my realization that this database would
never get emptied out, would only grow and grow as I went on, so best to
keep the focus on the ones I was excited about recently. As another
consequence I have stopped removing citations as I read them (and move
them to Read), but rather leave them there just with their "Order Read"
field filled in (in preparation for copying to Read) so I know I've gotten
to that one.

This system is far from perfect. For one thing papers do get lost down in
there - there's not a huge motivation to go trolling down into it to find
something to print and read, except on certain occasions, like for a plane
ride I might peak into it. But usually not all the way to the bottom,
which has stuff totalyl irrelevant to what I'm doing now. The fact that it
is searchable mitigates this. But to be honest I'm a bit scared of the
hugeness of the list now. Nevertheless it works pretty well for me to
capture the important papers that fly my way that I can't sit down to read
right now.

Developing Your Own Constructs and Other Advice from Western's Survival Skills for Graduate Students

Western has a site called Survival Skills for Graduate Students, directed
primarily at neuroscience grad students:

http://www.physpharm.fmd.uwo.ca/undergrad/survivalwebv3/frame.htm

Some of the advice is routine and useless, but some is solid and novel,
for instance about how to decide whether you want a particular job, and
how to make slides. There's an interesting discussion of how to make
timelines, which I'm not sure I agree with, and at least one thing that no
one ever told me but I wish they had, about how your real job as a
scientist is developing constructs:

http://www.physpharm.fmd.uwo.ca/undergrad/survivalwebv3/s4_skill/constr.html

"As a scientist you need to develop constructs, in your mind, for how you
think things work. ... Now you have been given your own Lego construction
set and you have to learn how to build something. This requires *reading
less* and *thinking more*." Key ways it helps: To keep from reading too
much, to keep from doing too many experiments.

Yes, this is exactly how I will think of my work from now on.

Some other pieces of advice that struck me as surprising enough to note:

*Go to the graduate club. Being a scientist is being a part of a culture.
You will be surprised what you can learn about the brain, playing pool
with an anthropologist.
* Make sure to leave some unscheduled time in your regular working time.
Sit back and let your mind wander. You will find that this is your most
important time.
* Doing a literature search Do not start with a computer search (eg
Med-Line). Then they say how you should do it:

http://www.physpharm.fmd.uwo.ca/undergrad/survivalwebv3/s4_skill/Search.html

My Citation Management System: Read

(this is part 2 about this) The EndNote database called Read is the heart
of my citation management system. Whenever I write a paper, this is the
database that the citations are drawn out of. Conceptually, it's a list of
all the papers I've read. That keeps me honest a little bit, since I can't
cite a paper I haven't read. By read of course I mean "read": at a bare
minimum,have read the abstract, a few paragraphs of the intro, and at
least skimmed the discussion. But I *must* do this much for papers I cite:
I've discovered all too often that you can't rely on how papers are cited
by others, you have to actually make sure it says what they think it says.

It's not as big a hassle to add every paper you read to the database as
you might think - especially compared to how long it takes to read 'em.
Even if you don't have EndNote and its direct connection to ISI Web of
Science, you can find the citation online somehow, with some combination
of google, google scholar, and your university library's homepage or the
publisher's homepage, within a few mouseclicks and keystrokes. Usually a
search by the first 4 or 5 words of the title is fastest. The advantage of
this is not only the higher likelihood (but far from guarantee) that it
will be entered accurately, but also that it will bring with it metadata
such as keywords and abstract, which are then readable and searchable on
your local machine. And its all ready any time you want to write a paper.

Besides being a huge pool of citations (which is sortable and searchable),
my Read database is also a kind of diary of my reading, that tells me
approximately when I read something. The most straightforward way would be
just using the serial numbers that endnote assigns when you add a record
to a database. But I wanted to do a bit better, for those times when I
want to insert something between previously entered records, since the
record ids are not changeable (this might be where I lose you, but it
works for me anyway). I added a new field to the citation record (more
specifically, redefined Custom 1) called Order Read. Then I made my own
serial numbering. I got this together in about january of 05, so
everything read before then is 1-100. January 05 is 101 and on, February
is 201 and on, etc. That lets me slot in ones I've forgotten where they
belong (I have not yet read 100 articles in a single month). I put a
comment in the Notes field of the first one of the month with the month
and year, so I can remember that eg the 1200s are October 2007. I made
Order Read one of the fields displayed in the box, and sorted by it.
Presto, a chronological list of my reading, and a hugely valuable pool of
citations to instantly draw upon for any future papers.

My Citation Management System: The Basics

If you are an academic, you need citation management software. It's as
essential as a pen and tweedy elbow patches (ok more essential than even
that). If you are in doubt, consider how much of your life you want to
spend typing in citations into a reference list, in the exact right
format. Then how much you want to spend checking that each citation in the
text has a one-to-one correspondence with an item in the reference list.

There are lots of software solutions, and more all the time. The bare
minimum it must have is this:
* Be able to download citations off the internet (either directly or by
importing) - I only have to type in 1 in 20 by hand, and it's a lot easier
to check something than to type it in correctly (but you do have to check
it) Plus a bunch of metadata comes along for free, like keywords and the
abstract.

* Stores them in a pool that is searchable, sortable, etc and can be
reused for multiple projects

* Can generate reference lists and ideally in-text citations in many
predefined formats. Because it's very nice to have the ability both to
have a big assist with matching your target style, such as APA 5th (though
you *always* have to double check it), and to rapidly switch the style if
you decide to submit to another journal (Nature here I come!!)

I use a program called EndNote. It is powerful and well-supported, and
I've found it easy to use. The one drawback is that it is incredibly
expensive. If you can't get it through your academic connections you
probably won't be able to afford it. One alternative that is also well
supported is called RefWorks. At least at Queen's, it comes for *free*,
and seems to be somewhat intergrated with the library system which is a
plus. Another excellent thing about it is that it's on the web, so you can
access your references whereever you go. A disadvantage I can see to that
is the slight clunkiness of web-based applications, and also that it isn't
stored locally, so backing it up might be more of a procedure. But the
biggest disadvantage is that I don't know its disadvantages.

Advanced questions to ask about any such tool:

Does it let you:
* Do literature searches within the application?
* Do searches within your own past reading? (like being able to google
your brain)
* Do an operation on multiple records at once?
* Add additional fields to a citation record, like to make your own
tagging system?
* Allow for multiple databases/directories?
* Do clever search and replace?

EndNote is lightning fast in its operations, even with a list of 10s of
thousands of citations (I've tried it).It's quite customizable, in a
user-friendly way, and it has lots of support for various filters and
templates people have produced. Best of all is that it can hook into
online databases and suck down citations directly - I've found that ISI
Web of Science almost *always* has the journal article I'm looking for,
and any number of university libraries can contribute book citations. I've
been using EndNote all the way along and so far it hasn't done me wrong.
(ok in a couple of niggling ways)

So EndNote lets you make separate databases, as many as you want, and
those are useful for many things, such as doing a specialized lit search.
However my approach is to put all my citations into a couple of big pools,
that are used for all my papers. That's the most flexible way: it means I
can search, sort and edit them all at once. And reuse the same citatioins
in different papers. There are two major databases, which I will talk
about individually in the next couple of posts:

Read
To Read Someday/Maybe

How to Conduct a Super-search

Last year around this time I was searching very hard for an apartment. I
felt like I'd never been properly taught how to do this kind of a search,
so I wrote up some notes on it. Looking at these, I realized that this is
a more general class of search in life that these might apply to, for
instance the search for a job, for the perfect couch, or an idea for a
thesis. But I will use my apartment search as an example. The core things are
EXPLORE EVERY AVENUE SIMULTANEOUSLY
ORGANIZATION and
PERSISTENCE.

EXPLORE EVERY AVENUE SIMULTANEOUSLY
* This is what you might call a parallel terraced scan (if you're a
Hofstadter fan), or equally nerdy, a breadth first search.
* Spend time assembling lists of places to look, constantly growing that
list. I kept a bookmark folder for the kingston websites that had
apartment listings, and kept finding new websites with listings that
weren't on the others. Ask people where they look.
* Places I looked: the web, riding my bike around neighbourhoods I wanted
to live in looking for "For Rent" signs, the newspaper classifieds (often
overlooked), and especially word of mouth. Of the 3 apartments I made a
bid for, one was from the web, one was from word of mouth, and one was
from the newspaper.
* Very important: TELL EVERY SINGLE PERSON YOU MEET about your search. I
was amazed at the number of leads I got from friends and friends of
friends, as well as advice. I must have looked at at least 5 based on
those tips. Keep your friends updated on your search. Ask them about their
places, what they're happy about and not so happy, and what they pay.
* Whenever you go to see a place, ask the person there if they have any
other properties they are trying to rent.
* Pursue all these avenues simultaneously, don't get stuck on any one.

Which definitely requires:

ORGANIZATION
* I would harvest addresses from all these different sources every day,
filter some out based on my criteria, and dump into a big file
* Pretty quickly I realized with the volume of listings I was checking
out, I would need to keep detailed notes on my progress with each one. I
actually came very cloee to visitng the same apartment twice when I was
right in the fury of it, and certainly got all excited about a listing
only to realize I'd already ruled it out.
* After a while I had set up 3 different files: one that I would dump all
the listings in that looked promising, with as much info on them as I
could glean but most importantly contact info, one called Apartments SEEN
with notes on my impressions after having visited, and one called RULED
OUT which I moved a listing to when it was no longer in the running for
whatever reason. So each listing only appeared once in the three.
* Record in a format such that you can compare them as much as possible
* The discipline of maintaining these notes became particularly important
when it came to places with just a phone number. If the person wasn't
home, I would write down the date I called, so I could make sure to try
them again.

Which leads me to:

PERSISTENCE
* The places that took the most persistence, for instance in calling back,
were not necessarily the best, but not the worst either. My eventual
apartment could have easily come from one of those places.
* Prepare for it to be a big, long search. Mine took 2 months, and in the
end I had been shown 27 different places. (wow) Go into it with that
mindset, and hey, you might get lucky right away.
* Start NOW. Even if you don't have all the info you need, even if you
don't really know what you want. Use the first ones you see to help figure
out what you want. Be ok with possibly losing one of those early places
because you don't yet know enough to be able to say yes confidently.
* By the same token, it's worth going out to check out places you're
pretty sure you don't want, just to clarify your preferences more. It's ok
to not quite know what you want at first.
* At the same time, always be working on a set of criteria where you know
it would be good enough for you, so you can rent on the spot to grab it,
and end this time-consuming search. This is known as satisficing: this is
so good that it would not be worth the cost of the rest of the search and
its uncertainty to find something better.
* As you can tell from the organization section, you have to get into an
everyday rhythm: checking your traplines for new listings, slotting them
where they belong, and adding info from phonecalls you make, emails you
receive, and visits you make. Each listing is its own mini project, that
you keep moving along.
* Learn to enjoy the process! Be like a machine grinding through this
stuff, not thinking too much about the endpoint. Do it with enthusiasm.
* Don't get fixated on any one as the perfect place. There will be lots
that will work fine for you; don't stop looking. And if you lose a
"perfect place" just yell NEXT!! That happened to me *twice*, that I had
settled on a place, had spent a lot of time picturing myself there, in
fact thought we had agreed that I had it, but was snatched away from me.
Frustrating, but the search goes on, and I ended up with a terrific place.

So that's my advice that should apply to any of these large scale super
searches. I took all that time and effort, maybe more than I really
needed, just to find out what it felt like to do it *right*. I won't
always be able to do that in the future either, but this is what it feels
like.

In addition I include:

ADDITIONAL KINGSTON or APARTMENT-SPECIFIC TIPS

* It ain't over till you sign a lease! Landlords will screw you like that.
To be fair, they probably get screwed on verbal agreements all the time
too.
* Sharing a two-bedroom makes a lot of economic sense.
* Lots of electronic listings you can copy out of your web browser and
paste into Excel, then you can sort by price, location, etc.
* Start before the end of may for sure, probably way earlier. However note
that all the Homestead places start coming up and being snatched up
in late may/early June, as that's the two-month notice deadline.
* You can find out what a place's elecricity bill was over
the last year from the city. Dial 613-546-0000,press 5
* Places to look you might not have thought of:
Kingston Whig-Standard
Craigslist
Facebook
Websites for holding companies: Panadew, Homestead, Keystone, Springer,
Lamb Rentals, Jonallea Housing, anglesey
* Try to ask around about your prospective landlord. I had an experience that left a sour taste in my mouth with one named Harvey Palmer.

Podless Days and Productive Boredom

I recently saw a fun talk about advice for young researchers by Barrie
Frost, the very successful and entertaining octagenarian animal psychology
prof at Queen's. One of the things he said was about how he got one of his
best ideas (a flight simulator for butterflies!) while walking home for
lunch. He said, "A good way to have ideas is to walk home for lunch!"

This struck me, both because of how it tied in with what all those
computer scientists in my review said about their most creative times -
unstructured, quiet, regular and of a fixed duration, involving exercise -
and because it provides a possible criticism of my way of doing things. I
had been listening to podcasts every single day for my half hour walk to
school and back, and the talk started me wondering if it was stunting my
creativity. I can't mull over whatever problems I may be facing in my
research life if my mind is busy being stimulated and wildly entertained
by the likes of Ira Glass, Terry Gross, Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, Jad
Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, Jesse Thorn and Jordan Morris, and Dan
Savage.

So mondays, wednesdays and (possibly) fridays are now podless days, where
I leave my iPod at home so there's not even the temptation. (the fact that
this feels like a big step is testament to just how much I adore these
shows - and how completely they alleviated the pain of trudging through
the snow for an hour a day this winter) And I have found a slight increase
in creativity. Even if I spend 25 minutes of the time thinking about Phil
Hartman sketches or sex - which are both likely - I'll likely spend 5
minutes touching on the problems I'm about to (or just finished) grappling
with at work, and with that time come up with an idea or two I never could
have in front of my computer.

Basically I wasn't letting myself be bored enough. Think about if you're
filling your day too full of entertainment or tasks, and not allowing for
enough boredom. Your mind needs time to wander and take the *long* way to
a totally novel solution, one that might seem too offbeat to contemplate
and explore when the pressure is on. One of the major foodgroups of
creativity has got to be big blocks of boring time, which a mind that is
already creatively revved up can make good use of.

My Photo System: Archive and Souvenirs

My system for managing my digital photos broke down for good around the
time when more photos I wanted to save were coming from friends cameras
(usually via facebook) than my own. But it was already crumbling
around about the time when the novelty of snapping photos with
my first digital camera wore off. Now I have a new system. It's tuned
for my specific priorities and setup (an ancient iMac and the free
iPhoto), but you may find things you can use with your system.

The central dilemma with regard to photos boils down to: keep or throw
away? Do you err on the side of having oceans of photos, gradually filling
up your hard drive and impossible to find anything in, or carefully
selecting the best? I do both. There are two tiers:

THE ARCHIVE

Basically a bucket for all the photos that have something to do with my
life to collect in. From my camera, facebook, email, etc. The only
winnowing that I do is to erase the worthless blurry ones, or the near
duplicates, or ones taken for special purposes (like a web page). I also
don't put in just cool or funny pictures off the net - these are photos to
do with my life.

Each photo is saved at its original size, more or less unretouched, as
uncompressed as possible (my camera saves them as jpegs, so whatever)

This would still work if it was just a huge list of files - photo
management software could sort through them. But to make things a little
bit easier to find, I put them into folders by term (4 month stretch), and
in those folders I have optional subfolders by the batch of photos - like
"Lindsay's Birthday"

The archive allays my fears of deleting a photo I might value later, gives
me a resource if I feel like wallowing in plentiful images from a
particular time in my life, and lets me indulge the fantasy that someday
something in the corner of one of my photos may be needed in a criminal
investigation, like in Blow Up. (and what if I had just deleted it??)

On the other end of the spectrum are:

SOUVENIR PHOTOS

Complementing my term souvenir system which I discussed in a previous
post, this is a file of photos, divided by term, which have been carefully
selected for maximum enjoyment and reminiscing. Exactly 50 photos per 4
months selected, each retouched, cropped, and exported at 1024x768. Also
ordered chronologically, by hand if necessary.

This gives me a way to get a quick blast of a term - people, places,
events - without having to page through hundreds of repetitive photos.

An organizational system only works if it also comes with processes to
maintain it. Here are the processes for my system:
- Over a term, collect all the photos that come my way to the archive.
- When the term is over, actually a few months after its over so that
those last few photos come in, start going through the archive for that
term and select the photos.
- Every year or so, have the souvenir photos for that year printed and
mailed to me. So 2 years will fit in a 300 photo album.
- When the photo archive gets to be the size of a DVD, burn it and delete
from hard drive.

That last point was the key to my system, when I realized that my whole
enormous glut of photos from my camera over 2 years was only about 3 gigs.
You may use your camera a lot more. But still, I think it makes sense to
keep *everything*. If a photo is 1 meg, then you can fit 4700 photos onto
a DVD. Whether that lasts you 2 years, a year, or 4 months, it's still a
tiny cost in terms of both money and time. DVDs are not the most stable
and long term medium in the world, but it wouldn't be a horrible loss to
lose part of my archive. I can save the heavy backup guns for my souvenir
photos - which will have a tiny size.

Online Discretionary Income Calculator

Following up on my blog post, here's a nice calculator for factoring in at
some of the common expenses into your discretionary (here called
disposable) income calculation, to get you started:

http://www.disposableincome.net/

A nice feature is a calculation of how much time it takes you at your job
to earn things like a coffee, a night at the movies, or a laptop.

The Golden Mango Regime

When thinking about how to work effectively, it's worth looking back on
those times in your life when you just found a groove. In 2001 I had the
wonderful opportunity to write a book chapter for a cognitive science
professor. I set aside 4 months to do almost nothing but research, think,
and write it. But I had a terrible time with it. I was isolated, my time
had no structure, I was too timid to ask for enough help from the project
head, and as far as research went, I had no idea what the fuck I was
doing. It was ok when I was gathering materials and reading for it, but
when I had to admit I had collected as much information as I could use and
it was time to start writing, I stalled out. That blank screen would stare
me down. I had many many days where I did nothing for it, unless you count
worrying.

Finally, by accident, I hit on a fairly extreme regime that nevertheless,
over about a 3 week period, got my draft written. Every single day, I
would do practically no work on it during the day. I would chat with
friends, relax, go for a bike ride, maybe read a littlet for the or do a
couple mindless chores for it. Then every evening - and this seemed key -
I would order the #7 at the Golden Mango in Waterloo (that's shredded pork
on vermicelli with spring roll, yum). Then I would go for a long long walk
by myself, often travelling way out into the agricultural areas, walking
along the roadside or on biketrails in the dusk. Then at 9 o'clock every
day I would get to my little tiny office (actually a storage closet with a
computer in it) and get 2-3 hours of very solid writing done. I'd reread
what I did the day before, fix it up, and power onwards. It wasn't even
hard.

I'd completely forgot about this till just today, but now that it's in
my mind I want to ask, why was this so effective? What can I take from it
for my current life as a graduate student?
* I worked on it every single day. That meant it was always somewhere in
my mind, meaning I was actually doing some work during those unstructured
times.
* I had those unstructured times, when I wasn't trying to force myself to
think about it but had no other real demands on my intellect either. The
daytime, and especially those long walks were good for that.
* I had a workspace with no distractions (surely it had internet - I must
just not have been such an addict back then. See the Privoxy entry for one
approach to combat that)
* I had good food in my belly. There's a famous quote about how
stimulating and encouraging that can be to the cognitive faculties, but
I'm too lazy to hunt it up.
* I was getting some regular exercise.

So this was no doubt a tremendously inefficient routine (not to mention
impractical for most people; and what if you don't like vietnamese food?)
but there's lots I can take from it to add to what I know about how I work
- that is the very hardest parts of what I do, which are writing and
trying to come up with creative research ideas. I want to get back to the
feeling that I had, if only for a little while, then: that I was in
excellent mental and creative shape, with my powers in hand, running with
a long stride and easily jumping obstacles that came along.

Somewhat coincidentally, the point about needing unstructured time to
think was one of the major conclusions of mypaper, which was about
creativity in computer science: creative people need long blocks of time
to let their mind wander. Many of the computer scientists in a survey I
relied heavily on said that the times when they had their best ideas were
on their daily commute, just before or after bed, or in the bath or
shower. In fact Alan Kaye, one of the most creative of them all, had a
special shower installed in the Xerox PARC building just for that purpose,
to help him think! If you were there at 4 in the morning - when he got in
- you might hear him showering merrily away. So one way to be more
creative: take more baths.

How's Your Mise-En-Place?

I've been working on finally setting up my home office to be functional,
and have a flow, mostly following my own interpretation of GTD (David
Allen's system). I was been thinking about the importance of having all
the elements of your system, from inputs (blank paper, your inbox) to
tools (pens that work, stamps, staplers, hole punches, post-it notes,
blank CDs) to outputs (out box, reference filing system, garbage and
recycling) all *within arms reach*. Then I read this, from Anthony
Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, that reinforced why this is so important:

Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks. Do *not* fuck with a
line cook's "meez" - meaning their set-up, their carefully arranged
supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil,
wine, back-ups and so on. As a cook, your station and its condition, its
state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system - and it is
profoundly upsetting if another cook, or God forbid, a *waiter* - disturbs
your precisely and carefully laid-out system. The universe is in order
when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find
everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of
the shift is at the ready at arm's reach, your defenses are deployed. If
you let your mise-en-place run down, get dirty and disorganized, you'll
quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for backup.

Sure my job doesn't have the kind of ultra-high second by second urgency
of being a line cook, but I want to take this attitude towards my desk and
its immediate surroundings:, not just setting it up right to begin with,
but fiercely protecting and maintaining that arrangement. I have a sense
that's a critical part of getting that flow in my job going, that feeling
that my tools are "an extension of your nervous system", like those line
cooks *must* have to survive (I also have a theory that this setupcan play
an important part in fighting procrastination)

Now what is the equivalent of having a good mise-en-place on your
computer?

What's Taking Up All the Space On My Hard Drive?

If you're wondering that, I've discovered a type of tool, called a tree
map, that is thrillingly perfect for visualizing the hierarchical
structure of your hard drive and how much space different files and
folders take up. There are wonderful free implementations for the PC:

http://windirstat.info/

and Mac OS X:

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

Try it!

Another (Probably Better) Approach to Backup

My backup system is failing. The latency is getting to a month or more,
and it's very tiresome. I'm seriously thinking of switching to this hard
core strategy, which seems easy and effective, but costs money to get
going. I'm pasting the text here so I can always find it and it won't
disappear, but it's from here:

http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html
(lots of useful, mostly mac-specific comments below)

--

Dear Lazyweb, and also a certain you-know-who-you-are who should certainly
know better by now,

I am here to tell you about backups. It's very simple.

Option 1: Learn not to care about your data. Don't save any old email, use
a film camera, and only listen to physical CDs and not MP3s. If you have
no posessions, you have nothing to lose.

Option 2 goes like this:

You have a computer. It came with a hard drive in it. Go buy two more
drives of the same size or larger. If the drive in your computer is SATA2,
get SATA2. If it's a 2.5" laptop drive, get two of those. Brand doesn't
matter, but physical measurements and connectors should match.
Get external enclosures for both of them. The enclosures are under $30.
Put one of these drives in its enclosure on your desk. Name it something
clever like "Backup". If you are using a Mac, the command you use to back
up is this:
sudo rsync -vaxE --delete --ignore-errors / /Volumes/Backup/

If you're using Linux, it's something a lot like that. If you're using
Windows, go fuck yourself.

If you have a desktop computer, have this happen every morning at 5AM by
creating a temporary text file containing this line:
0 5 * * * rsync -vaxE --delete --ignore-errors / /Volumes/Backup/

and then doing sudo crontab -u root that-file

If you have a laptop, do that before you go to bed. Really. Every night
when you plug your laptop in to charge.

If you're on a Mac, that backup drive will be bootable. That means that
when (WHEN) your internal drive scorches itself, you can just take your
backup drive and put it in your computer and go. This is nice.
When (WHEN) your backup drive goes bad, which you will notice because your
last backup failed, replace it immediately. This is your number one
priority. Don't wait until the weekend when you have time, do it now,
before you so much as touch your computer again. Do it before goddamned
breakfast. The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it.
That third drive? Do a backup onto it the same way, then take that to your
office and lock it in a desk. Every few months, bring it home, do a
backup, and immediately take it away again. This is your "my house burned
down" backup.
"OMG, three drives is so expensive! That sounds like a hassle!" Shut up. I
know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway.

Update: Mac users: for the backup drive to be bootable, you need to do two
things:

When you partition the drive, use GUID, not Apple Partition Map;
Get Info on the drive and un-check "Ignore ownership on this drive" under
"Ownership and permissions."
You can test whether it's bootable by holding down Option while booting
and selecting the external drive.

----

UPDATE: I have now implemented this system. Well not all of it - I don't have a backup backup hard drive. But I bought a spacious hard drive that is compatible with my computer's internal HD (not that swapping it in will be a piece of cake, but possible), and an enclosure with a fast connection (USB 2.0/Firewire). It wasn't too expensive. I use a program for the mac called Carbon Copy Cloner to automatically backup all changes every week at noon. This hard drive is also bootable - I tried it out. A nicer thing to have would be Apple's Time Machine, which keeps track of many old versions of your files too, but for my geriatric computer and price range Carbon Copy Cloner works well, if slowly, and there are no doubt thousands of similar applications for the PC (and if you're using Linux you're probably comfortable enough with using rsync on the command line). So I'm feeling a lot more secure about my data now. The critical points are that it's *automatic*, it backs up *everything* (don't have to manually add files to backup), and it's *bootable* (so I'm not stuck when my hard drive dies).

How to Ship A Lot of Books Across Canada

BEFORE YOU START

You will need a bunch of boxes, and a tape dispenser (the kind with a
handle and teeth). You can get the boxes from behind a liquor store, or in
the cardboard-only dumpster behind many other kinds of businesses (there's
one behind the McDonald's on Princess in Kingston). You want smallish
boxes, about the size of a cat carrier at most. I found that some of the
plain brown cardboard boxes started to fall apart in transit. What
survived much better were the wine (or wine-making kit?) boxes, which were
shiny and strong, and a nice shape.

You also need a big piece of floor, for the next step.

PREPARING THE BOOKS

This step might not seem necessary, but for me it was the secret, to
making it both manageable and efficient. Pull all the books off the
shelves, every single one, putting them into piles by *size*. In my
collection there are 4 main sizes: pocket book, trade paperback, oversize
trade paperback, hard cover (or super sized trade paperback), and
textbook. If one is not an exact fit for a category, you can always err on
the larger size. And then one more pile for "weird shape" books (which
included a lot of coffee table books for me, since they vary in size).

First of all this lets you see just how big the job is, and how many boxes
you'll need. It's a process that is easy and satisfying. Secondly, it lets
you pack the boxes by size, which is both a very good way to fill the
space and fast - once you've discovered what orientation they will fit in,
you can drop them in by the armful. It had the expected side effect for me
that they are sorted by size when I took them *out* of the box, so I could
fit them to my variable height of bookshelves.

Once a box is full of a certain size of books, you can then fit the
weird-shaped books, and also magazines, in around the sides. One problem I
haven' was that some of these books got damaged around the edges - maybe
it would be better to pack that with clothes or something. Especially if
you use the brown cardboard, this is not a method that can guarantee to
keep your books in mint condition.

I made up some address labels on MS word, which saved some time.

AT THE POST OFFICE

First of all, there is no longer any "book shipping rate" via greyhound or
viarail or some such. At least none that I could find via internet search.
Please tell me if there's an alternative. But as far as I can see you've
got to go canada post.

My big secret here is to tape smaller boxes together, using packing tape
they supply, and that's cheaper. My dad has known this trick for years,
but I went so far as to geek out and prove why that's true. I spent a fair
bit of time experimenting with the online package rate calculator, and
these are my findings, valid as of January 2008:

- Canada Post rates are calculated by weight, unless the dimensions become
oversized, at which point it is calculated by size.
- The formula is $1.18 per kg + $8.70 (when not oversized) This may not
include the fuel surcharge I just realized, so may underestimate by $1-3.
- Switching to the oversize will always make it more expensive, so you
want to avoid that. The formula is to add up all 3 dimensions in
centimeters, multiply by $0.56, and subtract $50.52.
- The rules for when something becomes oversized are complex, and I didn't
figure them out entirely. Things can be bigger if they're heavier, and I
suspect the more cubic something is (and so hard to pack) the lower the
threshold. A medium box packed with books won't be oversize, but if you
tape a bunch together it might be. Your best bet is to consult with the
person at the post office to make sure you don't go over.

You can see the logic of taping boxes together now: since a 0 kg box costs
$8.70, that's how much you save everytime you tape together two boxes.

At the post office is the place to make sure they're really well taped up.
Some of mine not so much, and there were rips in the cardboard.

That's basically all I've figured out, besides make sure to have a car or
a friend with a car on both ends (my awesome dad actually did the final
mailing on the Victoria side)

THE COST

I shipped the equivalent of about 19 wine-kit sized boxes of books,
8x12x14 inches each (so a bit more than 22 feet on the shelf), for
$319.42. A typical box, actually two taped together, was 16 kg and about
$30. It hurt, but it was sure nice to be reunited. Like all book-loving
people, building a proper home (not a temporary home), I'm just going to
have to get used to this whole process happening every few years.

If you're reading this and know any tips, I'd love to hear them. The
biggest thing that would have helped me: improved tape despenser
technique. I still can't get the hang of that, and end up completely taped
to myself.

Souvenir Folders, Pouches of the Past

The first time I organized in any way shape or form was halfway through my
first term in residence. I was trying to clean up entirely, for
essentially the first time (I was a pig. Still basically am). I found
places for all the things I needed to function, and threw out a lot more,
but then I was still left with papers that I wanted to hang onto, even
though I didn't need them. That was the key revelation: that I want to
keep them for the *memories* associated with them. They were souvenirs.
Which is a totally legitimate reason to keep something. Here's the system
I came up with.

Every 4 months I start a new big yellow envelope (whatever they're
called). 4 months because that's the schedule I ran on for years in
school, and still feels like a natural way to segment my life. I write on
it Souvenirs 2007 Sept - Dec for instance. In there goes anything flat I
want to save to remind me of that period: ticket stubs, show posters,
personal letters and postcards, notes from people and from myself,
newspaper clippings. Then after the 4 months it's effectively sealed
(though not literally, since I will often find things later on that belong
in there). How to deal with 3D objects? Well there aren't that many of
them. But in some cases, I suppose you could take a lot of photos of it,
and put those in the folder...

I've adopted the same system for computer files: images and text off the
internet (and increasingly, flash videos downloaded from YouTube that
reflect something that affected me at the time - like Obama's recent
primary speech answering the accusation that he was about "just words"),
bits of work by me and friends. I also use it now to archive all the
personal email, digital photos (including other peoples'), and substantial
MSN chats that I have over the 4 months. They all go in the same folder,
which is named like 2007 Sept-Apr - I discovered if I used that
convention, alphabetical is the same as chronological order (Jan - May -
Sept).

This means that all this stuff is out of my current workspace, but is
safely preserved. Once in a while I will go back to one of those old
folders and crack it open, and it's like the aroma of that time in my life
comes pouring out: fears, excitements, people and places. It's important
to start being the librarian of your own life right now, because that
stuff will zoom into the past so fast. Do *you* remember what was on your
mind in say, the winter of 2004?

Quick Reference Check Trick

This is for a pretty limited audience, but I find it so useful I'm
putting it here so I don't forget it.

If you are writing an academic paper with citations, and you're worried
about getting the formatting of them wrong - especially if you use an
automatic reference manager like EndNote - this is a way to quickly step
through every reference in a Word document. It only works if your
references are in APA style or similar, that is, (Schlemiel & Schnook,
2007)

1. Go to Edit -> Find
2. Click the More button
3. Select Use wildcards
4. Type into the Find what box (exactly): [0123456789]\)

Now just keep clicking Find Next and it will take you on a tour of all the
references in your document.

If you are using EndNote, it's also a good idea to search for "#" and "{"
just to make sure there aren't any unprocessed tags you've left.

The ABC System for Prioritizing Projects

I keep a list of projects in my PDA, frequently updated (at the very least
once a week). When I started doing that after a while I found the length
of the list overwhelming - and a lot of it were things that I'd just like
to make progress on if I had extra time, but weren't that urgent. So now I
put a letter in front of each project name (which makes it sort the list
this way):

A: Top priority projects, must be significantly progressed *this week*.
Often need to be finished this week.

B: Projects that are a bit time sensitive, or important, but nothing bad
will happen if I don't make any progress this week.

C: Projects I would like to get done, but nothing bad would happen if I
didn't get to them in the next 4 months or so. Or else they are time
sensitive, but really unimportant so it would be ok to let it go. Should
keep next actions on the todo lists, but no worries if I don't get to the
todo item for a long time.

This is why frequently reviewing it is absolutely essential: B items can
become A items! Todo list items in my PDA can have a priority from 1-5. So
it's natural to associate 1 with A, etc. for the todo items associated
with a project.

5 Things To Do When Starting a New Project

1 Make space for it. First clear your desk of other projects, by filing
away or dumping into your inbox. Then choose a name (or code name), very
important, and making a file folder for it (under Zillion Folder Filing).
Take out a blank piece of paper, the first piece of paper for the folder,
and use that for things 2-4.

2 Purpose. Write it down in about 1 sentence, why you're taking on this
project.

3 Outcome visioning. Envision WILD SUCCESS for your project. Try to
imagine as many details of what that would look like as possible.

In case you need encouragement, Bill Drummond says:

"We all have the capacity for unlimited fantasy, it is the fuel of genius.
Do not be afraid to turn on the tap and let it flow. ... Fantasy can be a
dangerous area to delve into, an unreal place to escape into. Fantasy is
also the place where everything starts from. The place where a personality
can grow. ... Do not be afraid of your fantasies. Dive into them."

4 Subprojects. Break the project into subprojects that you can pursue and
finish independent of each other, as many as possible. Think of one
concrete, physical action, no matter how small, you can do towards each
one. If some of those subprojects look big and intimidating by themselves,
you might want to repeat these steps 1-5 for it.

5 I Have Decided. Write that as a heading, with lots of space underneath,
and quickly make and write down as many decisions as you can think of
about the project: when you want to finish it by, when and how you'll work
on it, what you *wont* do for it as well as what you will, even when and
how you'll make other decisions.

(This is basically David Allen's "natural planning", with a few tweaks of
mine)

The Sleep Formula

Running low on sleep turns up the suck on everything, especially
intelligence and mood. Sleep deprivation sucks in any job, but is
especially disastrous in a self-motivated, creative-type job like being a
grad student. I can easily lose a whole day of sciencing if I screw up
that night's sleep. What's confusing though is the sense that the night
*before* last night plays a big part too. So how can I predict for how I'm
going to feel on a given day? (the non-geek may wish to skip
to the punchline at this point.) As a simple model, I will call the lack
of sleep deprivation, or the amount of well-restedness, my "sleep charge",
and it will be a function of the last n nights' hours of sleep. Let's make
it a linear function then at time t it's x(1)*s(t) + x(2)*s(t-1) + ... +
x(n)s(1+t-n). So what are the x's and the n? How far back do I look at my
sleep pattern, and what weightings do I give them?

This will differ for different people. But for myself I've decided and
tested the model of going back only 2 nights. And they will be equally
weighted. (so this is a 2-point simple moving average) The formula I now
use, and which has been remarkably successful in predicting how much I get
done and how I feel about it is this then:

Sleep charge = number of hours slept last night * 0.5 + number of hours
slept the night before * 0.5

As an example, 6.5 hours one night and 8 hours the next, equals a sleep
charge of 7.25. Now all I need is interpretation. Using intuition, for me
I think it goes something like this:

Sleep charge < 7: Zombie like.
Sleep charge 7-7.5: Ok
Sleep charge >= 7.5: Shiny and full of pep, cleverness and creativity.

This rule has been astoundingly accurate at predicting my days over the
last week and a half. Just as the formula predicts, one bad night affected
two days and then I was fine. And knowing that showed how it's useful: by
knowing I was going to havee a zombie day, I could stop panicking about
being too scattered and slothful, take it easy on myself, and plan for
what I *can* do - there are always a few zombie jobs around that I've been
putting off. And it becomes ultra-clear what the benefit of getting that
extra bit of sleep is, and when to plan to exploit that burst of willpower
and inspiration (like I had sunday).

What have you figured out about how your sleep works?

Ira Glass on the Taste Gap

These youtube videos by Ira Glass of the glorious radio show This American
Life make up one of the most inspiring 12 minutes I've ever seen:

http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2007/02/ira-glass-on-storytelling.html

The biggest revelation was this one, in Glass-speak which I have
painstakingly transcribed (because I love it):

"there's a gap - that for the first couple of years that you're making
stuff, what you're making isn't so good, ok, it's not that great. It's
trying to be good, but it's really not that good. But your *taste*, the
thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer. And your
taste is still so good that you can tell that what you're making is kind
of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? Like you can tell that
it's still sort of crappy. A lot people never get past that phase, a lot
of people at that point they quit. And the thing I would just like to say
to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know, who does
interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they
had really good taste and they knew what they were making wasn't as good
as they wanted it to be. They fell short...

You gotta know that it's totally normal, and the most important possible
thing that you can do, is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put
yourself on a deadline so you know that every week, every month you're
going to finish one story, whatever it's going to be.... it's only by
doing a volume of work that you're going to catch up, that you're going to
close that gap and the work you're making will be as good as your
ambitions."

And then, god bless him, he plays an old, embarassing tape of himself on
the radio, to make the point of how after *8 years* working at it he was
still pretty bad. And yet, eventually, he *got* it.

The Weekly Review

This is such an essential part of how I work now that when I miss it for
some reason I feel a sense of confusion and anxiety. However when I do
complete it I feel just the opposite.

Like most of the revolutionary changes in my habits over the last 16
months, this is from Getting Things Done. But this one is the motor that
powers everything else about the system. Basically all the lists I use in
my daily work get updated and cleaned up, and so do all the papers and
objects in my working area.

I block out early friday afternoons for this - recommended because if the
process turns up something urgent then you can still catch people at work.
I have to make sure to allow no less than 2 full hours. The fact that I've
missed no more than a handful of weekly reviews in the last year - in the
middle of a work day on a typically busy week, all through writing my
thesis - speaks to how critical it's become.

So what it involves is going down a checklist that I made in Microsoft
Word and print out each time. I changed it around a lot at the beginning,
but now it's pretty much stabilized. Here's the short version, of the
absolutely key parts of my weekly review:

* Dumping my pockets, backpack, and desk clutter into my inbox (this step
is great - today I realized I've been carrying a loaf of bread in my
backpack to school and back for three days)
* Pruning all my to do lists
* Copy reminders and notes from my pocket index cards into my PDA
* For every project on my list, check out that the timetable is on track,
and figure out what is a visible, physical action I can do towards it to
put on a to do list.
* Process all my inboxes (more on this in future, but basically go through
every item one by one and put it away, chuck it, or do one step towards
dealing with it, until the inbox is empty)
* Go through my deferred work boxes, to make sure nothing is mouldering in
there
* Empty my garbage and recycling

My real list is much longer, since it's such a habit I can easily attach
more items to it that need to happen regularly - like making backups.

Interestingly, the emptying garbage & recycling is one of the best
results. There's an insidious bit of mental resistance to getting rid of
something if you have a full recycling box, and fixing that alone can help
organization a lot.

When this is all done, my desk is clean and clear. Everything is in its
place. In the words of my favourite kids book, Rhyme and reason reign once
more, sense and sanity prevail. And not just physically, I know that my
projects are mentally in order, since I've looked at them and their
deadlines and figured out what the next step is for each. I can leave to
enjoy my saturday with a lightness in my step.

Magpieing: How my collectors work

I had this image of like a giant bin I could carry along with me, like an
apple-pickers sack if you've seen one of those, and I could pick out and
collect all the shiny and fascinating things I heard or saw or thought of
and toss them in the hopper to be saved for good. Because I'd been
thinking about the problems of creativity, how many ideas you come across
in a day and forget about, and also how people manage to think of the
perfect quotation to head their book chapter, or give weight or wit to a
best-man's speech. Certain people must have found a way to build their
private hoards, like a magpie.

So about a year ago I discovered that I can comfortably sit on five
ordinary index cards in my back pocket, along with a pen clipped on the
outward side. As people who've hung out with me lately know, I can whip my
stack of cards out at a moments notice to make a note. Quotations,
research ideas, to do items, upcoming events, people's names, all go on
those cards.

Then at least once a week I enter it all into my PDA and replenish with
fresh cards. This is a certain amount of work, and takes at least half an
hour a week, but I've found that it's totally worth it. It means that if
something comes up for me to work on in the future I can act on it
immediately, making a note, rather than attempting to mentally store it
away. It's nearly perfect in its capturing of book recommendations,
projects to try someday maybe, and events around town. But it's really
changed things in how it lets me save random inspirations I have
throughout the day. For instance I will share with you this one, from last
month:

"The fantasy of an edible world, made of candy or chocolate. Does that
mean on some level we'd really like to bite everything we see?"

Ok they're not all gold. But that's the great part: good or bad, it's out
of my head and down on paper, freeing up space for the next idea to come
along. As David Brooks says, "your brain is a great place to have ideas,
but not to store them."

Why index cards and not directly into my PDA? Well it's slightly less rude
to be writing on an index card, since people might think I was checking
email (even though my Palm was manufactured during the Clinton
administration). I'd take them places I wouldn't take my palm. But the big
point is just that little bit of extra time to write using the touch
screen could mean just enough resistance for me to decide to be lazy and
skip this one (pretending that I'll write it later). It's got to feel
pretty much automatic.

The quotation collector is working great too, already giving me a glorious
heap of endlessly ponderable thoughts, like this one also from April:

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend
to be." -Kurt Vonnegut

This is what sold me on the PDA in the first place: a practically
unlimited storage space for bits of text and lists (and searchable!).
Paper just won't do for a permanent storage medium for this, because it
inspires rationing and stinginess: it should be ok to have one month where
I collect and store *a thousand* quotes - maybe even all from the same
source if you really hit a vein. In the realm of digitized text it's ok to
be a packrat.

The funnest part of it I'm finding are the lists that aren't so essential,
but come along with the rest for free. Without them I would have already
forgotten my enjoyment of the words chthonic, paragon, chirality and imbue
last month (in the Words list). And my unexpected favourite is a list I've
been keeping of Phrases, funny, catchy or interesting strings of words
that have caught my ear. They come from rap songs, newspaper headlines,
advertising, the web, tv shows, comedy routines, overheard conversations,
spam, and my own brain. Keep in mind while reading this list is that I
made no special effort to notice these in April, and by just emptying my
collectors this list essentially made itself. (please see me about
permission if you wish to use one of these for your band name)

2007 April
fill your boots
haplessness, hype and hypnosis
You can allure femme covert?
fleeing inmates seldom analyze the consequences
If it wasn't for disappointments, I wouldn't have any appointments
Desperate lark
A flying screamer, and a crasher too
All persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.
accidents in a very busy place
Shields up, lock the door and keep your dukes up
We're all concerned about how gross you look.
looking like you just got diagnosed with cancer of the puppy
spurty knowledge
the only way out is through
two-story outhouse
If this isn't nice, what is? (I don't know what is)
The first of your many reverse masterstrokes
The weather is not trippy, perhaps it is the way we perceive it that is
indeed trippy...
Who will survive, and what will be left of them?
I believe in an eye for a tooth and a tooth for an eye. I like to mix it
up like that.
Reincarnation is making a comeback
Kittenball
Feeling dangerously well
Pick up your whiskers
This teetering bulb of dread and dream - Edson
Soul shards
Dessert in motion
fast snails
That's where I'm a viking
I like people with big egos. They remind me of me.
If you're going to laugh about something in 5 years, you might as well
laugh about it now.
Love not given lightly
SCIENTIFIC PROOF THAT I'M JESUS CHRIST AND GOD
Designated mammal
Hasta la bye bye
Now he walks through his sunken dream
Even the blues gets the blues

(I wrote that last one down in the middle of the night, and I have no
idea what it means. Any thoughts?)

How To Get Things Done With No Deadline

From the wonderful and inspiring blog by famed Buffy writer Jane Espenson,
some advice about how to finish projects regularly without setting
yourself artificial deadlines - which rarely work for me, so the job ends
up expanding to fill the time allotted for it:

"Well, save me from myself, because the answer seems to be: take on
another project. Suddenly, that distant deadline looks a lot closer,
doesn't it? Because I know there's that other thing that also has to get
done in the same amount of time. Now I'm working -- fast, smoothly,
without a lot of hand-wringing and pacing. Just writin' without thinkin'.

My father always says 'give the job to the busy person.' He means that the
reason that the busy person has so much work on their desk is because
everyone knows that they're the one who will get it done. There's a lot to
be said for making yourself the busy person."

http://www.janeespenson.com/archives/00000204.php

This idea makes me feel a little scared, even gives me that sensation in
my gut remembering what it can be like to be overwhelmed with commitments.
And yet I think there's wisdom there. As I greatly improve my organization
and hence ability to manage multiple projects, I actually find I *want* to
take on more. For instance, becoming the VP of education of Queen's
Toastmasters. In general, these projects are getting done - largely
because I see the other ones lined up behind them.

Zooming In

I've been working at getting good at projects that require a lot of tiny
errands that have to be done at specific times and places, like doing my
taxes. So getting things done smoothly without a lot of mental effort. But
when it comes down to it, there are certain projects that just demand
extended concentration - and those include any project that really takes
creativity. I've just read two articles, one in Time and one in Walrus,
about how harmful multitasking turns out to be, and I think they mean this
kind of project.

So I think of it as "zooming in" on a task, an image I like because it
includes the most important part: excluding things that are outside the
focus of the task. To do good writing, for instance, it really seems like
I have to have pushed other things out of my mind - and off my desk. Off
the desk is easy, I just dump everything in my inbox (or file it away if I
want). Then thanks to my Zillion Folder Filing system, I can have a folder
in front of me with *just* the things that are relevant to that project.
Often it helps to grab a fresh piece of paper.

Clearing a space mentally is harder. When you've got half a dozen
deadlines or undone tasks - even other parts of the same project - nagging
at your mind, it gets hard to concentrate for more than 10 consecutive
seconds. The only solution I've found is better time management. You have
to be sure that you have *plenty* of time to focus on this one thing, and
nothing else. That means budgetting that uninterruptable time, at least an
hour usually, and making *hard barriers* on either side of that time to
stop other tasks from seeping in, even if they are urgent. Often for that
to happen I have to make sure I've decided when those things *are* going
to get done. This is why I try to always block out my day the night
before: "project A before lunch, and not even thinking about project B
until after lunch"

Of course the other thing that can prevent focus sometimes are other, more
emotional issues: guilt, insecurity, all those negative inner voices.
Those can be reflective of bigger things than the scope of this blog, but
two quick strategies that sometimes work: arguing with those voices, in
writing (what the psychologist Martin Seligman calls disputation); and
sometimes when I can't actually do the work, I can *plan* the work - as in
the tactic I read somewhere of pretending you've given up on the task, but
you have to write a detailed list of instructions for what the person who
*is* going to finish it needs to do.

The Ten Year Rule

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945

Fascinating article about the psychological concept of chunking, and how
it takes about 10 years of hard work in any area to become a master of
that area:

"Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but 'effortful
study,' which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond
one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens
of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument
without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained
student can overtake them in a relatively short time."

That fits in well with my maxim of "experience alone is a poor teacher" -
that you need continual feedback and consideration, as well as always
pushing yourself further, to benefit from experience. I've seen how it's
possible to get good incredibly fast if these conditions are met. Which
gives me hope for all the abilities I haven't even started trying to
master...

I found the link on a great screenwriting blog by Alex Epstein, at

http://complicationsensue.blogspot.com/2006/08/push-envelope.html, who
adds about the process of chunking:

I think I do that, in my field. When I have a screenplay in my head, I
sort of "feel" it. I don't think in terms of beats, though beats are what
I write down. I think in terms of story structures. In other words I don't
see a beginning, a middle, and an end; I see a beginning-middle-and-end
that all go together... Comedians do the same thing. Ken Levine wrote in
one of his posts about how Jim Brooks [of the Simpsons!] would come up
with entire pages of dialog on the spot. It wasn't that he was having one
insight after another. He had ONE BIG INSIGHT that gave him the whole run
of jokes.

The Emergency Break Glass Kit

Sometimes you just know you're about to waste a whole afternoon. You've got time, but you're feeling so groggy or unmotivated or indecisive that you know those hours are going to slip away. For times like that, I envisioned an emergency kit that you would break the glass on with a little hammer, and it would contain all the things you need to get energized and accomplish at least *one* thing.

Maybe I'll make that someday, but what is almost as good and that I make use of every so often is this list of commands for me to follow, unthinkingly, when I find myself in that predicament:

1. Have a snack (I keep protein bars in my desk)
2. Drink a short can of cola (ditto)
3. Sweep everything on my desk into my inbox (sometimes mere clutter slows me to a halt)
4. Take out a blank piece of paper and write down the name of 1 project to make progress on for 2 hours solid. (having too many projects vying for my attention can also be a source of paralysis)
5. Brainstorm all the ways I can make progress on this project
6. Pick one of those ways, decide what the next simple, physical action would be towards that. If the task is an unpleasant one, launch web browser and do 10 and 2s.
7. Two hours later, go home!

For a while I was trying to make something out of a shoebox, that would contain the pop and protein bar, and these instructions. I still want to someday. What would you put in your emergency kit? Some other suggestions for what might go in:

* A cd burned with high energy music
* A map to go take a walk
* Inspirational phrases
* Step by step list of exercises
* Smokebombs. Because those are always handy.

Saturdays Are Off

I take saturdays completely off. I might take the evenings of a few other days off, but saturdays I *have* to take off. Jim Davies, a hardworking, successful cognitive scientist, showed me how this works; definitely read about his philosophy here. It struck a chord with me because I'd read a Garison Keillor advice column years ago about a man who was being driven almost to insanity, on the tenth year of his PhD, stressed out every single day and yet no longer making any progress at all. "Mr. Blue" advised him to take one day completely off, to reconnect with life and at least briefly lift the burden of his career worries.

So that's what I've done every week for about 10 months now. I kept it up all through the writing of my masters thesis, through many other scary deadlines, breaking my rule only twice that I can remember and that was when I was just getting used to it. It *is* possible, and a glorious thing.

Some saturdays end up being about rest and self-indulgence, like spending most of it catching up on some tv show, but many are about having adventures and trying new things. What I've really come to treasure is the looseness of the day. Saturdays are for serendipity and digressions, randomly running into people and spending the next 3 hours hanging out. On saturdays my theme songs are "The 59th Bridge Song" by Simon and Garfunkel and Mr. Tambourine Man: "I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to."

Today was a great example. I slept in late after going dancing last night (friday nights are the other time that I almost always take off), then wandered downtown to get my hair cut. Afterwards I strolled on Princess St, as I often do of a saturday - it's the long main street in Kingston and offers constant interest in the form of shops and people. I lunched at a deli I'd never been in before, and tried a czechoslovakian pickle recommended by the counter lady. Then I went with Jamal and Michelle for a matinee of the ridiculous, wonderful spectacle of Ghost Rider. For dinner I ate enormous amounts of sushi served in a wooden boat with Meghan and Tyson. And now I'm writing in this blog. Soon I will watch an episode of Friday Night Lights, or read my book about Baltimore homicide detectives. All these things I do because I feel like them, without the tiniest bit of guilt or having any obligation to think about work once (although it's not uncommon that I get good ideas on my day off! That loose mindset is great for creativity)

I can justify this not just for my sanity, but for productivity. The flipside is that I put in a nearly-full day of work on sunday (often getting a slightly later start). It's nice and quiet in the office, completely free of distractions. Sunday is frequently my most productive day of the week. I used to have weekends that were two days where I could never fully enjoy myself and yet got hardly anything done. Instead I have a great time on saturdays, and on sundays get more done than I used to in two days - usually more than on any other day of the week.

Give it a try!

The Importance of Alone Time

Interesting advice from a cutting-edge web development company:

"When you have a long stretch when you aren't bothered, you can get in the
zone. The zone is when you are most productive. It's when you don't have
to mindshift between various tasks. It's when you aren't interrupted to
answer a question or look up something or send an email or answer an im.
The alone zone is where real progress is made.

Getting in the zone takes time. And that's why interruption is your enemy.
It's like rem sleep - you don't just go to rem sleep, you go to sleep
first and you make your way to rem. Any interruptions force you to start
over. rem is where the real sleep magic happens. The alone time zone is
where the real development magic happens.

Set up a rule at work: Make half the day alone time. From 10am-2pm, no one
can talk to one another (except during lunch). Or make the first or the
last half of the day the alone time period. Just make sure this period is
contiguous in order to avoid productivity-killing interruptions.

A successful alone time period means letting go of communication
addiction. During alone time, give up instant messenging, phone calls, and
meetings. Avoid any email thread that's going to require an immediate
response. Just shut up and get to work."

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Alone_Time.php

The Joy of Outboxes

I'm going to write a longer entry about the greatness of inboxes, but
something of immediate use is an outbox: a place you can immediately put
stuff in to be taken to the office, or from the office. The important
point is that it's got to be within arms reach. At work it's a plastic
tray, at home it's one side of the top of my dresser. When I leave either
location I automatically scoop what's in my outbox into my bag.

This works for the same reason as a lot of the things I've recently
adopted: it means I can act *immediately*, even thoughtlessly, when I
think of something I have to do - instead of making a mental note, which
a) often doesn't work and b) adds to stress as I have to keep reminding
myself over and over. Goes to my outbox, goes out of my head.

Swaying To The Top

"When the Bass brothers financed the first Biosphere, that earth in a
bubble out in Arizona, the trees all failed in an interesting way. All the
trees in the biosphere were droopy and lacked the strength to stand
upright. They grew, but were too weak to stand. They studied the problem
and found the answer. No wind. The Biosphere bubble lacked any wind so the
trees had nothing to make them sway. It was the swaying, pushing against
an invisible yet very palpable force, that gave them the strength to grow
upright, stand reaching up to the sky."
- reader of David Byrne's online journal

This is such a beautiful metaphor, and quoted on so many christian
websites, that I was afraid it would turn out not to be true. Not so. From
a transcript of PBS's Scientific American Frontiers:

ALAN ALDA You know what else I noticed that you don't seem to have- out in
this big open space, anyway- is wind.

BERND ZABEL That's correct.

ALAN ALDA That's a big element that's missing, isn't it?

BERND ZABEL Which causes a problem for these trees. When you look here,
these acacia trees, they have very funny forms. And what we found out
later on, that if a tree grows, to harden the tree it needs wind action.
Every time when a tree moves, it builds actually outside what is called a
stress wood.

ALAN ALDA So that strengthens the tree?

BERND ZABEL So it strengthens the tree. In our case here, the tree is
growing without any wind, without any disturbance, and it actually becomes
so top heavy that they break off.
- PBS Scientific American Frontiers

What's Your Learning Style?

I had the interesting experience today of filling out the Kolb Learning
Style Inventory, homework for my university teaching course. You answer 12
questions, and it gives you a readout on where you are along four learning
style dimensions. These are Active Experimentation, Active
Experimentation, Reflective observation, and Concrete experience. From
there they show how different combinations of strengths in these areas
make up different overall learning styles.

I only half buy this stuff (mindful of the Barnum effect and the often
unearned authority of things that have numbers attached to them), but it
has been a valuable experience calculating my own score and seeing what it
can say about me - as well as the alternatives to the way I learn. I turn
out to be a highly Converging learner, because of my Active
Experimentation and Abstract Conceptualization. Especially the latter was
really high, the result of ranking highly statements such as "When I learn
I like ideas and theories" and "When I am learning I am a logical person".
(big surprise)

Somewhat disturbingly, this learning style is thought to work best in
highly technical professions like economics, engineering and computer
science. The learning style of the scientist and mathematician is more
Assimilating (Reflective observation and Abstract Conceptualization) Could
knowing this help me to become more comfortable and affective as a
scientist, by developing my more Assimilitating side?

I recommend you give this a try if you have the chance. I feel that not
only will it help me to teach people with other learning styles and
appreciate their different strengths, it's made me think about what I can
do to take advantage of these other types of learning. Interestingly, some
foreign and awkward skills I am working at these days, like socializing at
parties and lifting weights properly, are probably really working those
underdeveloped learning styles. Kolb provides a semi-helpful table of
advice for what to try to improve on each style:

For Diverging (Reflective observation and Concrete experience)
* Being sensitive to people's feelings
* Being sensitive to values
* Listening with an open mind
* Gathering information
* Imagining the implications of ambiguous situations

For Assimilating (Reflective observation and Abstract Conceptualization)
* Organizing information
* Testing theories and ideas
* Building conceptual models
* Designing experiments
* Analyzing quantitative data

For Converging (Active Experimentation-Abstract Conceptualization)
* Creating new ways of thinking and doing
* Experimenting with new ideas
* Choosing the best solution
* Setting goals
* Making decisions

For Accomodating (Concrete experience and Active Experimentation)
* Committing yourself to objectives
* Seeking new opportunities
* Influencing and leading others
* Becoming personally involved
* Dealing with people

How Much Money Do I Have? The Concept of Discretionary Income

All the bright-eyed 17 to 19 year olds in the huge auditorium were asking questions like, are blue chip stocks as good an investment as they once were? and Is property a better investment in this economic climate? but I just had one simple, burning question for the money guru: how do I figure out how much money I have? Bits of money are coming in and going out at all different intervals, and it is bewildering! My rent cheque is every month, but my graduate award money comes in a big chunk in september and january. Then my TA pay is spread over 7 months. I definitely can't just look at the number in my bank account: most of it might be earmarked for a big withdrawal, for tuition say, the tuition that changes every term!

He looked a little impatient, but spat out the following great advice: pick some span of time for which your big expenses and earnings are fairly predictable. Could be the next 12 months, 6 months, or in my case 8 months. Add up your earnings over that period, and then subtract your fixed expenses. Then divide by however many months. That's your discretionary income! That's the money you make a conscious decision how to spend each month.

In my first calculation, I included for expenses my tuition, and rent (which in my case includes utilities, phone bill and internet), but also a few other expenses I knew were fixed: my regular laundry bill, my zip.ca membership, and a monthly grocery budget, which I estimated by looking at the last year of interac payments to grocery stores. I just tonight made a second version of this discretionary income, adding in my B.C. Provincial Health care payment, an estimate of how much I spend on photo developing and stationery every month, my fancy new haircut expenses, my cellphone, and my allergy medication. I put it all into a microsoft excel spreadsheet, so that I can see the calculations laid out, and so that if any of the numbers change I can easily recalculate. (one tip: if something goes over say 5 weeks, like my haircut, just divide by 5 and multiply by the average weeks in a month, which is 4.34)

Now I've got a number, my discretionary income for the month. This is great, because it makes possible again all the good financial concepts you had when you were a kid, with just a piggy bank: saving up for things, waiting for your allowance, not being able to afford things, giving up something so you can buy something else. (one way to see just how much something will set you back is to look at it in terms of percentage of your discretionary income, and compare it to other things. Can be surprising!). And then, if you decide to chop off a bit more to save for the long term (what do they recommend? 10%? 20%?), and maybe an emergency fund, you can feel totally free to spend *all* of what is left.

Though you probably learn this in the first day of Accounting 101, it was a big revelation for me: not only does this mean more confidence when I pull out my wallet, but I probably will actually spend more - or at least splurge, and economize, on the right things, knowing where it counts. (hey why not spend the extra dough for the *good* jam - 0.1% of my discretionary income is not going to kill me!)

In a future entry I'll talk about the way I use my PDA to conveniently track basically everything I spend, and some nerdy but neat and useful things you can do with that.

How Important Is Networking?

Here's a bit from an interview with the lead special effects artist on
Angel, about getting established in a competitive field like his:

--

WWFF -
How important is networking?

AH -
The two things you have to do in LA, boiled down, are, 1. work on your
thing, and 2. build relationships. You have to know when to shut the door
and get some time on the clock building your skills. That.s why you.re
here, so, get something done. Don.t party everyday, unless you already
have the career you want. But then, you also have to know when to go out
and drink (or not drink) with people. You have to build relationships with
people you.re going to work with. Go to all film wrap parties. A film wrap
party is not so much about hooking up with the wardrobe girl as it is
about having a little fun with each crewperson. You.re kind of saying,
.hey, I liked what you did on this movie, lets work together again some
time.. You have to become a face in the film community, even if just in
one small circle. And if you can, you should constantly try to hook other
people up with jobs. Do a little bit of that and now you have a family.
Going out to parties and bars has gotten me jobs, gotten me into doors to
pitch movies, gotten my screenplay to a high profile Hollywood agent (even
though he didn.t like it, my vodka-aided pitch in the corner of the bar
got him to read it within a day, which is almost unheard of). I suppose
the same could be said of golf courses.

One Approach To Version Numbers

Make the whole numbers the "official releases": the ones that are good enough for official-type people (in the case of my thesis, my advisor or my thesis committee members) to read. Or, if it's a sofware package you're working on, to try out. The decimals in between, associate with preplanned milestones. So for example, here are some actual version numbers I planned out for my thesis
(after version 1, which my advisor Niko and others read):

Draft 1.4 First pass, incorporating the major points of comment
1.5 textually complete, but without all the final checks on the
text, and not the refs. Incorporates Niko, Jim & Anna's comments.
1.8 Formatted according to apa and everything, but has not had a final
readthrough by me for spelling etc
1.9 Try to get other people to proofread

And then version 2 went to my committee. Once a copy of the file you're
working on has met the milestone criteria, save it with the filename of
the next version along, so "Thesis draft 1p5" is the file for draft 1.5
*in progress*. For supersmall changes, fixes etc that are not planned,
you could maybe use the next decimal: 1.9.1 has a disastrous typo fixed,
etc.

Then, and this is important, you save that list of the version numbers and
what they mean, either on your computer or in your paper filing system.

Two points:
This is mostly for handling linear versioning for one person, not those
complicated cases where you want to branch off in two different
directions. So you can go back to earlier versions, but you can't work on
two alternate versions in parallel. We had extremely complex commercial
software packages at Amazon.com just to handle those kind of cases -
especially the difficulty of putting two alternate versions back together.

And if you just need linear versioning, Word now has a feature that can
let you save all those versions into a single file. Go to File ->
versions... and you can see how it works. For that there would probably be
no point to having version numbers. But I'm not sure if I entirely trust
that file format.

The Zillion Folder Filing System

"I bought a donut and they gave me a receipt for the donut... I can't imagine a scenario in which I would need to prove that I bought a donut. "Listen, skeptical friend, don’t even act like I didn't buy a donut, I've got the documentation right here. Oh wait, it's back home in the file... under 'D', for donut."
- Mitch Hedberg

(you might want to peek at the Prelude to the Zillion Folder Filing System for some accompanying illustrations)

It doesn't sound like it would work - but I've been using it for 8 months, and so far, it totally does. And having a filing system that really works, that you actually *use*, makes an incredible difference. Imagine never losing a scrap of paper, very important or not so important, lists, plans, instructions, previous work. Imagine being able to instantly pull up every single piece of paper associated with a particular project and have it on your lap.

I think what inhibited me in developing an organizational system was the feeling that I should have a clever, detailed hierarchy set up that would anticipate my every need. What are the major divisions of your life? Now how can you subdivide those? You could spend a lot of time trying to figure that out. Then a piece of paper comes along that doesn't fit into one of the categories, so you don't file it, or stick it somewhere it doesn't really belong, and bingo, your system is broken, like most people's.

So this is one that actually works for me. I got it from Getting Things Done by David Allen, and have named it the Zillion Folder Filing System. There's no point in repeating it all, so I'll just give the skeleton and my experiencce with it. What you absolutely need to make it work:

* A filing cabinet with drawers that slide open and closed smoothly, even when heavily loaded
* The metal thingy that goes in those drawers to help file folders stand up. Sometimes found at the very back. (mine was in pieces, so it was a great victory when I figured out how all the spring and all the bits of metal went together)
* A zillion ordinary manila folders (in practice I think I bought 200 - the point is that they should feel very plentiful)
* A labeller, and at least one extra roll of tape for it. (I bought a Dymo Letra Tag, about $30, and it's worked great for me)

How to do it:
1. Place all of these items within sitting-down, arms reach of your desk
2. When you have a piece of paper you want to save for future reference, put it into an existing folder, or grab a manila folder and make a label for it.
3. Stick that folder into the drawer in *alphabetical order*

That's basically all there is to it. Occasionally there might be a topic that really demands subfolders. In that case, just put the heading then a dash then the subheading. Like for my teaching assistanceship, I have "Psyc 380 - Handouts" and "Psyc 380 - Marking". You should feel totally ok with putting a single piece of paper in its own folder. Definitely every distinct project you start should have its own folder.

So you probably have lots of objections coming to mind. This is an extremely *dumb* system. But that's why it works: by not having to deal with a fancy system when you want to file something, you actually *use* it. (plus using the labeller is *fun* - I wouldn't even bother trying this out without buying a labeller) There have been cases where I couldn't remember what the name of the project was that I filed it under, but those are surprisingly rare. Generally I can go directly to the one I need. The alphabetical system means that you can usually aim for the right spatial location. It also happens once in a while that I make a folder where one already exists, but that's not too big of a deal either.

You still might feel like it will be overwhelming. To give you an idea about how it scales up, I have at least 150 folders in my drawer at the moment, almost all being the top level of a hierarchy. The whole system is about a foot and a half in thickness. Sometimes I have to adjust the slidy thing if they get too tight, but in general I can pull folders out and drop them in with ease, as well as sticking in pieces of paper and flipping the titles to find one.

Some examples of folders I have in my office reference system:
* Business cards
* Passport (this just contains my passport!)
* School admin (eg registration forms)
* Taxes 2006 (every time I got a piece of paper for my taxes, I stuck it in here. This year I finished my taxes 3 days early - instead of 2 months late like last year)
* Thesis (at least 20 subfolders under this heading, such as "Draft 2" "Planning", "Results", etc)
* Medical receipts
* Advisor meeting notes

I was so inspired by how well this worked that I adopted Zillion Folder Filing in lots of other places. I have another paper one at home, in one of those standup plastic frames which used to hold my ineffective six hanging files. It includes categories like Gift Certificates, Warranties, Menus, Manuals, Landlord and Poems. I use the system for my email - navigating a zillion folders is even faster and makes more sense in an electronic system. I have 81 email folders, and it's absolutely no problem. I use it on my harddrive at home (55 folders) and at work, and to organize all my internet bookmarks. Sometimes in an electronic context it makes more sense to organize things into subfolders. But I generally do this just when the folders for some area are getting very numerous. It just makes it less easy and fun to file something if you have to dig around in an elaborate hierarchy for where it belongs, and that means you won't file.

Again it's hard to overstate the impact consistent filing has had on how I work. To pick just one aspect, if I scrawl some plans or a diagram of something for a project, on the back of an envelope say, it's still amazing to me that I'm able to instantly retrieve it two months later, when I've nearly forgotten it existed - and start from *there* rather than from scratch again. Gradually I'm coming to trust my filing system, and I'm only beginning to see the power of that.

As a final note, Zillion Folder Filing might be helpful on its own, but it is made to work with two other David Allen concepts which I live by and plan to post about: having an In box, and doing a weekly review. If you try it, first of all post a comment, and second if it works, you should probably buy the David Allen book for all the other good stuff in there.

No I don't have a file for "Donut" - but I do know just where it would go.

Some Rules and Hints for Teachers and Students

Some Rules and Hints for Teachers and Students
----------------------------------------------
By Corita Kent

cf. The Next Whole Earth Catalog, ed. by Stewart Brand (Point/Random
House, 1980), p. 540

Rule 1: Find a place you trust and then, try trusting it for a while.

Rule 2: General duties of a student---pull everything out of your
teachers; pull everything out of your fellow students.

Rule 3: General duties of a teacher---pull everything out of your
students.

Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.

Rule 5: Be self-disciplined---this means finding someone wise or smart and
choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way.
To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Rule 6: Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail, there's only
make.

Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something.
It's the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually
catch on to things.

Rule 8: Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're
different processes.

Rule 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's
lighter than you think.

Rule 10: "We're breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do
we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities." -- John Cage

Hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to
classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies
carefully, often. Save everything---it might come in handy later.

(found this on the net attributed in whole to John Cage, have not verified
the Kent attribution at the top - or the fidelity of this text to it - but
it seems relatively convincing since it has a page number. In any case
thought these were worthy of pondering and discussion. Some parts I find
vague or don't make sense to me, but I particularly liked the hints and
rules 7 and 8)

How To Run A Brainstormer

"The best way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas."
- Linus Pauling

I ran my first brainstormer this past august in the lab where I am doing
my graduate studies, the biomotion lab. Our supervisor, Niko, was going to
be away for a month, so I thought it was a good opportunity for us to take
charge a bit and think of ways we could be doing things differently around
the lab.

I was inspired by a neat book, The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, about
an incredibly creative design company called IDEO, who were behind eg the
original apple mouse, the Palm V, the TiVo, and many other product
designs. Once they developed a radical new shopping cart prototype in 5
days for a Nightline challenge. Anyway they use brainstormers, as they
call them, as an integral part of their day-to-day process.

Here are the guidelines I used to run our brainstormer, mostly derived
from ideas in that chapter (though they don't lay it out like this):

BEFORE

* Having the boss gone really helps. The book actually recommends sending
him or her out for snacks, I'm not sure for the whole thing or just while
you're getting started. But the point is to try to set up an atmosphere
where people don't feel they are getting judged on the quality of the
ideas they shout out.
* Choose the room. With a table to write on and walls to stick stuff to,
but ideally kind of cramped - I think that helps the creative energy.
* Bring in toys: prototypes, diagrams, anything remotely relevant to
the subject that could spark ideas. All I could think of was a
crude floorplan I drew to help us think about possible alternative
space arrangements
* Figure out a clear statement of the purpose of the brainstormer. Should
be focused, but without presupposing what kind of solutions there will be.
I chose "How can we make the lab work better?"
* Prepare the room. I put big pieces of paper on every wall and spread them out across the desk, with tons of
felt pens around. The idea being people can sketch away to work on and
show their ideas.
* Write up your purpose statement at the top of one of the sheets of
paper, and then put up any rules or slogans you want people to keep in
mind. I wrote up "QUANTITY NOT QUALITY" - somewhat tongue in cheek, but I
thought that's what we as a group needed to hear to get uninhibited.

DURING

I acted as the facilitator to the session. My job was to stand up at
the front and write down on a big piece of paper every single idea that
anyone said, and to keep up the energy and focus of the session, by
asking questions, encouraging elaboration, etc. Here's
what I followed:

* Announce a strict time limit, and a goal for the number of items. We
went with 40 minutes (you probably don't want to go over an hour), and a
goal of 50 ideas.
* Number the items as you put them up.
* Have the rule no discussion allowed, and especially no criticism,
thinking of the problems with a suggestion. I had to stifle this a few
times.
* Encourage silly and extreme. As long as the purpose is up there and the
pacing is kept up, I think joking around is really good for creativity
(the book has a couple of examples of creative solutions that started off
as jokes). I made sure to write up all the silly suggestions too ("A
wading pool")
* Don't worry about repetition or overlap. Write them all down as their
own item.
* Ask questions and solicit contributions based on the concept of "build
and jump". This is a bit tricky to explain, but felt totally
natural to do. You encourage more and more ideas in a particular
vein ("ok lets hear some more ideas about what we could be doing with the
space layout"), until they start to peter out. Then jump to a different
area, either a totally new one or an area you were exploring earlier. It
works well to physically go back to that area in the list - spacial
memory.

So there are a few things to keep in mind as the facilitator, but it was
really easy, I'm pretty sure any member of the group could have done the
job just as well.

It felt like a success, in fact it felt electric. The actual count of
ideas after the 40 minutes: 53. Everyone contributed some, including
people who almost never speak up during lab meetings. We found out about
people's problems or preferences that we would never have known about, and
came up with creative solutions to them. Out of the 53, at least 10 were
great ideas for improving lab workings, or at least the beginnings of them
- and those are 10 great ideas we might never have come up with otherwise.

AFTER

This is the part where there's more I have to think about: what's the next
step after a brainstormer? Anyway here's what we did. We left the 53 ideas
up in that meeting room for a week or two, and some people added more
ideas to the list, at least 10-15. I moved one of the sheets into where we
have our lunch, and we ended up chatting about it a bit while eating for a
few days. At the next lab meeting we went through and mined it for 5
projects that seemed easy and valuable, and 1 or 2 people volunteered to
lead each of them. Eventually I took down the sheets and consolidated them
into a best-of list with repetitions taken out that I put on our wiki (the
subject of a future blog entry)

The best measure of the success of this session: as of now, three of those
projects have been accomplished. About 3 more are still moving forward
actively. And we've all got a little bit more into the mindset of, "what
could be different? how can we make things work better?"

I hope you will try running a brainstormer yourself someday, in your lab
or office, and that you'll tell me how it goes. As long as you define a
fairly specific objective statement, it could be used for a huge range of
purposes. I predict you'll find your group as a collective is far more
creative and good at solving problems than you ever imagined.

Prelude to the Zillion Folder Filing System

I'm going to write a post soon about the wonderful, lifechanging filing philosophy I think of as Zillion Folder Filing, but before I get to that I wanted to show this picture of Jim Davies' implementation of the same system, derived like mine from David Allen's Getting Things Done. This is his filing drawer for life in general, and below is a picture of his drawer for scientific papers, in his new system where each author gets their own folder.

Some Web Essays For Grad Students

From Nature, a bunch of substantial essays with hints for graduate
students in science and graduate supervisors, including time management
and collaboration. Probably good ideas in there for people in other lines
of work as well.

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/magazine/editors-choice.html

They also have an article that links to this terrific document "Guide for
PhD students (and post-docs) aiming for a successful career in science" by
people at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research:

http://www.qimr.edu.au/research/labs/georgiat/Guideforphds.doc

"Doing a PhD should be fun, rewarding and be seen as a privilege. It's
the only time in your life that you can spend 100% of your working time
learning to do research, finding out new things, having freedom to pursue
new areas and getting paid for it, without any administrative or other
responsibilities. Those who stick it out do so because, despite the
relatively poor pay, long hours and lack of security, it is all we want to
do because of the intellectual satisfaction it brings, the excitement of
discovery, the freedom to make your own work schedule, the opportunities
for travel, the pleasure of being in an international community of
like-minded people and (for some people) the possibility that we might
actually help the human condition!"

8 Tricks I Learned about screenwriting

From this guy, http://jamesgunn.com, who wrote Slither. I don't want to be
a screenwriter, but it's writing and it's very hard, so I still found
some inspiration in this:

"Remember, these are 8 TRICKS, not 8 RULES. I believe each of these gives
a person a greater chance at becoming a successful screenwriter. But NONE
of them are NECESSARY to becoming a screenwriter (although the last one
comes pretty close.) Here goes:

1) Write at least 3 hours a day 6 days a week.

2) Move to Los Angeles. Of if you can't do L.A., move to New York.

3) Spell check, of course, but also make a pass checking for "its" and
"it's", "their" and "there," "your" and "you're", and so on.

4) Don't even think about trying to get an agent until you have completed
your best possible work.

5) Don't blame others for your failures as a screenwriter. By assessing
your own responsibilities, and learning from your failures, you
supercharge yourself and become unstoppable!! (NOTE: it's good to read
this trick out loud and pump your fist up in the air while doing so).

6) Got friends who like to cut you down and tell you "this isn't possible"
and "that can't be done"? Lose 'em.

7) On the flipside, have 3 good objective readers, who are very honest,
even harsh, and who have your best interests at heart. (Mary Harron agreed
with this trick, but added that you should make sure the objective readers
at least somewhat share your tastes -- that is, they have the same goals
you do).

8) FINISH WHAT YOU START. Are you doubting what you write? Are you
starting to think it's crap? Good! That's a part of being a writer! We are
doubting, tortured, angst-filled souls, and all it takes to be a writer is
to write in the face of that!! "

Can you call on doozer power?

The Doozers are a race of beings in Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock universe. They are green and about six inches tall, and wear little yellow hardhats. Unlike the Fraggles, the doozers are seen labouring to build elaborate structures made out of glass sticks. They stay in the background of the show much of the time, so it's neat when you occasionally get a glimpse into their society. In one episode, we see the doozer community coming together for the ceremony wherein young doozers receive their helmets, initiating them into adulthood. It's also an occasion for reaffirming the basic values of doozer life. It's really quite beautiful, so much so that I am including a link by which you may download the mp3 of the song they sing. It takes the form of a call and answer, of all the things that a doozer does, and one verse goes:

Can you build a doozer tower? (Yes we really can)
Can you call on doozer power? (Yes we really can)

That part struck me when I heard it again recently, as I'm finishing my thesis. What is doozer power? I imagine it as an ability to work hard, but joyfully, and with purpose. To work as though that's what you were made to do. You just have to watch these cheerful little guys are, marching along with their work crews, or sitting in tiny construction equipment moving things into place with great satisfaction. Even though their constructions will quickly be eaten by fraggles ("Ah it does my heart good to see architecture being enjoyed" says one doozer watching a fraggle chow down) they take enormous pride in it.

Maybe "calling on doozer power" is when you feel your will or inspiration flagging, to give you that extra juice, reminding you of what you're about: dreaming things up and then making them real by planning, cooperating, and building, constantly building.

--

Jim has a different, and as usual interesting take on doozer power: maybe it's the power of the doozer community, the aid that you can call upon if you really need it. That's an inspiring thought too.

An MSN Discussion About Jim Davies' Lit Search Process

Had this conversation the other day, thought it was worth sharing:

Daniel S says:
How do you attack a lit search on a totally new area?
Do you start a new notebook?
JimDavies says:
I don't use paper. I start a new lit review file in my lit review directory
lit-reviews/face-to-face-human.txt
Daniel S says:
What goes in there?
JimDavies says:
SaundersDaviesHaighMaitee2006: Shows that 20% of discussion is talking about girls
referencing the pdf in my articles directory and the paper in my files
Daniel S says:
So a blurb about each paper you "process"
JimDavies says:
yes, and perhaps the sentence you'd cite it in
put the paper in multiple lit review files to handle crossreferencing
Daniel S says:
Nice. So what constitutes an individual review? Like on some question or subject area?
JimDavies says:
you mean a text file?
Daniel S says:
Yes
JimDavies says:
a subject area. I don' thave a systematic way to decide the granularity.
Daniel S says:
Do you organize under subheadings within a file?
JimDavies says:
no. visual.txt, visual-analogy.txt, analogy.txt
flat file system, not subdivisions within a file
I have too many refs to keep track of indentation and subdivision within a file
The articles do not even have an order in a file
Daniel S says:
Ok, so you use it as a bin and go for smaller order insertion time versus extraction time (which is still very fast I'm sure)
JimDavies says:
I follow the stub with an R if read, and S if summarized on my website
Daniel S says:
Oh ok so you don't have separate lists for "to read" vs "have read" or "not sure if I want to read"
JimDavies says:
no. it's just so if I want all papers relevant, I know where to go
Daniel S says:
So if you look into something and it isn't relevant you might take it out. It's just a big heap of papers etc. related to the topic, some read, some not etc
JimDavies says:
yes but if the paper is in my articles computer directory or in paper form in my file,it must be in at least one review document, so it's not lost. They are the index to the paper file system. I can grep on the directory to find papers. grep -i saunders *
Daniel S says:
So the heap has threads leading out of it to the real active papers
Daniel S says:
What about books? How do you read books in a big lit review?
JimDavies says:
Saunders2007: RS proved a theory of everything
if it's just a chapter, I note it as such
but I will put books in there without having read them if I'm pretty sure they're relevant

Time to Break Out the Big Checklist

This is the Big Checklist I made to help me get to the end of draft 1 of my thesis, with all the things that remained to be done. It's about 1.5 metres long, mounted on a easel that was on rollers. Somehow making it big seemed to help. I know putting a big felt pen check mark felt good.

Something I've done better in this project, the writing of my thesis, than I ever have before is setting aside time to look ahead and try to define all the work that needs to be done, as distinct from doing the work. So I would read a printout of my draft and fix everything that was easy to fix right away, but keep a list of the other pieces of work that would take more thought. I would make myself not start worrying about them right then, but come back to them. Besides giving me a slightly less vague idea of how much time things were going to take, and helping to conceptualize my progress in small, concrete steps, keeping checklists like this helped me with perfectionism, since I would become aware that even though I had a tricky decision, or a tough paragraph, before me, there were more to come afterwards - it was just one of the jobs I had to get through.

Thesis progress indicator

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:14:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: xxx@xxxxx
To: Daniel Saunders <xxxx@qlink.queensu.ca>
Subject: Thesis progress indicator

This seemed like the sort of thing you write about in your how to work Web
log - I've set up a cron job to measure the size of my thesis draft and
post it on my Web comic's front page. I don't know if that'll help me
stay motivated, but I found similar tactics helpful when I was doing
NaNoWriMo. The official announcement for comic readers will go up in
tomorrow's news posting, but the stats are already visible at
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/bonobo-conspiracy/ .
--
Matthew Skala
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/

----

Absolutely Matthew, this sounds like a neat idea. 37 pages,
nice work! Is this just writing things down for a first draft, or are
these pages that you've signed off on?

How Do You Write A Book On A Deadline?

From the blog of Toronto author Emily Pohl-Weary:

http://emily.openflows.org/index.php/?p=93#more-93

Guess what, from her and from what her commenters say it's much the same
idea as the advice I got from Linda Williams: set yourself a realistic
weekly target for the work you want to get done (in the blog commenters' case word
count), break it down into daily targets, and work out how to schedule
blocks of time for each day of the week to make sure that happens. And
when that target is reached, you're done for the day - very motivating for
getting started earlier, and working steadily.

Especially impressive is the discussion of how this approach let someone
write a thick nonfiction book, while having a fulltime job and a toddler!
This just goes to support my belief that productive people even in highly
creative areas like painting and novel writing have very structured
working habits.

Fiery Inspiration from Teddy Roosevelt

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even
though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who
neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey
twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."

I was searching for that quotation that I'd heard somewhere, and learned
that Theodore Roosevelt had said a great number of
other stirring things on a similar theme:

Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an
oyster.

If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble
peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of
their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and
stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the
domination of the world.

The man who really counts in the world is the doer, not the mere
critic-the man who actually does the work, even if roughly and
imperfectly, not the man who only talks or writes about how it ought to be
done.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute
courage, that we move on to better things.

Apart from their content and his status as one of the more awesome
presidents (and originator of the phrase "speak softly and carry a big
stick"), these carry weight for me particularly because of another famous
speech of his I found, which starts like this:

Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether
you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than
that to kill a Bull Moose.... First of all, I want to say
this about myself: I have altogether too important things to think of to
feel any concern over my own death; and now I cannot speak to you
insincerely within five minutes of being shot. I am telling you the
literal truth when I say that my concern is for many other things.

And he went on for an hour and a half! They couldn't drag him off! And, with a hunk of lead in him, he said more sensible and articulate things than George W has said in his whole time in office! Now that is an hombre - and worth listening to on the subject of self discipline.

The Creative Break

One of the many things I got from meeting with Linda Williams was the
concept of taking breaks in the middle of working time, 10 minutes per
hour, and a clearer idea of how to have a "working break" - the kind of
break that accelerates your work and breaks through blocks. I've long
thought and read that real creative problem solving, at least the solo
part of it, takes a mixture of solid working time at your desk and
undirected, unpressured time when it's nevertheless on your mind (in fact
I published a book chapter about that). That means that often brilliant solutions come in the shower or on your daily commute, but you can actually incorporate that same kind of free-thinking time into your regular working hours.

The main thing is to do something on your break where you're alone and not
distracted by other words, problems or ideas, so what you were just
working on continues to bubble away. You don't get into a conversation,
and you don't read anything or write anything.

So what does that leave you to do during your break? I brainstormed this
list just for starters:

* Go and get a snack
* Make tea
* Go for a walk around the building
* Stretch out under a tree and watch the branches
* Wash your face
* Have a good BM
* Climb something
* Juggle
* Play with a pet
* Take off all your clothes then put them back on
* Feed the ducks
* Find a body of water and stare across it
* Watch construction
* Do dishes
* Do stretches or exercises

(note that these kind of breaks can be very good for your body too)

As long as you were actively attacking the problem right up to the break,
and know that you're to get back to it after a short, set interval, it's
basically impossible not to get at least one creative idea during this
kind of breaks. So a last tip is to make sure you have a notebook or index
card and pen with you, just in case.

I Heart My Draft

A practice I've begun is to whenever I pick up my current draft of my
thesis, while I have it in my hands deliberately say "I *love* you" (not
out loud). This is to counteract a tendency of mine to become very shy of
looking at words that I've written, if not being slightly ashamed and
disgusted, thinking of them as leprous and scabby and feeble. This can
make it hard to get back in there with making it better. So I affirm the okness and lovabibility of my draft. To hate my draft would be like hating a seedling because it is not yet a tree. Or as Voltaire once wrote in a letter to a child actress who had opened in one of his plays and gotten bad reviews, "the worst thing anyone could say, is that you are not now what you will be."

This principle has become particularly important since I finished a complete
first draft and started having other people read it, which often sounds
like "I'm impressed, you've done a good job" followed by 25 minutes of
specific things that will need to be worked on (which I'm very grateful for, but a tip for giving more enjoyable feedback is to be very specific about things you liked as well). So I must say it even louder. How do I love
thee, first draft? Let me count the ways. I love you for not being a blank
page. I love you for representing concrete progress, things that will not
need to be done again. I love you for containing many solid scientific
ideas, some of them *my* ideas, and even many turns of phrase and figures
that will hold up to the end. I love you for representing a rallying point
to call on the aid of my amazing allies in writing my thesis. You
represent a great deal of work that's ahead of me, but it's work that I
have the will, the ability, and the time to do.

Bigger and stronger drafts will succeed you, but first draft, you're
everything a first draft should be, and I love you.

Rebooting My Working Habits with Linda

I finally got to see Linda Williams, a Learning Strategist who works at
the Queen's counselling centre. I heard about her from my friend Chris
Trimmer over beer at the Toucan, who said that as a result of talking to
her he had revamped his working schedule radically in a way that was
making his thesis writing go much better. I saw her in her last session of
the summer, so we got to talk for two whole hours. She is some kind of supergenius about this stuff.

I've had the idea in my mind for a long time, from various graduate school
books, that it's a good idea to be very businesslike in when and where you
work. And that's a lot of the philosophy that they teach in learning
counselling: treat school as a job, and your most important job. The other
idea I've heard though is to track the number of hours you work
specifically on *research*, on being a scientist, (not various administrivia or
TAing or anything else), and make sure you fulfill a certain quota. So
which is more important to adhere to? How do you reconcile them? Linda
basically solved it for me.

Here's how it works: you set a target for the number of hours you will
work on school/research a week. Then you go through each day and make a
plan for how you're going to achieve those hours, generally as early as
possible. This is the timetable we made together:



We started by filling in all the fixed commitments, like my lab meetings,
swimming classes etc, in pencil and yellow highlighter. We even filled in
my pretty much committed social time: friday evenings there's always
something going on, and I take saturdays 100% off. Those are blue.

Next we tried to figure out how I would make my week target for thesis
hours. My plan currently is to put in 36 hours a week, potentially a
steady 6 hours a day 6 days a week. So we put those in with the orange
highlighter at the earliest places they could go.

I was looking at it then, and I was wondering, what about these blank
slots? Do I have to fill those up too? (thinking of overly brittle time
tables I've made for myself in the past, and how quickly they've fallen by
the wayside) I did think of a couple of things to put in, like regularly
scheduled exercise and groceries. But the rest stays blank, and this is
what really makes it work: the concept of "flex time" (I also have in my
notes the term "overdraft banking" - anyone know what that means?). You
try to do your serious work during the regularly scheduled times, but if
life gets in the way there's always the flex time to make it up. Which
answers another big question I had coming in, which is how do you know
when you should make up working time. The best part is, if I make my six
hours for a day early and am not trying to make up time from a previous
day, I can do *anything I want* with what's left over. Any kind of fun or
projects with a clear conscience.

Flex time plus aggregating hours over the week is a big improvement over
my old scheme, which was daily-target based, and on bad days sometimes had
me staying up past a sensible bedtime just trying to get in my three pages
or 2 hours or whatever. Now I can give up responsibly. An excellent piece
of advice from Linda: "Don't use sleep as a reward!"

Some more great tips from the session:

• To try to work in 3 hour blocks if you're doing work that takes
  sustained concentration, like writing. This has already made a huge
  difference to me I feel. I'm still always thinking about how to break work
  into teeny quick jobs, that are easy to pick up and put down, but the fact
  is that when you're doing serious reading or writing you need a chunk of
  time. 3 contiguous hours is an ideal, but it shouldn't actually be all
  that hard to fit in at least one into every working day.
  
• However this means getting in a block before lunch, which means for me
  getting to work at 9, a whole hour earlier! And yes, amazingly, I have
  changed my habits this way, and have been more or less following it for
  the last two weeks since the interview. Who would have thought anything
  could get me doing this of my own free will? And yet I love that quiet
  first thing in the morning time (well it feels like that since most people
  come in a little later), and the feeling of getting tons of stuff done
  before lunch.
  
• 10 minute breaks between each of the 3 working hours. Those breaks of a
  particular kind which I'll write about in an entry coming up, but for
  example going for a walk so that you move your body but don't get too
  badly distracted with other input.
  
• We scheduled time in the middle of the working day, around lunch, for
  what I call because of Jim TCB, Taking Care of Business. Just random
  paperwork, phonecalls and emails to do with school or life. (Next Action
  lists a la David Allen are perfect for this)
  
• Even with taking an hour and a half in the middle for lunch and TCB, I
  can be done a productive research day at 4:30 pm! Though it's only worked
  out exactly like that a few times so far, it's a very motivating thought.
  
• I said that I felt really smart in the late evenings, and was worried I
  would miss that productive writing/reading/thinking time if I switched to
  working completely during the day. So I penciled in an extra hour in the
  evening. This is one part that hasn't really happened, I wonder why not?
  
• If you have a housemate or officemate working on the same kind of task,
  you could try synchronizing schedules, breaks etc to help each other stay
  on track.
  
• Be real when you're filling out the template. This means for me for
  example, not planning to come in at 9 on sunday, since I'll probably be up
  late the night before, and realistically putting in all the time I spend
  reading etc between going to bed and sleep.
  
• Finally, as is a big theme of this blog, it's an experiment, this
  timetable is a work in progress and should be constantly tweaked based on
  what is working and what is not.
  

This new working timetable I feel has made a huge difference in the preparation of my first thesis draft over the last few weeks. Especially combined with the tricks for getting started and various other things I've picked up about project and time management, this project has gone better than any I can remember in the past.

As a postscript to this, I ran into my friend Ryan Edwardson the other
day, a post-doc who has two books on Canadian cultural history in the
process of being published (one about canadian rock and roll!), and got
talking to him about his own habits. He said that he knows some people who
are very businesslike about their research and just work certain hours,
but he's working on his book all the time. He thinks about what he will
write when he wakes up and is lying in bed, he spends all day in the
Sleepless Goat (a cafe which is a hub of hip activity in kingston) with
his laptop, then thinks about the next day's work while he's going to
sleep. He says he would be doing this for fun anyway, so why should he
have to schedule specific time for it? Something to think about.

(my first reaction is that sometimes life might be like this in my
research, but other times I'll need the kind of strong structure and
discipline described here to get me through the very unfun parts that most
major projects have, especially towards the end. As a further thought
however, from what I've read many sparklingly creative people, poets and
comedians etc, do swear by extremely regular, disciplined working times)

Rudy Rucker's Writer's Toolkit

From Rudy Rucker, a science fiction writer I admire a lot:

http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/writerstoolkit.pdf

All kinds of great stuff, including: the fractal nature of writing, which
I was just thinking about while finishing my thesis draft - how you are
trying to make it good on every level at once; having a separate file for
notes and how to organize it; Be a magpie; having an "on deck" section;
design patterns for fiction; and surprise, the "next action" idea which
has made such a difference to my working habits since I got it from David
Allen's Getting Things Done (to get moving on a piece of work, write down
at least one simple, physical action to do on it)

He makes working on a fiction project sound really exciting, a way of
engaging with the world and finding constant stimulation in it: "Stay open
to every possible influence, be a sensitive antenna, and you'll pick
something up....At times it feels as if the world, feeling your
sensitivity, gladly dances back. Dosie-do. Keep your eyes peeled."

Reference Slugs

This is an idea I've been trying out, again in the vein of doing writing
in manageable smaller tasks and reducing the mental mode switching that
makes things take so much concentration. Especially looking up the details
of what is said in a reference when I'm trying to write can throw me off
(even sometimes remembering the format for a citation). So the idea of a
reference slug is that to dispose of a paper you want to cite, you open
your reference slug file and add the citation in the proper format, then
*write the sentence that will contain that citation* around it. Examples:

As Cazelles and Stone (2003) demonstrated, a cross-correlation will fail to show a coupling in cases where the phases are synchronized but the amplitudes are uncorrelated.

For instance an fMRI study by Amedi, Malach, Hendler, Peled and Zohary (2001) concluded that an area considered to be strictly visual, the lateral occipital complex, also responds to touch, and so should be considered a multimodal object-related network rather than a visual area.

The normalized Shannon entropy was used (Cazelles & Stone 2003; Le van Quyen et al. 2001; Tass et al. 1998), a measure which gives a score of 0 to a perfectly flat distribution and 1 to a distribution where only one bin has any contents and the others are empty.

This way you don't have to keep going back to look up the details of what
they did and what they concluded. You don't ever have to look at that
paper again for the project. And you end up with a lot of the volume of
your paper written, which is encouraging (of course the actual words of
the slug could change a lot once you slot it into its proper place - the
important thing is that it have the *maximum* amount of detail you might
want).

This seems to be a very complimentary approach to writing a ropebridge: a
ropebridge is like writing from the outside in - gliding over it all then
filling it in more later - while working on reference slugs, and growing
the text out from them, is like writing from the inside out. And best of
all, you can do a ropebridge and reference slugs more or less
independently, and they use different parts of your brain. Draft 0 is when
you try to shove them together.

So far I've put all my reference slugs for a particular paper in one big
file, and if there get to be so many that it's hard to find the one I want
I start to roughly organize them by topic. Better yet, by what order
they'll come in in the paper.

Why "slug"? I don't know. That's just the word that came into my head for
them. Maybe it's because they're long and lumpy, like slugs? Or have a
certain heft to them, like a slug of metal? I'm open to alternative
suggestions for the name.

The Tyranny of Email

A good article about how email can interfere with work, especially when
instant notification is turned on.

All I want to add is that there's an old Kurt Vonnegut story called
Harrison Bergeron, about a future where mediocrity is enforced, and
government regulations require any exceptional individuals to be hobbled.
For instance the exceptionally graceful or strong are compelled to wear
calibrated weights on their arms and legs to put them on the same level as
everybody else; and the exceptionally smart are equipped with a device
that BLATs a noise in their ear at random intervals. This wipes out any
potential creative train of thought they might have been pursuing, and
keeps them on the prescribed standardized level of dullness.

I often think about that story in relation to email notification, cell
phones and MSN, and wonder if those kind of interruptions actually
measurably lower our effective IQ.

"I Have Decided"

A neat trick from Lakein for when you're feeling stuck on a project: take
out a piece of paper and write "I Have Decided" at the top, and then for
the next 10 minutes or so continuously list decisions about the project.
These could be anything, from when you're going to start, to how you're
going to tackle a particular part, even when and how you're going to make
a decision. Especially useful are decisions about what you're *not* going
to do: I'm going to leave this stuff out, I'll gloss over that.

I'm often amazed how much of the stuckness in something came only from
having unconsciously avoided making certain decisions. Another reason this
works, I think, is that jobs feel arduous when they requires switching
mental modes. Oddly enough, "making decisions" seems to be a mode of
its own. When you're in that groove, making a bunch of decisions in a row
is surprisingly easy, even pleasant.

Here's some examples from a speech for Toastmasters I've been working on:

I Have Decided:
* That I will give it before the end of the summer
* I will choose at most 4 of the best topics to talk about
* I will do only light research, using the internet (and textbooks)
* That each of the parts can be worked on independently, and the
transitions between the parts will come to me as I write

Getting Started

Getting started is hard. For me anyway, how about you? For me there's
always the temptation to do lots of little jobs when I first get in, and in particular to check my morning email (just about irresistable) rather than to seriously start on research stuff.

The last couple of weeks I've been trying something that seems to work. I
start every day in the office doing a half hour to one hour of (10+2)*5, as described in a previous blog entry. But basically using a website with a java stopwatch on it, I start my day with 10 minutes of work, followed by 2 minutes
of goofing off (enough time to check email and write one quick reply),
followed by 10 more minutes work, then 2 minutes play, and so on. Usually
the cycle breaks down into straight work before I have to do another hour
of it, which is what is supposed to happen. And I think it helps my morale
for the day if I get some solid work in first thing.

For another perspective on getting started: I once heard an author on a
science fiction convention panel say that when she wanted to start a
writing session, she sat down at her computer and put on the Mortal Kombat
soundtrack. She said she doesn't even hear it any more, but it's a signal
to her brain that it's time to work. Have been trying that a bit with the
Go Soundtrack, which is smooth and pleasant (Len, Esthero, Fatboy Slim).
So far what it's mostly good for is blocking out office sounds without
being distracting (since it's so familiar), but I don't know if it's
actually helping me get busy.

What do you do to get started?

Complete journal scans

Thanks Jim, this sounds like a potentially extremely useful exercise.
Could you say anything more, maybe in the comments, about the process,
like how you will decide whether a particular title is going to be
important and what you do with it then? How much time do you think the
whole thing will take you?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 14:13:58 -0400
From: Jim Davies <xxxx@xxxx.com>
To: Daniel Saunders <xxxxx@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: you can put this on your blog if you want. I just put it on mine

Through Queen's Library webpage I can access PDFs of many journals
going for years back. There are probably around 20 or 30 journals that
I cite from most often. I just realized how easy it is to look at the
titles of every paper published in a journal for the past 50 years or
so.

So my plan is to take the time to work through these journals,
downloading papers and making notes regarding which project ideas the
papers are important for. I'll go back as far as I feel is important.
After this is done once for a journal, then all I have to do is keep
up.

I also have a plan to review the most recent year of articles in all
of these journals every year. I put a repeating date (Feb 12) to
review the journals into my palm pilot. This way I will feel
comfortable that important journal papers will not slip past my
notice. Attached to the date is the list of journals I will review. I
can keep this list updated. I suppose I can do this for conferences
too, if they have online archives.

--
JimDavies http://www.jimdavies.org/

Unpleasant and Overwhelming

Alan Lakein in How to get control of your life and your time lays down
the two basic reasons why we avoid doing things, even avoid thinking them:
because they're unpleasant, or because they're overwhelming. He has a
chapter about dealing with each of those.

For unpleasant, as I recall there are some visualization things, imagining
yourself doing it and it going well or else imagining some ridiculous
catastrophe, and (presumably as a last resort) telling yourself what bad
thing will happen if you don't get it done. For overwhelming it's largely
a matter of figuring out how to break it down into less overwhelming
chunks. One tactic is what he calls the swiss cheese method: make a big
list of tasks that can be done in 5 minutes that will result in progress
on that project, however tiny. Then start knocking them off. Not only can
you cut down the size of a project in that way, by punching a lot of
holes, but also sometimes doing a tiny job leads you to continue working
steadily.

I think the most powerful insight here is just that there are these two
different reasons why you procrastinate on things, and that they take two
different sets of approaches to deal with.

Breaking Bad Web Habits with Privoxy

In the past I've had spells of compulsiveness about visiting certain frequently updated websites, like slate.com, and sites with deep archives, like the Onion A.V. Club and Bob the Angry Flower. I can lose big chunks of time, as though I'm in a trance I can't snap out of. When I started finding myself tempted to get into those same bad habits while waiting for things to run etc. in the lab, I decided to put my foot down and find a technological solution. Just something to raise the threshold of temptation higher so I'll usually be able to catch myself before I get into those same ruts - enough time for my better nature to catch up with me.

All you need is a nifty free utility called Privoxy, that is available for both the Mac and PCs.

1. Download Privoxy from their web page and follow the instructions about how to get it running. But basically this just involves putting the application somewhere, running it, and changing your web browser to use privoxy as a web proxy (by pointing to 127.0.0.1 port 8118). When you are using a proxy, what happens when you ask for a web page, is that instead of requesting it directly you ask a program to go and get it for you - possibly doing some operations on the page before it gets to you. In Privoxy's case, it does a pretty great job of filtering out advertisements and other annoying features of the web.
   
   
2. Try it out on any site that has ad banners and enjoy the relative (visual) peace and quiet. The one thing I should warn you about is that Privoxy can occasionally disable a feature of a web page that you want to use, in particular ones that use pop ups or complicated forms. You might have to temporarily turn off privoxy (by going to http://config.privoxy.org/toggle) if a web page you need is exhibiting strange behaviour. I find it's more than worth it (only like 1 in 100 pages have this problem) for the ad filtering and the selective web blocking, which I will now describe how to do:
   
   
3. Go to the Privoxy Status page (you use your web browser). If Privoxy is set up properly, you will see a page which includes the line "/Library/Privoxy/./default.action" and beside it a View and Edit button. Click Edit.
   
   
4. There will be a bunch of items in a list in a light green box. Scroll to the bottom of that first box and click where it says Insert new section below.
   
   
5. There will be a new box with a green, blue and yellow layer. Click the Add button below where it says "URL patterns:" Type in the pattern of a website that is bad for you. Typically that's just a URL without the http:// part, like "www.retrocrush.com" But it has some features for recognizing partial names. For instance www.guardian.co.uk has a number of different sub-sites, film.guardian.co.uk etc. I wanted to block them all, so I put in just ".guardian.co.uk" Any URL ending with that string would be captured. There's a lot fancier things you can do with URL patterns (most of which I have sadly had to employ at one time or another to defeat some attempt of mine to think of ways around my own blocking software)
   
   
6. Keep clicking add until all your fatal attractions are accounted for (you can come back and add more later)
   
   
7. Decide on the image you want your web browser to be redirected to when you attempt to access one of the forbidden sites. At home, my browser simply goes to this image:
   
   
   
   It's Isaac Newton, glaring at me as if to say, "I invented the generalized binomial theorem when I was 22. What have you done lately?"
   
   At school it's a different picture, the renowned computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra:
   
   
   
   Also hard to beat in the productivity department - among other achievements he wrote over 1300 brief manuscripts on computer algorithms and many other subjects (in fountain pen!) . Unlike Newton, I've actually met him, when he came to speak at the University of Waterloo, I believe the year he died. It's a friendly picture, yet a firm reminder that maybe time spent reading articles about the worst dressed at the Oscars could be more fruitfully employed.
   
   Whatever you choose, copy that URL.
   
   
8. Back on your Privoxy Edit Actions screen, just above the list of URL patterns you added, it should say "Actions:" Click Edit. On the line where it says "add-header" in blue, click Enable. Also do that for handle-as-image, and set-image-blocker.
   
   
9. An extra bit for set-image-blocker will appear when you do that, with the words "Redirect the browser to this image URL:" Paste your blocking URL in the box right underneath it, and click submit.

And that's it. Give it a try by trying to access one of the forbidden sites. Sometimes I deliberately do this just to reassure myself that I (and Edgser) am looking after myself.

As I've implied, it can't completely cure you of wasting time on the web, but you can use this to at least break the power of some of your worst temptations. Even when Privoxy is turned off, I still feel much more able to resist their lure.

What is a milestone?

I heard the term "milestone" used a lot while I was working as a co-op student at Amazon.com and other places, and I've also heard it in graduate school, but I realized a couple of months ago I don't really know what it means. So I asked google. There are some conflicting ideas about what it should mean it seems, but here's the one I like best, synthesized out of a few:

A milestone for a project is a measurable set of conditions such that, when they are fulfilled, we can say that progress has been made.

By "measurable" I just mean something that is objective, inarguable. "The finished essay, ready to submit, is sitting printed out on my desk." "All the papers I need are on a list on a piece of paper." "50% of the assignments have a final mark written on the front" etc

By this definition, it's definitely possible to have more than one milestone you're working on at once, and the completions don't have to come in a set sequence. However often there will be dependencies, so that one milestone can't be reached, or even started on, until another one is finished. There may be a milestone that represent a whole phase of a project, so that no more milestones can be reached until that one is, a bottleneck.

A milestone can have a date associated with it. All deadlines are milestones (but not all milestones are deadlines). For your own milestones, you could reward yourself for achieving them, or penalize yourself for not hitting the date on one. But at a minimum they should help you to get a sense of where you are in the progress of a project.

I tried to put this into practice recently with a milestone chart for my psyc 917 project, showing the milestones for the different sections and their dependencies. I didn't really use this effectively - as you can see only one circle is crossed out - but I think that was more due to other project management problems on this assignment, not that there's something wrong with the principle (though one issue: need to be able to change the chart around more easily - at least leave lots of free space) Read it from left to right, so that a circle on the left connected to one on the right means the left milestone must be accomplished before the other one can.
(larger version here)

Play as Work and Organized Fun

This is borderline whether it belongs here, since it's about play, but it's about how I've come to the view that play should be work, in the sense that you should use your leisure time (or part of it) to pursue projects, that have end results.

The reason why is not particularly for the end results. In fact I'm not sure the goal even matters. The real reason is that any sufficiently ambitious project will inevitably take you to new and interesting locations, reveal fascinating new sides of the people in your vicinity and bring you closer to them, and pay off in extraordinary events and deep personal satisfaction. I feel like a constant message of mass culture is that you should sit back and consume instead of trying to do things, make things happen, when from my observations I now think that's the main thing in life. Here's a group of people who think that way, and look what they made happen: Improve Everywhere's Mp3 Experiment 2.0

Their phrase, "organized fun", is something I have been pondering on - I really think they have the right idea. It ties in with a wonderful book I just read, Son of Interflux by Gordon Korman, where a student at a fine arts high school appropriates the student social budget to form a group to fight Interflux, the overbearing corporation that wants to build on the school's beloved creek. The student president is outraged at all the dances and parties they won't be able to have, but then it turns out that the activities required for opposing the development - such as running a worm farm, and having a cultural festival - are more fun and better social events than what they replaced - and inspire the students to new heights of creativity.

As another example, to show as I said that it almost doesn't matter what the actual project is, here's part of a list of things my friend Jim Davies was challenged to see if he could do by his improv troupe:

• (Figure) Skate
  
• Speak with a Jamaican Accent
  
• Bake Bread from Scratch
  
• Play the trumpet
  
• Cut a woman's hair
  
• Win a game of pool/darts
  
• Sew a garment using a pattern
  
• Win at blackjack
  
• Speak french
  
• Double dutch
  
• Grow an herb garden
  
• Take his underwear off without removing his pants

(you can follow how he's doing on the list on his blog)

I think the only thing better than committing to a list like this designed specifically for you, would be to take on one specifically designed for someone else. Maybe I should take on Jim's. Where wouldn't it take me?

The Ropebridge Method for writing projects

I developed this method to deal with my own personal writing problems, which are: anxiety, procrastination, perfectionism, and project management. So you may have totally different problems, which this won't help at all for. But if you have trouble getting started on a writing project, get started but then right away look at it and stop because it looks like it's sucking, or have a hard time telling how far there is left to go and end up fiddling endlessly with the easier sections and avoiding thinking about the harder ones, it could help.

My second caveat is that it's only been tested for two 20 minute presentations, one 10 page paper, and (now) one blog entry (this one), and I don't know how applicable it is to longer things (though I strongly suspect it could be used for distinct sections of larger projects). So it should evolve, and I want to hear any ideas you have about how it should.

The ropebridge is your very first attempt to sketch out a writing project from beginning to end, and it is meant to be incredibly rough, miles away from a first draft, but structurally complete. It's written using a forwardwriter, some setup where you can only write forwards, never backwards. The objective is to get from the beginning to the end as quickly and fluently as possible, not stopping to perfect or improve anything but just leaving a note right in the text, often in square brackets. Like

That would be as ridiculous as an eeel chasing a aheron [bad analogy , made no sense, thinkgo nof a betwter one to go there]

A great advantage of using a forwardwriter is that the text really looks like a mess, at least if you're as bad of a typist as I apparently am, so your brain knows it's unfinished, and feels uninhibited about the exact wording. A good simple next step after you have a ropebridge is to tell yourself you're just going to copy the ropebridge to a new document and correct all the spelling mistakes. If it works for you like it does for me, you'll find you're doing a lot more than that, choosing better words, rewriting whole chunks and writing all new chunks.

A rope bridge might be flimsy and rickety, with many planks missing, but once you can cross the chasm between having an absolutely blank page and a complete piece of work, you can start to build the real bridge - of concrete, steel, or whatever metaphorical building material you might choose (for me it's rainbows). I got the image of a rope bridge from Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot, where he talks about the highly constrained creativity necessary in translating a piece of poetry that rhymes in a foreign language into rhyming english poetry. He said that he always feels less anxious when he gets some rough translation that basically rhymes, like he can relax and be more creative once the chasm is spanned. As my friend Chris said when I explained it to him, "So it's something you could turn into a finished paper over the course of a night, if you absolutely had to."

Failing in writing a ropebridge is very important, and you should let yourself do it - if it isn't going quickly, quit at once. It's a sign that you're not yet ready to really start writing. You need to read more, you need to talk it over with your friends, and you need to do more free writing (thinking by writing, again possibly using a forwardwriter), until the moment is right to try it again. I think part of why this works, and could even produce better writing, is that it focuses on the story of your paper as a whole, the overall flow of the argument, and it forces you to tell the story to yourself first. If you haven't figured out the story, you're not really ready to write a draft.

It should really be doable for projects of the size I say above in about two sittings, around 2-3 hours. It will be skimpier than the finished document, with IOUs in square brackets you wrote to yourself to flesh parts out, but the idea is that each paragraph should roughly match to a paragraph of a hypothetical finished draft. There will likely be passages that you can use almost as is in a real draft, but it could also happen that your first draft contains almost no words in common with the ropebridge. It just acted as scaffolding. On some of those first drafts I opened a completely blank document and just had the ropebridge open at the side as I typed afresh. Other times, as it says above, I start by copying over paragraphs of the ropebridge and "just fixing the spelling".

I see this as a key tool in a larger project of mine, learning how to finish writing projects and other things needing creativity with a steady, easy effort over time, knowing where you are in the project and with no portion so terrifying you put it off and can't face it. A complete rope bridge can give you a readout of where there is serious work to do. Even if you don't solve all the hard writing problems on this one pass, it at least charts a course past where they are. Hopefully it can be followed by another just as easy pass, and then more and more, always making it better and better (this part is still theoretical with me). As a number of my books say, writing is nothing at all like producing perfect crystalline prose when you sit down at the keyboard, but splatting something down there and continuously beating it with a stick - beat beat beat - until it starts to vaguely resemble what you had in mind.

As a last note, this is all about generating just a *first* draft. What happens next is a highly social process which I will write about in a future entry (hopefully by which time I'll understand it more).

How to Do Research in the MIT AI Lab

Now that I finally found this link to How to Do Research in the MIT AI Lab, I'm putting it here so I won't lose it again.

It's where I got the idea of reading How to get control of your life and your time by Alan Lakein - which made a big difference - and where I first learned about the Secret Paper Passing Network. This also made an impression: that over his or her first couple of years an AI student at MIT should expect to write their own version of:

"a truth maintenance system, a means-ends planner, a unification rule system, a few interpreters of various flavors, an optimizing compiler with flow analysis, a frame system with inheritance, several search methods, and an explanation-based learner"

Also some very good tips on how to give talks that have stuck with me:

You can only present one ``idea'' or ``theme'' in a talk. In a 20 minute or shorter talk the idea must be crystal clear and cannot have complicated associated baggage. In a 30 or 45 minute talk the idea can require some buildup or background. In an hour talk the idea can be presented in context, and some of the uglies can be revealed. Talks should almost never go on for more than an hour (though they often do).

The people in the audience want to be there; they want to learn what you have to say. They aren't just waiting for an excuse to attack you, and will feel more comfortable if you are relaxed.

My forwardwriter

The several writing books I've looked at strongly advocate something they
call free writing, or automatic writing. The idea is just to write
continuously for a while and produce lots of stuff measured by the
page, even if its complete crap, and to do this on a very regular basis.
The idea is that it prevents you from getting stopped up about actually
sitting down to write which is itself a very important thing, if you've ever spent a
number of days not even being able to sit down at your word processor
because of dread of the blank page and the blinking cursor. There's a
whole set of steps, but basically they say to write as fast as you can,
and don't think very much about it and don't self-criticize. Don't stop and
look back at what you've written.

To help me to try this tactic out, and to combat bad habits of fiddling with wording and spelling rather than forging ahead to the end, I have
made myself a forwardwriter. This is a word processing program that
doesn't recognize the backspace key, arrowkeys or the mouse. You can only
write forward. It's impossible to correct spelling, or second guess
yourself. You just continuously type.

I've found a way to set one up for Mac OS X, and the instructions below
pertain to that platform. Luckily I found a solution that doesn't involve
physically popping off the delete key as I was considering at one point,
my backspace addiction was so bad! I would like to hear ideas about how to set
up forwardwriters on other platforms (of course there's always paper and a
pen, but that has other disadvantages). My method requires acquiring some
small familiarity with the text editor EMACS.

1. Run the Terminal program, which should be in the Utilities folder
within the Applications folder. This opens up a Unix prompt.
2. Go to the Terminal menu, Window Settings and find Keyboard in the
drop-down menu in the dialogue that comes up. Click "Delete key sends
backspace" (so it is checked) - this disables your backspace ability for
that terminal.
3. Click Add below the Key Mappings window. For Key: choose Cursor Left
for Modifier: choose none, and click OK. Do the same again except for
Cursor Right instead of left. This disables the left and right arrow keys.
4. Type

emacs myfilename.txt

and the EMACS editor will pop up.

This is a little like the Pine email editor if you've used that, but also a bit different. It does take a little time to master completely since like many Unix programs it's not very intuitive. But if you just want to use it as a forward writer you could probably get by with just the following commands:

* control-x then s saves the file
* control-x then control-c quits, prompting you if you want to save
first.

I've found my forwardwriter to be a really valuable tool, not just for
conditioning yourself against that blank-screen freeze but also for
actually generating material - often when you look back at it there's a
lot of good stuff amongst the messy spew. You can use it to make a "draft
0": the one where you pull together bits from all the stuff you have,
eliminate duplicates, and try to come up with something that vaguely
resembles a complete draft (also see my ropebridge method). I also use it often to just bust my way through any problems I'm having, and to come up with ideas. It's basically impossible to write about your topic without thinking - and I'm tempted to say vice versa, since I've gotten about 10 times as many ideas writing than I ever have staring off into space.

One of the best things about the forwardwriter is that it allows you to really measure how much writing you're doing. Then, as many of the books recommend, you can set yourself a daily writing quota, say of three or four pages. It doesn't have to be a lot, in fact it should be a little, but it should be kept up, a little every single day (hence the book title Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day). I'm not doing that at the moment, but I have for months-long stretches, and it's very motivating and satisfying to see those pages adding up. For a long time I was even plottinghow many I wrote per day with a felt pen on a chart posted on the outside of the door to my room so that if my page count flatlined it would be exposed to all my housemates! I'll probably do it again when I have my next writing project.

Future entries (like this one about the ropebridge)will talk more about how I integrate my forwardwriter into some systems for tackling projects.

The Peanut M&M Method for finishing projects

1. Buy a package of peanut M&Ms
2. Break up a big, non-creative job - I have used this for finishing
powerpoint presentations, that is for dealing with my list of figures
needed - into distinct jobs that can be done in under 5 minutes, listed
on separate lines of a piece of paper
3. Open the package of M&Ms, and make a line of every one in the package
on your desk (use your desk drawer if you don't want people seeing a
whole bunch of candy on your desk)
4. Do one of the 5 minute tasks
5. Cross it off the list with a big felt pen
6. Eat a peanut M&M
7. Repeat 4-6 until the task is done, you run out of M&Ms, or your body
goes into sugar shock.

(note that this may work with other candies than peanut M&Ms, but that's how it first worked for me, and I don't dare change now!)

Anti-procrastination: "(10+2)*5"

This trick, called (10+2)*5 (from the neat productivity blog that inspired me to buy Getting Things Done, 43Folders.com) worked astoundingly well all four
times I've tried it, and I encourage you to give it a go if you want to
spend a solid hour (well 50 minutes) not procrastinating on some big horrible task (or dozens of little "mosquito" ones).

How it works, briefly: set a timer for 10 minutes and work solidly for that time. Then when the alarm goes off, set a timer and spend *2* minutes goofing off. Surfing the web, checking email, whatever. Then work 10 more minutes, then break 2 more, and repeat 5 times. Though often I don't make it to 5 before I start skipping breaks, having tricked myself into fully engaging with my work.

You can use this online timer with it.

---

Update: I now use this timer since it's more convenient: just go to the website, click Detach twice, and type 10 into the Minutes box of one and 2 into the other. Don't close the main window or the two child windows with your timers will close too.

How Jim Davies works (AKA how to live the JimDavies life)

Although this blog is titled How I Work, the "I" can refer to other people,
since it might be just as interesting to you, and much more so to me, to
hear addional people's procedures, rules and guidelines - and in this
case, also philosophy of life.

------- Start of forwarded message -------
Subject: how to live the JimDavies life
From: Jim Davies
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 11:55:17 -0500 (EST)

How I try to live my life
-------------------------

I assume the following things are good: 1) well-being,
happiness, and reduction of suffering for all things that
can feel such things, and 2) an understanding of the world
for beings capable of such understanding.

Being a good person means maximizing your positive effect on
the world at the largest possible scale. There are many ways
to help the world. One should find out the things at which
one would be most effective, and do those things to the best
of one's ability. For me it's being a scientist and an
artist.

People have limited resources that they can use to have
their effect on the world: Time, physical and mental energy,
enthusiasm, etc. I will refer to all these things generally
as "resources." Trying to maximize my positive effect on the
world, to me, means always doing the most important thing I
can do at every moment, given the resources I have. What
ends up happening is that everything I do should either be
1) making the world a better place, or 2) replenishing my
resources with something I enjoy. In short, I'm either
making the world a better place or doing something fun so
that I can get back to work.

Different people have different potentials. One should work
to fulfill one's potential, by working to help the world at
the largest possible scale. That means don't ladle soup at a
soup kitchen if you're capable of restructuring the soup
kitchen organization to make it more effective. Don't spend
time picking up trash if you can affect social change to
make a whole city cleaner.

As a scientist, I spend as much of my resources as I can
doing science. This ends up being probably about five or six
hours per day, six days per week. The rest of the time I
spend relaxing so I can get back to work effectively.
So how do I spend this relaxing time? Luckily for me I find
creating art engerizing. Generating art makes the world a
better place too, in general. If, during my relaxation time,
I have the resources to generate art (writing, painting,
etc.) then I will do so.

Here is a priority list of what I do with my given
in-the-moment resources:

1) Conducting scientific research, including programming,
experiment running, reading scientific literature I need to
read, having intellectual discussions.
2) Generating artwork (writing, painting, etc.)
3) Enjoying artwork (reading, watching movies, etc.)
4) Unintellectual socializing, dancing, etc.

The seperation of work and play
-------------------------------
Conducting scientific reseach is an activity composed of
many tasks, most of which are mentally taxing. Since I'm
trying to maximize my scientific productivity, there is a
danger of feeling guilty during those times when I am not
doing scientific work. While I was working on my master's
thesis in psychology I worked at the university as well as
at home. What I found was happening was that I became unable
to relax at home: I always felt that I should be working on
my master's thesis. The effect of this was that to relax I
had to go out of the house. Usually this meant going to a
movie, or socializing with friends. My home was no longer a
sanctuary where I could relax. An engaging movie on video
could distract me, but even such things as reading for
pleasure became difficult because of the anxiety I felt. The
first step I took to attack this problem was that I took a
Saturdays off. I would not allow myself to work on Saturdays
, so after a few weeks the possibility of working did not
really enter my mind on Saturdays. I was able to spend time
at home and not feel anxiety about not working. Later I took
an additional step and stopped working at home altogether.
The problem is now basically solved: my home is now a place
of relaxation.

What to read
------------

When I can't write anymore it's time for me to read. I used
to have a peculiar problem: I would feel like reading, and
would want to read a fun book, like a Michael Crichton
novel. But then I would think, well, if I'm going to read, I
should be reading something more heavy, like a non-fiction
book about something I want to learn about. Then I would
think, well, if I'm going to read non-fiction, I should read
this boring paper I need to read for my research. But I
would not feel like reading that research paper, so I'd
abandon the idea of reading altogether and watch a video.
It dawned on me that I was spending more time watching
movies and less time reading fun books and that the
situation was kind of silly. I wasn't reading any fun books
anymore. There is a lot to read and there are many reasons
to read. I believe I made the mistake of not really
recognizing that you read different things for different
purposes. The desire to read Michael Crichton is a different
desire than the desire to read non-fiction or to read a
boring scientific paper. If you want to read Crichton, it is
probably a desire to escape into a story, relax, and have
fun--the same motivation to watch a video. The desires to
read more challenging stuff stems from a different desire--
to better your understanding of the world. Just because they
all qualify as "reading" does not mean they are
interchangable in your schedule.

I now read one fun book and and one difficult book at the
same time. When I feel like reading, I think: do I have the
resources to read the difficult book? If so, I read it. If
not, I read the fun book. Sometimes after a chapter of the
fun book I will ask myself the question again. Also, since
reading is a lower prioity than writing, if I get inspired
to write while I'm reading anything, I drop the book and
write immediately.

Sometimes I don't even have the resources to read whatever
fun book I'm reading. I usually have a super-relaxing book
too, usually about Buddhism, that I can read in these
instances.

Most people can read more than they do. I also keep a book
in the car and a book for the bathroom. Good books for these
categories are ones that can be read piecemeal and still be
appreciated. If one of the books I'm reading is small enough
for my coat, I will put it in my coat when I leave for the
day. Else I will start another fun book to keep in my coat.
I read the book in my coat when I walk, wait in line, and
occasionally at red lights. I thank Stephen King's memoir
for the inspiration for this. As prolific as he is he still
reads about eighty books per year, because he has learned to
read "in little sips," whenever he has a spare moment.
Sometimes a book I'm reading isn't any good. The danger is
that you stop reading. A moment's reflection should reveal
that a bad book should never stop you from reading. Some
people finish all books they start. I think this is foolish.
There are simply too many wonderful books out there to waste
your time finishing something bad simply because you started
it. Stop reading the book and pick up another. Not only will
you have read more books every year, but you will have read
more good books. I gave up the policy of finishing every
book I start in my twenties and it's made my reading life
much better.

Still there are those border cases where the book isn't
great but you have decided you are going to finish it
anyway. Here you just need motivation to keep reading. To
help with this I keep two bookshelves reserved for the books
I'm going to read next: one shelf for hard books, one for
fun books. I have then in a rough order of which to read
first. Occasionally I will re-order them. This bookshelf is
very inspiring. Looking at it you see all these great books
you have to read in your future, as soon as you get through
the books you're currently reading.

The literature I read for science tends to be very specific
to my subfield and uninspiring. It's important to read more
general cognitive science books, but when am I supposed to
do this? Recently I made a policy that I would read a
cognitive science book that was not specific to my subfield
for every other difficult non-fiction book I read.
So in total I'm often reading four or five books at a time,
which is managable in terms of keeping them all straight,
but enough so that I always have something to read for every
context and mood.

Why I don't follow politics, or "what could be older than
the news?"
------------------------------------------------------------
---------

There seems to be an almost consensus opinion that following
the news and world events is a good thing to do.
Intellectuals, even if they don't follow the news, think
they would be better people if they did. I don't read or
watch news and I feel fine about it.

The reason is that I try to spend my time making the world a
better place and enjoying myself. Following news does
neither. Simply knowing about world events does nothing to
improve the state of the world. The only way it can play a
part in making the world better is if the knowledge gained
is used to inform actions that improve the world. And for
the vast majority of people these actions fall into three
categories: 1) voting, 2) life choices, and 3) I can't
remember the third but I'm sure there is one.

Let's look at voting for a moment. I've been told that I
should follow the news so I can make an informed vote. I
vote according to my values, which in general do not change
and are unaffected by day-to-day events. I have a hard time
even imagining what the world would have to be like to get
me to vote for a republican candidate. But even if some
amount of knowledge is necessary to make an informed vote in
the presidential election, a few hours of research before
the election should be sufficient to allow you to make an
informed decision. As politics get more local, voting is
more effective in the sense that your vote has a greater
likelihood of making a difference, but the effect these
elections on the world is smaller too. And even so, how
often does one vote? A few hours for each election should be
plenty. So what is the benefit of spending an hour or two
every single day following news? Some people read the paper
in the morning and watch the news at night, learning things
they cannot apply to their lives, and will probably not use
to inform a vote. On top of that they probably see similar
news items on the television that they read about that
morning! What a waste of time. For those of you who followed
the day-to-day happenings of Montica Lewinsky or the Gulf
Wars, how much has that knowledge helped you help the world?
By "life choices" I mean choices regarding how you live your
life to make the world a better place. Some people boycott
companies or countries so they do not support ideologies or
practices they believe are hurting the world. I think this
is noble, but like voting, the actions of a single
individual makes very little difference to the state of the
world. Throwing ice cubes in the ocean makes it a bit cooler
, but if you really are concerned with the oceans warming,
you might want to think about affecting change at a larger
scale. This not to say that one should not live a lifestyle
that encourages the good and discourages the bad. I do it
too, to some extent. I am however arguing that the effects
of these actions are negligible, and you should not cramp
your lifestyle much doing them when you can affect change at
a larger scale. Is that your calling?

My calling is not politics. If it was, I would follow news
and try to affect change by changing laws. However, I'm a
scientist, so it's more important for me to follow science
and contribute to science, where I can really make a
difference.

The other possible reason for me to watch the news is
because I enjoy it. Well, I don't. Some people think they
enjoy news but really don't. Many people feel some drive to
watch the news, but this does not necessarily mean they are
happier for doing so. For many people news makes them
depressed, angry, or frightened.

Closing mantras
---------------
Don't read if you can write.
Don't watch movies if you can make movies.
Don't look at paintings if you can make paintings.
Read while you eat, read while you walk
Draw while you listen, draw while you talk.
JimDavies

Personal backup, shallow and deep

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 17:44:11 -0500 (EST)
From: Daniel Saunders <xxxx@qlink.queensu.ca>

I've been thinking about the personal backup system, and I wanted to put
forward this idea, of a simple two-level backup:

* Shallow backup. Purpose is to allow you to continue to work on your current
projects, and not lose recent work (including recently finished projects) and
correspondence etc. The window is about 2 years. This could be taken care of by
an automatic snapshot system such as Jim has the benefit of. This would ideally
be updated at least weekly.

* Deep backup. Conceptualized as a single backup system spanning your *entire
life as a computer user*. Across every computer system you have ever worked on
(which is now technically possible), work, school, home, etc. We would expect
to save in here things such as
- completed projects (including data that went into old papers)
- uncompleted projects, indefinitely suspended
- personal records
- long term personal reference material
- personal history (souvenirs, emails etc)
So this window could conceptually be 40 years wide. It could be updated on a
monthly, or term basis. It would also include everything that's in the shallow
backups.

Now here's the major principle: that there should only be *one* instance of
each, that is, one current shallow backup and one current deep backup, and each
of them must be *complete*. So that doesn't mean there couldn't be multiple
copies of your shallow and multiple of your deep - but unless they're throwaway
ones, all the copies should be *identical* - that is, they must be synced.

I think the completeness is particularly important - with some of my adhoc
backups I have left off things I believe to already be backed up somewhere
else. Especially given I've not been very good at tracking my backup CDs, that
puts you at very great risk of things falling through the cracks. Even if it
takes 20 DVDs, or buying external harddrives, there should be only one: you
always know where it is, you can take steps to protect it. And you don't have
to worry about any others.

The only reasons I can think of for violating this rule is if you have to
preserve a kind of very high volume data, or if you have to deal with a kind of
data that apparently can't be integrated with the rest (eg Apple II floppies -
I believe) But there's no problem with adding extra systems to deal with those
issues, as long as they're conceptualized to fit under your deep or shallow
backup. And of course this two-level system doesn't preclude adding more backup
systems, for instance one for your ripped mp3s. But I feel this is what I would
need to have peace of mind.

What do you think?

Laundry Limbo report (an Unthinkable case closed)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 22:34:05 -0500 (EST)
From: Daniel Saunders <xxxx@qlink.queensu.ca>

This was number 1 on my list of unthinkables, that is conundrums of trivial
daily life, usually just below conscious awareness, that slow me down:

1 What to do with laundry that isn't dirty, but also isn't clean? (ie
pants that have been worn only once or twice)

In other words, what to do about laundry limbo? So here are the results of
asking my friends, including some other observations about laundry:

JAMAL * Notes that washing is hard on clothes.
* Clothes need to air out to be ok to wear. Drapes them over a chair, would
ideally hang up on a clothes rack before putting in closet again. (3 bin
system)
* If exposed to strong smell, like cooking oil or cigarettes, immediately
dirty.

JULIE 4 bin system:
1. Clean clothes. In dresser
2. 1 or 2 wears, good enough for school. In a specific area of the floor.
3. Sweaty or horsey. Good only for stable or gym. Another specific area.
4. Dirty/unwearable. Dirty clothes hamper.

JIM * Has current clothes on the floor. Always wears those clothes when he
wakes up
* Replaces parts of his outfit in the morning as they get dirty
* Exception to the system: half-dirty socks. Lay them on top of sock box.
* "I don't think I've ever washed a sweater" Correction: what he said apparently was "I think I have sweaters I haven't washed." As in since he bought them not that long ago.

PAM * Put clothes back in the drawer, folded.
* Just remember how many times each worn (don't wear shirts more than once)
* Also mentioned smell/stain override.

MAGGIE * Freshly laundered on one side of the shelf, worn on the other.
* Remember # of times worn

ANNA Put back with clean clothers, memory aided by the fact that they're on
top of the pile.

JEN Washes sweaters after two wearings.

TYSON'S FRIEND The only 1 bin system: dirty, clean and partway all rolled into
a ball.

JEN (girlfriend of my housemate Eddie) * Folds laundry and puts on chair
* Tries to mix up outfits to give the illusion of always changing clothes (like
many of us) so has several sets on the chair at a time. (Eddie less bothered by
wearing same clothes several days in a row)
* Goes by memory how many times, launder if in doubt.
* Half believes in the "airing out" idea: that if you don't wear them for a day
or two, and they aren't crumpled up, they become more acceptable.

Eddie and Jen believe dirty clothes, even ones that aren't damp with sweat, can
contaminate clean clothes.

Everyone agrees:

* There needs to be an override system if things get obviously stained or
sweaty (I don't think wearing lasagna remains on a t-shirt will ever become a
fashion statement)
* Wrinkles are undesirable, and a good system should prevent them.

However there are significant issues on which people differ, which seem to be
the parameters that generate their systems:

1 Contamination or not. Jim and Pam don't believe in dirty clothes
contaminating clean clothes, as in transferring their scent, and neither do
others based on their system. Eddie and Jen do.
2 Airing out or not. Does it help to hang clothes up between one wearing and
the next? Either in the sense of reducing funkiness, or preventing an increase
in funkiness?
3 Rotation or not. How important is the impression, presented to your lab,
classmates and the world at large, that you change outfits every day? The
drawback to heavy rotation is that you have many sets of clothes in the
limbo state, and must remember how dirty each article is. Jim's system, with
only one outfit partially dirty at a time, takes much less cognitive load.

The results of self-examination: I do believe in contamination, I don't think
airing out is necessary, and I do rotate heavily, that is, every day - but
maybe I don't need to so much.

The principle that my system is based on: *limbo cannot contaminate limbo.*

ONE GREY CHAIR system

I will drape all of my limbo laundry, that can be worn at least once more but
is not clean, over the back of my extra chair (which is grey) in the corner of
my room. So this is a 3 bin system. If I think I could wear a pair of socks
again, I will put it on the seat. I will use memory to decide how often an item
of clothing has been worn. I'm not going to worry about wearing the same outfit
two days in a row.

Based on the first two weeks I've been trying the one grey chair system out, *I
may never have clothes lying on my floor ever again*. One concern was that
items would rarely move to the dirty clothes, however I am addressing that by
going through the mound on the chair on monday on the weeks that are not
laundry weeks, that is, every other week.Other potential drawbacks:

1. It's hard to get individual items that might be a bit buried
2. The chair was originally for guests to sit on. Will I need to buy a new
chair??

But so far I'm very pleased with it. Thank you, recipients of this email, who
helped by contributing your systems and thoughts! Now that that's off my mind I
can really get back to marking. Ug.

BONUS UNTHINKABLE CLOSED CASES

3 What does it mean when honey goes granular? Do you have to throw it out?

Honey hasn't gone bad when it's granular, in fact it can be restored to
liquidity by heating it for a while in the microwave. (thanks Pam)

10 How to deal with butter - it's hard and unspreadable if it's kept in
the fridge, but doesn't it go bad when it's out?

Butter can last a long time out of the fridge, definitely more than a week. The
solution is to cut off a portion of your butter in the fridge, the amount you
think you will use up in that time, and put it in a covered butter dish on the
counter. If you just don't use that much butter, margarine is the only option.
(thanks Maggie)

--
Daniel Saunders

Unthinkables

This is the first in a series of relevant emails I am dumping on here.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2006 12:52:32 -0500 (EST)
From: Daniel Saunders <xxxx@qlink.queensu.ca>

There are a number of seemingly trivial problems that I believe have been
oppressing me nearly every day for years, but just below the level of
consciousness - like the same level as that stiff lock that annoys you every
morning, but not so much that you remember it for more than two seconds
afterwards. They are the kind of problems that I've never heard discussed, that
you can't seem answer by searching on the internet or just thinking about them.
Because of that I have labelled them "unthinkables", and on wednesday night I
made a list of as many of them as I could dredge up.

It made me feel better just to see them written down, but I thought over the
next months and years I would try to answer them one by one. So I was amazed to
find that the combined smarts of a table full of psyc students, plus beer,
found solutions to *five* of them on friday, and helped me make progress on
most of them. Here's my list - the asterix means it's solved:

* 1 What to do with laundry that isn't dirty, but also isn't clean? (ie pants
that have been worn only once or twice)
2 How can you tell how much money you have, what you can afford and not, etc,
when you've got chunks of money going in and out at different time intervals?
* 3 What does it mean when honey goes granular? Do you have to throw it out?
4 Do I smell? How could I ever tell, since I'm probably used to it?
* 5 How should one behave towards dogs socially? Cats?
6 What's a good way to take notes on books you're reading?
7 How and when should you clean things like coats, sweaters, and quilts?
8 What is the right way to dance in a club?
9 How should you develop ongoing correspondences with professors at other
universities, as one book on gr