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, who play all day, 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 highly structured 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. I think it's beautiful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=262kfAoZmog

(I love the doozer moms in their working class sunday-best hats) The song they all sing 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.

Another great doozer song has the lines, "Every day the world is new, there's dreams to pay attention to, and building is the surest way we know (two three four)" Maybe "calling on doozer power" is what you do 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