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