Fiery Inspiration from Teddy Roosevelt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Creative Break

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Heart My Draft

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

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

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

Rebooting My Working Habits with Linda

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Some more great tips from the session:

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

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

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

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

Rudy Rucker's Writer's Toolkit

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

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

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

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

Reference Slugs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tyranny of Email

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

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

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

"I Have Decided"

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

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

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

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

Getting Started

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

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

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

What do you do to get started?

Complete journal scans

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unpleasant and Overwhelming

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

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

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

Breaking Bad Web Habits with Privoxy

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

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

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

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

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

What is a milestone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play as Work and Organized Fun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ropebridge Method for writing projects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Do Research in the MIT AI Lab

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

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

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

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

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

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

My forwardwriter

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

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

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

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

emacs myfilename.txt

and the EMACS editor will pop up.

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

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

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

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

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

The Peanut M&M Method for finishing projects

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

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

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

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

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

You can use this online timer with it.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal backup, shallow and deep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

Laundry Limbo report (an Unthinkable case closed)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JEN Washes sweaters after two wearings.

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

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

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

Everyone agrees:

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

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

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

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

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

ONE GREY CHAIR system

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

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

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

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

BONUS UNTHINKABLE CLOSED CASES

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

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

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

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

--
Daniel Saunders

Unthinkables

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

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

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

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

* 1 What to do with laundry that isn't dirty, but also isn't clean? (ie pants
that have been worn only once or twice)
2 How can you tell how much money you have, what you can afford and not, etc,
when you've got chunks of money going in and out at different time intervals?
* 3 What does it mean when honey goes granular? Do you have to throw it out?
4 Do I smell? How could I ever tell, since I'm probably used to it?
* 5 How should one behave towards dogs socially? Cats?
6 What's a good way to take notes on books you're reading?
7 How and when should you clean things like coats, sweaters, and quilts?
8 What is the right way to dance in a club?
9 How should you develop ongoing correspondences with professors at other
universities, as one book on grad school recommended you do?
* 10 How to deal with butter - it's hard and unspreadable if it's kept in the
fridge, but doesn't it go bad when it's out?
* 11 My mayonnaise seems to last for months in the fridge. Isn't it supposed to
go bad fairly quickly, since it has eggs inside it?
12 Can scuffed leather shoes be fixed, or are they ruined? Would just
polishing fix them?
13 Who do we get colds and flus from? How exactly does it happen?
14 Do people generally sit up straight? Should I?
15 What are the things that encourage zits? How can I make sure I don't get
new zits without using a special topical medication like Oxy cream?

This list isn't to be cute; I seriously believe these have been weighing on my
mind and slowing me down, by whatever fractional amount. I would love to hear
from you, if you 1) share one of the unthinkables I have solved and would like
to hear the answer, 2) have thoughts on one of the unsolved ones, like how you
deal with it, even if dysfunctionally, or 3) have some unthinkables of your own
- private, unconscious, unresolved problems gumming up daily life - that you
would like to add to my list so that we can all try to answer them together and
relieve a little of our collective burden.

About unthinkable #1: It turns out everyone has a personal
partially-dirty-laundry system, whether they've thought about it or not, and by
asking everyone I meet I've collected 9 examples of them over the last couple
of days. They turn out to be very interesting! After looking at the strengths
and weaknesses of them all, I've come up with one of my own that I think will
work for me and keep my floor more or less permanently clothes-free. I'm
planning to send out an email with those 9 systems and my own, but let me know
if you told me about your system and don't want it publically known (though
none of them seem
incriminating to me).

--
Daniel Saunders

Books that have really helped me

These are all sensible, sane, well-written, kindly books, and I've got at least a few extremely important things from each of them. Some of the titles are scary - and some of them lay on my desk for a week or two before I could bear to pick them up - but I was incredibly glad when I did.

Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning an MA or a Ph.D. by Robert L. Peters

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Advice To A Young Scientist by Peter Medawar

Professors As Writers by Robert Boice

Writing For Social Scientists by Howard S. Becker

Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day by Joan Bolker

A Ph.D. Is Not Enough: A Guide to Survival in Science by Peter J. Feibelman

Welcome to How I Work

Hi and welcome to How I Work! The title is a little stern, but I like it because it sums up the two things this is going to be about:

1) The procedures, rules and guidelines I live by in my daily life, both to get chores and various duties done, and also to produce creative work, like writing, research, etc and

2) How my own mind works. I am always trying to figure that out, for one thing to aid in continually tweaking those procedures, rules and guidelines for daily productivity and contentedness - and to outsmart myself when it comes to things like procrastination ("Bastard! He's always one step ahead!"). Here's Socrates (via Plato, via this course I took on classical rhetoric):"I ... investigate not these things, but myself, to know whether I am a monster more complicated and furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature to whom a divine and quiet destiny has been given by nature."

I have started this blog for friends who might be interested, to share some of the procedures, rules and guidelines I have been working on, in the particular hope that they will comment and suggest and share what works for them. I like the fact that it's electronic so that it can be continually updated, as all these procedures, rules and guidelines must be, so that they're things that I can and do follow. No point in having ones that just sit there and make you feel bad: these are to help the person I actually am, rather than who I wish I was. Anyway hope you find entries here to stir your thoughts about your own working habits, and even to inspire you.