Productive (adj)

One of my first mentors after high school told us that it was best to keep busy, because it was much easier to accomplish a task when you had several things to do. This made it more difficult to procrastinate on any one thing, whereas having only one thing to do is counterintuitively more difficult and is much more easily left for tomorrow. At the time it sounded crazy, but it's definitely something I've come to appreciate. In graduate school, I find having one paper or assignment to work on can eat up entire days at a time without necessarily any progress, but a busy day with a full to-do list and multiple appointments usually results in most tasks getting accomplished. To that end, I am giving myself a challenge for the rest of November and December: a Holiday Baking Challenge. I figure that by adding one delicious task to my to-do list, I will through sheer momentum achieve more of the non-baking things, and as a bonus have tons of treats to eat and/or bring in to school. I...

We're all heading back to Montreal for the 2010 joint meeting of the HSS/PSA (History of Science Society and Philosophy of Science Association). I enjoy going to conferences when I'm not presenting a paper; although giving a talk can be very rewarding, it's much more stressful . Since I caught a pretty bad cold in Ottawa, it'll be nice to be able to take it easy and sit in on a few sessions a day. At the last joint HSS/PSA, in Pittsburgh, I was a first-year grad student trying to make a good impression and I made the mistake of going to talks every hour the conference was running. It didn't take long before I was completely burned out, and the real shame was that in being at every talk, I got much less out of each one. It's difficult to listen actively to a day's worth of information, especially when most of it is new to you. In grad school you attend many papers, conferences, symposia, and workshops, both at your own institution and in far-flung places, and...

I attended a conference this weekend on the strength of an abstract I sent in earlier in the summer. In between being accepted to the conference and now I had some significant feedback on the paper upon which the abstract was based (short version: write a better paper) and so the content of my intended presentation changed significantly during the last month. Arriving at this gorgeous facility the night before, then, my slides needed some work. In addition, I had to condense about 25 minutes of material to 20, then 15 once I found out that was the intended time, and psych myself up to explain my ideas to a room full of invited big-deal speakers. I want to point out some things I noticed while getting ready. First of all, under the stress of getting this talk ready over the last few weeks, I had been surprisingly good at devoting time and mental energy to it. Basically, the reason I was burning the midnight oil on my slides was not that I had been slacking off, since pretty much all I...

As usual, there's been a few months since my last posts. As one of my fall resolutions is to be a much more frequent blogger, both here and over at The Bubble Chamber , you'll be hearing much more about me and the endless quest for productivity in grad school. I want to share my summer success story. While on vacation in Maine at the beginning of the summer, I came across The Complete Idiot's Guide to Overcoming Procrastination at Barnes & Noble. It was a peculiar reading choice during the summer break, but since I was trying to put off the research paper I was purportedly working on at the time, I worked my way through. This book is not a cakewalk, despite its title. Michelle Tullier makes you take a long, hard look at your habits and gets you to face the things motivating your procrastination head-on. She deals with the kinds of excuses we make to ourselves when we put things off to do later; things in our surroundings that we use as excuses to avoid work (I didn...

Back in March I took a Science Journalism workshop with Ivan Semeniuk. We learned how to write about science for the public, the 5 W's etc. and how to interview a scientist about their work. We were also assigned to write our own stories. What follows is my submission based on interviews with Mubdi and Ilana. It takes a dust buster to reveal Milky Way’s massive star clusters Eleanor Louson Our Galaxy was hiding its biggest and brightest star forming regions. A new paper for the Astrophysics Journal reveals how the authors cut through the dust and located massive clusters of stars in our own backyard. Secret clusters in our Galaxy Mubdi Rahman and coauthor Norman Murray, a professor from the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, wanted to measure the rate at which stars form in our Galaxy, “one of the critical measurements about our own Galaxy that we take for granted” says Rahman. In the process of doing this, they found the massive star form...

What does productivity mean to you? Do you measure how many things you crossed off your to-do list by the end of the day? How many hours you spent reading papers? Getting your laundry done? We spend loads of time telling each other how much we've accomplished since waking up or complaining about how hard it was to even get started this morning. Those of us in grad school are getting used to working on projects that span months or even years, and it can be hard to imagine carving reasonable chunks in the short term. That's why I think we take such pride in our mundane chores: a clean load of laundry is a much more tangible accomplishment than being a few paragraphs closer to the end of your paper. These days I even feel proud of myself after an afternoon's photocopying, and based on conversations with those of you further along in the program, my battle with productivity won't be over anytime soon. That's why I've re-imagined this blog. My own productivity tends ...

Welcome to my new blog. I've noticed that lots of grad students start a blog describing their research interests and impressions at the beginning of their first year. It reminded me of the fresh new diaries I used to resolve to write in diligently every year, with entries that grew fewer and further-between as enthusiasm invariably waned. Since this, my grad school blog, is 18 months late, I hope it will have a different fate. This is not an official website, although you can find out about my work here and here and about my awesome department where I've been for the last 3 semesters, after my lengthy stretch here . This blog will be a space for the ups and downs (mostly ups so far) of my time at the IHPST and links to exciting things happening in philosophy of biology (like this big-deal conference where I gave my first paper) and HPS generally. Since I spend (waste) lots of time online putting off my work, you'll also see the coolest things I find. This way, you can p...