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...