Productive (adj)

We've all been there: things are chugging along fine, until everything grinds to a halt. Your productivity measures aren't working anymore. Your writing goals feel more and more out of reach. Unhelpful or challenging feedback makes you doubt yourself. The emails are piling up, as is the marking. It's even more frustrating when you've devoted energy over the years to building systems for getting to work, getting things done, and keeping yourself accountable, and things are still not progressing. For me, the low point was a few years ago . I was working on a major paper and I'd utterly lost momentum. I hadn't written a thing in days, and I barely had the drive to open a book. The project was so big and unwieldy that I didn't feel like I could make a dent. I realized how bad things were when the most I could muster the energy to do was take out the garbage. On the walk back up the steps, I realized that the pride I had in accomplishing such a minor task ...

RealSimple just posted an article called How to Be More Productive . These kind of articles pop up all over the place, especially over at Lifehacker ; this one drew my attention because the items on the list are so innocuous, even pleasant. Get more sunshine, do something mindless, be present when a compliment is given, get physical, and work in small increments all sound manageable, and in some cases enjoyable. I'd love to take a sunny walk and do some mindless activity, and who doesn't like getting compliments? The best tip is probably the one to break your projects into smaller, more manageable chunks; this is the mindset behind Getting Things Done and is also at work in the Pomodoro Technique . It's definitely motivating to cross smaller tasks off of a to-do list, especially when projects in graduate school easily growing to monstrous size in our imaginations. "Pass comps" or "write thesis" are impossible tasks to tackle in one go, but "re...

My supervisor warned me recently about how small responsibilities can pile up. Her strategy is to take 3 straight days to work on a project (a paper, proposal, etc.) because by day 3, your focus is so concentrated that it's much more efficient than continuously returning to the same project for many days over a few weeks. But when things get busy, distractions eat away at your ability to focus. One of the worst, she said, was email: administrative, teaching, and miscellaneous emails pile up and erode productivity, meaning that she doesn't ever have 3 straight days to focus on one project. Things work a little differently for me. I like to move between projects, to tackle multiple things in a day. I enjoy the feeling of crossing things off my to-do list, and since email is the biggest part of my graduate assistantship, I like to read and respond to any that come my way ASAP so that they're not hanging over me (leaving small tasks undone for days, on the other hand, ...

Last week I gave a talk at the annual meeting of 4S, the Society for Social Studies of Science , in Copenhagen. It was a great excuse to visit a city I'd never been to before, and a nice change of scenery from an autumn devoted to reading for my comprehensive exam (and in York's STS program, is it ever comprehensive !) After giving myself permission to enjoy my trip and not feel guilty for not keeping up the reading pace, I ended up doing much more work than I expected; mainly writing notes on pdf files of papers in my Documentary Film list. I use GoodReader to read and annotate files on my iPad, which was much easier than lugging stacks of printed papers or books on a transatlantic flight. The difficulty is that I find the iPad sluggish when I try to type notes and work off the pdf file at the same time, so I just wrote in my moleskin notebook and typed them up later. The conference itself was vibrant and well-designed, much like Copenhagen. Based on the theme of "De...

This summer there are many balls in the air. I'm ostensibly on vacation in Maine, but there are some significant responsibilities to take care of before heading back to Canada in August. In decreasing order of importance, these are: 1) Wedding planning. People warn you about how many details need to be looked after, but I severely underestimated the amount of work it would be. And doing many things ourselves (especially of the craftier variety) reduces cost but increases time and effort. Even though we're holding a low-key, casual affair, the to-do list goes on and on. Fortunately, this kind of project is agreeable to work on, and Isaac and his family have been doing a tremendous amount. 2) Reading for comps. My exam has been scheduled for the beginning of December, and there are so many books to read! 150 in all, in 3 lists. I have a handful under my belt so far, but it never really feels as though I'm going fast enough. My problem might be that I'm a fast, retenti...

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...