Productive (adj)

It's been a while since this blog has updated... 2.5 years, in fact. Wow! I should start by announcing that I finished my PhD and I'm working at Michigan State University at the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology and at Lyman Briggs College . I'll have way more to say about this and what I've been up to since 2016 in future posts. But right now, let's talk about blogging (how meta!). One of my goals at work this year is to turn blogging into part of my regular practice. I do so many cool projects, and the Hub has an awesome blog where people with better follow-through than I have regularly churn out posts about their work or reactions to issues in higher ed. I even had a series of posts in mind about informal learning on campus that I pitched in the spring to write in the summer... and then it never happened. Not because I'm not interested in the topic, not because the actual writing would be too hard or unpleasant, but because I never hit the rig...

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 ...

No one enjoys having unpleasant chores to do. Being on maternity leave means I have more time around the house, and I've taken it upon myself to be responsible for a greater share of the non-baby-related household chores as well. Here are some initial thoughts on chores, based on the last few months; some of these were surprising to discover. -As anyone who struggles with productivity knows, finishing a task can be immensely satisfying. Having a discrete chore to do and having the time, energy, and opportunity to take care of it are a recipe for self-satisfaction. Floor needs sweeping? Done. Flour on the counter? Wipe that down. Full dishwasher? Stack those plates back in the cupboard. You feel like a champion. The link between cleanliness and procrastination is well established. -But there's only so much you can tackle. Work on our  finite willpower , decision fatigue , or more enjoyably this classic Hyperbole and a Half post , illustrate that you can't chug alon...

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...

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...

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...