Grad Hacker

Humor me for a bit by engaging in this short exercise:

1. List all of your projects. Define a “project” as something most people would define it as, not the way David Allen would define it. If you’re confused, don’t worry, just go with your gut for now; step 4 will take care of things. I have 6 projects; in semi-cryptic shorthand: research, business1, business2, thesis, motorcycle, jobs, sidejob.

2. Put a line through occasional fun things. For me, “motorcycle” gets nixed here.

3. Put a line through things you can automate. For me “thesis” gets nixed here. In my field, we publish small papers along the way and assembling them into a thesis is easily automate-able work. For others this may not be the case.

4.Put a line through anything requiring less than 5 tasks to complete. This is definitely distinct from a lot of time management web-apps and GTD. Let’s be honest, “get an oil change” is not a project for normal people. Yes, technically it takes more than 1 task to complete, but get real, it doesn’t need a “project folder”, it doesn’t need it’s own list, it simply just needs to get done. Call the place to arrange a time and take your car there. It’s not that hard. I didn’t list any “projects” like this in my original list so nothing gets nixed here.

How many projects do you have left?

I have 5 left.

Now if I were to list immediate actionable tasks for each of these 5 projects, I’d come up with an average of 3-5, and that’s being generous. Often a project simply has one obvious next action. Say I have 4 tasks for each of these projects, that gives me 20 tasks.

Add another 5 miscellanous tasks that aren’t associated with projects (this is where “call the oil change place” comes in).

That’s 25 tasks. (My real task number is even lower, keep reading)

What Does this Mean?

Elaborate task management systems are probably unnecessary for you. And, as I’ve mentioned before, GTD style context sorted lists are most certainly overkill. Remember, even in the book GTD itself, David Allen says explicitly, “If you have only twenty or thirty of these [next actions], it may be fine to keep them all on one list…For most of us, however, the number is more likely to be fifty to 150″.

150?! Immediately actionable items that need to be tracked? Get out.

Also unnecessary when you only have 20-30 tasks are all those time-management webapps that sort tasks by project, context, labels, folders, display this and that mode, and what not.

All it takes with 20-30 tasks is one list, and, for good measure, planning your day.

What if you got way more than 25-30 tasks when you did this?

If you have more than 5 real projects as a grad student, you are either a) fooling yourself b) way overcommitted and thus should not be reading blogs right now c) likely not making progress on your most important project at the pace you’d like (for me, this is “research”). Cal Newport had a great post about Einstein focusing on one or two projects at a time. Einstein folks, Einstein.

Another possibility is that you are listing tiny things as “projects” and giving them way too much weight in your life (see the oil change example above).

If you have more than 3-5 immediate next actions per project, something is definitely askew, or you’re doing the completely overkill thing of listing “dependencies”, tasks that are dependent on other tasks being completed. That, by the way, is a huge waste of time, cause how often is it not obvious what the next action is after you finish doing what you’re doing right now?

So if no elaborate time-management system, then how should I track these tasks?

In a list somewhere. One list. And then don’t worry about it. If you want some important ones to stand out, put a star buy it (I do this all the time), or circle it or something.

What my list looks like:

I’ve been keeping such lists, updated daily in a single text file since February. Every day I just copy yesterday’s list, paste it at the top, delete stuff I did, add some new stuff, and proceed with my day. This has happened almost every day, minus weekends (sometimes), vacations, conferences, or other special scenarios. In addition, by keeping a real simple text file like this I can impromptu brainstorm on stuff when I want, or do a more zoomed out “goals for the week” list wherever I want (note below you see some really long lines or indented lists).

Here’s a really zoomed out snapshot of what it looks like:

My average number of tasks:

While writing this post I was curious how many tasks I had per day on this list. I averaged over this past month cause it’s too boring to go back further.

My daily average number of tasks over the past month was 10.45454545.

Way less than 25.

That’s impossible, certainly you have more, what about errands and things?

For the most part, I find keeping track of little personal crap on my todo list that contains work related tasks distracting and unnecessary. When I need to make sure to do some personal item, it goes on the list, (just like we added that extra 5 items earlier to our final list to get 25 total tasks). But by and large, personal things just get done without tracking. When I need to mail the census, I just mail the census, I don’t write it down somewhere first.

I find no problem with this because most little personal things don’t weigh on my mind at all, and the few that do go on the list. In addition, a lot of things come up ad hoc when I’m in the flow of working, as is the case for most everyone. Why interrupt that flow by writing stuff down, or worse yet, moving to the next item when there is no urgent need to?

Such has been my todo list experience for the past month: completely maintenance free. One list, mostly the important stuff, no sorting, no filtering, no contexts, no headache.

One of the biggest concerns of grad students is what to do after grad school. This is especially true of Ph.D. students who know they don’t want to continue in academia, don’t want to be professors or post-docs, but aren’t sure what other options are out there.  This post is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts interviewing people that have gotten their Ph.D. and done something unexpected with it.

Here we continue with Part 2 of my conversation with Marilyn Garcia.

Read Part 1 here.

How She Made the Switch

Of course, the next question is: How do you make that switch when you’re busy being a professor? As it turns out, “I bought a house and basically never stopped looking at houses, never stopped following the market, it became a hobby. So the idea of being able to make this hobby my profession was just…an immediate shift, and I was excited about it.”

When I asked her about the concrete steps she took to become a realtor, she noted that “the barriers to entry in real estate are not that high.” She took some classes, took a test to get a license, and looked for a well established company that would be able to help her get started. She also saved up some money to make the transition, and jumped in during the summer between the fall and spring semesters.

What’s interesting, though, is how much time passed between real estate being a hobby of hers, to her profession. “It was my hobby for…approaching 5 years…but I didn’t even think of it as that. It was just something that I did and enjoyed and it never even crossed my mind to do it for a living.” Five years is a while. Note she didn’t first decide that she wanted a change and then start looking at real estate as a hobby, it was the other way around. It took time in fact, and a some discontent with her current job, to see her hobby as a possible future profession, “When I was thinking about it I was in a massive panic. Until I thought of something that I would love to do,” she recalls, “I was freaking out, and then I thought: oh my god, I could do real estate for a living.”

Marilyn’s entry into real estate came from realizing her hobby, which she had cultivated for five years, could become her profession.

Although she discovered real estate as her hobby and, later, passion when she was a professor, the initial spark of wanting to venture away from academia came much earlier in grad school. She told me a story of her best friend in grad school that left the economics program and became a landscape architect. When Marilyn recalls that episode, one word comes to mind: “Jealous.” Specifically, she was jealous that her friend was doing something creative. Which, in the end, is the underlying theme behind Marilyn’s switch.She has a passion for creativity, and as she says, something “visually creative.”

Economics simply doesn’t cut it, but being a realtor, for her, does.

So Was the Ph.D. Useful At All?

“I absolutely won’t say that I’m using it to the fullest,” Marilyn says about her Ph.D. “But it’s absolutely a benefit in my profession, even though, it’s in most senses completely unrelated. I feel like it absolutely gives me a leg up in what I’m doing.” Interesting, of course, because most realtors do not have a Ph.D. I asked her whether it was the Ph.D. aspect or the economics aspect that gives her the leg up. She feels it’s both. The economics part has more obvious benefits in terms of being able to analyze the market and find trends. In fact, Marilyn puts out a quarterly newsletter with her market analysis based on data she’s compiled.

But there are also some more subtle benefits. For example, getting a Ph.D. demands self-motivation, which being a realtor also requires. Also, Marilyn cites one of the most valuable skills of being a good academic: “figuring out projects that are worthwhile, and then getting myself to do them.”

Lastly, there is the often-mentioned benefit that having the Ph.D. “opens doors.” That is, it gives you some sort of status or stamp of approval. Personally, I’ve heard this benefit mentioned several times, and I have my doubts as to how useful simply having a Ph.D. to show you have a Ph.D. is, and even if the Ph.D. stamp does carry some weight, whether it’s enough weight to be worth it. Why not spend that time gaining an extra 5 years experience in whatever industry you’re interested in?

Nonetheless, Marilyn is certainly glad she finished her Ph.D.

Her Advice to Me and You

How do you know if a life of academia is for you? Simple, “you have to really want to do it” is how Marilyn sees it, and I agree. I imagine most would. For example, Marilyn recalled a friend of hers that loved geography as a grad student, got a faculty position and swore “I’m gonna get tenure and then I’m gonna kick back” but now that he does have tenure, he hasn’t kicked back. From what I’ve seen, that’s not uncommon, and in fact, it means that her friend really likes doing his job.

But even more importantly, it’s Marilyn’s belief that this enjoyment of doing what you do carries over to a greater likelihood of being good at what you do. “I think that most people, if they’re doing something that they really enjoy and really care about and really feel passionate about…I think there are very few people who are doing something like that that don’t do well at it.” This is not an uncommon idea.

We agreed that a big reason for this is because a lot of the stresses of your job and, consequently, a lot of the advice out there (this blog included) on how to do your job with the least stress, how to manage your time, and “hack” your way through this and that, become unnecessary when you truly like what you’re doing.

Of course, that doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be great at what you love — I love playing basketball, but I knew in high school it was not gonna put bread on my table. But it does mean honing your skills and pushing your boundaries will feel less like work. That is, I’m sure Michael Jordan wasn’t staring at the clock during practice and thinking “Okay, I’ll shoot ten more jumpers and call it a day.” And if you think the sports example is too easy since sports are naturally fun, we can also be sure that Albert Einstein wasn’t thinking “Damn, I gotta work for the man at the patent office all day and moonlight as a physicist all night…” Of course, most of us are not as good at anything as they were at basketball and physics, but we can still take something away from the examples.

For grad students, Marilyn suggests asking yourself what you’re jealous of when you see other folks your age and feel jealous. Am I jealous of their specific job, their independence, their salary, their time off, the prestige of their job, the creativity? Armed with that information, you can more carefully discern what it is about your current situation that needs tweaking: I love this part of my job, but I hate that part. Perhaps I can find a way to make it work, or find a related profession (or hobby) that has less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff.

For grad students feeling the itch of changing gears right now, Marilyn suggests finishing. “I was jealous, but I still don’t regret finishing,” she recalls about being jealous of her friends that left. This is great practical advice for someone who doesn’t see themselves making a big leap into something totally different, as she did. “[Go] the traditional route” and “see if there’s something modifiable and interesting” to turn a mediocre job into one you enjoy. And at the same time “think about where else you could go and how else you could use your skills and what other possibilities there could be.” That’s manageable.

And if that doesn’t workout? Well then just save up some cash, take the jump, and do what you love.

One of the biggest concerns of grad students is what to do after grad school. This is especially true of Ph.D. students who know they don’t want to continue in academia, don’t want to be professors or post-docs, but aren’t sure what other options are out there.  This post is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts interviewing people that have gotten their Ph.D. and done something unexpected with it.

“People don’t really think of real estate as being artistic.”

Neither did I, until I spoke with Marilyn Garcia. Marilyn got her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Economics, taught economics at the University of San Francisco for five years, and is now a realtor, and loves her job. This may strike you as an unusual path, it certainly did to me. But it was also just the sort of unconventional post-Ph.D. career path I was curious about, so I had to talk with her, and Marilyn was nice enough to have a conversation with me. We spoke about why she decided to move from academic economics to real estate, what she loves about being a realtor, what she didn’t like about being a professor, and how her Ph.D. still gives her an edge in her new career.

Why She Chose Real Estate

Of course, my first question was the obvious, why? She said, “I wanted to be doing something more creative, as in visually creative, which no matter how you spin it, economics just isn’t.” Fair enough, but this makes me think that she wanted to start a painting career. Real estate is visually creative? She explains that it’s more than just signing closing papers,  “It is artistic in the sense that the marketing is creative, and doing the marketing materials.” In addition Marilyn spends time working with sellers to “basically go in and help them make over their houses while on a reasonable budget…I love houses. I love architecture, and I love sort of envisioning what the houses could be, with sort of the right changes here or there.” Contrast that with studying GDP trends from the past decade, and you can quickly see how real estate wins in the more-visually-creative fight.

But certainly someone that goes through years of economics training, gets a Ph.D. from a top 10 program, and lands a professorship must have a serious appetite for the analytical that needs to stay satiated. She gets that as well, explains Marilyn, “[Real estate] is a fantastic mixture for me because I love doing all of that. I honestly feel like I’m playing and having fun…there’s sort of the figuring things out, and watching the market, and calculating statistics, which of course I do more than kind of any other realtor, because of my background. There’s an analytical side as well, which I think is really important to me and makes me happy also. And it’s that, the mix of those things: the logical analytical side, the artistic side, and then it’s a flexible lifestyle that works with the family.”

Realtor vs. Professor

Issues like “lifestyle” and “family” came up often in my talk with Marilyn because, as she explained, one of the factors in switching from teaching economics to becoming a realtor was the birth of her first child while she was a professor, “which,” she jokes, “tactically was not the optimal thing.” But moving from being a professor to any other profession for a more flexibile schedule struck me as odd. I mentioned to Marilyn that setting your own schedule and not having a boss are often the most cited pros of being a professor. Marilyn responded, “I think that that’s very true, except for, for me it was the: you can set your schedule, but certainly at the junior level, every moment that you’re not doing something that you’ve scheduled, you really should be doing research. And it’s sort of that continual, 24 hours a day guilt — I truly don’t miss that at all.” That doesn’t exist in real estate? Marilyn explains, “in real estate…I work at all different times of the day, but I’m doing very specific things: I need to do this and then I’m done and I can go enjoy my life.” To which I asked, “but how is that not true [as a professor]? You can’t delineate that like: I’m going to finish this grant proposal and then I’m going to call it a day?” Marilyn elaborated on the more subtle distinction, which is one of the most important differences between her old job and her new one. “I think that’s true to some extent but I think the activities are much more open ended and long term. Okay, a grant proposal is one thing but you need to write a paper that’s going to be published in some fabulous journal so you can get tenure,” she said. “Setting a specific goal is great but you have no idea how long, really, it’s going to take to achieve that goal. So you work for three hours and you’re not there, and then what do you do? You work for three hours after you’ve been in class all day, and you’ve got the faculty meetings, and had office hours, and driven back and forth.”

This is one of the parts of my conversation with Marilyn that I’ve thought about the most. Comparing careers, especially in the context of finding your “dream job” (whatever that means), is not a matter of just counting hours, dollars, or some other seemingly objective measure of comparison. Instead it has to do with feelings like guilt and contentedness, subjective feelings, that are difficult to quantify and differ from person to person. As a professor, the demands of the job meant that she felt more guilt when she was not working. As a realtor, she feels more content and simply doesn’t feel that nagging guilt. She agreed with me, “I don’t. And you know I think the other thing for me, honestly, was that doing economics, like doing research to me, never felt like fun.” Bingo. “Right…could it just be that you just simply enjoy this more?” I asked. “I think that’s absolutely true. I do enjoy this more and that’s why I’m willing to do it for far more hours. I mean I think that the people who are fantastic academics get joy out of the process and they’re having fun while they’re doing it. There isn’t this sort of trade off that I felt.”

That gets to the heart of what I learned from talking to Marilyn, she switched from academic economics to real estate because she likes being a realtor. She has fun doing it.  That was not true of being an economics professor, despite having spent years studying the subject and developing her skills. It’s not that she wasn’t good at it. Not everyone that gets a Ph.D. is good enough to become a professor. She was. Yet, she found she plainly wasn’t having fun doing it, and, lucky for her, she found something else she does enjoy. Perhaps equally as important was the fact that her new profession gave her more autonomy (a subject discussed recently by Cal Newport), which she feels was more suitable to being a mom at the same time. Lastly, note that for her, there was little autonomy in being a professor, despite the fact that it’s a quintessential “you’re your own boss” job. Specifically, when she stopped doing work as a professor, she felt various pressures to do more, ruining any sense of autonomy that the professor job has on paper. The same was not true of real estate.

Stay Tuned…

The next obvious question is how she decided on real estate out of all the other creative professions out there. But in addition, Marilyn and I also talked about the concrete steps she went through to become a realtor when she was already a professor, whether her still considers her Ph.D. useful, and what advice she has for other people thinking of leaving academia. Stay tuned for Part 2!

Part 2 can now be read here!

Photo by: moriza

In life, sometimes no matter how hard you try to do good, there are those that try to undermine your efforts. Today’s culprit: The New York Times.

Since March 2008, when I originally advised people that walking fast would improve their efforts to act productive, I have been on a tireless mission to coach people on how to not only be productive, but how to also act productive. That is, put their productive habits on show so as to both inspire people and improve your perceived value.

But today, in a dirty-handed move to discourage people from such a basic display of productive multitasking, the New York Times has published a seemingly serious and scientific-study-filled article on how cell phones and walking don’t mix.  Those bastards. They put the “ir” in irresponsible; trying to prevent people from being productive with scare tactics like a shameless story of an innocent 16-year-old boy who “walked into a telephone pole while texting and suffered a concussion.” Have a heart.

It doesn’t stop there, however, they also cite an innocent “68-year-old man who fell off the porch while talking on a cellphone, spraining a thumb and an ankle and causing dizziness” and even start the whole article off with a tale of a 25 year old Tiffany, who was walking while talking to her grandmother and ran into a truck, which the Times adds “was parked in a driveway.”

Perhaps what disturbs me the most about this article, though, is that they don’t just stop at little anecdotes. They try to add science. That hits too close to home. They cite work by a graduate student at Ohio State, which finds that “slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 because they got distracted and tripped, fell or ran into something while using a cellphone to talk or text.” Who is this grad student whose research is making people act less productive?! I need to give him a call, perhaps I’ll do it on my afternoon walk.

So what do you do when someone tries to compromise your life’s work? You fight propaganda with propaganda. So I am writing this post to encourage all of you to talk, text, play iPhone games, even set your home DVR with DirectTV all from your phone, while walking! Show people that you are too busy to walk and do nothing else at the same time!  Check your Gmail! Text your friends! Read papers with a smartphone pdf reader! Even read the New York Times itself! But walking and texting is such a basic productivity maneuver, I feel bad leaving it at that. Try more impressive productivity displays such as biking and talking, or better yet, biking and texting (If this is outlawed where you are reading, then do not do this. Grad Hacker is not responsible for you breaking the law. Breaking the law is not productive.). Whatever you do, don’t listen to the haters, and make sure you act productive.

Standard messaging and data rates may apply.

Find the full list of How to Act Productive posts here.

Recently, I read Michael Pollan’s new book “In Defense of Food”, which was #1 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for six weeks. It’s about eating good things, things that keep you healthy, and things that are good for the earth. The most famous line from the entire book are its first seven words, which, he says, sums up his whole philosophy: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. He goes on for an entire book to elaborate, but does, in fact sum up his advice.

I liked this simple approach to a subject (eating food) so overdone it makes me want to vomit (the opposite of eating food). While repeating this catchy phrase over and over in my head one day, I thought: time managment is another totally overdone subject, wouldn’t it be great to have a similar credo to simplify all this hackneyed advice on to do lists, productivity, time management systems, and the like? Then, sent from the productivity heavens, it came to me:

Make lists. Not too much. Mostly do.

Let’s look at the three parts individually.

Make lists.

Let’s be honest, 99% of time managemenment techniques involve some sort of list making. From Alan Lakein’s ABC system back in the 80’s to GTD, everyone is telling you to write things down one way or another. Generally, in subjects with a lot of differing advice (e.g. time-management, fitness, diets, etc.), if you find a few recurring themes that everyone agrees on, it’s likely that they are solid principles to abide by. So in this case, it probably doesn’t matter whether you sort your lists with ranked A, B and C priority items, or by context in GTD, or keep a list of projects in your pocket like Cal Newport, or go through your list in a clever way like in Mark Forster’s Autofocus system. What matters is that you write stuff down and use that list. Otherwise you’ll forget stuff and not have something to fall back on when it’s not obvious what you should be doing right now. Certainly there are productive people that never make lists, but there are also people with great bodies that never workout. They’re lucky. You can hate them. But the bottom line is that writing stuff down in some form is a recurring piece of advice in differing productivity literature in the same way that regular excercise and avoiding junk food are a recurring themes in differing health and fitness advice. So make lists, but…

Not too much.

Don’t get obsessed with the list making and list sorting. It’s easy to get caught up with maintianing your list(s), tweaking your system, and trying to automate everything. Stop. Also, don’t worry about keeping too many different lists. If it makes sense, sure, make separate lists (e.g. home, work). Or if you start to lose focus or feel overwhelmed on a certain day, it can be useful to make impromptu lists of what projects are important right now, or what tasks you need to do for today only. Otherwise, lists that unnecessarily break up items waste your time. Instead, focus your energy elsewhere…

Mostly do.

Do whatever is necessary to do the (most important) items on your list. In that sense, my personal opinion is that simple pen and paper or low-tech lists are best because they don’t distract you with new techy features, you can flip through all items quickly, there is no tweaking of settings, and they don’t release new versions. Just write your stuff down and get moving. If you need the right setting to do things well, get in that setting. If you need quiet, or no distractions, move to a new place. If you are starting to get burned out, take a break, or ask yourself if you’re trying to work too much. If certain items seem to sit on your list undone for a long time, ask yourself if they really need to be done, and if so, then reword them, or break them up to do them more easily. Lastly, some days, it will be so obvious what you should do that you don’t need a list. That’s good. Consider those days a gift. Just do what’s obvious.

With these 7 words, you should be able to proceed through most days smoothly. This is not to say that particular systems aren’t appropriate for different people, they can be, but in the end you will have to do your tasks one way or another, and the simpler the way the better. Do obvious things you have to do first; focus on your most important tasks and projects first thing in the day, when you still have energy; and when nothing obviously is needs to be done now, look at your list, and do more. Then go home and relax.

Note: Thanks for the comments reminding me that the title has 7 words and not 8. What can I say?

…who’s there?

Me!

Looks like it’s time to break my hiatus. Excuse me for the long gap, I took a bit of a break. I did, however, advance to candidacy in the meantime. Yes. Good to be back!

Let me be straight with you, I like the idea of routines. I like the idea of having a life where I know that at this time, I’m working, and at that time, Im not working, letting me thus “not work” guilt free. Fixed schedules seem to allow avoiding two deadly grad school traps: 1) the distracted i’m-at-work-but-wasting-time-pretending-to-work trap and 2) the i’m-at-home-and-feeling-guilty-about-not-being-at-work effect. In fact, some parts of my life are all about routine. I eat the same dinner and breakfast almost every day of the week that I’m home. No joke. But I have a lot of trouble following a prescribed work/play routine consistently.

Thus, I have e a predicament: I can’t seem to follow fixed work schedules, but I hate those two grad school ills more than tax-dollar funded corporate bonuses.

What’s a nerd to do?

First, we should ask why I can’t follow a fixed schedule: a legitimate question. I can boil it down to two main reasons: 1) I don’t want to go home when I have momentum. 2) I like variety. Let’s discuss each.

Momentum

Momentum is key in my work. I’m in the natural sciences and a lot of key results come from seeing a pattern in data, supposing that it is a result of some physical principle (modeling the data), and doing, if necessary, further experiments to see whether your model is right. For idiots like me, this is tricky work. If you miss a pattern in the data or think you see something, which later turns out to be a mirage, it could cost you weeks, months, or years of work. The cold truth is, there’s not much you can do about this. It’s how science works. Sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong, but hopefully you’re right more than you’re wrong.

So what do I do when I have a new idea, think I see a new pattern, or think I see how an old hypothesis is wrong at 8:00pm on a Tuesday night? Do I watch some TV and say I’ll get to it in the morning? It’s certainly an option. I’ll definitely be enthusiastic about getting to work on my new ideas in the morning. But I could also forget a lot of the subtlety in my ideas by that time. I have a lot of sympathy towards the idea that a fixed, limited work schedule preserves creativity, focus, and energy by not trying to do work at all waking hours. But if I think I have a decent idea, or if things start to go my way, previous reasons for not working late begin to melt away; that is, energy, enthusiasm, and focus are easy to come by when you think you’re on to something. So in times like these I clear my desk, get scratch paper or my computer out and play with the ideas.

This is what I mean by preserving momentum.

Variety

What’s there to say about variety other than that it kicks ass? Work can get repetitive and boring and variety is the cure for it. Specifically in terms of work schedule variety, I mean: sometimes going in early and leaving early, sometimes working at night, sometimes taking a break in the afternoon and coming back, sometimes working morning to night and taking the next morning off, you get the idea.

Problems

But that can cause problems: adopting a work schedule with “variety” quickly leads to an “I work whenever the hell I feel like it” schedule, which leads to the two grad student ills I described above. How? First, “I need variety” can often mean sitting at your desk and browsing the internet all day. Then doing the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, until the week goes by and you start to feel bad about not having done anything. Second, with a variety schedule you have no clear boundaries between when you’re “supposed to” work and not work, so you can easily start to feel guilty about not working during your play time, which is a miserable, horrible place to be.

Solution

I’m not clear I have a good solution but I’ll suggest some ideas and let you list your brilliant ideas in the comments.

Simply count your hours of honest work. I know this isn’t a sexy idea, it’s old school, it’s not what bloggers say, but there is simply no substitute for doing work, and if you want to make sure you do a certain amount of work each day, while still maintaining the freshness of different schedules, you can just try to make sure you hit your goal each day; plain and simple. You don’t have to be anal, just make sure you’re getting roughly x hours of honest, uninterrupted work in a day. I know there are all these timer widgets and online things that time your work, but simply remembering you’re at some number and have to reach another number by the end of the day is usually good enough; you’ll know if for the past few days you’ve basically been doing diddly squat. Of course, this may be okay if a break is what you need, but you should be aware.

Don’t go overboard.  That is, don’t change your schedule from a sane, practical work schedule too much. At least, unless you feel you have a really good handle on avoiding the grad student ills of distracted work and guilty play. For example, I’ve learned that if I have a huge break in the middle of the day and try to go back and work in the evening, my chances of failure are high, so I usually just switch between morning and evening schedules as well as super-sized-days and half-sized days.

Such is what I’ve been doing lately, and although I’m not sure whether it’s made me more “productive” in the sense of “output” I don’t care, because it has served it’s real purpose, which is that it has let me enjoy work more, it has made work feel more fresh, and it’s kept my energy and enthusiasm up. Hopefully this will last.

Here at Grad Hacker, we feel that simply being productive is not enough. What good is your inner, clandestine productivity, if your bosses, colleagues, and you yourself don’t really know the extent of just how unbelievably productive, busy, stressed, in a rush, and important you really are? For these, reasons, we will periodically provide you with a tip on how to act productive.

In the age of the interweb, your online presence is your life. If you’re still commuting to work, working in an office with other humans, and physically handing-in paper reports to your boss, you clearly didn’t get the memo. We have home offices now, and we communicate online. But that’s cool, if you still go to school to “do experiments” or “TA a class”, or go to the office to “sit in your cubicle”, don’t worry, this advice will still apply, because I’m sure you’ve learned by now to have your computer with you always to check email often, and while you’re checking email I can bet a chat service is up and running in the background.

Now, here’s what separates the women from the girls: does your chat status look green or say “available”? “Yes,” you say, “I want to talk to my friends, that’s why I’m online.” What an amateur response. You need to ask yourself what kind of message this sends to the world, especially the chat world, which consists of your close friends and colleagues. How often are you online? (if you answered “not often” please re-read the first paragraph). How often are you broadcasting to the world that you are “available”? Do you know what this means? “Available” directly translates to “I have nothing to do. I have no active projects on my plate right now. I am accomplishing nothing in my life. I do not contribute to society. I am worthless as a human being.” Is this really the kind of message you want to send to the world?

Fret not, however, because your problems are easily solved with a simple click of the mouse. Wave goodbye to that little green dot next to your name and turn it red. Simply change your status to busy. Ideally you should type something that emphasizes how stressed out you are because of how many things you’re doing at the same time. Try to be more creative than what I’ve shown in the picture above, but otherwise the redness of your status will suffice. Notice how the image at the top of the post makes you want to talk to me a lot more than the green image below it: “What are they doing?! Why are they so busy?!” It also inspires you: “I better get to work too. I don’t want to be seen as worthless!” Inspiring others is important, it makes your stock go up.

Lastly notice how I didn’t ask you to sign off. True, you may actually get more work done if you sign off altogether, but that simply doesn’t allow you to inspire others with your displayed productivity.

So take a second right now to look at your chat status and ask yourself how you want to be perceived: worthless, or productive?

Find the full list of How to Act Productive posts here.

When you’re in school of any kind, grad school, college, high school, what have you, you interact with or simply overhear a lot of people. They say things. You say things. This is life. But sometimes things that are said are so precious that they should be remembered and posted on a blog somewhere, like here.

“Grad school is like a mullet. Business in front, party in the back.”

In discussing grad school and how our “research is going” with a friend of mine, he uttered the above quote. I laughed really hard. Then I thought about it and realized that the philosophy behind it isn’t too bad. What he meant was simply that you gotta take care of your business when it’s time to take care of business. Do your work. Then, to maintain sanity and not get into “my life sucks” lamenting mode that doesn’t benefit anyone, you just gotta have some fun. In other words, have balance, a idea that has been taught by parents and teachers and everyone else for ages, but never quite so eloquently put.

Photo by: Prabhu B

It’s true. Admit it, being over GTD is the new GTD. I’ll be the first one to admit I’ve been on this train for a while now. Here are some of my “GTD is so not cool” posts: 

-It started off with me talking about how I think priorites are important: Priorities and Getting Things Done.

-Then really emphasizing the idea that some stuff just doesn’t need to be tracked: Are all open loops really created equal?

-Then I decided I could ditch contexts totally, I mean seriously, what am I a businessman?: Simply GTD: Do You Really Need Contexts?

-Then I went even further and said a next actions list is also getting chucked: The danger of next actions lists and what to do instead

So I love priorities, don’t like contexts, and I don’t even have a next actions list. So after all that, I’m clearly on the “GTD is so 2008″ bandwagon right? Kind of. But kind of not. GTD is still badass in my book. Here’s why I still think so and what ideas I still implement. 

It’s main idea, and I’ll stick by this, is simply that you gotta do what you gotta do to get crap off your mind. That’s it. That’s the main premise. All the other stuff is what David Allen has learned is useful to that end. But in the end he has said in multiple interviews that the extent to which you use any of the tips in the book is simply determined by what you gotta do to get stuff off your mind. If writing down a task and a half every other day does that, so be it. This idea of just getting things off your mind makes sense to me. I like it. I like being able to get lost in whatever I’m doing. I think that’s badass. 

Getting in the habit of capturing ideas so they don’t bother you and let you get lost jives with me. It makes sense. I think that’s badass. Of course having 18 different capture tools that waste time but cost money is ridiculous, but simply texting something to yourself makes sense to me. 

The idea of writing things down makes sense to me. I’ve talked about a bunch of notecards of the day. I use a txt file for the day if I’m at my computer a lot. I have a work.txt file where I list projects, ideas, thoughts, and even, hypocrytically, some next actions if the mood shall strike me. Whatever. But the point is, I write stuff down so it doesn’t get lost in space, and I check that writing often enough so that, again, it doesn’t get lost in space. Writing stuff down (one could say, making lists, if ’stuff’ is in that form) to keep crap off my mind makes sense to me. I think it’s badass. How much do I write down? However much I need to not keep thinking about it. That’s it. 

The idea of reviewing where I am and what I’m doing makes sense to me. It’s easy to get lost in tunnel vision mode as a grad student and stepping back every once in a while and seeing what you’ve done, patting yourself on the back, looking to where you want to go, and making a plan of attack is useful. Doing this regularly makes me feel good, so I think it’s badass as well. 

So this constant association of GTD with 43 folders, a palm pilot, a moleskine, a label maker, a million lists, and all the rest is, in my opinion, ridiculous. If you think GTD is “too complicated” and “wastes more time than it saves,” your revelation is not original, sorry. All that crap I listed is overkill indeed, but it’s crap hyped up on the internet, that’s all. The “system” is pretty flexible and it’s premise remains the same, just do what you gotta do to get crap off your mind so you can enjoy the feeling of getting lost in work and getting lost in play. That’s badass.