Link of the day: "Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player"

I follow Cal Newport's blog, whose theme is something along the lines of how to live your life, so that you are creative and get a lot of (real) work done while staying sane.

I liked one of his recent posts where he discussed a piano player's strategy to becoming better. The strategies of "Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy; To Master a Skill, Master Something Harder; Systematically Eliminate Weakness" -- they all fit the general strategy of deliberate practice, which I've discussed in the past here and here.

The last strategy "Create Beauty, Don’t Avoid Ugliness" fits into the general strategy of visualization. In sports, coaches talk a lot about visualizing your success or visualizing your strategies to deal with a particular situation. For example, if you are a forward playing ice hockey, you could visualizing the three different moves you'd use to score a goal on a breakaway. But visualization can be extended to so many other situations beyond athletic and musical performance. When you get up in the morning, you can script your day and visualize how you want things to go.

Link of the day: Program your daily tasks on your calendar

I was glad to learn that I'm not the only one who puts mundane tasks like "gym" and "schedule haircut" on my calendar.  Whitson Gordon (who seems to be the best writer on Lifehacker these days) wrote a very nice post about how he schedules basically everything on his Google calendar. 

I like doing this for many reasons.

1. You don't have to waste your cognitive energy on worrying about when to do these boring, routine tasks.
2. The calendar tells you when to do it. Think of it as your electronic mother. If you tell yourself, maybe I'll clean the bathroom this week, it's not going to get done. If your mother tells you to do it this afternoon, you are much more likely to get it done.
3. The calendar enables you to get the chores done on a regular basis so you keep your life in order.

Link of the day: "How to Find More Time in Your Day by Putting Your Chores on Auto-Pilot"

Lifehacker has a nice feature on how to schedule and organize household chores so that you can concentrate on more important things in your life.

I'm interested in this topic since I want to uphold a certain standard of cleanliness and organization in my life, but I don't want it to be distracting. I already put my chores on a Google calendar, just like the author of the Lifehacker article.

What I learned about tablets

A friend of mine recently asked me where I worked. I said either at home or in the office and off-handedly commented that if I had a tablet, I could work in other places like libraries or coffee shops.

I've thought about getting a tablet now and then, but I never read about anything that seemed truly appealing. But I keep coming back to tablets because as great as pen and paper is (fast, cheap, light and portable), you can't index and organize paper anywhere as well as you can with digital media. Yes, you can put your paper in tabbed binders, but digital data can be tagged and is searchable. I thought about scanning paper documents, but these scanned documents are large in file size and no one has solved the problem of recognizing handwriting in images so the scanned document can't be resolved into text and searched. (In case you're wondering, OCR is for properly printed characters.)

This is what I would want in a tablet:

• Lightweight (under 2 pounds)
  
• Storage space of at least 20 GB for my electronic books, notes, files
• Color screen with large viewing angle
  
• Fast internet connectivity
  
• Pen input for taking notes
  

I'd like to be able to just throw the tablet in my bag and carry it without being burdened by its weight. I'd like to be able to carry around my library of electronic files (pdf, djvu, etc) and have speedy access to the internet, so I don't have to bring a heavy, expensive laptop to the library or coffee shop. I'd like to write down thoughts and ideas in a digital notebook.

I didn't realize how hot the tablet market has become. A little curiosity resulted in me getting into some seriously deep Internet research. I ended up learning a lot about tablets, pen input, and Android. I thought I'd write it all up before I forget.

Pen input

The most significant dividing line for tablets right now is pen input.

Tablet PCs are designed to use pens as the main form of input. The older tablet PCs use resistive screens which really need a stylus and don't respond very well to touch. Some of the newer tablet PCs support multi-touch by using a capacitive screen. The best tablet PCs use an active digitizer which allows for a smooth and precise writing experience closer to writing with pen and paper.

The Android tablets and iPad use a capacitive touch screen which is great for finger gestures, but non-ideal for pen input. You can use a passive, capacitive stylus, but writing with one is like using the eraser on the back of a pencil. It's very crude. However, companies are starting to think about focusing on pen input. The HTC Flyer is the very first Android tablet that will come with an active digitizer made by N-Trig.

For precise input, the general consensus is that you must have an active digitizer which means the tablet needs to be designed for pen input. Artists won't use anything besides an active digitizer. The two main companies currently making active digitizers are Wacom and N-Trig. People say that Wacom is the best, but N-Trig is getting better.

For satisfactory pen input, you not only need good hardware but also good software. Most people who want a tablet are interested in using it for work purposes: business people, scientists, artists, architects, etc. It seems to me that pen tablets are a niche market. No wonder Apple had no interest in making a tablet with pen input.

People who are interested in taking handwritten notes and storing them in an organized, searchable fashion will want Microsoft OneNote software. This program allows the user to mix handwriting input with other files, typewritten text, etc in an endless page and organize the pages into notebooks. OneNote uses the excellent Windows handwriting recognition software and can recognize your handwriting in real-time. It can convert your handwriting to text, or you can leave your notes handwritten and search them later. Unfortunately, OneNote is only a Windows program, so you can only use it if you have a Windows-based tablet. The current Windows tablet PCs are heavy and have poor battery life because the Windows OS was designed for desktop machines and not little tablets. Evernote is a popular alternative to OneNote, but people say it's not quite as good.

Artists will want to use drawing and painting programs like ArtRage. (I'm no artist, so I don't know what is the best software.) Most of the great software can only be run on desktop operating systems like Windows and Mac OS X.

So the take home message is that if you want a tablet to do actual work, you have to get a tablet PC that runs Windows. The current favorite is the Asus Eee Slate EP121, which has a powerful Intel i5 dual core CPU, runs Windows 7, and weighs about 2.5 lb. The main drawback is its short battery life: 3-4 hours. If you don't mind having an old model, many rave about the HP TC1100 tablet. It uses a Wacom digitizer, runs Windows XP, weighs about 3.3 lb, and has a detachable keyboard. Without the keyboard, it becomes a slate.

The Asus Eee Note EA800 is an intriguing possibility. The slate uses active digitizer pen input, only weighs 520g, has a long battery life (~ 8 hours), and will be cheap: around $200. The reason it is able to achieve all these features is because it uses Linux and has a monochrome LCD screen which is not backlit. Unfortunately, the Linux OS means you can't use OneNote though the Eee Note allows you to upload your notes to Evernote via internet. However, people report that the Wifi connectivity is really bad. The fact that the LCD screen is not backlit means that it is very hard to see in dark environments, for example, when people are giving presentations with the lights off. So the Asus Eee Note is probably not going to work for most people. The good news is that Asus seems to be working hard to re-vitalize the pen tablet market and may come out with something exciting in the next generation. Reportedly they are working on a color version of the Eee Note.

Sorry, Mac users, it is doubtful that Apple will directly support pen input, and as I mentioned earlier, you really need an active digitizer for good pen input. This is a hardware problem. However, there are some nice iPad drawing apps out like Penultimate, and Wacom is releasing a capacitive stylus (with 6 mm resolution which is supposedly the limit of the iPad's sensitivity -- compare that to a real pen which is something like 1 mm). If pen tablets become popular enough, maybe Apple will become interested. Finally, I should mention that Microsoft OneNote is not available on the Mac, though Evernote supports OS X.

[Sidenote: If you look at forums about pen input on tablets, people call writing on tablets "inking."]

Tablets without pen input (iPad and Android)

If you are willing to live without pen input, you have a lot more options like the iPad and Android tablets (with the exception of the HTC Flyer mentioned earlier). Due to the success of the iPad, there are a flurry of Android tablets coming out this year. These tablets are all very good when it comes to touch screen manipulation, speed, and internet connectivity with good battery life because they use operating systems that are derived from smartphone OS's.

Three different tablet sizes are being pushed right now: 7", 8.9", and 10". The iPad uses the 10" form factor which is best for multimedia like video and photos. People who prefer a large viewing area will like this form factor, though it starts to get a little heavy. The lightest 10" tablets are around 1.3 lb. The 7" form factor is great for reading ebooks. A lot of people like the lightness and the fact that you can hold 7" tablets in one hand for an appreciable time. The Nook Color has a 7" screen. Most tablets are currently either 7" or 10". A few companies are testing the market for midsize tablets with an 8.9" form factor. This might be a great compromise between viewing area and portability.

For the iPad and Android tablets, the hardware is already very good. The tablets are light and have plenty of processing power. The screens look beautiful and many of them incorporate large angle viewing technology.

The potential of Android tablets is currently restricted by the software. Google designed a tablet-specific operating system called Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). But it's so new and Apple is so dominant in the marketplace that there are few developers for it. Honeycomb is still kind of buggy and there are few apps. Hopefully, in a year, the situation will change.

You could get the iPad, but I'm not a fan of Apple's censorship and closed-source model. It's true that Apple technology is very good, but when you buy an Apple product, you are buying into Apple's culture and dogma. I don't think of daily computing as a religious experience; I think of the computer as a tool that allows for swapping hardware and tinkering with softare. Also, Apple currently doesn't support Flash on the iOS, the operating system used on the iPhone and iPad, so you won't be able to watch most Internet videos (including Hulu and YouTube) on the iPad.

I think if you're willing to wait, the Android tablets will have better hardware and more innovative features, not to mention a microSD or SD card slot for extra capacity and convenience (the iPad doesn't have any external storage options). There are already Android tablets designed to have a removable battery (Toshiba tablet), a detachable keyboard (ASUS Eee Pad Transformer), slideout keyboard (Asus Eee Pad Slider), or pen input (HTC Flyer). The competition among Android tablets will result in dramatic price drops, too.

The coolest thing about Android tablets is their modding potential. There is a huge developer community hacking and tinkering with the Android OS. It is well-known that you can "jailbreak" the iPhone/iTouch and "root" Android smartphones. A couple Android tablets have been well-hacked. The 7" Nook Color and the 10" Viewsonic G Tablet run Android 2.x off the shelf. Both devices are easily rooted and flashed with custom ROMs (essentially operating systems). ["Rooting" means to gain administrative access to a device so you can run anything on it. "Flashing" means changing the read-only-memory (ROM) on the device. This is dangerous because all the low level operations and booting is controlled by this memory. If you mess up, you might "brick" the device, i.e. render it un-operable without any way to restore it to working condition.]

The Nook Color ad G Tablet were targeted by the developer community because they are relatively cheap for Android tablets. With the right software, the Nook Color can be upgraded from Android 2.1 (Eclair) to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and overclocked from 800 MHz to 1.1 GHz. The Bluetooth capability of the tablet can also be unlocked.

Essentially, you can buy the Nook Color for $250 and upgrade it to be comparable to the Samsung Galaxy Tab. When you consider that the Galaxy Tab used to cost $400 with a two year data plan or $600 off-contract, this is an incredible deal, so good that if you search Google News for "rooted nook color", you will find at least a dozen articles about ordinary people with no tech-know-how rooting their Nook Colors. Well, it used to be an incredible deal. Now, there is a $350 Wifi-only version of the Galaxy Tab, so the savings isn't quite as much. You could also mod a G Tablet. I don't find that option as attractive because the G Tablet isn't supported as well among developers and because the G Tablet's screen is reportedly quite poor.

With the announcement that the 10" Acer Eee Pad Transformer will cost $400 and the Acer Iconia Tab A500 will cost $450, maybe a rooted Nook Color isn't quite as attractive as it used to be since it has a 7" screen size and only 8 GB storage (compared to 16 or 32 GB). But it's still a good deal and you have the advantage of using a mature OS like Gingerbread (Android 2.3) rather than the "beta" Honeycomb (Android 3.0). All the new Android tablets use Honeycomb and all the old ones use Android 2.1 or 2.2.

The future of tablets (?)

It will take a while for the Android tablet market to grow and mature. But I think it's a safe bet that in the near future, Honeycomb will be refined, people will develop more apps for it, and the price of Android tablets will drop substantially. In the meantime, you can get yourself a Nook Color or G Tablet, root it, and get access to the best and latest Android updates the hacker community has to offer (in contrast, retail Android devices are very slow to get updates). When your tablet becomes outdated, you'll be able to buy a new, cutting-edge device that is very satisfactory right out of the box.

Don't forget about tablet PCs and pen-based tablets. With the growing popularity of the iPad and the huge push by Android to focus on tablets, I think tablet PCs and pen-based tablets will also benefit. A much broader and mainstream audience will be exposed to tablets, the technology will improve, and people will demand more. Manufacturers will be more willing to take a chance on innovating tablets with inking capabilities.

The next few years should be exciting if you like tablets.

Thoughts on deliberate practice

Lately I've been intrigued by discussion of deliberate practice. Cal Newport has a nice post explaining what "deliberate practice" really is.

Looking back at life, I can see where I applied deliberate practice. It’s really easy to do deliberate practice with sports since they are so structured and well-defined. I think that’s a good area to start with, to see how it’s done and to gain confidence. That's right: learning a sport is a good way to "practice" deliberate practice. In college, I spent about a year learning skating and hockey so I could make the varsity hockey team. I went to a couple PE classes and then spent as much time as I could at public skate and intramural hockey.

Here are my general thoughts about how to apply deliberate practice. The obvious factor everyone has already mentioned is practice time. (Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the notion that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert on something.) Then read as much as possible about your subject. That could mean reading books, talking to people who are good at what you want to learn, or watching videos on the internet. Learn good technique and learn good taste (why do people think successful person X in your field is so great?). If you really want to get good fast, move to a place where you can fully immerse yourself in the topic. For example, if you want to become an artist, move to New York. If you want to learn a foreign language, move to that country.

Then refine and tailor the learning technique to yourself. Not all training methods will work for everyone. Find a way to maximize the efficiency of your learning technique. In hockey, professionals don’t practice hours everyday. They practice one hour at maximum intensity, just like a game situation. It is better to practice small amounts of time at high intensity then for long periods at low intensity.

If you want to become decently good at multiple things (as opposed to the 10,000 hour expert), I think it’s best to choose a hard fundamental area of the topic. If you want to become a scientist, physics is a great topic because it forces you to appreciate deep understanding. Physicists find it really easy to jump into other sciences like biology or linguistics. (Disclaimer: I am a physics grad student.) If you want to become a great visual artist, I would pick drawing/painting over photography. I’ve studied bits of both and I can already see that the technical aspects of photography are really easy to pick up. Drawing is much more skill-oriented and really forces you to think hard. There are plenty of self-taught photographers, but that's not really so true of painters.

Deliberate practice can be done in different amounts. Malcolm Gladwell's figure of 10,000 hours is intimidating because it means spending 20 hours a week learning for ten years. Committing ten years of your life isn’t really realistic. What I think one should do is do deliberate practice on one thing for a year at a time and evaluate at the end of the year.

Link of the day: Yahoo search pad

This looks like a fantastic way to compile research and share it with others, especially for travel plans. To see what I mean, check out the demo video. Great job, Yahoo.

Free mailing lists on the web

I recently wanted to create a mailing list. I was familiar with creating and administering mailing lists on university servers, but that wasn't an option for this mailing list because most of the people on the list wouldn't be affiliated with a university. The obvious choices for free, web-based mailing lists were Yahoo Groups and Google Groups.

Google Groups was more sophisticated than Yahoo Groups, but it doesn't allow you to create a private mailing list that doesn't require members to have Google accounts. If you want to allow non-Google members, you have to make the mailing list public and I didn't think people would appreciate that. I also wanted people to be able to subscribe, unsubscribe, and post to the mailing list via email and not through a web interface. Yahoo Groups fit those requirements. It allows the mailing list administrator to moderate posts and approve new members (if desired). Members also have the option of receiving daily digests instead of individual emails. So, in the end, I went with Yahoo Groups.

Link of the day: Tour of David Allen's office

Now you can see how the GTD master, David Allen, organizes his office in this video.

Link of the day: "Goal setting for skeptics"

I really enjoyed this inspiring, short essay by Gina Trapani about why goal setting is important or in her words: "why you should risk dweebhood with written goals."

Calendar setup

In a previous post, I described how I use my calendar to send myself "strategic reminders." Reminding yourself to take your vitamins, look at your finances, schedule a haircut, etc is a pretty obvious idea and it's not surprising that Gina Trapani wrote about it in an article called "Tickle yourself with Yahoo Calendar."

I thought people might like a more detailed look at my calendar. I used Yahoo Calendar for over two years and it worked very well. However, recently I wanted to transfer my calendar from one Yahoo account to another. There was no good way of performing the transfer because I had too many events (Yahoo should fix this!). I became very annoyed and switched to Google Calendar.

One nice thing about Google Calendar is that I can manage many calendars and label each calendar with a different color. I have different calendars: "Daily reminders," "Weekly reminders," "Monthly reminders," "To do," "Appointments," and "Special events." I chose colors for the reminder calendars in the bluish-purplish part of the spectrum, allowing for easier identification.

Reminders are exactly what they sound like. They are to-do items -- reminders to do something. In general, I only require that the reminder be done the same day but I put a time on the reminder so that I get the reminder at the time-of-day when I should do that item. I should go to the gym in the morning, so the reminder email gets sent at 5 am. I don't want to worry about cleaning my room in the morning, so that reminder gets sent out at 7 pm. Often, I am so used to doing certain items on a daily basis that I will just do them without the reminder. Whenever I complete a to-do item, I delete the corresponding reminder email from my inbox.

Now for your amusement, here is my calendar for all of you to see. The first screenshot is only the daily reminders. There are a ton of them, which is why I turned off viewing for the other calendars. Most of the items are self-explanatory. "Temptation blocker" is a piece of software that prevents me from wasting time on the internet. You probably noticed that I track various information including my bedtime, wakeup time, my mood that day (on a numerical scale), and the work I planned and actually did that day (which I call a "worklog").


There are too many daily reminders, so they get cut off in the monthly view. Here's a detailed view.


As I already mentioned, these same daily reminders show up in my inbox. Since I use Gmail for personal communication and don't want to mix that up with to-do items, I setup a Gmail filter to forward calendar reminders to my Yahoo account.


Here's a view of my other calendars. The "To do" calendar consists of to-do items that don't reoccur, e.g. that only happen once. The "Appointments" calendar consists of to-do items where I need to be somewhere at a certain time. The "Special events" calendar current includes birthdays, though I might decide to add other types of events later.



Not everyone may agree with this method, but I always associate an email reminder with every calendar item. I like to be able to open my inbox and look at what needs to be done that day. I don't want to open up Google Calendar and look at the big picture unless I'm doing a weekly or thirdly review. My calendar operates on a need-to-know basis, which I believe is the most efficient setup.

Link of the day: Planning fallacy and alternative productivity manifesto

Here are two great articles I read via Cal Newport's Stuck Hacks blog.

Eliezer Yudkowsky writes a guest post about the planning fallacy at I Will Teach You To Be Rich. The message is very simple. There is no way you can estimate the amount of time a project will take by breaking it down into little details. (This statement is backed up by studies and data in the post.) The best way to estimate the amount of time is to remember how long it took for a similar project.

At a blog called "The Growing Life: Alternative Productivity, Anti-Hacks for Living," the author, Clay Collins, lays out his "alternative productivity manifesto." He tries to take down some common myths about productivity and bring us knowledge workers back to the reasons why we live and why life is worth living.

Link of the day: Google to host large scientific data sets

Apparently, if you're willing to give Google your scientific data, they will host it for you and make it open to everyone. For more details and links, see Jose's post at Academic Productivity.

Creating a knowledge vault

Cal Newport blogs about writing down what you learned so all that studying doesn't go to waste.

I've been having exactly the same thoughts lately. I moved my website to siteground.com because they claim to make it easy to install and use MediaWiki, the wiki software used by Wikipedia. I suppose I could have used something free like pbwiki, but pbwiki uses proprietary software. I want to have control of my data and be able to back it up and move it to other servers if necessary.

Receipt system

I download my transactions via Quicken's One Step Update, but I verify the transactions by comparing them to the receipts I've collected. I get receipts not just for buying items, but also for withdrawing money from ATMs, depositing checks, etc. I also try to remember when I spend cash so I can enter transactions in my Quicken cash account. For transactions without receipts, I write them down on an index card. This includes returning items. Occasionally, I jot a note on receipt to clarify the category. For instance, I might spend money on postage to return clothes. The transaction will show up in Quicken as USPS, but I want to categorize it as "clothes" not "postage".

The receipts I collect go into a small manila envelope.


Every week, when I download transactions into Quicken, I check the payee name and transaction amount against the receipts in my manila envelope. If the two are reconciled, then I put the reconciled receipts into an expanding file with pockets for different months.


Every now and then, I clean out the expanding file and throw out old receipts. I'm not running a business so there's no need to keep receipts. I suppose if I were really obsessive, I could scan the receipts with a flatbed scanner.

Strategic reminders

There's been some discussion at Metafilter about using your calendar to remind yourself of recurring events. I have been doing that already for the last two years. I use my calendar to remind myself of tasks ranging from the mundane daily stuff to weekly and yearly actions.

Here's a sampling of some reminders:

Daily - check weather, take vitamins, sit up straight, drink water, fill out worklog/daily checklist/timecard

Multiple times weekly - go to gym

Once a week - seminar reminders, listen to new music, backup hard drive, replenish cash in wallet from ATM, update financial information

Once a month - more extensive computer maintenance, clean room, clean bathroom , change contact lenses, go over finances

Less frequent - birthdays, reminder to send Christmas cards, quarterly review, reminder to write an update to stay in touch with friends

My view is that my calendar is a gentler version of the nagging mom. Maybe one of these days I will finally sit up straight!

Tracking processing tasks and questions

I'm using Gmail to track quick tasks and questions I have from reading, class, or seminars. I came up with my method independently of Cal Newport but it is basically the same as described in his blog entry. To summarize:

1. Create a Gmail label.
   
2. Decide on an email address to go along with it. I use username+p@gmail.com for process tasks and username+q@gmail.com for questions.
   
3. Create a filter that will archive all email sent to those addresses to the appropriate label. For example, all emails to username+p@gmail.com will be labelled "process" and archived.
   
4. Create an email shortcut in all your email programs for these addresses. I type a single letter "p" in Pine and it fills in the address username+p@gmail.com.
   
5. Pick one day out of the week where you will go through your process and questions labels. I think it's best to do this on your all-administration day.

How do I decide what tasks to send to my process label? They are basically some kind administration (downloading a paper and putting it into my Jabref database, looking at some funny video someone sent me, a reminder to do something at home that I can't do right now because I'm at my office, etc). They might be a task that I can't do right now because I'm in the wrong context. Or they might be a task that is relatively short but longer than the two minutes that David Allen recommends (2 minutes < t < 15 minutes). If the task takes too long, I get distracted from my real wrok. I prefer using a Gmail queue to keep track of little tasks because they are too trivial to put into a GTD system like todo.txt. Also, I want to get them out of the way. If they sit around for more than two weeks, then it becomes less and less likely that I will do them.

The reason I use a Gmail queue to keep track of questions is so that I have a natural way to check them off. Also, since I check my Gmail account all the time, I'm constantly nagged to follow up on my questions.

Some new productivity things I'm trying

First, I'm going back to an old-fashioned idea: time cards. I use grid-lined index cards (available from Levenger). I write down the times of day in 15-minute blocks, going from 12 midnight to 11:45 am on one side and 12 noon to 11:45 pm on the other side. At the end of each day, I recorded the number of hours spent on various activities such as sleeping, hygiene, meals, research, teaching, homework, classroom, sports, exercise, administration, errands, news reading, internet surfing, etc. I'm hoping this will help me be more efficient.

Second, I have a bad habit of checking email whenever I'm bored, so now I'm limiting myself to checking my work account twice a day and my non-work account and Facebook once a day. Of course, there will be exceptions if I'm expecting something. I sent up a reminder for myself in Yahoo Calendar telling me when I can check my email. The reminder goes to my Yahoo email account which is not publicly available and only serves as an organization hub for todo items.

I'll report back on if any of these schemes work.

Link of the day: Graduate student work day

Since I'm on the topic of time management, here's a sample schedule of a graduate student I found via Cal Newport.

Unschedule estimate

I've been reading the Now Habit and it discusses something called the Unschedule. You should figure out all the non-work activities you have on your plate, put them in a schedule, and then fit your work around them. That idea works pretty well for graduate studies who have a lot of unstructured time. I've started something like that before in this post.

It's been a while so I should count hours again. Here's my estimate of non-work activities during a typical week:

Meeting with advisor - 1 hour
Group meeting - 2 hours

Study hall - 4 hours
Class - 3 hours
CMT seminar - 1 hour
Physics colloquium - 1 hour

Medical appointment - 1 hour (I actually go once a month, so this is an average which includes the hassle of commuting to the doctor's office)
Sleep - 56 hours
Meals - 21 hours

Hockey - 4 hours
Gym - 8 hours (I don't actually go 8 hours yet, but I'd like to ... )

Cleaning/computer maintenance - 2 hours
Commute - 6 hours (hard to believe that just walking around campus takes up that much time)
Post office/grocery shopping/random errands - 1 hour
RSS reading - 7 hours

That leaves 50 hours a week to do work (defined as reading for class, problem sets, and research). And it's not possible to work that whole time because you need to take breaks, so maybe at my best, I could do 40 hours of quality work a week?

I'm going to keep a time log of my activities over the next week to get a sense of whether this estimate is correct.

Link of the Day: Study Hacks

I stumbled across a blog by Cal Newport, who is a computer science graduate student at MIT. His blog focuses on productivity advice for students. He espouses some interesting ideas like the Straight-A Gospels.

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye:

• "Never be hungry" - I have learned the hard way about skipping meals. JUST DON'T DO IT. Cal also suggests that you should drink three glasses of water and eat one healthy snack per caffeinated beverage.
  
• "Studying is a technical skill" and "Pseudo-work does not equal work" are posts about you can train yourself to be ultra-efficient with your studying. This is related to the old adage of "work smarter not harder."
  
• "What makes an interesting life interesting?" - I like idea #4 of having one secret project. Feynman used to work on multiple secret projects at the same time. At any one time, one of them would be successful, so it made him look like a genius (not that anyone thought he was dumb).
  
• "Paying your dues" - I agree with Cal that the baby boomer generation is really harsh on us twenty-year olds. We should all send this blog post to our parents to make them realize that no, we are not a bunch of spoiled brats. To me, the idea of paying your dues is just a vicious cycle of abuse. Your boss: My parents/elders/bosses made me suffer, so you should suffer, too.
  
• "The graph as a question" - I like to structure papers and presentations around figures, but I've never thought of figure-based learning.