Why not to be a workaholic: Finally a real reason

I've been a workaholic. Sometimes it was great and I got tons of stuff done. Other times, I burned out.

Lots of people say, "Don't be a workaholic! You must have balance in your life!" Sorry, but sounds like a mere opinion to me. Everyone has a different idea of what balance means.

If you could work day and night, why not do it? The practical reason is that it's just not sustainable. Burnout is inevitable. (Maybe there's someone superhuman out there. But I don't know anyone personally. Paul Erdos?)

Still, this is a practical reason. I've never come up with a good philosophical reason not be a workaholic. Now, I think I have one. If you're a workaholic, it means you value your work above all other human endeavors. You might think of a priority system where you determine your priorities by how many hours you assign to each aspect of your life. When you're a workaholic, you've assigned infinite hours to your work; no finite number is good enough. In other words, you consider your work to be infinitely more important than anything else. This is a terrible mindset to have. Because there are many other interesting and worthy activities going on in the world. There are other important/brilliant people out there.

We've all met zealots who seem to think they are the most important people in the world. Don't become like that.

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.

Sports analogies to deliberate practice

Being an athlete and training for a sport confers skills that are easily transferred to many kinds of work. Many employers like athletes because they know how to be part of a team (unless it's a solo sport), and they understand what it's like to work towards a goal.

The nice thing about sports is that training and the results of that training are tangible and easy to see. When you train for a sport, you aim to be consistent in your performances. You also pace yourself so that you peak at competition time. Each sport is different. For instance, playing basketball requires you to peak several evening a week for games, but a marathoner might only run a race every few weeks. However, the ideas are the same. Pacing is important because you don't want to get injured. This is just like in a knowledge worker type job. If you work too hard, you'll burn out. So pace yourself.

The reason that athletes become really good is because athletic training is a form of "deliberate practice." The idea is that you figure out what are the key things you need to work on so that you can perform at the highest level during competition. For a hockey player, that might mean trying to take shots from many different angles, off different feet, in awkward positions, so that during a game, you can score. For more information about deliberate practice, check out this post about deliberate practice at Psychology Today and this discussion of Geoff Colvin's book on the subject.

Link of the day: "Build Your Own Productivity Style by Remixing the Best"

Over at my favorite website Lifehacker, Alan Henry has written a really nice article summarizing the most popular and effective productivity methods and explaining the core principles of being productive. He emphasizes that you don't have to follow a particular system, but you can mix and match to find whatever works best for you, hence the title of the article "Build Your Own Productivity Style by Remixing the Best."

I really like this piece because there is so much stuff out there about productivity, but the article really cuts through all the crap. It's a fantastic introduction to productivity that was sorely needed.

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.

The zero Gmail inbox for minimizing distractions

In a somewhat old (but still good!) post, Cal Newport explains how to mark all your incoming messages to Gmail as "read."  I also take the additional step of moving the messages to another label called "process." 

So now I never see anything in my Gmail inbox, which is great for minimizing distractions.  I can still go into Gmail and write messages, but without getting sidetracked by new messages in my inbox.  Having a "zero" inbox means that I'm not tempted to check new messages.  Now I can really stick to only checking my personal email once a day.  I wait until the end of the day to look at my "process" label and respond to the messages then.

I restrict my Gmail account to personal mail, but I think this method might also be helpful to people who receive work mail.

Here's how to set up the filter.

1. Go to the upper righthand corner of your Gmail screen and click on "Settings".
   
2. Click on the tab "Filters".
   
3. Towards the bottom of the screen, click on "Create new filter".
   
4. In the "From:" field, type hyphen followed by your Gmail address, for example, "-me@gmail.com". This will prevent Gmail from marking your sent emails with the new label we are about to create. So any mail sent to me@gmail.com will not be affected and go to your Inbox normally. You can include several emails, for example, in the "From:" field, type "-me@gmail.com -mom@gmail.com -dad@gmail.com".
   
5. Leave all the other fields blank and click on "Next Step".
   
6. Gmail asks you to choose some actions. Select the following: "Skip the Inbox (Archive It)", "Mark as read", and "Apply the label:". For the "Apply the label" box, click on the drop-down box and select "New label". Enter a new label and click "OK". I called mine "process".
   
7. Click "Update Filter" and you are done.

Instead of going to your inbox, now you go to the "process" (or whatever you called it) label to see your new mail. You can assign labels or delete messages as you normally due. When you are done processing a message, simply remove the "process" label. You can use the shortcut "Y" or click on 'Remove label "process".'

The excluded email addresses ("me@gmail.com" in this example) will not be affected and mail from this addresses are delivered to your Inbox. So you can include important addresses in the excluded list, for instance: "mom@gmail.com". I know, for sure, that a list of hyphened addresses works, e.g. "-me@gmail.com -mom@gmail.com -dad@gmail.com". I have heard reports that using something fancier like wildcards and Boolean operators has problems.

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: The Pomodoro Technique

I can't remember where I found out about this technique (Lifehacker?), but the Pomodoro Technique seems like a very nice time management system. It was invented by Italian Francesco Cirillo, but his book on the system was only translated into English two years ago. From my speed reading of the text, the system has been tested with real subjects and shown to be effective. The main idea is to quantize time into 25-min chunks. During each chunk or "pomodoro", one focuses on a single task. The word pomodoro is Italian for tomato and comes from the fact that the first timer the author used was made to look like a tomato. The goal is to finish a certain number of pomodoros each day, say 8. I haven't tried the system, but the system seems to make time more manageable because you only have to keep track of 8 pomodoros instead of worrying about how much time you spent on each task, or losing sense of time and spending wrong amount time on a task (or worse wasting time on an unplanned activity). Cirillo claims that quantization changes our perception of time (which we normally think of as a continuum) and allows us to relax and focus on our work.

Link of the day: "Quitting the Paint Factory" by Mark Slouka

I enjoyed the essay "Quitting the Paint Factory" by Mark Slouka. Apparently, it was originally published in Harper's Magazine in 2004. Thanks to Gina Trapani for pointing it out in her original post. I think the main essence of the essay is captured by this quote (and Trapani agrees with me, I think):

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had "too much time on our hands." They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, "Quick, look busy."

Link of the day: The ghost telecommuter

Everyone knows about telecommuting, but this guy takes the next step. He syncs his home desktop monitor with his cube monitor. He sets up a webcam and speakers in the cube as well. Co-workers can go into the cube, talk to him, and look at what he's doing on his monitor as if they were working with his ghost!

Link of the day: How to declutter your Facebook homepage

An essential link for heavy Facebook users -- "How to De-Clutter Your New Facebook Homepage." I didn't know about the feed preferences page. There's a person who posts updates that I'm not interested in, but I don't want to hurt the person's feelings by de-friending him. So I went to the feed preferences page and put him in my "less about these friends" list.

Link of the day: RescueTime

Lifehacker mentioned the computer usage tracking software RescueTime almost a year ago, but I didn't try RescueTime until now. [Note: The Lifehacker post is a little old so I recommend visiting the RescueTime website to see the current features.]

As long as you're not too worried about privacy or installing yet another application on your hard drive, RescueTime seems like a nice piece of software. It tracks what applications and web sites you're visiting, then transmit that information to a central data server where you can log in and see how you actually spend your time. It's sobering to see that you thought you did six hours of work, but actually only three. Of course, this doesn't work very well for off-computer time like updating my research notebooks.

In my first week of usage, RescueTime seems like a killer app and I recommend it. I'd like to write a more detailed post on RescueTime at some point (maybe a few weeks or months from now?)

Growing Life

I recently discovered "The Growing Life", a blog that seems to center around the philosophical aspects of living life. There is some stuff about productivity tricks, but the author, Clay Collins, is trying to take the blog into a more philosophical direction, in order to separate himself from popular life-hacky blogs like Lifehacker and Zen Habits.

Some posts that I enjoyed:

• "When Crazy Isn’t Crazy Anymore: Life Balance and Insanity" - If your friends accuse you of being a workaholic or living a weird lifestyle, this post will make you feel better. I like the idea of your life being "seasonal."
  
• "The Alternative Productivity Manifesto" - I mentioned this article in a previous post.
  
• "Living the Prolific Life: A How-to Guide" - A nice reminder to those of us who live an intense, creative life
  
• "The Battle for Our Minds" - The importance of growing and nurturing your perspective especially when you work long hours
  
• "The Cult of Abundance, Goal Autoimmune Disorder, & Abundance 2.0" - My take on this post: don't make too many and/or too ambitious goals. We can't have everything. Don't become a slave to your goals. Just pick a few of your best goals and go from there.
  
• "On Growing The Growing Life" - Nothing special about this post. I just like the following quote: "You can learn A LOT from the older generation. In order to do so, however, it helps to remember this: the lessons that elders will teach you are often not the lessons they want to teach you. The important lessons are usually learned by immersion, by just hanging around — they are lessons you have to pick up on your own. It takes time and energy, but it’s well worth it."
  
• "Quitting Things and Flakiness: The #1 Productivity Anti-Hack" - A piece of advice I've known for a long time, but I'm not very good at following.
  
• "A No-Nonsense Guide to Meditation: No Gurus and No B.S." - A nice introduction to meditation for people like me who are interested, but don't know much about the topic.
  
• "How to Un-digitize and De-analog Time for Increased Productivity and Better Time Management" - I like the idea of using sand timer to be more aware of time. My time card idea serves a similar purpose.
  

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.

The streak board

I started a five-day-a-week gym habit about a month ago. To inspire myself, I bought a piece of foam poster board and write a mark for everyday I went to the gym. The idea is to not break the streak. I read about this idea in a Lifehacker post. Apparently, Seinfeld wanted to improve his comedy skills and decided that he should write new jokes everyday. To pressure himself to keep up the habit, he bought a big wall calendar. He would draw a big "X" on each day that he completed his habit. The positive motivation was to make the chain bigger and bigger; the negative motivation was not to break the chain.

I call it the streak, rather than the chain. It really helped for the first three weeks of the habit. I've kind of gotten used to going to the gym now, but on that one slow day of the week when I don't really know, I think of my streak and that helps push me to go to the gym even though I don't feel motivated. I don't want to break the streak!

Here are a couple photos. Notice I don't use the standard tally where you draw four vertical lines and then complete the tally with a diagonal slash across the vertical lines. I use the Chinese method which is to write a 正 character, stroke by stroke. It looks nicer and it's easier to track of where you are when you tally for a long time.


You can see that I've kept up my gym habit for five weeks, the start date being June 17th, 2008. The missing mark in the third week is because the gym was closed on the Fourth of July.

Thirdly Review 2008, Part 2

I've been remiss in doing my quarterly review. I had it on my schedule to write up my review a month ago, but then I felt a little down (I had to send in my laptop for repair), so I put off writing it.

Also, I realized that quarterly isn't accurate since I only plan to review after each semester and the summer. So the title has been appropriately changed to "thirdly." Onto the review.

The contents of this review are only going to address January through May, even though I'm writing in June. My work output really hasn't improved since my last report. First, I went through a craze where I spent vast amounts of time analyzing Sondheim musicals. I think it was useful to use musical plays as a means of self-reflection, but it did take up a lot of time. Then after that ended, I had a whole bunch of visits from various people (including my dad coming to see me for a whole week) plus I flew cross-country to see my sister and I had a weekend-long hockey tournament in Vermont. Somewhere around April, the Stanley Cup Playoffs started and I would find myself watching a 3 hour game every 2-3 days, going to bed at midnight or later (because my favorite team lives in the Pacific time zone), and then trying to get up early and failing. Ugh. Normally, all of this stuff wouldn't be a problem, but if I'm already having trouble getting started on my work, disruptions are major sabotage.

Non-work wise, I just had the usual activities: reading my RSS feeds, checking online forums, watching Battlestar Galactica, and playing hockey. I think the amount of time I read RSS feeds is reasonable (average of 1.5 hours a day). I could definitely cut back, but I'm not sure I want to. I check Facebook once a day but that doesn't take long (about 10 minutes a day). I feel like Facebook has gotten to the point where you have to check it daily like email. I don't spend as much time on forums (hockey, musicals) as much as I used to. I learned what I need to know for the most part, so it's not necessary to spend as much time. Hockey, next to RSS feed reading, takes up the most time. Of all my activities, this is the only one that involves real contact with people, so I am definitely keeping this one. I just concluded my second season with the women's team and I really feel like part of the team now. I genuinely enjoy the company of my teammates. It's wonderful.

This third, I'm planning on staying in town for the most part except for a few day trips. That will cut down on distractions and help me focus on work. I'm trying to put less pressure on myself and keep up a sunny disposition (listen to South Pacific!). I think it's helping me a lot. To keep me on track, I'm slavishly trying to follow a schedule where I get up at 5:30 am every morning and go to the gym 5 days a week. It's really hard, but I think it will be worth it. The trick is to focus on just a few things at a time. I just find it so hard to let go of all ridiculous ambitions.

Now that I'm socializing more with my hockey teammates, I would like to extend that to fellow graduate students. I have a habit of turning down invitations. Being alone isn't so bad, but it is definitely not a good thing in the long term. I have to work on making eye contact and stopping to say hello to people more. I need to get back to my friendly West Coast self! My hockey teammate recently pointed out to me that I see relationships as a black-and-white thing, which unfortunately is not true. I want to work on getting more comfortable with "gray."

That's pretty much a wrap. The key is to want to get better and to believe that things will get better.

Grad Hacker

I found a new productivity blog (yes, I know, yet another one). It's called "Grad Hacker" and written by a graduate student in the natural sciences. I like his view on productivity:

Let me start of by declaring this outright: my goal in personal productivity is not to minimize the amount of time I spend “goofing-off” it’s to maximize the amount of time I spend in the focused, imaginative, stress-free “flow state”. I spent some time walking the first path and it just made me tired, bitter, and sick. But, now, changing the way I view productivity has made life absolutely splendid.

Here are some posts that caught my attention:

• "My views on productivity" - the above quote comes from this very post
  
• "Getting up early: Week 1" - logging and reporting on his experiment to get up early. As he says and also in my own experience, it's really hard to keep it up because one day you stay up late and screw up the next morning.
  
• "Simple GTD: Do you really need need contexts?" - an interesting opinion, that graduate students don't need GTD-style contexts. I agree. I always end up organizing my todo list by project (that is, when I was using my todo list).
  
• "Reading natural science papers: A method I swear by" - I suck at reading papers. Maybe I'll try his advice.
  
• "Notecard for the week" - Yup, I love the one-notecard, one-pen in pocket method. I have three posts just on that very topic.

Overall, a great blog! I look forward to more thoughts from Grad Hacker.

Link of the day: Upgrade an unproductive day

Via Lifehacker, I read an interesting post called "Upgrade an Unproductive Day by Mentally Rehearsing a Better One." I agree; there is considerable value in replaying the "tape" of how your day went and figuring out why it went wrong. For instance, I found that it was hard to get up in the morning. I finally realized the reason was that after I turned off the alarm clock, I didn't know what my next step was. So I decided that my next step was to make coffee/tea and that has really helped.

Link of the day: How to make accurate time estimates

I'm always underestimating how long things take. Steve Pavlina shares some nice ideas about improving time estimates in a recent post. The basic idea is to record how long it takes you to do things and after accumulating enough data, calculate your appropriate fudge factor.