You. You who are reading this blog post. You have already spent an ungodly number of hours sitting down, hunched forward, staring unblinking into this screen. Do we really need your computer to remind you that you need a break every now and then? Sadly, yes. There are many software-based solutions out there for Mac …
Category Archives: Advice
Inspire yourself
In my PhD methods class, our professor asked us to pick something that inspired us — it could be a song, a research article, a movie, a book chapter — make a brief presentation on it and on how it inspired us in our work. Inspiration can come from unexpected sources and feed us in …
On starting before you’re ready
When I first got the idea to restart the blogging, my first thought was: “No, don’t start this Monday, start next Monday.” It felt like the safe option: give myself time to scope out other blogging tools, come up with a list of topics,develop a workflow, etc. And then the second, more challenging voice of The …
On using timers and timeboxing
Mark Forster recommended the use of timers in his book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play. It sort of starts with the idea of timeboxing, a demarcated bit of time within which you choose to work on a specific task. A teacher may set aside 45 minutes to grade papers, say, and …
Christine Kane, Upleveling, and an updated seminar
In July 2010, I’d made the big decision to leave the PhD program. I was back working part-time at my old job, turning over the strange things I’d experienced. And feeling a bit adrift. The PhD promised a roadmap of sorts, after all, and I’d just balled up that map and thrown it out the …
Continue reading “Christine Kane, Upleveling, and an updated seminar”
Don’t overthink it (Installment #247)
I volunteered to do a tedious job at work — copy/paste about maybe 200-400 parameters scattered throughout a group of FORTRAN files. The parameters may be in one of maybe 3 different formats. Also, the parameters came with multiline comments (with each commented line starting with !), and sometimes just big wodges of comments on …
Writing in the library
I had an excellent ~6 hours of solid writing/wrestling with my master’s paper one day last week. At this stage, I’m still drafting raw text and am not in the polish stage where I’m honing the thoughts in the sentences and paragraphs, and ensuring my themes and the story I’m telling are all working together, …
Little steps
In trying to implement some new behaviors, I’m finally listening to advice and looking at how to piggyback the new behaviors on existing behaviors. The best way to introduce a new habit being to start small and link the new behavior to an existing behavior. These are basically implementation intentions [1], as introduced to me …
Two views of boredom
The first, from an emotional, Buddhist perspective, and the second, from the productive academic’s perspective. Both emphasize being mindful of when you’re in the state of boredom and how to use that as a cue to put the mind in a more curious, awake state. I like Jonathan’s summation of the problem: Boredom is like …
More on panic and discomfort
Mark Z at ZhurnalyWiki paid me the great honor of referring to my panic post. He ended with this thought: And of course there’s my favorite strategy: try to identify what causes panic and avoid situations where it might arise. Sensible (and I think a little tongue-in-cheek) advice, though I believe there is more to …
Brownstudy's Blog 