Tag Archives: Productivity

Would You Announce Your Email Habits?

Posted on by

laptop catHow much time do spend in your inbox? Do you check email on your phone, in odd bits of time throughout the day? Is your inbox always open in a browser tab? How much email do you have piling up that you’ve glanced at but not responded to or deleted?

If you have difficulty focusing on your priority projects because you spend much of your day responding to email, one of the best strategies to improve your processing of email and your focus on other things is to limit your handling of email to set times during the day. Batching your email processing allows you to better assess what is truly urgent, what is truly important, and what can be quickly deleted or archived.

Several years ago, I read Tim Ferriss’s post How to Check E-mail Twice a Day, in which he suggested that in addition to retraining your own work habits, you should add an autoresponder to your email that lets people know how frequently you will check email.

The idea behind doing this is that over time, you will retrain people’s expectations, so that they know you probably won’t be responding within the hour. Of course, an autoresponder does add to the other person’s email burden, and I’ve read more than one of Ferriss’s critics complaining about that fact.

Enter Calmbox.me, a low-footprint movement which encourages its followers to:

  1. check email only once in the morning and once in the evening
  2. announce this practice in your email signature.

A similar strategy is part of Courteous.ly, which sports the tagline: “if they only knew how much email you have.” This service (which is part of a larger research project by Eric Gilbert, at Georgia Tech) connects to your Gmail account and counts how many messages you receive. It calculates your email load (as high, normal, and light) relative to your inbox, rather than to preset numbers. Users get a personalized courteous.ly link that they can add to their email signature, encouraging their correspondents to click on the link following the phrase “My current email load is.”

Such announcements of one’s email habits seek to raise awareness of how email overload affects us and ultimately improve communication habits by encouraging people to stop and consider how necessary the email they are sending truly is.

Personally speaking, even though I mostly batch my email processing into a few set times per day, I haven’t started announcing my email habits in my signature line. Nor am I likely to, since I don’t see the need to clutter your screen with additional signature lines. But I’m observing this trend with some interest for what it suggests about a general wish for a more peaceful relationship with email.

Would you announce your email habits to every person you email? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed image by Flickr user Justin Dolske]

Should You Say Yes Or No?

Posted on by

tangled wireDo you ever find yourself looking at your calendar of upcoming events and wondering why you ever agreed to do one of them?

Whether it’s a professional obligation, a service commitment, or a social event, many of us say yes without really taking the time to evaluate whether that’s the right response.

Too Many Commitments, Not Enough Time

If you say yes to everything, you’ll very quickly become overwhelmed. This is true for anyone, but many academics struggle with this for two main reasons:

Some parts of your schedule are flexible and some are not. Classes or meetings that are held at set times are firm commitments that can’t be modified. But other research and service obligations may have more flexibility, which can actually be harder to allot time for.

Many academic commitments are hidden or variable. In addition to balancing research, teaching, and service commitments that are more or less predictable for a given semester, many faculty are asked to take on other kinds of tasks that blur the boundaries between those categories. Writing letters of recommendation for students applying to graduate school, for example, can be seen as both a teaching responsibility and a service to the larger profession. Reviewing manuscripts for a press or journal, or serving as an external tenure reviewer, are professional obligations that many faculty gladly take on, but one rarely gets much lead time to plan where that work will fit into one’s schedule.

Why Do We Say Yes Too Often?

We care. Most of the over-committed academics I know are passionate about their teaching, invested in their research, and care deeply about the workings of their institutions. But if you’re over-committed then you can’t really give your best to things and people that are important to you.

We don’t have a clear sense of our prior commitments and priorities. If you don’t have a handle on all of your existing commitments — whether that’s blocking off writing time in your calendar each week or coordinating your schedule with that of your family members — you can’t possibly know whether you have room in your already busy life for something else.

It’s often easier to say yes. If you’re someone who wants to be collegial, agreeable, and well-liked, it’s easy to want to say yes. If you’re in a quasi-social situation, or in a group, you may feel that it’s often easier to just say yes to something. If you’re in a hurry, it’s easier to just say yes without really thinking a commitment through.

Some Questions to Consider

If you’re concerned that you’re saying yes to too many things, or to not enough of the right things, then a structured method for evaluating the next opportunity or invitation that comes your way might help. Here’s a checklist of questions to get you started:

  • What would be the benefit of doing this?
  • Who would I meet or connect with through doing this?
  • What would I learn from doing this?
  • What experience would I gain from doing this?
  • What would I have to give up to do this?
  • What would be the consequence of not doing this?

Changing your Yes Habit

The most important thing you can do to ease your habit of over-committing is to institute a 24-hour waiting policy on any invitations or commitment decisions. Very few things have to be decided on right then and there, and once you’ve said yes to something, it’s much harder to back out of it if you change your mind.

If saying yes is your default pattern, you may need to practice saying something different. Here are two scripts you can use:

That sounds really interesting. Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you tomorrow with my decision.

That sounds really interesting. Let me check something and I’ll get back to you in a day or so with my decision.

If you’re feeling pressured to make a decision right away, I recommend the second script. “Let me check something”  reminds you and the other person that you have other commitments and/or people in your life you are responsible towards.

Then, use a few minutes of that 24 hour time to go through the checklist and evaluate whether this invitation or obligation is really something you want or need to do.

Are you over-committed? Let us know in the comments!

[Creative Commons licensed image by flickr user Peter Zoon]

Improve Your Results with Google’s Advanced Power Searching MOOC

Posted on by

A magnifying glass over shag carpet

At ProfHacker, we’re big fans of all things Google. We like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and even have a soft spot for Google Hangouts, the video chat tool that includes document sharing and editing. Google does so much for us, it is sometimes hard to remember that it all started with its eponymous search tool. (Of course, Google doesn’t really do anything for us; as Amy pointed out last year when Google’s new privacy policy went into effect, we are not Google’s customers so much as its products. Siva Vaidhyanathan has a few things to say about the Googlization of Everything as well.)

Now, you might think that there’s not a lot that you need to know about searching with Google. It more or less does what you want it to: find what you’re looking for on the Internet. But then again, I’m betting that ProfHacker readers know a thing or two more about searching than the average undergrad student. The use of quotation marks, for instance, to search for a specific phrase is invaluable. And if you’ve ever come across a site with a bad internal search tool (as is the case with many universities), you might have found a lot to marvel at in the “site:” command. (In short, put your search terms and follow it with the domain you want searched, e.g., “croxall site:chronicle.com“. [Bonus tip: Set up site searches you use frequently as Text Expander snippets! --@JBJ])

It turns out that Google is pretty concerned with helping people use its tools more effectively and information literacy in general. This is why they created “Google Search Education,” which George covered in two posts last year about teaching students to search and a follow-up on the same. But starting today there’s even more to learn about searching on Google. Today, Google launches its own version of a MOOC, or massively open online course, on Advanced Power Searching. Registration is—of course—free, and according to the site, you will be able to complete the course at your own pace and on your own time. The course will be structured around particular challenges that will require Google searches. For example, this teaser video asks you to find the name of the chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge, the name of a traffic flow invention that he patented, the patent number, and an image of the device.

(Spoiler: Joseph Strauss, Overhead Crossing Signal, 1,967,380, and here.) By the end of the course, you should have a bevy of new skills: know how to use various search operators (including the AROUND operator, that I don’t know anything about), have the ability to filter content by Creative Commons license, set Google Alerts, and make the most of Google Trends. If you complete the different assignments in the course by February 8, you’ll receive a certificate. Woot?

If you’re still warming up to MOOCs, a subject that Douglas H. Fisher covered this past November, this Google experience might be just the opportunity to try one on for size. If you want to know more about searching but don’t think you’re ready for “advanced” power searching, you could check out last year’s course on plain ol’  ”power searching.” I’ve never had the time to participate in a MOOC before, so this is going to be my first exploration, and I hope to report back in a few weeks about what I’ve learned through my experience.

What are your favorite power searching tips? Let us know in the comments!

Lead image: Magnifying glass / Ivy Dawned / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Zotero Quick Tip: Transform Title Text

Posted on by

Big Red Lowercase Letters

Have you ever used Zotero to grab a citation from a library or journal database, only to have to retype the title of the article because it’s not capitalized correctly? Or maybe the article has a superfluous space before a colon that you have to manually edit out?

I don’t know about you, but dealing with these nagging little details takes some of the magic out of the otherwise automagical powers of Zotero. A while ago I tweeted my frustration with this problem and asked if there was some way Zotero could automatically reformat lowercase titles into proper title capitalization.

And guess what?

Sheila Brennan, the Associate Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (developers of Zotero), wrote back with this quick and useful tip: Right-click in the title field in Zotero and you’ll have an option to transform the text to the title case. This trick will also remove those extra spaces before colons! On a Mac the trick works with a CTRL-click. I’ve tested this trick out on the Zotero Firefox extension and the standalone Zotero, and it works on both.

To recap: transform title capitalization in Zotero by right-clicking (PC) or CTRL-clicking (Mac) in the title field.

big red plastic letters photo courtesy of Flickr user David Salafia / Creative Commons License

The Up Goer Five Text Editor

Posted on by

No matter how regular your writing practice, it’s possible to get stuck. When you’re stuck, sometimes what’s helpful is not motivation, but just a change in perspective. And what could offer a bigger change in perspective from the complexity of most academic writing than a text editor that restricts you to the thousand most common words in English?

As with most great things, the idea originated with an xkcd strip by Randall Munroe, “Up Goer Five” (Click for full size):

The Up-Goer Five

The idea, then, is to describe complex ideas or projects only using the “ten hundred” most common words in English.

Theo Sanderson realized that this might be a fun way to think about one’s own writing, so he created The Up-Goer Five Text Editor, which checks your prose against a list of the thousand most commonly-used words. As Sanderson explains, the list is Wiktionary’s index of word frequency in contemporary fiction.

As you can imagine, people have started describing all kinds of things using The Up-Goer Five Text Editor, from parliamentary democracy to the moons of Saturn. There’s even a tumblr devoted to scientific explanations, Ten Hundred Words of Science. On Twitter, there’s also the excellent hashtag, #UpGoerFive.

There’s already an Up-Goer 6, which will color-code your text based on how common the words are.

As the comic makes clear, it’s pretty hard to imagine a situation where one would actually want to use text written in the Up-Goer Five Text Editor. On the other hand, the challenge it offers (which as Jim Dalrymple notes, can be incredibly frustrating) can help you think about your writing in a new way, especially if you’re stuck.

Do you have a toy or game that you use to help with your writing? Let us know in comments!

Photo “Saturn V Rocket” by Flickr user / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0