Silver Linings: To Ask or Not To Ask

Today, I have the honor of inviting Laura Berger to share with us her Silver Lining. 
Laura Berger (26) is a PhD candidate in Business Administration at the Institute for Management Research, Radboud University Nijmegen. She studies the networking practices between universities and industry within technological innovation projects. 

A writer's block, deadline stress, near death by data asphyxiation. Problems a PhD usually comes across at least once during a research trajectory. I know I do, and when I do, I wait as long as possible to go to my supervisors and tell them. Though they have repeatedly told me to come and ask for help whenever I need it, I still feel I need to keep up appearances and not fail.

Which, of course, is stupid, as a PhD project is meant to be a learning process: how can you learn, if you never fail (which is inevitable)? If you don't stumble and fall every once in a while, so you can learn to get back up your feet again? To understand what you need to do to prevent yourself from falling; to know how to get up quicker; to get more comfortable with the feeling of failing/falling and knowing that it won't hurt you that much. You fall quicker when you're afraid of it: relax and it won't happen to you as often, or at least it won't be as painful.

But you cannot learn all that on your own. It's like learning how to ride a bicycle: if it wasn't for your parents (or caregivers, or whomever), you would not have felt the safety to go and try to hold your balance, knowing there was someone to hold your bike, and when they let loose, they would still be there to help you get up when you fall.

I recently came across a TED talk by Amanda Palmer - an artist I had never heard of. I still don't know much about her or her music, but she did leave an impression on me. She argued how we shouldn't be afraid to ask for help:

Through the very act of asking people, I connected with them. And when you connect with them, people want to help you. It's kind of counterintuitive for a lot of artists – they don't want to ask for things. It's not easy to ask. Asking makes you vulnerable. I don't see these things as risks – I see them as trust.

She is right. Asking does make you vulnerable. It is admitting there is something you cannot do, something you do not know. But the beauty of it all is: you don't need to. That's what other people are for. Your supervisors, for one. They teach you, and you learn. Asking is trusting that people will help you, will not laugh at you and let you fall. It creates a stronger bond, BECAUSE you show your vulnerabilities.

I recently discovered a pattern in my writing process: first I feel inspired to work on a paper (and I work fast when I'm inspired). I write, I edit, I analyze and re-analyze data. And that's when doubt creeps in. Am I interpreting things correctly? Do my arguments make sense at all? Is this total crap? BLOCK. And it's not as if I can go home and forget about my troubles. I take them with me, even in my dreams. Which is annoying, and stressful. But I know the pattern now. I recognize the phases. And I know I'm currently in that stage of self-doubt again. And this time, I have decided not to wait, but to ask help from my supervisors. Because I've decided that asking for help is not a sign of weakness, but of strength.

So whenever you feel stuck, go and talk to your supervisor, you colleagues, your friends, your family. Put trust in others, and they will put trust in you. You do not need to do everything by yourself. As said Alexander Graham Bell once, "Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds." So go forth, and ask.

The Creative Process: Essential Components of Creative Acts

When you force yourself to work on a research problem, until you find the solution, you might be putting too much pressure on yourself and actually hurting your creative process.

Instead, you should try to take a few days of distance from your problem and let your inner gears do their work.

You can take a break by working on a different problem, or by spending time preparing teaching duties, but you could also simply take a weekend off.

Are you surprised to read that continuous deep work might hurt your creative process?

To understand why you need some time off, it is necessary to have a closer look at the essential components of creative acts. Graham Wallas [1] analyzed reports of scientists like Poincare to understand the components that are found in all creative acts. He identified four components:

1. Preparation

This step involves a long period of intense conscious work, without success. In this stage, potentially useful ideas are considered. Others might identify this stage as the point where you hit a blockage.

2. Incubation

The problem is put aside and not thought about or worked at consciously. Within the unconscious, potentially useful ideas from the preparation stage are combined in new and unexpected ways.

3. Illumination

If the incubation is successful, a sudden illumination occurs: the researcher experiences a sudden insight into the solution. This event can be considered as an unexpected leap forwards, but is simply the outcome of your brain doing some background work while you are not fully focused on it.
In this stage, true creative work is done as the researcher manages to cut through his/her blockage.

4. Verification

The illumination stage produces an insight that needs further work. In the verification stage, the new insight is tried and tested.

[1] Wallas, G., 1926, The art of thought, Harcourt Brace, New York.

Writers' Lab: The Art of Writing Compelling Figure Captions

When skimming through a paper, you typically read the abstract, glance over the introduction and conclusions and study the figures. 

However, when we write (and subsequently proofread) our papers, the figure captions are an often overlooked element of writing.

By writing compelling figure captions, you can attract the reader to go and read the entire paper. But how do we select figures and write good captions along with them?

1. The right figures

Consider your figures as a graphical representation of what you want to tell your reader. For a traditionally structured paper, this would mean that your visuals go from introducing a concept, then showing your specimens, your results and finally your analysis of these results.

2. Check the guidelines

When preparing a paper, carefully read the instructions. Play the game by the rules and avoid a straight rejection. Make sure your figures use the right font, line thickness and calculate their word equivalent according to the given rules.
If you react to this piece of advice with a "duh" - awesome! But too often authors seem to overlook this essential element of writing.

3. Caption and figure belong together

Your caption should explain your figure without the reader needing to go and dive into the text to figure out what the figure actually means.
When proofreading, give the figures and captions a separate round on a different day, and check if you can understand the figure by simply reading the caption.

4. Give due credit

Another "duh" moment, but again not always correctly done.
If you use an existing figure, make sure you request the right to replicate the figure to avoid copyright infringement.
If you build a figure based on a theory, give due credit to the author of the original idea by adding the correct citation in the caption.

5. Print the page

To check if your font size is correct and your labels clear, print a separate page and check the figure.
I learned this lesson while working on my dissertation. My promotor remarked that my figures had odd font sizes. On my screen, and in Illustrator everything looked fine and I consistently used the same font size - but I had overlooked that fact that figures are rescaled as you implement them into MS Word.

6. Dual approach

A good figure caption contains two parts:
1. A description of what the figure shows, and
2. an explanation of what it means.

7. Subfigures

If a figure consists of different components, give them a name (a), (b), ... This rule should be totally obvious as well, but too often authors refer to Figure 2, bottom or Figure 7, right - and when an article is prepared for printing and the layout is arranged by the editors, these spatial references might lose their meaning.

8. The Ranly rules

Don Ranly's rules [1] are too good not to state here:

• Every picture needs a caption.
• Captions are read five more times than text.
• Complement the image; say what it does not say.
• Give useful information.
• Connect the figures to the text. A good caption says "see story" without saying it.
• Write complete sentences.
• Use active verbs in the present tense.
• Scale the caption to the size of the image: captions should be at least two lines, optimum three lines, maximum four lines.

Do you have a personal style of writing captions? Or have you not paid much attention to them until now?

[1] Don Ranly, “Ranly on Heads,” University Research Magazine Association Annual Conference, Florida State University, May 16–19, 2006.

Silver Linings: Joi Ito on Learning, Authority and Kickstarter

As part of the "Learning Creative Learning" MOOC from the MIT Medialab, we got assigned watching this video.

For all of us in higher education, there is so much food for thought in this talk. Joi Ito touches upon using the internet and Kickstarter to quickly get a working, practical project up and running, upon learning styles and what that means for education, and on how higher ed and the broader society worldwide all model themselves after the West.

Here's your share of Sunday inspiration - enjoy, and let me know your musings in the comments!

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

RSA Animate made an interesting video of what motivates us:



We all know that sticks and stones won't make us get our PhD.

In this video, we get a few glimpses of how motivation really works. In the light of PhD research, we can think more deeply about some of the results that are shown in the animation.

The most interesting part is the three factors that lead to better performance:

1. Autonomy
"If you want engagement, self direction is better".
In these terms, PhD research is among the most self-directed types of work you could be doing.

Take-Home Message: Take ownership of your research. Own your project, push it forward, and take pride in it.

2. Mastery
"We enjoy getting better at skills over time"
There's a large number of skills that you learn during your PhD. To stay motivated, it's important that we track our progress and see how we are getting better at our skills - and these skills cover a wide array: planning our work, coding, measuring data, writing,...

Take-Home Message: Identify a number of skills that you develop in your research. Measure your performance and track your progress, so that you can visualize your path to mastery.

3. Purpose
"We are motivated by a greater purpose".
In our research, it is easy to get absorbed by the specific problems we need to solve: how we should code a routine, how we should measure a variable in an experiment and similar issues. It is important to realize frequently the greater impact of our research.

Take-Home Message: What is the greater purpose of your research? How will it impact society? Is it related to the economy, the environment or our society?

What motivates you? Do you recognize yourself in this video?

Writers' Lab: A Writing Diet

My thesis, after the help of Mr Kitty

Do you have a plan for improving your writing?

Or do you simply assume that one glorious summer morning, you will open your laptop, start typing your dissertation, and finish happily a few months later?

Do you assume that you can get a journal paper published without practicing your writing?

If you are a non-native speaker, do you think reading a few English papers is enough practice for your English? Maybe watching movies counts too?

One of the most powerful decisions I took during my PhD*, was to take writing very seriously.

I put myself on a diet of writing.

With even more determination than my plunge into the literature (I read a little less than 700 papers and reports during my PhD), I decided that writing is the single most important communication tool in academia.

Your dissertation depends on your writing skills. Your publications depend on your writing skills.

If you read academic blogs, you will find tons of posts on writing - because it's so important.

I started the writers' lab - because writing is so important.

For my writing diet, I decided that I would write as much as I could, about as many things as I could.

To give you an idea, here's a list of the many different ways in which I tried to improve my writing:

1. Test reports
The complete description of my experiments is reported in 3 massive reports.

2. Background reports
I tried to keep the number of pages in my dissertation limited, so my theoretical work is described at length in a few background reports.

3. Paper summaries
In the beginning of my PhD, I wrote summaries, critiques and comparisons of the papers that I read. I compiled documents in which I compared all the references reporting on parameter Y on the shear capacity.

4. Analysis reports
I kept a clear distinction between the pure observations of the experiments, and then the lessons learned from the experiments. The parameter studies and comparisons to the code predictions are all reported in separate analysis reports.

5. Meeting preparations
I often prepared short summaries of my work to discuss at meetings with my funding organization.

6. Conference papers
I've been around a bit over the past years, so you can say.

7. Journal papers
Something that is becoming more and more a priority for myself is working on my papers. I published some of my experiments already, but I've identified 11 papers that I would like to write from the material in my dissertation. It's of course not granted that any of these will get published, but at least the idea is there.

8. The dissertation
This guy simply doesn't need more information. I'll bombard you with pictures once the baby is printed and published.

9. Blog posts
Since September 2010, I've been writing here at PhD Talk, and I've settled for 3 posts to be published per week.

10. Guest posts
As you can see in my list of guest posts, I've been writing posts for other websites regularly. Especially the last few months, I've tried to write a guest post every week.

11. CD reviews
Since October 2012, I've been reviewing new releases for Grave Concerns. Writing CD reviews is yet another skill, and I've clearly noticed a learning curve in here.

12. Journaling
First in 750 words, and then in a pretty Moleskine, I've been just blurting out sentences on paper without really caring for what I write. it's incredibly liberating.

In practice, my weekly meal plan writing plan looks like this:
- at least 2 hours of writing for my research every workday
- 7 days of journaling
- 2 CD reviews
- 3 posts for PhD Talk
- 1 guest post

Do you have a clear plan for your writing? Or do you just wait and see and hope for the best?

* I'm almost finished and scheduled to defend, and thus I think you allow me to look back on the past years already.

Silver Linings: Your Daily Checklist

I recently came across The Daily Checklist on Zen Habits.

These are the most powerful ideas in the article:

A good tool for learning to trust yourself to do all the important stuff is to make a daily checklist. Put 5-7 things on there. Try to get almost all of them done each day, but know that it’s not always fated to happen. Often things that aren’t in your control come up and change your plans.

Notice that social media, reading news, watching TV, checking email, browsing my favorite sites, sharing photos … none of these are on the list. If I’m doing one of these things and not one of my daily checklist items, I’m probably not doing the right thing.

For the past years, I too have been writing a few things in my planner every day, and gradually these have evolved into My Daily Checklist, to use Zen Habits terms.

The following items are on my Daily Checklist:

1. Meditate
Meditation is simply every day in my planner. Whatever happens, I try to find at least 5 minutes to give my brain its necessary exercise.

2. Exercise
Going to the gym, biking to work, or simply squeezing in 10 minutes of yoga - after an entire day of thinking and researching, my body needs its share of attention too.

3. Write
So Important. At the office. I track my progress with the PhDometer, and I try to write at least 500 words each day. Even on days that are dedicated to research, meetings and other non-writing activities, I try to write a few lines in a report, paper or summary.

At home, I spend some time writing every day as well: poetry, blog posts or CD reviews.

4. Journal
After using 750 words consistently for some time, I switched back to journaling longhand - and I use an extended form of journaling that also incorporates gratitude lists, success lists and my dreams.

5. Fresh juice
I've had my juicer for almost a year and a half now, and I try to make fresh juice every day. Previously, I mostly used it to make fruit juices (or my beloved orange - carrot - ginger combination), but since the beginning of 2013, I've added green juice to my toolkit.

6. Reflect
Whether I work on my Life Handbook and check my progress towards my goals and purpose, or simply ask myself if I give the best of myself today, I try to make some time and space every day to reflect.

7. Learn something new
Every day, I try to learn something new, outside of my research. There's so much information freely available online. from this vast sea of knowledge, I try to learn something new. I watch TED Talks, Google Tech Talks, enroll in MOOCs, listen to podcasts and generally try to keep an open and curious attitude towards life.

What is on your daily checklist? You can share it in the comments, or reply with a post!

One powerful trick to boost your productivity

 If you want to move a project or task forward, there are many techniques that you can apply to give yourself that little extra kick.

You can prepare yourself by starting with a 5 minute meditation.

You can use the Pomodoro technique.

When your deadline is not near, however, you might find yourself browsing over the internet, or chatting in the hallway with your colleagues.

When you have 4 years to finish a dissertation, you might not even feel to need to impose deadlines on yourself.

But, dear PhD students, this is reality calling.
Reality tells you that you need to push your project forward continuously to secure your success in the end.
Reality tells you that only a handful of PhD students finish within their 4 years of time (in the Netherlands).

To succeed, you need frequent bursts of productivity.
You need to regularly squeeze in a few hours of concentrated, uninterrupted time.

I do the following when I want to push myself to finish a task (writing a subsection of a chapter, or a paragraph of a paper, or execute a set of calculations):

Unplug your laptop from its power cord and use the battery.

Finish your task before the battery runs empty.

Here's why this trick works:

1. Urgency

Suddenly, you have a clear time-frame defined to finish your task.
You might reach the same effect with the Pomodoro technique, but in my opinion, Pomodoros are better to divide a large task into manageable chunks, while the Laptop Unplug works best when you have a clearly defined goal that takes about 2 hours to finish.

2. Ideal writing time slot

Writing two hours a day is the ideal writing diet in academia. Devoting 2 hours, preferably in the morning, to writing will lead to a larger output than writing a few days uninterruptedly whenever a deadline is near.

3. Walk away

The Laptop Unplug works best for me when I take my laptop away from my computer table in my room, and place it on my desk. My desk is my devoted study and work area at home, while my bed and computer table are for browsing the internet.
When I sit at my desk, my mind knows that I'm at my designated work spot.

Now it's your turn! Give this technique a try, and please come back to tell me how you liked it, or why it didn't work for you.

Writers' Lab: Overview of Journals on Structural Concrete and Bridge Engineering

As I was determining which journal papers I can write from my dissertation, and where to publish them I gathered a little list of interesting journals and their respective impact factors.

For those of you in my field of research, here is my list of journals and their impact factors. Note: I wrote about my Journal top 5 long time ago for PhD2Published. You can consider this a longer version, but with less additional information why I like a particular journal. The goal of this list is to inform you, and to give you an idea of where you could publish your work.

I've added the links to the author information, whenever it was possible. For TRR, you need to submit a paper for the TRB conference, and indicate you want to have it eligible for publication in TRR. The submission portal is only open between June and August 1st (the deadline for submission).

1. Transportation Research Record: IF = 0,471
2. Journal of Structural Engineering ASCE: IF = 0,955
3. Journal of Bridge Engineering (ASCE): IF = 0,623
4. ACI Structural Journal: IF = 0.667
5. Magazine of Concrete Research: IF = 0,604
6. Structural Concrete: IF = 0,395
7. Advances in Structural Engineering: IF = 0,324
8. Beton- und Stahlbetonbau: IF = 0,456
9. Cement and Concrete Composites: IF = 2,421
10. Engineering Structures: IF = 1,351
11. Materials and Structures: IF = 1,278
12. Heron: IF = 0,25
13. Structural Engineering International: IF = 0,321

PhD Life at TU Delft

Have you ever wondered with doing a PhD at Delft University of Technology is like?

Well, a few fellow PhD students made a short movie to show you all what it's like. And the cool thing: it's filmed in the main building of Civil Engineering and Geosciences. I'm in one of the labs that is attached to the main building.

Five Lessons for Science Teachers

Flickr Image under CC license by ceolm

Teaching science, especially to teenagers, should be an opportunity to share our love for science with curious and young people. But too often teachers simply end up boring their students to death. (I, too, dreaded the science classes in school and just rolled into engineering because I enjoyed solving math riddles).

But in his TED talk, Tyler DeWitt shows us how to teach science, and make it fun. From his short presentation, there are four lessons for all of us that love science and want to share this love with possible future scientists.

1. Avoid jargon.

you should avoid jargon at all times when you talk about your research or interests to friends, family or students. I'd even say that you'd better avoid as much jargon as possible when you talk to other experts, because we all have very narrow and deeply defined fields of research.

2. Science is fun.

We know that science is fun. Now it's our turn not to keep that little secret to ourselves. Nature is beautiful and filled with smart hacks. Our inventions can go beyond our imagination. Asking "What if?", drawing connections and simply playing in the sandbox are all vital parts of science. That's the story we should tell young children.

3. Show your enthusiasm.

If you are passionate and enthusiastic about your field of expertise, then it's completely OK to overflow and express this feeling to others. One of the brilliant parts of Tyler DeWitt's talk is the absolute joy he seems to find in talking about bacteria and viruses. If I'd have had someone with so much zeal in front of me in school, I would have listened.

4. Tell a story.

It's OK to simplify an explanation, as long as the gist of the idea is crystal-clear to the audience and learners. Telling a story, creating analogies and relating concepts from science to situations from everyday life are all different ways to grab the attention, to build eagerness to learn and to foster curiosity.

5. Display visual information.

Another brilliant part in Tyler's story are the simple, yet clear drawings that he uses. These drawings tell students so much more than a few lines of text. Visuals bring our stories to life, and that is exactly one of our goals in the classroom.

Here, you can watch Tyler DeWitt's talk:

First Time at the TRB Annual Meeting

Last January, I attended the Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington DC.

The Annual Meeting, nicknamed the Superbowl of Transportation, attracts between (estimated) 11000 and 20000 participants, of which 5000 international participants. The Annual Compendium of Papers holds about 2500 papers. Between 20% and 30% of these papers make it into the Transportation Research Record Journal, a journal that has seen its impact factor rise steadily over the past year: from 0,093 in 2003 to 0,482 in 2010 (click here for the full analysis).

TRB is by far the largest conference I ever attended. At first, I was absolutely overwhelmed, and therefore I decided to share my lessons learned with you:

1. Get the app

If you have a smartphone or tablet, make sure to get the app. In a next post I'll go at length into the excellent app and use of social media by TRB, but as for now it is most important to know that the app will hold your schedule, and will show you where to go.

2. Travel early

I arrived on Saturday evening, with the conference starting on Sunday morning (even though the schedule at a glance does not really show that you should expect to dive in at 8 am on Sunday:

As a result, I missed out on Transportation Camp on Saturday, and didn't really get to opportunity to get the jetlag out of the way.
If possible, I'd also recommend finding the time to explore the hotels and surroundings some time before the conference, to avoid loosing too much time trying to find your way around.

3. Prepare your schedule

If you use the app, prepare your schedule in the app (the online scheduling option won't sync to the app). Otherwise, use the online version and print it out or send it to your Outlook or Google Calendar.
With so many sessions, workshops and committee meetings to attend, you can't just decide on the go where to go. Also, keep in mind that the distance between rooms can be large, so you can't plan to hop from one session to the other.
Keep some time available to have a look at the exhibition hall as well.

4. Book early

I had to wait for my paper acceptance to request travel budget, but if you can, register early and book your hotel room early!
If you're late, you end up in one of the overflow hotels. Some of these hotels are just next to the three conference hotels, but for other hotels (like the Mayflower, where I stayed) you need to take the shuttle or the metro, and the commute becomes long (especially during rush hour).

5. Use the metro, not the shuttle

One morning, I left at 7:12 with the shuttle, only to make it at 8am to the conference hotels. The metro might be crowded, and have tracks that are closed, at least it is not influenced by rush hour traffic.

6. Define your committee(s) of interest

In the schedule, you can see which committees organize the sessions. If you are interested in the research supervised by one of the committees, it'd be wise to search by the committee number in the schedule.

7. Eat at odd times or locations

Trying to get food at lunch time or dinner time in one of the restaurants around the conference hotels is a challenge. Therefore, go a little earlier or later, or take the metro to a different location.

Have you attended TRB? What would you advise first time attendees? What would you have done differently?

25 Quick and Easy Ways to Save Money in Graduate School

When you are living from paycheck to paycheck in graduate school, it is time to change your spending habits around.
When you are dreaming of saving for the downpayment of a house, or a new car - again, it's time to start pinching pennies and make your little graduate school paycheck go far.

In this post, I give you 25 ideas on how to get started with saving money on your regular expenses.

1. Check out the weekly sales of the supermarkets. Just go online and look at what's on sale in the grocery store this week. At times, I can get up to 10% off my total purchases, just by planning my meals around the products that are on sale.
2. Bike to campus. If you live within 10km of campus, you should leave your car in the garage and bike to campus. Not only will you save a lot on gas, it's also healthy and it kickstarts your brain for the day.
3. Ditch the meat every now and then. Your body doesn't need a big piece of meat every day. You can make rice with vegetables, or a pasta with a nice sauce, without needing to spend on meat.
4. Save the juice. Turn of the lights in all the rooms at home, except for the room where you are at that given moment.
5. Happy thrifting! You can save tons of money by buying clothes, furniture, decorations,... in thrift stores. Moreover, you are reusing items that otherwise would be thrashed - so it's an eco-friendly choice too.
6. Share a house. Even though you're in your mid or late twenties as a PhD student, try to cut down on rent by sharing a house with roommates. Just look for other PhD students - you don't have the lifestyle to live with undergrads anymore.
7. Grow your own herbs. Buying a full pot of basil is only double the price of buying fresh basil, but with one plant you are good for many months (just give the basil some light and water).
8. Bring your own meals. Bring your meals to campus, and bring some snacks as well. Buying from the cafetaria/food court and from vending machines is not a smart choice. Moreover, if you bring your meals, you have better control over what you actually eat, and how good that is for your body.
9. Shop for presents online. You can find great gifts at online gadget stores, or on Etsy, where lovely handmade craftworks are sold at good prices.
10. Only spend on given days. All other days, or spending-free days. I, for example, typically only spend on Tuesdays for groceries and (sometimes) Saturdays.
11. Use soap and shampoo bars. Bars of soap and shampoo last much longer than bottles, as you have to make them foam yourself, instead of just squeezing a bottle and using too much product.
12. DIY beauty. See what you can do at home, and what needs to be done by a professional. For example, I cut and dye my hair myself, but I do go once a month to a nailstylist.
13. Online deals. If you plan a weekend getaway, or a massage - check out online deals websites for a great discount.
14. Buy in bulk. Often, buying in bulk gives you a great discount. For deodorant and toothpaste, there are regularly buy 2, get 2 for free actions - that's the moment to buy these items.
15. Vegetables in bulk. You can save by buying large packages of the same vegetable. Just chop them up and keep them in the freezer - they last up to 6 months in there.
16. Library card. Get yourself a library card if you like reading books. Don't buy every single book that you'd like to read.
17. Repair your stuff. Try to repair your electronics when they give up on you. Learn how to sew your clothes back together.
18. Get a water filter. And just stop buying bottled water - it's expensive and not eco-friendly.
19. Invest in quality. Buy shoes that last many seasons, and electric appliances that won't die after using them a few times.
20. Ask yourself: "Do I really need this?". Before you buy something for yourself, stop for a moment and consider if your really need this in your life. If you don't, then don't drag something new into your house.
21. Don't buy a dryer. Just dry your clothes on a drying rack or outside on a clothesline. You save on electricity.
22. Smart investments. If you have something valuable, protect it. Use a surge protector for your electronics and a solid lock on your bike.
23. Keep an eye on when advantages end. You might be enjoying a certain discount for a certain number of months, and afterwards the company will charge you the full amount. I recently got a 150 euro phone bill, because my phone company put me on the biggest plan, for the smallest fee for a given number of months. I didn't keep track of the months, and then got charged the full amount.
24. Wear hand-me-downs. You can trade clothes that you don't like that much with friends and family, and get something new for free.
25. Read personal finance blogs. They contain tons of great information on saving money.

What do you do for keeping your little expenses under control?