Planning for Success - an update on my time management system

As I'm constantly experimenting with what works for me, and how I can optimize my workflow, it should be of no surprise that my time management system tends to gradually evolve over time.

The last time that I discussed my time management system on PhD Talk is more than a year ago. Since then, I've changed some of my tools.

Even though I haven't changed my overall top-down approach for planning what needs to be done, I've made some changes in the tools that I use: I tried to reduce the number of tools that I draw upon, to improve the fluidity in my planning.

I was reminded of critically analyzing my time management system recently, after reading The Sunday Meeting on Inside Higher Ed. I still do my planning usually on a Friday, before heading home for the weekend.

My current approach looks like this:

1. Tools for planning

I split up my planning from the general overview, down to the daily task lists:

- The general overview
With paper deadlines and conferences always planned several months in advance, and teaching duties coming up, I need a good overall view of what needs to be done in which month.
I am keeping the general overview in Google Calender, and I've added additional calendars with my personal planning, the academic calendar of USFQ, the Dutch holidays and more. More and more, I am gravitating towards Google Calendar for planning.

- To Do lists
I've given up filling out the Word documents with my monthly and weekly to do lists - something that I have used during my entire PhD. Instead, I've started to incorporate Google Task lists. These integrate better with my planning in Google Calendar. I still review my planning every Friday evening, to make my daily appointments. That precise moment also serves as a moment to reflect on my progress and to ask myself why or why not I met my goals for this week; a method inspired by the monthly progress monitor.

- Daily appointments
Rather old-fashioned, but I keep my day-to-day appointments in a paper-and-pen type of planner. (It's bound in red leather with a pattern of roses on it, if that explains why I can't switch to a digital version). I write down my most important task(s) for the day, and have all my appointments written down and planned. Also, I write down my To Do list for the evening at the very bottom of the day page. I've expanded on how I structure my To Dos in a different post.

2. Tools for tracking

I'm not using RescueTime anymore, and since leaving my office and office computer in Delft, I've also not been adding what I did to ManicTime anymore. I do plan to start using ManicTime again - but I'd need to sync it over different machines.
LeechBlock and Cold Turkey come in handy when I need to ban myself from the distractions of the internet, but most of the time I prefer a different approach: whenever I feel the urge to give up my task and go browse around, I smile, acknowledge the urge, let it pass, and continue working.

3. Tools for reminding

This part of my approach did not have a solid foundation earlier, but by applying the Task lists in Google Calendar, and having both my planning and deadlines in a visual display together, I've overcome this hurdle in my planning.

How does your time management system work? Has it changed much over the past year? And what did you learn from changing your planning habits?

Silver Linings: Creating Nurturing Morning Routines

For some of us, our morning routine includes nothing more than jumping out of bed, into clothes and rushing out of the door. Others wake up a few hours before heading out to work, and take their time to drink tea, read the newspaper and ease their way into the day.

I, too, have gradually started to take a little more time in the morning to get ready for the day. One year ago, I've blogged about my morning routines, and how I am constantly trying to fine-tune what I do before I get out. As I put it then (and this still holds true):

The ultimate goal is simple: I want to be energized, ready to dive into the day, and with as little friction and time-loss as possible.

Last Spring, I started to wake up earlier to meditate first thing in the morning. I also started taking more time to cook breakfast. After many years of eating cereal (or sometimes oats) for breakfast, I've decided to ditch the sugary stuff and treat myself a balanced breakfast of protein/fat and carbs. Sometimes I have eggs and sweet potatoes, sometimes toasted sprouted bread with avocado, sometimes a breakfast smoothie, sometimes a porridge, sometimes oatbran protein pancakes... all these things take a little more time to prepare, but they work wonders to my energy.

Recently, I've started to practice yoga in the mornings, and finish it off with a longer meditation. That means that I need an extra hour in the morning, and that means waking up around 6am (I'm still using the SleepCycle alarm clock, that's why I mention "around" a certain time).

At the moment, I'm working from home and waiting for getting started on my next employment. That doesn't mean I am staring at the wall or sleeping in every day. My current morning routine looks like this:
6:00 - wake up, brush teeth, drink water, etc.
6:15 - yoga & meditation (typically 40 minutes yoga and 20 minutes of meditation, but times are variable according to how I feel)
7:15 - shower and get dressed
7:25 - cook breakfast
8:00 - start working

Have you paid attention to your morning routines, and how it affects the rest of your days?

Consider the Internet as a Tool, not a Time-suck

Latest internet-as-a-tool fave: MOOCS!

It's not a secret that I find the internet one of the best inventions of mankind ever. I can't imagine how I'd be communicating with my husband across the Atlantic if we'd have to rely just on calling cards and letters.

Thanks to my uncles who played around with computers in the 80s, I pretty much grew up with a computer. As everybody from my generation, I remember dialing into the internet in the mid-nineties, insanely long URLs, Encarta and the early news websites. What might have been slightly different from my learning style, is that I embraced the internet as a tool very early on.

Of course, I have procrastinated many hours by surfing around on the internet (who hasn't?), but when I am in the flow in my life, I notice that I don't need this procrastination. Those are the moments that I use the internet as a tool.

My first experience with exploring the possibilities of the internet was during the early 2000s. My graduation project from high school was about the political situation in Lebanon (even though I was planning to study engineering, I graduated with a project for History). All the books and theory about the Middle East left me confused. I felt that I simply couldn't grasp it. And so I ended up mailing/chatting with teenagers from there. The social aspect of interaction characterized my learning style.

Another aspect of my learning style was simple tinkering. I never took a formal course in HTML, but I learned it by trying to put together a website. It was tons of fun to learn-by-doing.

As time went on, I became a forum-enthusiast. Again when I needed to study, I procrastinated by replying to silly game topics, but I also learned a lot about music and gigs on a music forums, and I would have never had my signature long hair if it were not for the forums that taught me how to take proper care of it. I picked up some skills as a moderator on different boards, and then lost interest and started exploring the web 2.0.

An essential question to ask yourself when you open up your laptop, is: "What do I want to know?". You don't want to know how person X looks like on the party of person Y that you didn't attend, right? But you do want to know when your train leaves tomorrow, or you want to learn something about, say, a good workout for your poor back muscles.

Try paying more attention to what you really want to know, and also value the skills you pick up along the way. 
You'll start to realize that, once you value the internet as a productive tool, you will feel less tempted to use it for procrastination.

Do you feel that you can be productive by using the internet as a tool? Share your story and reflections in the comments!

Writers' Lab: A Quick Hack to Writing with Less Disturbances

Do you recognize yourself in the following description?

You are trying very hard to write a paragraph, and just got into the flow of writing. But then you need to add a table or figure, and you need to start switching between programs. By switching and multitasking, you feel like you lost your momentum again, and you end up slacking around for another 20 minutes, before hitting the keyboard again.

This problem often arises when two programs are both equally important for your work, a situation that can occur when you start writing about results that you have stored in spreadsheets.

You will need to go back and forth between your spreadsheet and your writing, continuously. And this continuous switching might slow you down. In fact, this continuous switching might make you lose your train of thought. You can get tempted to click that internet icon on your task bar and start reading the news or hanging out on social media platforms.

I made huge progress when I applied this super-simple easy trick:

Use two screens

No, seriously, adding a second monitor to my desktop has been one of the best productivity hacks I applied over the course of the past year.

Suddenly, I could place a spreadsheet next to my text document and start discussing my results while looking at the additional screen, showing me the spreadsheet.

For large calculations, I can now easily have two spreadsheets open next to eachother and see if I haven't copy-pasted the wrong column from one sheet into the other (something that has happened to me too often).

When I'm planning out my next week, I have my planning document in the left screen, my Google Calendar in the right screen and my planning on my table.

For me, having two documents available on two screens has been such a lifesaver. Before adding the second screen, I didn't even realize how much friction occurred in my work simply from changing between programs.

Do you use an additional monitor? Do you recognize the benefits I described?

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.

Thesis Distance: Inner resistance

Mid November I finished the first draft of my thesis, printed it and handed a copy of it to my 2 supervisors. Shortly afterwards, I headed to Pittsburgh for holidays. I intended to take my thesis print with me, and proofread it in the beautiful library of Pittsburgh.

And then, I decided to take a step back.

I decided to take a Real Holiday and not to touch my thesis until returning.

I forced myself to create a distance between what I wrote and myself.

And to be honest, it was very hard. Here, I give you some insights in why I found it difficult to take a break (you'd think I'd be more than happy to relax after such a big effort, no?):

1. Tunnel vision

For many months, I have been planning my writing and have been focused on the thesis and the thesis alone. Finishing the thesis not only became my first priority, but also took over my entire mind. Realizing how much of tunnel vision I am experiencing is already one step towards returning to the world outside of the thesis again.

2. Stress

Admittedly, I am terrified by the idea of not graduating within the 4 years of my program. It creates a certain type of stress that makes me act like a hamster in a wheel: keep running keep running and keep busy to make sure it will all get done in time.

3. Perfectionism

I dislike the opening lines of my first chapter. I've wanted to change them around again recently, but I decided that instead I should ask the opinions of my supervisors. As a perfectionist, I want to keep on editing my text and polishing it and proofreading it. Again, taking a step aside and waiting two weeks to continue working on my thesis, helps me to reflect on which editing is necessary and which comes out of perfectionism.

Have you walked away from your thesis at a certain point in the process? I'd love to hear your stories in the comments below!

The Creative Process: Reading Sparks Creativity

Reading as part of the creative process? I've discussed reading, and reading loads at length in a previous series of posts discussing archiving, understanding different levels of reading and keeping up with the output.

Reading a lot and keeping up with your field is not only important to have an understanding of what is going on, but it actually fuels your creativity. One of the big wins I noticed during the development of my theoretical work, is that I immediately could link a question to a paper I had read in the past 3 years.

Let me give you an overview of the different ways in which a good understanding of the literature can help you in your creative work:

1. Don't do double work

It might sound obvious, but you wouldn't want to figure out that somebody has already done precisely what you were working on for the past months or maybe years, and has published that work already. Carrying out a literature review before starting is key to understand what has already been done.

2. Identify the boundaries of the current knowledge

So you are going to develop a theory that explains Life, the Universe and Everything in your field... And thus you sit down in a cabin in the woods with paper and pencil and work on your brilliant idea, right? Well, to have a clue where you should get started, provided that you want to advance your field, you need to know what has been done. And you should critically revise the work that has been done, testing the assumptions and wondering where the caveats lie. Through such an analysis, you can determine where to start from with your own work, by working on an open question that you come across when studying the state of the art. Asking questions with regard to the existing work can teach you much more than what is purely written in the existing papers.

3. Know where to find important bits and pieces

Developing theoretical work requires you to look up parts of theories that are already fully developed. If you have carried out a proper literature review, then you have a good overview of these theories. Once you need to implement these in your own model, it is crucial to have read and understood that material. A good background knowledge is of the utmost importance when trying to come up with a novel theory. If you run into an obstacle in your creative work, it is important to be able to quickly go through your memory to see if you've already come across a similar problem in the past.

The Creative Process: The Creative Habit

In a first post on this series about the creative process, we looked at the conditions you need for creativity. In this post, we focus on a long-term way to find more creative solutions to research questions.

Some people might be naturally more creative than others, some people might seem to enjoy to be creating things and ideas all the time and some people might think that creativity is just not for them. Well I think creativity is something you can develop over time.


Here are a few ways you can use to foster "The Creative Habit", and train your mind to think out of the box:

1. Creativity over a whole spectrum

Pick up an artistic hobby, start blogging and journaling, sketch, get interested in fashion, arts, literature or anything that helps you break out of the bubble of your regular thinking. Debate politics and read up on history. Get your grey matter working!

When you get used to divert your thoughts and focus on other topics, pulling ideas together by looking at them from a different perspective becomes easier as well.

2. Daily creativity

Creativity comes when you make it a habit, when you train it on a daily basis. Try to break out of your research shell on a daily basis.

You can for example schedule activities (music classes, photography classes, painting workshop...) that push you to take time to be creative. Or you can pick up a challenge, like a 365 photography project, or try to write a set of poems within a few months.

3. List ideas 

When you are solving a problem in research, don't immediately go with your first idea. Try to sit down and look at the problem from every possible angle. Make a list of possible approaches, and notice that once you start thinking about different possibilities to solve a problem, you will start generating more ideas on how to approach it differently. Again, it's all about the mindset, and knowing that you don't have to come *snap* with a solution, but can sit and reflect.

4. Mindmap ideas

Mindmapping itself involves sketching and drawing, and is in essence a creative process as well. When mapping out ideas, try to explore all the tentacles of your mindmap spider web and explore them just a little deeper to try and seep out some additional thoughts and ideas.

5. Courses on creative thinking

If you're completely stuck, or can't find a way to think in creative ways, know that there are courses out there that are especially aimed at creative thinking for scientists. I haven't followed any of these courses, so I can't come up with a recommendation (I'm the kind of person with more ideas than time to develop them, so a lot of bubbling is always going on up in my mind). The NWO in the Netherlands used to offer classes, it'd be good if they'd bring them back!

How do you develop your creative habit?

The Creative Process: Conditions

Inspired by my recent theoretical work, I'd like to dedicate a series of posts to the creative process.

The first idea I'd like to discuss is which conditions you need for creative work? Before you get started on developing a new theory, or developing a new design, it is necessary to reflect on what we need for creativity.

In my opinion, you need very little to deliver creative work. As Feynman discussed, you don't need a cabin in the woods and all the time in the world to come up with good ideas.

Now let's look at what I think you need to push forward creative work:

1. Scheduled time

You don't need all the time in the world; I think 2 hours of undisturbed time in your planning can be enough. The key here is to claim that time, free up your schedule and plan those 2 hours - and use that time to the maximum. Use it for creative work, don't start using the "free" time to clean out your mailbox, or catch up on administration work.

2. Comfort

You don't need a cabin in the woods, but to help yourself getting into the right zone, you might like to sharpen your pencil, have space on your desk, have all material ready, a cup of coffee and music to block out the (lab) noise.

3. Mindset

For creative work, your mindset is key. I had been building up quite some tension with regard to my theoretical work - in fact, I hadn't been doing anything yet since all my time was devoted to experimental work, and my promotor had conveyed the message I really had to get started on it because it would take a long time and a lot of effort and searching and frustration. The mere thought of all that brought me panic and lots of impostor thoughts.

Then, I decided to turn around my entire mindset. I thought to myself: "I am just going to answer a question." My entire chapter 6 is the result of a smart question of my co-promotor, which I decided to flesh out completely. So, for my theoretical work, I decided to ask myself questions, and answer them, and if the answer would bring up another question, then I'd continue with answering that question.

Changing my mindset took away most of the pressure I was feeling, and it woke up my curious inner child.

Which conditions do you think are necessary for creative work? I'd love to hear about your experiences!

The active bird catches the worm

Over the past 10 years, I've been a student, and thus living as a student in shared houses. In total, I've had 36 housemates so far (if I didn't forget to count anyone), and I have lived with different characters. But most of all, I think you can subdivide people in the go-getters and the sedentary folks.

When I started studying, I was already juggling a lot of activities: my studies, my band, my music classes and an active student life. Nowadays, I am juggling a PhD, lots of transatlantic trips to see my husband, almost daily workouts, taking care of my cat, actively playing music, blogging here and there, reviewing CDs, daily meditation, daily journaling and a tadload of other activities. You might get tired at the very idea of buzzing around all the time, but it mostly boils down to having the right mindset. Admittedly, I might come across as 10.000 Volts kind of person, but moving around and doing different things is exactly what fuels me up and what sparks my creativity.

Here's how you too can make the switch and become a go-getter:

1. Different activity, different location

For me, moving to different places and having appointments here and there is key to finish one task (for example my research day), and then get to the next place (for, say, a workout).
When I plan to work from home, eat at home, and do some yoga at home - my day becomes too blurred and I might not get much out of it. When I take the energy level up and move from the office to the gym to home and maybe some store on the way,  I actually feel fueled up.

2. Good planning

Vague ideas on the different activities you'd like to add to your schedule won't actually get you there. Know the dates and times and plan accordingly. Also, a good planning will help you to get more hours out of your day - we all know that, but really, having a schedule can prevent you from sinking in the TV/internet/... black hole.
Having a fixed day or gym class will help you consider it as an appointment. Not only will you be more productive during the day because you have something to look forward to, but you will also notice that additional activities energize you.

3. Be active, everywhere

What I observed over time is that the go-getters are the people who work hard, play hard, and, while they're somewhere, see what needs to get done, roll up their sleeves and get it over with. You won't easily catch me staring in the blue while I wait for my food to cook. I typically will start putting dishes aside, cleaning up part of the kitchen (very much inspired by Zen Habits cleaning as you go) and prepare lunch for the next day.

4. Put your heart and mind to it

Being active is easier when you put your heart and mind to what you do. When you're fully dedicated and passionate about your activities, it's easy to keep the flame alive.
In the end, it's about knowing what you can do, and simply doing it.

5. Really enjoy relaxation time

The fact that I like to be jumping around and going here and there doesn't mean I don't value downtime. It only means that I more consciously enjoy my downtime: relaxing in the sauna after the gym, drinking a cup of wine in the evening, watching something online - I experience downtime as much more rewarding when I have been active for the entire day. It's similar to the idea of celebrating your successes in research.

Five pitfalls to avoid when working from home

For the past two years, I haven't had much opportunities to work from home as I have been very busy with my experiments in the lab. I do have the habit to squeeze in some hours during the weekend, but only recently I've worked a full office day from home (either on purpose, or because I had to be at home for some maintenance works/expected mail/...).

Working from home has the incredible advantage that no one can come in and disturb you, but at the same time it might feel harder to work from home.

Here are typical pitfalls for working from home, and how to avoid them.

1. Not getting into work-mode

You might feel tempted to clean up the kitchen, put another load of laundry into the washer... Quickly, before you are "really" going to get started. And then you go and browse the interwebs... And before you know, it's time for lunch already. Even though I don't have a designated work area at home (I can use my desk, my computer desk, the living room or the balcony to work from), I do need to switch my brain into work-mode and ignore all other distraction at home before I really can get started.

2. Not setting boundaries

When you're already at home, it's harder to decide when it's time to call it quits for today and go home. I find it helpful to define my task for the day, and just be satisfied if I can finish it by the time I would typically leave my office. Admittedly, I find this one quite difficult.

3. Isolation

This one is more a challenge for students working from distance and/or working part-time on their PhD. Not being in your research group and having the regular chitchat with fellow PhD students can make you feel isolated, as described here.

4. Losing focus

The downside of having a day of quiet peace, is that it might be too quiet - which makes it tempting to doze off or let your thoughts wander unlimitedly. I've tried to solve this by changing my work-space in the house (giving me some variety) and by setting regular breaks (which is hard when it's so peaceful and quiet that you can get completely absorbed in material and forget about the world around you).

5. Missing tools

It might be out of your hands to solve this pitfall. I, for example, cannot remote control my office computer from home because of an incompatibility in the operating systems. However, when I plan to work from home, I check and double-check to see if I have all necessary data, papers and documents with me to carry out the task at hand.

Which pitfalls have you come across when working from home and how did you solve them?

Five helpful websites

In today's sea of information, I selected a few websites which are part of my daily toolbox.

1. Rescuetime
Together with ManicTime (which does not depend on internet connection), these timetracking software tools have greatly increased not only my productivity, but also my understanding of how I divide my time and how I can take most benefit out of it.

2. GoogleReader
I used to check several websites and blogs at random times. GoogleReader has become the portal through which I manage updates from sites and blogs

3. Diigo
The Diigo toolbar and library website help me to save interesting articles for later, make lists of favorite sites, highlight excerpts of websites here and there and tag all this information into relevant categories.

4. BeoLingus
This extensive, easy-to-operate online dictionary German-English has helped me through several German papers.

5. Scopus
Scopus has become the search engine to which I turn for finding papers and technical documents.

In the background: Grooveshark
When last.fm turned into a paid service, I searched for an alternative, and ended up really enjoying Grooveshark.

Which websites have become an integral part of your daily work and research experience?

Blog post about holidays

Before I went on holiday last summer, I read this inspiring post (in Dutch) about how you can keep that "holiday feeling" a longer.

That feeling was described as:
"This feeling is associated with peace, energy, creativity, inspiration and relaxation"

This made me realize how much I actually need a holiday every now and then. As a salaried employee of my university, I am entitled 41 working days of paid leave per year (yes, that's not a typo, and that's quite common for us here).

As I had read this article before I left, I decided I would pay closer attention to how precisely I was feeling before and after my (relatively short and very full holiday).

I left completely exhausted. In fact, I fell asleep before my plane took off and slept through most of my 10 hour flight.

Now that I've been back to research for one week, I clearly noticed how taking a break positively influenced my abilities. My thinking is clearer, my attention span longer and my focus sharper. Even though I find it hard to stop and rest for a while, this should be a reminder for the upcoming (crazy-busy) months.

As a result of this, I decided I will take the recommendations of that post and put them into practice. Here's a brief summary of that advice:
- do something new once per week
- take enough breaks
- go outside
- turn off your phone/mail/twitter/facebook
- surround yourself with that holiday feeling

I'll be writing in 1 or 2 months to describe how I could savor my holiday feeling a little longer.

A personal note: I wrote my holiday was rather short (10 days) but very full. In fact, it was filled with the PhD defense of my boyfriend, my birthday, a lot of partying and our engagement.

Leechblock

My discovery of the week is Leechblock.
Last week, I was getting on the procrastination and pointless browsing path again (because I'm worried about a though deadline I just heard about), and I decided I needed a strong hand to get this under control again.

I've used blocksite in the past, to control my random facebooking. After having facebook and other distracting websites blocked from my office computer, I started boycotting myself. I started turning off the add-on, surf around for some time, and then turn it on again. Silly, isn't it?

Now I'm experimenting with Leechblock. This software has two options:
- allow certain websites for a previously defined amount of time during a day, and then block them
- set a timeframe during which you want to block certain websites.
The great thing is that you cannot change any settings while a block is active. You simply have to sit through it.

I've used the second option yesterday during 1h40mins to make some good progress on a writing task, and I've made the first option a standard feature allowing me 20 minutes of browsing to my most distracting websites a day.

After just a few days of using this software, I would say it is a great productivity tool.

5 tips to boost your productivity

Today has been a day of great and fast progress. At 2pm I had a meeting with my supervisor to discuss a proposal that I had written for a design code which is in progress. We discussed it, and he asked me to add more to the background document I wrote for it. When I asked him how much time I had for it, he informed me that the meeting is this weekend, so that he would need it before Friday.
I calculated in my head that it would probably take me 2 or 3 days, so I should be able to do it. The timing was a bit unfortunate, as I was just informed about another deadline a few days ago.
At 3pm I was back in my office, with a nice warm cup of tea and a clear desk to start on this project. At 5:55pm it landed into my supervisor's mailbox.

So what gave me my productivity wings today?

1. Time pressure

I had a clear deadline, given by the person who has the highest authority over me (although I'm not treated as if there is some hierarchy in our university), and I knew he is taking this material to a very important meeting. I felt very motivated to simply pull out my sword and slay this calculation dragon right away.

2. A clear and defined task 

I knew exactly what I was expected to do, and so I could start right away doing it. Most of the time, my tasks are not very defined. I'm asked to do something rather vague (write an analysis report and pay extra attention to the dutch design practice), so I need to spend quite some time thinking how I will approach the task, set out what I precisely need to do and only after defining these steps I  am able to actually get started.

3. Curiosity

Since this piece of my work is taken to an important meeting, I felt that this is an opportunity for me to show some experts what I am doing (although it's taken to the meeting as a formula and its background document). Other than that, I was simply curious to go and carry out my supervisor's suggestions. The largest tasks he suggest were related to checking the validity of my formula against some test results from the literature. I was quite curious (and a bit anxious) to see if my little mix-and-match formula would be standing strong when comparing it to other experimental work.

4. Having material ready

I could provide such a quick response since I had all the main ingredients for the calculations ready. I already had a little summary of those test results from the literature in the literature review on which I am still working. Besides that, I also had a spreadsheet ready which I used to compare my test data to my newly developed formula. All I needed to do was to alter my spreadsheet so that I could use it for the experiments from the literature, and then plug in the properties and take the answer out of it.

5. An after-lunch walk outside

I was very sharp today, and I think one of the reasons is that I finally went to have a walk outside after lunchtime. I didn't feel my afternoon dip at all today, even though I'm emotionally tired and distracted as a result of all the trouble with my roommate. Before I started tackling the task at hand, I also opened my window for a few minutes to let in some fresh air. I think my office really needed some air traveling through it, since I've been keeping my door closed for most of the time and the windows haven't been open since September.

How to handle a large amount of literature

These days, I am less busy in the lab (my setup needs to be changed so I won't be carrying out experiments for about a month), so I've totally dived into my literature review again. Since I am trying to get a good insight on several topics (existing bridges, load distribution, shear in beams, shear in slabs and failure criteria from fracture mechanics) I have gathered a depressingly large amount of papers which I want to work my way through.

Bit by bit I've developed a way to tackle this task.

1. Read by theme or period of time

Initially, I thought that it would help me if I'd be reading several topics parallel. Now, I've found out that it helps me much more to see the connections between different papers when I gather information on the same subject and read everything I can find on the same subject until I've finished that topic. Every now and then I do feel tempting to vary topics or required level of understanding for the considered papers. I tend to alternate papers on experimental work with papers on purely theoretical work.

2. Speed reading

As I wrote before, I've been doing some attempts to speed up my reading. I still feel tempted to savor each and every sentence, but working with a stopwatch has made me more conscious of my time.

3. The egg timer trick

I'm now using the old egg timer trick to track my time. Instead of the egg timer I am using the stopwatch of my phone (a 6-year-old fridge-shaped Nokia), to see how long I can concentrate before I drift off and go walk around the hallway for another cup of tea. I'm trying to stretch my concentration span from 20 minutes to 45 minutes. My attempts to regain focus through meditation seem to have a positive effect on this.

4. Summarize

What was special about this paper? What is the main thought I need to capture? I jot down a few words on the first or last page of the paper for further reference. I also make some notes at the sides of the columns whenever I come across an interesting thought, but I feel it is also important to get the key message and write that down for later in order to avoid having to reread the paper.
 

5. Archive

I use Endnote to organize my references. Most of the papers I read can be found through the online version of Endnote, so I can import all the relevant information to the data entry and attach the paper to it. Searching, as well as looking how much work of a certain author or from a certain period of time I have read, have become much easier this way.

6. Use the relevant data right away

Whatever I need for the report of my literature review goes in the right section of the document - straight away. I also keep some separate files on the influence of different parameters on shear. I don't have any written text in those files yet (the literature review needs to be done first), but I copy the most important graphs and sentences about the studied parameter, together with the reference in those files. I expect that this will speed up my writing process significantly once I start writing about these parameters. In the end, I will only have to mix all the information together, and then discuss it with regard to my own experiments, instead of looking for that information in papers again.

Admittedly, I print out all my papers (reading on the screen hurts my eyes, and I just am a paper and pencil person), so the physical papers themselves also have to be stored. That system is not as good as my Endnote library - I find myself often going through binders, trying to remember under which keyword I stored the paper I need. Any advice on this would be very much appreciated!

7. Let the ideas melt together

While reading all this information, I feel like all ideas are melting together in my head. I plan to start drafting some mindmaps rather soon, to get the links between these ideas and to point out what I will use for my own theoretical work.