In my previous post, I described how I use a physical notebook to manage my daily and weekly work.
Getting things done is not the only purpose of this notebook, however. It is also an important part of how I maintain my mental health.
My notebook is the center of my day-to-day workflow. In it I track what I need to do, what I am doing, what we’ve discussed in a meeting, and countless other things. It isn’t terribly often that I actually go back more than a week or so to look at things — I tend to transfer long-term notes into digital storage after I’ve processed them — but they’re still there, and I find the very act of writing with pen helpful.
However, it isn’t just an ad-hoc thing where I write without structure. There is quite a bit of structure to how I use the notebook, and it helps immensely as I plan and execute my work.
I have tried a number of different productivity systems over the years. Some have worked better than others. I’ve tried:
One of my favorite people-and-preference papers is Kahneman, Wakker, and Sarin’s 1997 article ‘Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility’. They report on a series of experiments that examine how people experience and remember utility, pain, or pleasure, and the ways in which it affects their decision-making processes.
As professors, we get a lot of e-mails. One of these classes of e-mails is the prospective student e-mail, which comes in wildly varying quality. This takes time from faculty, enough that many have written guides to e-mailing or specific requirements for e-mailing them and receiving a reply; I have a version of this myself.
The standard advice is to be specific about your interest in the particular faculty member you are e-mailing, and demonstrate at least an awareness of what it is that they are working on.
However, there is a flip side to this: if we are going to expect cold e-mailers to be familiar with certain information about us an dour work prior to e-mailing, then we need to make that information clear and accessible. If we don’t, it’s a bit like the planning commission filing notice of intent to demolish Arthur Dent’s house in a disused filing cabinet in an inaccessible basement, though perhaps with less dire consequences.