If I had a time machine

When students ask what they can do to improve their grades at the end of the semester, I often think, “Invent a time machine, go back to the beginning of the semester, and start [coming to class, proofreading your work, studying for exams, etc.].” Now, in my second year of a new job, a year away from pre-tenure review, it feels like this is the semester that I would choose to return to if things do not go the way I want in the tenure process. With a paper under review, several papers I need to lightly revise and send out, and new projects in the early stages, this is a pivotal moment for my success in the coming years, even as the semester quickly melts away and, as usual, I haven’t completed nearly as much on these endeavors as I had hoped.

I have, however, made one change that I hope will pay off in the future. I installed LeechBlock on my web browser to ward off my Major Procrastination Disorder and keep time from getting away from me. In a few years, I’ll let you know how it goes.

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R.I.P. Google Reader

Tonight at midnight, Google Reader dies. I’m glad that this was announced back in March, giving me time to prepare for its demise (unlike some websites that are simply here one day and gone the next), because for the past five or six years, Google Reader has been my most-visited site. Turning on my computer in the morning, whether on campus or at home, I open my e-mail and Google Reader.

For those who are unfamiliar, Google Reader is a web-based program that uses RSS, or really simple syndication, to deliver the news from all of the websites you want to follow to a single place. Part of the difficulty in saying goodbye stems from the fact that I started using it when working on my dissertation. Given my struggles with Major Procrastination Disorder, I spent a lot of time in graduate school visiting websites and reloading them to see if anything was new. Google Reader allowed me to continue seeing if anything was new on the internet without visiting each site individually. This may sound simplistic, but I cannot emphasize the amount of time it saved me.

Over time, RSS has fallen out of vogue as sites have increasingly urged users to follow them on Facebook and Twitter for new information. I may be old-fashioned, but when I like to go to Facebook for news about my friends, not news (unless, of course, my friends are posting about the news). Now, it is time to move on. If you use Google Reader and you haven’t done so already, you need to download your subscriptions so that you can import them into whatever program you choose to use next. It appears that Feedly is currently the best replacement, though sites such as Digg are also making a play for those that Google has spurned.

Goodbye Google Reader. You will be missed.

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On Major Procrastination Disorder in 1751

Although it had not yet been recognized by psychiatrists (or graduate students), this article from Scatterplot indicates that Major Procrastination Disorder was present in 1751. I think it is time to add a “Nothing is New” category. Other entries: snark and technology, wasting time with media, and wireless reading devices.

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Be productive

If you, like me, suffer from Major Procrastination Disorder, you will likely try anything to increase your productivity. Recent posts at Orgtheory and Slate aim to help with this goal. At Orgtheory, Katherine Chen talks about the challenges of handling both structured and unstructured time, focusing primarily on the use of deadlines (both external and self-imposed). Two of these suggestions, understanding prioritization and breaking large projects into small tasks, might be aided by the topic of Farhad Manjoo’s article at Slate. Manjoo reviews an app called WorkFlowy, which is essentially an electronic way to make lists. If your lists look anything like mine (and, apparently, Manjoo’s), you end up with a piece of paper covered with writing in all directions, some of which is crossed out, circled, or highlighted. Manjoo recognizes that most note-taking applications don’t deal well with this sort of approach, but argues that WorkFlowy is different:

[T]his app is the easiest, best-designed, and most-flexible note-taker I’ve ever come across, and it solves many of the problems I’ve had with other software. In the weeks I’ve been using it, this new program has become my go-to place for storing and keeping track of everything—not just to-dos and grocery lists, but my ideas for articles, all the notes I gather while reporting, all the tasks I need to do for those articles, and even all of the stuff I’m gathering for a book I’m working on.

Now if I could just motivate myself to try it… Maybe I need to set a deadline.

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Summer doldrums

Many academics likely see summer as a time to get to work on the things they really want to be doing during the academic year. Freed of students and committees, they turn to research, course prep, and reading Important Books. Each summer, I look forward to being able to focus on those things. Each summer I fail.

This failure makes me feel bad about how little I am actually accomplishing, which leads to lethargy, which leads to accomplishing even less. Although the title seems appropriate, my experience in the summer is, in fact, the exact opposite of the problem faced by the protagonist in “Summertime Blues,” who is forced to work so much that he misses out on summertime fun.

I miss out on summertime fun because of how much I don’t work.

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Why I don’t get any research done

The semester has barely started and I already feel like I am treading water.  I have short essays to grade from each of my three classes, committee meetings, and meetings with students.  Beyond this and my recurring Major Procrastination Disorder, I’m also teaching my third entirely new course since starting my job.  In total, I’ve taught seven different courses since starting just over two years ago.  With so much emphasis on course prep (I’ve never had a semester when I didn’t have to prep a new course or substantially revise an old one), once assignments and exams start rolling in there isn’t much time for anything else.  Then, when there is a moment when I finish my teaching-related work I feel like I’m “done.”  This feeling is similar to the lack of motivation I felt as a student after completing a major paper.  In these moments I often think of the research projects I want to work on.  I think about them as I’m drifting off to sleep for a rare mid-afternoon nap.

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The five stages of grading

Speaking of grading, you may wonder where you are in the grading process.  If so, here is an outline of the five stages of grading:

And remember that at this time of the semester it is important to watch for signs of Major Procrastination Disorder in yourself and others.

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Major Procrastination Disorder relapse

For my entire life I have been battling the chronic Major Procrastination Disorder, which is said to affect 7 out of 10 high school students and 9 out of 10 graduate students.  This disorder tends to flare up when large blocks of unallocated time present themselves to me.  Despite being fairly productive during the academic year, winter and summer breaks tend to lead me to relapse.  Faced with my latest relapse, I have started looking for a partial cure.

Every time that I move I underestimate the workload of cable and internet installers and end up with a few weeks without access to either.  Thus, it was during my recent move from apartment living to home ownership that I discovered the healing powers of a lack of distractions.  Without TV and the internet I found myself filling my large blocks of unallocated time with activities such as reading and thinking.  If this period had been longer, I even suspect that I might have turned to productivity.  The effects of No TV and Internet were much greater than those of a sugar pill, though side effects included  a disconnection with the outside world.  For example, I missed both the announcement that LeBron James was announcing his decision regarding free agency and The Decision itself.  Thankfully, my access to the outside world was restored in time for Steve Carell’s decision.

I am obviously not the first person to find that there is more time for work when less time is spent on trivial things, but what always surprises me is how trivial those things seem when I don’t have access to them.  Sure, it is nice to know what is going on in the world, but do I really need to know which elementary school basketball players are being recruited by my alma mater?  I suspect that I don’t, yet I spend large amounts of time reading about similar things when my access to the internet is unimpeded.  While I don’t want to do anything too extreme, the idea of a tech sabbath is alluring.  If only I could pull myself away from the internet long enough to turn off the cable modem…

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Periodic onslaught or constant grading?

In planning to teach three classes at the same time last semester I was careful to space exam dates and deadlines in order to avoid having more than a few things to grade at any given time.  As the semester went on, however, I realized that by spreading things evenly over the course of the semester there was no point at which I didn’t have grading hanging around my neck like an albatross.  Still, I was able to grade most assignments within a week so from the standpoint of my students this approach was probably a success.

Preparing for this semester two of my classes remained the same so I left their deadlines and exam dates alone.  For my third class, however, I didn’t think to coordinate with my other courses.  As a result, I inadvertently had essays due in two classes on the same day.  It turns out that I appear to deal with constant grading much better than a periodic onslaught.  While neither assignment on its own was particularly burdensome their combined weight (and my ever-present disorder) prolonged the amount of time that it took me to grade them by a number of days.  I doubt that my students noticed but I can only imagine the delay that a buildup of longer papers or exams might cause.

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Floundering on fellowship

I have been on fellowship for the ’08-9 academic year.  Aside from various revisions and completing other projects, I have two major tasks during this time: getting a job and finishing my dissertation.

The completion of task number one leaves me with a single major task for the current semester.  Unfortunately, I have been clinically diagnosed as a procrastinator per the DSM-IV* definition of the term under the “Work Disorders” heading:

The problem, my doctor tells me, is that I don’t have enough work to do.  While this seems counter-intuitive, I have found that my most productive periods have been when I am extremely busy with other things.  I need to become a structured procrastinator, which is defined as “shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact.”  An illustration may be helpful:

The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Thus, while some may see starting a blog in the midst of dissertation writing to be counterproductive, I am actually trying to use my wasted time more wisely.  And if the blog becomes a chore, I may find myself working on my dissertation to avoid it!

*For those who cannot find this disorder in the DSM-IV, you probably checked the book when you should have checked your gut.

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