For the first post on observations on grad school after grad school, go here.

The idea of doing extracurricular activities during grad school is a touchy subject, and here’s why: On one hand, activities outside of your research are often the best way to run into interesting, new, out of the box opportunities. On the other hand, most grad students can easily point to a friend that is spending a lot of time doing anything but their research and is thus well on their way to the dreaded 10-year PhD.

I’m defining extracurricular activity here as anything that is not explicitly related to your PhD research.

I don’t have a definite answer to the above issue, but here are 4 observations I can make on the subject of extracurriculars from my experiences in grad school:

#1: An honest evaluation of whether you are using non-research related activities for procrastination is worthwhile.

Let’s make it pseudo-quantitative. Pick a particular extracurricular activity in question. Answer these two questions instantly, without thinking, and see what happens.

1. On a scale of 1 – 10, how enjoyable is the idea of doing your main PhD research right now?

2. On a scale of 1-10, how enjoyable is the idea of working on the extracurricular you picked right now?

Obviously this isn’t the most scientific test in the world, but I’d say if #2 minus #1 is greater than 5 and you’re spending considerable time on the extracurricular activity in question, it’s worth it to step back and evaluate whether you’re using the activity to distract yourself from bigger issues related to your grad school research. I’m not saying you have to love your research. Just think about whether it’s worth another x years of investment, honestly.

The opposite, if #2 is much smaller than #1, is worth a quick note: this likely means you’re stuck in some extracurricular activity you don’t like. This should be a lot more straightforward to recognize, though. Obviously, the important question to ask yourself, if this is the case, is: Why the hell am I doing this?

#2: If you’re learning a new skill set in your extracurricular activity, you’re doing pretty well for yourself.

What I’m thinking of here is the difference between an engineering Ph.D. doing graphic design for the school’s monthly magazine and being secretary for an “engineers interested in [insert something you're really not that into anymore]” club and taking minute meetings and sending emails more often than is useful. In the former, the grad student learns a new, potentially useful, skill set related to graphic design. In the latter, the grad student is taking minutes and writing emails: gross.

Another great example can be found in my interview with Marilyn Garcia, economics professor turned realtor, who kept real-estate as a hobby for close to 5 years before turning it into a full-time job.

#3: Administrative crap is generally not useful.

See above on taking meeting minutes and sending emails. Maybe you’re not spending much time on this and you don’t care, but it’s still worth re-evaluating.

#4: Your future profession is an important factor.

If you’re thinking of venturing slightly astray from a normal post-grad school job for your field (e.g. chemist working for DuPont or doing a post-doc), then often extracurricular activities can be crucial in making this switch.

A typical example of this is a technical PhD realizing they want to do more business-related activities in industry taking business courses, working with MBAs on business plan competitions, etc. They are simply building up experience for their next career move. Totally understandable.

Such are my observations on the usefull(-less)ness of extracurriculars in grad school. Add your experiences in the comments!

Photo by: Cameron Cassan

Some observations on writing my dissertation:

#1: I started early. And it was the best thing ever.

I should have bought myself a cake for doing this. Maybe I still will.

Simply put, there is no substitute for starting early. Absolutely none. It sounds like the most overstated work advice ever, and it kind of is, but when you do it, you realize why. It feels like getting escorted out of cramped coach mid-flight and being placed in luxurious first-class. I’ve never flown first class, but I started my thesis early, and that’s what it feels like.

Nonetheless, I, and many other people, continue to violate this principle time and time again; most of the time for the innocent reason of “I’ve got other stuff to do.” That sounds reasonable, but let’s put it this way, you have little hope of escaping a stressful thesis writing experience if you don’t start early.

“I know I should, but how can I get myself to actually start early?”

Excellent question, this gets me to observation #2…

#2: Early on, I blocked off time. A little bit of time. And it was quite useful.

I blocked off such a small amount of time early on that I wasn’t quite sure if it would be useful, but I scheduled it when I knew I could get something done, and it paid off. For me, this was Friday afternoon.

Friday afternoon was the time least likely for my mind to convince me there were other more urgent things going on. Basically because there weren’t; a perfect time to get in a couple hours of thesis writing. Not to mention, it makes Friday afternoon feel a hell of a lot more useful.

It may not sound like much, but in just 1 month you can log anywhere from 8-12 hours, and it barely feels like you did anything. In two months, that’s 24 hours. If you block of a few more hours on, say, Sunday afternoon, that’s 48 hours in two months without any feelings of a monstrous thesis looming over you. That’s priceless.

These are useful hours too, because they come in 2 hour chunks, as opposed to an all-nighter when you’re brain is fried and you want to kill the world and you’re writing nonsense that you’ll be deleting later.

#3: No one really cared about the details, or much of it at all.

This observation is definitely specific to my particular field. I’m in engineering, and the culture of our department is such that no one really cares about your Ph.D. thesis, and other things matter for your post-Ph.D. career (e.g., publications for academia or experience for industry). You do, however, need to have a thesis, it often needs to be a of some subjective length (in my case, dependent on professors’ biases), and needs to have a general flow.

I had 3 committee members. One didn’t seem to really read it. The other corrected english errors and typos for about 20 pages then stopped. The last seemed to read it in the most detail and actually had some non-trivial big picture scientific objections. So it was hit or miss. Nonetheless, there was some work involved, but not getting hung up on ridiculous details was a worthwhile decision for me (see observation #5).

#4: LaTeX was quite useful.

It was the first time I used LaTeX, and frankly, I was reluctant to because I knew I wasn’t going to use it again, but I got a template that had all the formatting requirements for my school written in, so that convinced me. Boy was it awesome. I could have wasted hours managing figures, equations, and references, but I didn’t. There’s been a lot written on LaTeX so I won’t belabor this any longer.

#5: I avoided attaching my entire self-worth to it.

I don’t want to get all woo-wooy on you, but I will. There’s this feeling I started to get sometimes, that it seems isn’t unique to just me, that involves some level of perfectionism about the thesis; that is, I sometimes slipped into thinking that the quality, breadth, and polish of my Ph.D. thesis was somehow a reflection of me and all that I’ve accomplished in my life so far.

Obviously, it isn’t.

There’s a reason you have to write “in partial fulfillment” on that title page. The Ph.D. is a long haul, and there are multiple milestones along the way. Obsessing over getting this one last document perfect will drive you insane, and likely build up all kinds of resentment towards working on it, which will make it suck more, countermining your original goal of having it suck less.

Caveat: Obviously this observation stems directly from #3, which may not be true of many fields (e.g. humanities). I’ve heard that in some fields it basically will decide academic jobs, your self-worth, whether your children will love you, etc. But if the thesis has an irrelevance factor for you at all, I recommend convincing yourself to chill out as much as possible; it’s bound to make the process a lot less painful. It worked wonders for me.

Those of you with alternate experiences, tell us about your lessons learned in the comments.

Clearly, the obnoxious title signifies that I have officially filed my thesis and finished grad school. Hooray. Although I have yet to receive my diploma, I did get a “receipt of filing” which literally has a gold star on it and, more notably, a See’s lollipop that says “Phinally Done” on it (with the Ph and D in bold just like that). Cute.

Now as for my lack of blogging, one may think it was because I was in a mad frenzy to finish my thesis and just didn’t have time for anything, in the spirit of How to Act Productive. I can honestly say, however, this was definitely not the case. I had plenty of time.

I just felt I didn’t have anything more to say.

I started this blog bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, suggesting this tip and that tip that would make you more productive. Then I realized some folks have these hilarious habits that make them seem productive, and are fun to make fun of, so I did — fully aware that I slip in and out of those characteristics all the time (e.g. bringing too much work on a plane and pretending I’ll do a lot over holidays, among others).

I then moved to a frame of mind where I realized that a lot of people who do cool things simply work well and work hard because they like it. So what additional comments are there to make? If you like it, you will end up making it past the various roadblocks of work-life that we all encounter.  And more than likely, you’ll put it enough hours to start to get good. Michael Jordan didn’t need a “system” to go practice. He liked basketball.

Wait, I’m not done with obvious analogies, here’s a better one: High school kids don’t need a “system” to try to get tail. They like getting tail, so they keep at it, over and over again, despite severe setbacks for all but the best looking of them, who everyone secretly hated. (not bad, huh?)

For me, after the first year or two, I simply didn’t like research anymore. It was work. So entered the productivity obsession. I figured there must be a magic pill that would make me damn good at what I do, thus increasing the chances of me liking it again.

Surprise. I didn’t find it.

But along the way I learned that the lack of magic pill doesn’t mean that there aren’t some useful tidbits you can pick up that makes the ride smoother or perhaps more efficient — most usefully from the people that have been there before.

That is my segue to the next couple of posts, which will be me recalling certain lessons I learned from my experience in grad school. They won’t translate to everyone, but they may help someone with something.

In a few days I’ll post the first, titled: Writing My Dissertation.

Good to be back.

Photo by: j.o.h.n. walker

Alas, you’d be wrong! Clearly, as the New York Times pointed out in a recent article, there are some serious consequences to (digitally!) stimulating yourself at all hours of the day.

It starts by pointing out some great habits of “productive” Americans:

“In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom.”

That’s true, how did I not realize how tedious and boring exercise was. Too bad we can’t just work all day instead..or check Facebook.

It continues…

“Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.”

Of course, if I only added up all the moments I spend waiting at a stop light or sitting there staring at my date’s face in silence across the dinner table, imagine how much more time I would have.

However, the article is quick to point out the more serious side of this digital addiction:

“The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.”

I have yet to be able to wrap my head around this, but I believe they are saying that constantly attaching myself to my crackberry only gives the illusion productivity, but in reality just makes me more of an idiot. That’s blowing my mind right now, but I will think about it later, cause I have a lot of work to do right now.

Bonus: In addition to the consequences of being “busy” all the time, check out the RadioLab episode on Sleep to figure out how sleeping less has similar learning-inhibiting consequences. Little do they know what that does to your productivity.

1. List all of your projects. Define a “project” as something most people would define it as, not the way David Allen would define it. If you’re confused, don’t worry, just go with your gut for now; step 4 will take care of things. I have 6 projects; in semi-cryptic shorthand: research, business1, business2, thesis, motorcycle, jobs, sidejob.

2. Put a line through occasional fun things. For me, “motorcycle” gets nixed here.

3. Put a line through things you can automate. For me “thesis” gets nixed here. In my field, we publish small papers along the way and assembling them into a thesis is easily automate-able work. For others this may not be the case.

4.Put a line through anything requiring less than 5 tasks to complete. This is definitely distinct from a lot of time management web-apps and GTD. Let’s be honest, “get an oil change” is not a project for normal people. Yes, technically it takes more than 1 task to complete, but get real, it doesn’t need a “project folder”, it doesn’t need it’s own list, it simply just needs to get done. Call the place to arrange a time and take your car there. It’s not that hard. I didn’t list any “projects” like this in my original list so nothing gets nixed here.

How many projects do you have left?

I have 5 left.

Now if I were to list immediate actionable tasks for each of these 5 projects, I’d come up with an average of 3-5, and that’s being generous. Often a project simply has one obvious next action. Say I have 4 tasks for each of these projects, that gives me 20 tasks.

Add another 5 miscellanous tasks that aren’t associated with projects (this is where “call the oil change place” comes in).

That’s 25 tasks. (My real task number is even lower, keep reading)

What Does this Mean?

Elaborate task management systems are probably unnecessary for you. And, as I’ve mentioned before, GTD style context sorted lists are most certainly overkill. Remember, even in the book GTD itself, David Allen says explicitly, “If you have only twenty or thirty of these [next actions], it may be fine to keep them all on one list…For most of us, however, the number is more likely to be fifty to 150″.

150?! Immediately actionable items that need to be tracked? Get out.

Also unnecessary when you only have 20-30 tasks are all those time-management webapps that sort tasks by project, context, labels, folders, display this and that mode, and what not.

All it takes with 20-30 tasks is one list, and, for good measure, planning your day.

What if you got way more than 25-30 tasks when you did this?

If you have more than 5 real projects as a grad student, you are either a) fooling yourself b) way overcommitted and thus should not be reading blogs right now c) likely not making progress on your most important project at the pace you’d like (for me, this is “research”). Cal Newport had a great post about Einstein focusing on one or two projects at a time. Einstein folks, Einstein.

Another possibility is that you are listing tiny things as “projects” and giving them way too much weight in your life (see the oil change example above).

If you have more than 3-5 immediate next actions per project, something is definitely askew, or you’re doing the completely overkill thing of listing “dependencies”, tasks that are dependent on other tasks being completed. That, by the way, is a huge waste of time, cause how often is it not obvious what the next action is after you finish doing what you’re doing right now?

So if no elaborate time-management system, then how should I track these tasks?

In a list somewhere. One list. And then don’t worry about it. If you want some important ones to stand out, put a star buy it (I do this all the time), or circle it or something.

What my list looks like:

I’ve been keeping such lists, updated daily in a single text file since February. Every day I just copy yesterday’s list, paste it at the top, delete stuff I did, add some new stuff, and proceed with my day. This has happened almost every day, minus weekends (sometimes), vacations, conferences, or other special scenarios. In addition, by keeping a real simple text file like this I can impromptu brainstorm on stuff when I want, or do a more zoomed out “goals for the week” list wherever I want (note below you see some really long lines or indented lists).

Here’s a really zoomed out snapshot of what it looks like:

My average number of tasks:

While writing this post I was curious how many tasks I had per day on this list. I averaged over this past month cause it’s too boring to go back further.

My daily average number of tasks over the past month was 10.45454545.

Way less than 25.

That’s impossible, certainly you have more, what about errands and things?

For the most part, I find keeping track of little personal crap on my todo list that contains work related tasks distracting and unnecessary. When I need to make sure to do some personal item, it goes on the list, (just like we added that extra 5 items earlier to our final list to get 25 total tasks). But by and large, personal things just get done without tracking. When I need to mail the census, I just mail the census, I don’t write it down somewhere first.

I find no problem with this because most little personal things don’t weigh on my mind at all, and the few that do go on the list. In addition, a lot of things come up ad hoc when I’m in the flow of working, as is the case for most everyone. Why interrupt that flow by writing stuff down, or worse yet, moving to the next item when there is no urgent need to?

Such has been my todo list experience for the past month: completely maintenance free. One list, mostly the important stuff, no sorting, no filtering, no contexts, no headache.

Here we continue with Part 2 of my conversation with Marilyn Garcia.

Read Part 1 here.

How She Made the Switch

Of course, the next question is: How do you make that switch when you’re busy being a professor? As it turns out, “I bought a house and basically never stopped looking at houses, never stopped following the market, it became a hobby. So the idea of being able to make this hobby my profession was just…an immediate shift, and I was excited about it.”

When I asked her about the concrete steps she took to become a realtor, she noted that “the barriers to entry in real estate are not that high.” She took some classes, took a test to get a license, and looked for a well established company that would be able to help her get started. She also saved up some money to make the transition, and jumped in during the summer between the fall and spring semesters.

What’s interesting, though, is how much time passed between real estate being a hobby of hers, to her profession. “It was my hobby for…approaching 5 years…but I didn’t even think of it as that. It was just something that I did and enjoyed and it never even crossed my mind to do it for a living.” Five years is a while. Note she didn’t first decide that she wanted a change and then start looking at real estate as a hobby, it was the other way around. It took time in fact, and a some discontent with her current job, to see her hobby as a possible future profession, “When I was thinking about it I was in a massive panic. Until I thought of something that I would love to do,” she recalls, “I was freaking out, and then I thought: oh my god, I could do real estate for a living.”

Marilyn’s entry into real estate came from realizing her hobby, which she had cultivated for five years, could become her profession.

Although she discovered real estate as her hobby and, later, passion when she was a professor, the initial spark of wanting to venture away from academia came much earlier in grad school. She told me a story of her best friend in grad school that left the economics program and became a landscape architect. When Marilyn recalls that episode, one word comes to mind: “Jealous.” Specifically, she was jealous that her friend was doing something creative. Which, in the end, is the underlying theme behind Marilyn’s switch.She has a passion for creativity, and as she says, something “visually creative.”

Economics simply doesn’t cut it, but being a realtor, for her, does.

So Was the Ph.D. Useful At All?

“I absolutely won’t say that I’m using it to the fullest,” Marilyn says about her Ph.D. “But it’s absolutely a benefit in my profession, even though, it’s in most senses completely unrelated. I feel like it absolutely gives me a leg up in what I’m doing.” Interesting, of course, because most realtors do not have a Ph.D. I asked her whether it was the Ph.D. aspect or the economics aspect that gives her the leg up. She feels it’s both. The economics part has more obvious benefits in terms of being able to analyze the market and find trends. In fact, Marilyn puts out a quarterly newsletter with her market analysis based on data she’s compiled.

But there are also some more subtle benefits. For example, getting a Ph.D. demands self-motivation, which being a realtor also requires. Also, Marilyn cites one of the most valuable skills of being a good academic: “figuring out projects that are worthwhile, and then getting myself to do them.”

Lastly, there is the often-mentioned benefit that having the Ph.D. “opens doors.” That is, it gives you some sort of status or stamp of approval. Personally, I’ve heard this benefit mentioned several times, and I have my doubts as to how useful simply having a Ph.D. to show you have a Ph.D. is, and even if the Ph.D. stamp does carry some weight, whether it’s enough weight to be worth it. Why not spend that time gaining an extra 5 years experience in whatever industry you’re interested in?

Nonetheless, Marilyn is certainly glad she finished her Ph.D.

Her Advice to Me and You

How do you know if a life of academia is for you? Simple, “you have to really want to do it” is how Marilyn sees it, and I agree. I imagine most would. For example, Marilyn recalled a friend of hers that loved geography as a grad student, got a faculty position and swore “I’m gonna get tenure and then I’m gonna kick back” but now that he does have tenure, he hasn’t kicked back. From what I’ve seen, that’s not uncommon, and in fact, it means that her friend really likes doing his job.

But even more importantly, it’s Marilyn’s belief that this enjoyment of doing what you do carries over to a greater likelihood of being good at what you do. “I think that most people, if they’re doing something that they really enjoy and really care about and really feel passionate about…I think there are very few people who are doing something like that that don’t do well at it.” This is not an uncommon idea.

We agreed that a big reason for this is because a lot of the stresses of your job and, consequently, a lot of the advice out there (this blog included) on how to do your job with the least stress, how to manage your time, and “hack” your way through this and that, become unnecessary when you truly like what you’re doing.

Of course, that doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be great at what you love — I love playing basketball, but I knew in high school it was not gonna put bread on my table. But it does mean honing your skills and pushing your boundaries will feel less like work. That is, I’m sure Michael Jordan wasn’t staring at the clock during practice and thinking “Okay, I’ll shoot ten more jumpers and call it a day.” And if you think the sports example is too easy since sports are naturally fun, we can also be sure that Albert Einstein wasn’t thinking “Damn, I gotta work for the man at the patent office all day and moonlight as a physicist all night…” Of course, most of us are not as good at anything as they were at basketball and physics, but we can still take something away from the examples.

For grad students, Marilyn suggests asking yourself what you’re jealous of when you see other folks your age and feel jealous. Am I jealous of their specific job, their independence, their salary, their time off, the prestige of their job, the creativity? Armed with that information, you can more carefully discern what it is about your current situation that needs tweaking: I love this part of my job, but I hate that part. Perhaps I can find a way to make it work, or find a related profession (or hobby) that has less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff.

For grad students feeling the itch of changing gears right now, Marilyn suggests finishing. “I was jealous, but I still don’t regret finishing,” she recalls about being jealous of her friends that left. This is great practical advice for someone who doesn’t see themselves making a big leap into something totally different, as she did. “[Go] the traditional route” and “see if there’s something modifiable and interesting” to turn a mediocre job into one you enjoy. And at the same time “think about where else you could go and how else you could use your skills and what other possibilities there could be.” That’s manageable.

And if that doesn’t workout? Well then just save up some cash, take the jump, and do what you love.

“People don’t really think of real estate as being artistic.”

Neither did I, until I spoke with Marilyn Garcia. Marilyn got her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Economics, taught economics at the University of San Francisco for five years, and is now a realtor, and loves her job. This may strike you as an unusual path, it certainly did to me. But it was also just the sort of unconventional post-Ph.D. career path I was curious about, so I had to talk with her, and Marilyn was nice enough to have a conversation with me. We spoke about why she decided to move from academic economics to real estate, what she loves about being a realtor, what she didn’t like about being a professor, and how her Ph.D. still gives her an edge in her new career.

Why She Chose Real Estate

Of course, my first question was the obvious, why? She said, “I wanted to be doing something more creative, as in visually creative, which no matter how you spin it, economics just isn’t.” Fair enough, but this makes me think that she wanted to start a painting career. Real estate is visually creative? She explains that it’s more than just signing closing papers,  “It is artistic in the sense that the marketing is creative, and doing the marketing materials.” In addition Marilyn spends time working with sellers to “basically go in and help them make over their houses while on a reasonable budget…I love houses. I love architecture, and I love sort of envisioning what the houses could be, with sort of the right changes here or there.” Contrast that with studying GDP trends from the past decade, and you can quickly see how real estate wins in the more-visually-creative fight.

But certainly someone that goes through years of economics training, gets a Ph.D. from a top 10 program, and lands a professorship must have a serious appetite for the analytical that needs to stay satiated. She gets that as well, explains Marilyn, “[Real estate] is a fantastic mixture for me because I love doing all of that. I honestly feel like I’m playing and having fun…there’s sort of the figuring things out, and watching the market, and calculating statistics, which of course I do more than kind of any other realtor, because of my background. There’s an analytical side as well, which I think is really important to me and makes me happy also. And it’s that, the mix of those things: the logical analytical side, the artistic side, and then it’s a flexible lifestyle that works with the family.”

Realtor vs. Professor

Issues like “lifestyle” and “family” came up often in my talk with Marilyn because, as she explained, one of the factors in switching from teaching economics to becoming a realtor was the birth of her first child while she was a professor, “which,” she jokes, “tactically was not the optimal thing.” But moving from being a professor to any other profession for a more flexibile schedule struck me as odd. I mentioned to Marilyn that setting your own schedule and not having a boss are often the most cited pros of being a professor. Marilyn responded, “I think that that’s very true, except for, for me it was the: you can set your schedule, but certainly at the junior level, every moment that you’re not doing something that you’ve scheduled, you really should be doing research. And it’s sort of that continual, 24 hours a day guilt — I truly don’t miss that at all.” That doesn’t exist in real estate? Marilyn explains, “in real estate…I work at all different times of the day, but I’m doing very specific things: I need to do this and then I’m done and I can go enjoy my life.” To which I asked, “but how is that not true [as a professor]? You can’t delineate that like: I’m going to finish this grant proposal and then I’m going to call it a day?” Marilyn elaborated on the more subtle distinction, which is one of the most important differences between her old job and her new one. “I think that’s true to some extent but I think the activities are much more open ended and long term. Okay, a grant proposal is one thing but you need to write a paper that’s going to be published in some fabulous journal so you can get tenure,” she said. “Setting a specific goal is great but you have no idea how long, really, it’s going to take to achieve that goal. So you work for three hours and you’re not there, and then what do you do? You work for three hours after you’ve been in class all day, and you’ve got the faculty meetings, and had office hours, and driven back and forth.”

This is one of the parts of my conversation with Marilyn that I’ve thought about the most. Comparing careers, especially in the context of finding your “dream job” (whatever that means), is not a matter of just counting hours, dollars, or some other seemingly objective measure of comparison. Instead it has to do with feelings like guilt and contentedness, subjective feelings, that are difficult to quantify and differ from person to person. As a professor, the demands of the job meant that she felt more guilt when she was not working. As a realtor, she feels more content and simply doesn’t feel that nagging guilt. She agreed with me, “I don’t. And you know I think the other thing for me, honestly, was that doing economics, like doing research to me, never felt like fun.” Bingo. “Right…could it just be that you just simply enjoy this more?” I asked. “I think that’s absolutely true. I do enjoy this more and that’s why I’m willing to do it for far more hours. I mean I think that the people who are fantastic academics get joy out of the process and they’re having fun while they’re doing it. There isn’t this sort of trade off that I felt.”

That gets to the heart of what I learned from talking to Marilyn, she switched from academic economics to real estate because she likes being a realtor. She has fun doing it.  That was not true of being an economics professor, despite having spent years studying the subject and developing her skills. It’s not that she wasn’t good at it. Not everyone that gets a Ph.D. is good enough to become a professor. She was. Yet, she found she plainly wasn’t having fun doing it, and, lucky for her, she found something else she does enjoy. Perhaps equally as important was the fact that her new profession gave her more autonomy (a subject discussed recently by Cal Newport), which she feels was more suitable to being a mom at the same time. Lastly, note that for her, there was little autonomy in being a professor, despite the fact that it’s a quintessential “you’re your own boss” job. Specifically, when she stopped doing work as a professor, she felt various pressures to do more, ruining any sense of autonomy that the professor job has on paper. The same was not true of real estate.

Stay Tuned…

The next obvious question is how she decided on real estate out of all the other creative professions out there. But in addition, Marilyn and I also talked about the concrete steps she went through to become a realtor when she was already a professor, whether her still considers her Ph.D. useful, and what advice she has for other people thinking of leaving academia. Stay tuned for Part 2!

Part 2 can now be read here!

Photo by: moriza

In life, sometimes no matter how hard you try to do good, there are those that try to undermine your efforts. Today’s culprit: The New York Times.

Since March 2008, when I originally advised people that walking fast would improve their efforts to act productive, I have been on a tireless mission to coach people on how to not only be productive, but how to also act productive. That is, put their productive habits on show so as to both inspire people and improve your perceived value.

But today, in a dirty-handed move to discourage people from such a basic display of productive multitasking, the New York Times has published a seemingly serious and scientific-study-filled article on how cell phones and walking don’t mix.  Those bastards. They put the “ir” in irresponsible; trying to prevent people from being productive with scare tactics like a shameless story of an innocent 16-year-old boy who “walked into a telephone pole while texting and suffered a concussion.” Have a heart.

It doesn’t stop there, however,  they also cite an innocent “68-year-old man who fell off the porch while talking on a cellphone, spraining a thumb and an ankle and causing dizziness” and even start the whole article off with a tale of a 25 year old Tiffany, who was walking while talking to her grandmother and ran into a truck, which the Times adds “was parked in a driveway.”

Perhaps what disturbs me the most about this article, though, is that they don’t just stop at little anecdotes. They try to add science. That hits too close to home. They cite work by a graduate student at Ohio State, which finds that “slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 because they got distracted and tripped, fell or ran into something while using a cellphone to talk or text.” Who is this grad student whose research is making people act less productive?! I need to give him a call, perhaps I’ll do it on my afternoon walk.

So what do you do when someone tries to compromise your life’s work? You fight propaganda with propaganda. So I am writing this post to encourage all of you to talk, text, play iPhone games, even set your home DVR with DirectTV all from your phone, while walking! Show people that you are too busy to walk and do nothing else at the same time!  Check your Gmail! Text your friends! Read papers with a smartphone pdf reader! Even read the New York Times itself! But walking and texting is such a basic productivity maneuver, I feel bad leaving it at that. Try more impressive productivity displays such as biking and talking, or better yet, biking and texting (If this is outlawed where you are reading, then do not do this. Grad Hacker is not responsible for you breaking the law. Breaking the law is not productive.). Whatever you do, don’t listen to the haters, and make sure you act productive.

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Find the full list of How to Act Productive posts here.

I liked this simple approach to a subject (eating food) so overdone it makes me want to vomit (the opposite of eating food). While repeating this catchy phrase over and over in my head one day, I thought: time managment is another totally overdone subject, wouldn’t it be great to have a similar credo to simplify all this hackneyed advice on to do lists, productivity, time management systems, and the like? Then, sent from the productivity heavens, it came to me:

Make lists. Not too much. Mostly do.

Let’s look at the three parts individually.

Make lists.

Let’s be honest, 99% of time managemenment techniques involve some sort of list making. From Alan Lakein’s ABC system back in the 80′s to GTD, everyone is telling you to write things down one way or another. Generally, in subjects with a lot of differing advice (e.g. time-management, fitness, diets, etc.), if you find a few recurring themes that everyone agrees on, it’s likely that they are solid principles to abide by. So in this case, it probably doesn’t matter whether you sort your lists with ranked A, B and C priority items, or by context in GTD, or keep a list of projects in your pocket like Cal Newport, or go through your list in a clever way like in Mark Forster’s Autofocus system. What matters is that you write stuff down and use that list. Otherwise you’ll forget stuff and not have something to fall back on when it’s not obvious what you should be doing right now. Certainly there are productive people that never make lists, but there are also people with great bodies that never workout. They’re lucky. You can hate them. But the bottom line is that writing stuff down in some form is a recurring piece of advice in differing productivity literature in the same way that regular excercise and avoiding junk food are a recurring themes in differing health and fitness advice. So make lists, but…

Not too much.

Don’t get obsessed with the list making and list sorting. It’s easy to get caught up with maintianing your list(s), tweaking your system, and trying to automate everything. Stop. Also, don’t worry about keeping too many different lists. If it makes sense, sure, make separate lists (e.g. home, work). Or if you start to lose focus or feel overwhelmed on a certain day, it can be useful to make impromptu lists of what projects are important right now, or what tasks you need to do for today only. Otherwise, lists that unnecessarily break up items waste your time. Instead, focus your energy elsewhere…

Mostly do.

Do whatever is necessary to do the (most important) items on your list. In that sense, my personal opinion is that simple pen and paper or low-tech lists are best because they don’t distract you with new techy features, you can flip through all items quickly, there is no tweaking of settings, and they don’t release new versions. Just write your stuff down and get moving. If you need the right setting to do things well, get in that setting. If you need quiet, or no distractions, move to a new place. If you are starting to get burned out, take a break, or ask yourself if you’re trying to work too much. If certain items seem to sit on your list undone for a long time, ask yourself if they really need to be done, and if so, then reword them, or break them up to do them more easily. Lastly, some days, it will be so obvious what you should do that you don’t need a list. That’s good. Consider those days a gift. Just do what’s obvious.

With these 7 words, you should be able to proceed through most days smoothly. This is not to say that particular systems aren’t appropriate for different people, they can be, but in the end you will have to do your tasks one way or another, and the simpler the way the better. Do obvious things you have to do first; focus on your most important tasks and projects first thing in the day, when you still have energy; and when nothing obviously is needs to be done now, look at your list, and do more. Then go home and relax.

Note: Thanks for the comments reminding me that the title has 7 words and not 8. What can I say?

Me!

Looks like it’s time to break my hiatus. Excuse me for the long gap, I took a bit of a break. I did, however, advance to candidacy in the meantime. Yes. Good to be back!