Category: Productivity
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Calm Productivity course: Example lesson published
You may have noticed that I’ve mentioned a new online course I’ve been working on for a few months. The course is called Calm Productivity and I’ve created it in response to a growing concern about the frenetic pace of academic life, and the increased pressure on academics to keep doing more, with less. Don’t…
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Calm Productivity course goes live on 24 February
Over the past few months, I’ve been building an online course called Calm Productivity, as part of my Head space project. It’s taken way longer than I’d hoped it would, and required a lot more work than I’d anticipated. But I’m very happy with the outcome and can’t wait to release it in a couple…
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Using a weekly review to close open loops
In this video, I do a walk-through of the weekly review that I do every Friday afternoon. This weekly review is a sweep through my entire personal and professional life, where I try to wrap up everything that might cause me any worry after I leave work. My weekly review is basically a process of…
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New ‘Thinking in public’ video: This is not a tutorial
I started a YouTube channel in 2021 called Thinking in public, with the intention of sharing the practices I use as part of my academic work. From the channel description: I’m a teacher and researcher working in higher education, and I spend a significant part of my time trying to figure out how to be…
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Why publish-or-perish? Why not, publish-and-prosper?
It’s weird to think of some of the things we take for granted in higher education. Surely one of the worst is to be taken in by the publish-or-perish mindset; the idea that, unless you publish you have no future in academia. That you’ll be punished, or worse, that you’ll ‘perish’: To die or be destroyed, especially…
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Using a ‘now’ file to prioritise new projects
Update: I’ve since published a ‘Now‘ page on this site after coming across the suggestion from Derek Sivers. I came across the idea of using a ‘Now’ file in the middle of last year and have incorporated it into my weekly review. The basic idea is that you keep track of all the big projects…
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Quickly capturing the essence of a new idea
Sometimes I come across a novel idea or new concept that I’m unfamiliar with, and recognise that it’s something I should spend some time getting to grips with. But even though I’m interested in the idea and know that it’s important, I’m busy with something else and either don’t have the time or the bandwidth…
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Expanding a note stub into a permanent note
In this video I walk through the process of taking a note stub (e.g. some information you’ve quickly captured) and expanding it into something more comprehensive and useful. I review the sources I use to add information to the note, talking about why I value some sources more than others, and explain what I’m thinking…
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Using Zotero to create literature notes from video
In this video I talk about the way that I use Zotero to create literature notes from a video presentation. With the increase of video content online – especially academic content that’s now being recorded by default – I’ve been spending some time experimenting with different approaches to extracting useful information from video. Video remains…
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Using Hypothesis and Zotero to create notes while reading online
In this short video I demonstrate how I take notes using Hypothes.is while reading on the web and in Zotero. I try to show the early stages of creating links between ideas that I’m interested in, and eventually where I add those ideas into my permanent notes. I didn’t do much planning for this video;…
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Knowledge work and academic productivity
This is an introduction to a new project I’m starting where I think about, explore, and discuss ideas around workflow, process, and productivity as a knowledge worker. If being an academic is about using information to create value for others, then I don’t think that we have systematic processes that we can use to manage…
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A review of 2019 and plans for 2020
One year ago today I posted some of the plans that I had for the year and this is a brief review of those plans, as well as starting to think about what I might get into for 2020. Writing: I managed to stick to my goal of writing every day with the caveat that…