7 Things Highly Productive People Do. What Brought You Here. 100 Reasons is intended to serve as a resource for the thousands of people who, every year, contemplate going to graduate school but have not yet taken the fateful plunge into a graduate program.
It exists for their sake. But nearly 3,500 comments (as of Reason 86) have made it obvious that a substantial share of the readers of this blog are themselves current or former graduate students. Their comments have helped fulfill the purpose of the blog by providing a great deal of insight into the nature of graduate school and (sometimes unwittingly) the nature of graduate students. What readers do not see are the search queries that drive much of the traffic to the blog. These, too, are revealing of the experiences and struggles that characterize graduate school. What follows is a tiny sample (about 250 examples) of the tens of thousands of search-engine queries that have brought readers to the blog over the course of its life.
One of the most striking themes is loneliness (see Reason 69): Productivity hints, tips, hacks and tricks for graduate students and professors. Contents Jump to: My philosophy: Optimize transaction costs Distilled into empirically-wrought principles, my high-level advice is: Reduce transaction costs to engaging in productive behavior.
Erect transaction costs to engaging in counter-productive behavior. In short, mold your life so that the path of least resistance is the path of maximum productivity. People are surprised when I tell them I'm lazy. I don't try to change the fact that I'm lazy: I exploit it. I try to make sure that the laziest thing I can do at any moment is what I should be doing.
Anecdote: Pull-ups A couple years ago, I wanted to start doing pull-ups, so I attached a portable pull-up bar to the door outside our bedroom. Every time I passed by, the transaction cost of a pull-up was near zero, so I did some pull-ups. Moreover, I didn't have to remember to do pull-ups, because I saw the pull-up bar all the time. One day (for reasons unknown) the bar was taken down and placed on the floor. Don't work from home. 12 resolutions for grad students. Map out the year The relentless focus on the next deadline causes grad students to ignore longer-term planning.
Map out what the next twelve months will look like. Put major deadlines on your calendar. Assign tentative topics to publication venues. Where will the major conferences be? Decide which program milestones (qualifier, proposal, defense) you hope to accomplish in the next twelve months. If any milestones involve getting a committee to agree on a date, start searching for a date now. Getting professors to agree on a date and time is cat-herding.
If you're worried you won't stick to the plan, place a reminder of each of the twelve resolutions here (or whatever resolutions you pick) at the start of every month for the next year. Improve productivity Take a moment to boost your productivity. Does your environment encourage a productive workflow? What measures are you taking to fight procrastination? Crippling your technology may make you more productive. / Inbox 0? And, if you're trying out GTD.