Optimization
by Alex
Maybe it is the new apartment or (more likely) awareness of how little free time I will have once I’m a father, but I have spent a lot of time massaging out the kinks in my intellectual muscles.
First, I’ve rejiggered, reevaluated, and rethought the set up of my outboard brain. After testing a bunch of different combinations of note taking programs, PDF managers, and bibliographic software I’ve found that yes, the same combination of programs that everyone uses are in fact the best things to use: Sente for bibliography, Things for task management, Delicious for bookmarking, and DevonThink for notes. I tried Evernote, but I don’t have a Mobile Device and frankly, I fear the Cloud and want my data somewhere where I can lose or compromise it myself. Also it’s actually not that powerful in terms of bintiliions of ways to organize folders etc. Now if I can just take the 800 fieldnotes out of my OLD note taking program I’ll be really set…
Second, better scheduling. After years of sorta-using GTD I have finally shoved every bit of anxiety-provoking task into Things and my life really is much better. Also, I recently had a student come to me asking how I took notes or managed reading books for the purposes of writing articles, what my process was when it came to writing, etc. and I found that I basically had nothing to tell them — a mixture of intuition and a reliance on the power of enthusiasm to muscle my way through this process meant that I ultimately had little to pass on to anyone who wasn’t me. It also meant, I realized on reflection, that I was still relying on grad school strategies to do professorial work — and I mean here not only training students but also my own research and writing. And lets face it, how many of us really want our dissertation and first fieldwork to be the zenith of our research prowess?
So, having done some serious work on research methods over the summer I’ve spent the past semester doing a lot of work on handling ethnographic materials and writing them up. A lot of this, I’m not ashamed to admit, has involved trying out the various methods in the ‘how to write a dissertation’ books I have field-tested in course of learning how to be an adviser. Not surprisingly, a lot of them are really really good. In particular (I am ashamed to admit) I’ve started taking notes on readings in a structured and regular way for the first time. Like ever. This really beats surrounding yourself with dozens of opened, heavily underlined books and searching for quotes you remember in them.
Overall, it has been a good experience and all the rethinking is finally beginning to get amortized off in the form of actual productivity. Speaking of which… back to work!