What technologies and apps do I use?

A bonus for paid subscribers

Hi Lab,

See the previous post on Unleashing Productivity in 12 Steps: A Practical Guide. Continued 10. Wellness Matters: Have A Reset Device

In addition to the irregular Reset, you also need to find the rhythm of your work-life balance. It can be at different scales for different people. For some, every day should the classic 8:8:8 balance - 8 hours of work, 8 hours of play, 8 hours of sleep. For others, grinding 10-12 hour days through the week and resting on the weekend is sufficient. When I was an engineer, we worked through the night if needed to meet a deadline and rested later. Others grind through their 20s and 30s, hoping to rest in their 40s and 50s, like anti-aging guru Bryan Johnson who after founding Braintree, acquiring Venmo, and selling Braintree-Venmo to Paypal for $800M, is now spending his money trying to reverse the clock caused by an unhealthy grind that got him there in the first place. Others enjoy the grind for it’s own sake for as long as they can. The grind itself is play or well aligned with their Ultimate Why.

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/193463161@N07/

Everyone is different, and you can have work-life balance at different scales and different times. But the ultimate message is to know yourself and look after yourself. Never underestimate the power of good sleep, exercise, and nutrition. A healthy body and mind are the foundations of sustained productivity. Overall output suffers if you burn out. For me, I have fixed commitments due to my children - I have the morning and evening shift and my wife has the day time. But being an academic means that I can work in bursts and rest as needed. My wife and I try not to compromise on 7-8 hours of sleep a night. Sleep consolidates learning, allows ideas to ruminate, and repairs our bodies.

11. Reflect and Adapt

During grad school, a survey went out to see how much people were working. Some grad students and most pre-tenure faculty were working the most - 60-80 hours a week. But how true were those numbers? A few of us agreed to install RescueTime to track how much we actually worked and what we actually did. The results were universally eye opening.

No one was working as much as they thought and most of us were wasting a lot of time on everything from email to social media. If you don’t mind the privacy concerns, RescueTime is an excellent way to check your assumptions. It also allowed us to improve our productivity by seeing how much time we actually worked and how much time we wasted. Once we were at the level of productivity we wanted to be and it was consistent, most of us uninstalled RescueTime. Reflection and adaptation had taken place.

Reinforcement learning is everywhere. All systems rely on feedback and change to learn, adapt, and improve. If you don’t have a system for tracking and learning what you’re doing, what worked, what didn’t, you cannot adapt your approach accordingly. You can’t learn and you can’t improve.

12. Celebrate Small Wins

The danger in not having irregular, but somewhat frequent rewards in the absence of sufficient intrinsic motivation is that you chase external rewards that are unconnected to your goals. The likes and retweets. Video games untied to reality, but that give you a sense of achievement. Video games and social media disconnected from your goals, are supernormal stimuli. They are what pure sugar candy is to nutritious fruits and vegetables. They are rewards without the actual achievement.

In academia and entrepreneurship, rewards are few and far between. The corporate world often has built in rewards to keep employees motivated but the more you work for yourself or have a system of uncertain rewards (like research), the more you need intrinsic motivation or to create your own reward system. I encourage the lab to celebrate all the small wins - submitting the paper or grant, the conference acceptance, the first draft done.

Writing this email took longer than I planned for, which I guess is a bonus lesson. Your schedule must have enough flexibility or it becomes brittle and breaks easily with unexpected shocks and the impossibility of perfect planning.

As promised, a little bonus for paid subscribers is below: the apps, platforms and technologies I use to manage my projects.

Wishing you all a productive 2024!

Best wishes,

Michael

What technologies and apps do I use?

Some of this is specific to my job as an academic, but here you go:

Writing

I write primarily in Word and LaTeX, with Google Docs if collaborators insist. All my citations are managed in Zotero.

It’s hard to spot errors in your writing, so I often use Text to Speech to proof read (Accessibility built into Mac, and TTS Reader when I was on Windows). It’s easier to hear the errors when spoken out loud.

I also wrote a lot of A Theory of Everyone with Speech to Text and continue to do so from time to time: Mac built in Dictation and Dragon Naturally Speaking (Windows). This made the prose more casual reflecting how I speak and was a good break from typing.

Communication

Superhuman (affiliate link) has been a game changer for processing my emails. There’s an academic discount. I use it for both Gmail and Outlook.

I communicate with my lab through Slack.

Project Prioritization