Accidentally in Code

Tag: effectiveness

  • Student Workaholism

    The infinite corridor, from the main entrance
    Credit: flickr / Ed Yourdon

    It’s been bothering me a little lately that some people have been describing me as a workaholic, I think that university effectively rewards workaholism and in the real world it’s easier to avoid. Here are a list of reasons I’ve come up with (feel free to suggest more!):

    • No distinction between work place and home place, since home is where you work some, if not all, of the time.
    • Ditto work time, even people on flexi-time often have set hours in the middle of the day where they’re expected to be working. This is not the case for students.
    • The demarcation between your job and extra curricular activities is fuzzy when you’re a student – i.e. volunteering is in a sense part of your studies, as is the part-time job you do to fund them.
    • Students are rewarded for perfectionism.
    • Studying is infinite – as you will never know everything.
    • Students talk a lot about how much work they’re doing, mostly they’re not doing that much (takes a while to figure this out though) which can skew an individual’s perception of how much they should be doing.
    • The organization of the semester, with little work at the beginning and lots at the end, is inefficient.
    • Feedback is typically limited to letter grades, which do not provide a full picture of work and achievement.
    • Students are sometimes encouraged to manage their time badly through pointless assignments and irrelevant reading.
    • Most time management advice for students seems to consist of “don’t procrastinate”.
    • Businesses have incentives to provide tools to increase efficiency, university’s don’t have incentives, and rarely seem to educate students on tools that will help them work more effectively (for a list of tools I think are useful, see this post).

  • Productivity for Minions

    Google this, there’s nothing useful. Someone needs to write a book on this! I’d buy it, would you?

    If not, hopefully it’s because you’re not a minion.

    by drewdomkus / flikr
    by drewdomkus / flikr

    Grad students are basically minions. I am the minion of my supervisor (luckily he’s nice), the minion of any prof whose course I take (to a lesser extent) and the minion of the prof I TA for.

    My supervisor is the reason I have a place at the university. He gives me a scholarship, too. So if he asks me to do something, I do it. It becomes my priority.

    If I’m taking a course, we get assignments and deadlines which obviously we have to complete on time. The course I’m taking at the moment has set us in the region of 100 hours of homework, which finally ended last week. Now we have a project to complete, but the deadline is fairly early in December – reflective of her schedule, not ours. When she decided that it was not OK for me to code in Haskell (despite saying any programming language) I had to rewrite it in Java the following day – this was not what I’d originally planned to do then, my priorities had to change.

    This is the least of it. I dropped a course, because the prof said openly that he wanted the “source code” to anything we did (including, say, word documents) so that he could use it if he wanted to. Lately, I’ve heard another prof doing a similar thing. Grad students are minions.

    Then, there’s TA-ing. Being a bit tender-hearted (also, and probably correctly described as a “people pleaser” I end up as the minion of my students. I see them on their schedule, help them longer than I get paid for, and respond to their emails as fast as I can. Then there’s the stuff the Prof asks me to do – at the end of the semester, I have four consecutive weeks of marking (an assignment a week), plus students being sent to me for tutoring, plus… these things have to become my priority.

    Lastly, there’s WISE. As President, you’d think I wouldn’t be a minion here but I am – I’m the minion of anyone involved who doesn’t do their job, because then I have to do it for them. My priorities have to change.

    This wasn’t meant to be a long moan, just example of how, whilst I set my priorities, being a minion means that they get changed because other people’s priorities are more important than mine.

    Lurching from crisis to crisis, panic to panic is not productive. It’s not effective. 7 Habits talks about this – your deadlines, your priorities need to reflect your values, not just be jerk reactions to events.

    But what if you’re a minion? Because I try to do that, I make my list every week. I try and incorporate the minion activities (like marking) that I know I will have to do. But then I can get a request and have to rejig everything. Recently I came home to an email (at 11:30pm, sent at 6:30pm) asking for something to be done by the next day at 10am. Of course, it didn’t happen. But I did have to abandon everything else the next day to get it done.

    Productivity for Minions – someone should write this. How to balance living a productive, effective life, whilst continually having to respond to others knee-jerk reactions.

    Advice welcome!

    By drewdomkus / flikr
    By drewdomkus / flikr

  • When 1 Week = 7 Steps Back

    on the infinite staircase
    Credit: flickr / Random Tony

    Last week, and at the start of this week I was feeling really worn out and disillusioned. Things were taking longer than they should, and despite working a lot and effectively I really wasn’t making the progress I wanted to be. I felt like I wasn’t achieving anything. What this really means, is that on Monday I worked from around 8 in the morning to 11pm at night (- perhaps 2 hours) and yet didn’t cross anything off The List. Tuesday I started a little later, but ultimately didn’t cross anything off the list either. Or Wednesday.

    I feel this real need to make progress, achieve something concrete, day in, day out. I’m aware that as a grad student there’s a risk of ending up at this place where you show up but nothing concrete happens, and this continues until you’ve been there for several years and people joke about whether you’re ever going to graduate.

    I don’t want to be that person.

    My far off goal, is finishing my thesis. It’s impossibly far away, and too large to conceptualize, so I have to break it into smaller, manageable tasks that mean I’ll make it, in increments. Like reading a paper a day. Coding a new visualization. Writing up all the papers I’ve read that are covered in notes into my work-in-progress. But then sometimes I end up spending a week on stuff that doesn’t help achieve these goals – like marking, or a ridiculously large assignment for the course I have to take. And then at the end of the week I look back and think, well I worked really hard, and I got this done, but in a months time (or even just another week) will anyone care? Will I care?

    It’s frustrating. And so every day, I set myself an unrealistic list of tasks. If something (for example, the presentation we made this week) takes longer than expected and I don’t achieve them, the following day’s list is even more unmanageable. And it continues. This is why the “Week in Brief” and my “Goals” list are so helpful, because when I’m trying to do 10+ high level tasks in a week I have to give myself a reality check and admit, that’s never going to happen.

    Setting goals that push me but don’t overwhelm me is something I’m working on. Because when I’m overwhelmed I’m not effective, I’m just overwhelmed. I’m not getting stuff done, I’m not motivated, I’m contemplating hiding from the world and wondering if everything would be OK if there were just 30 hours in the day. Panicking because I think I’ve missed an important appointment when I’ve in fact just misread my calendar.

    The irony here? After all that stressing at the start of the week, there’s a chance I might just cross everything off the list this week.

    Lesson? Start big tasks at the start of the week. Postpone smaller ones to the end of the week. Achieving large tasks motivates and inspires me to achieve the smaller ones. Vice versa does not work so well. Spend more time doing and less time scheduling.

  • Great Teachers

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, given certain circumstances I find myself in. And I’ve realized that in all my time at university (I’m entering my 6th year) I’ve had two great professors. The kind that inspire you, the student, with passion. Who explain clearly. The ones who teach the classes that you work hardest for, where you leave feeling it was worth it because you learned the most.

    Two. Out of  – lets take a pretty conservative estimate – thirty.

    There were a few more who were good – they didn’t inspire the same level of passion, perhaps, but I at least got the impression that they cared about what they were teaching. A significant number just couldn’t seem to be bothered at all. They weren’t “present” in their presentations. They made something potentially interesting sleep inducing.

    If this is typical in Computer Science, no wonder enrollment is dropping.

    So what do these great instructors have in common? I feel these can be summed up into a concept of “Teaching Effectively, not Efficiently”. Efficient Teaching is putting all the concepts out there and trying to cram them into your students. Effective Teaching is sending your students away understanding the big picture and interested in learning the details that make it up.

    • Passion. They believe in what they’re teaching and convey that to the class.
    • Practicality. Being able to talk about the practical applications of something keeps students engaged.
    • Understanding > Learning. Memorizing something is pointless if the student can’t apply it.
    • Class Engagement. Class is interactive and doesn’t consist of a prof droning on whilst students fall asleep.
    • Engaging Assignments. These profs set homework students want to do, not what’s in the textbook.

    Anything I’ve missed?

  • Overwhelmed

    The thing about focusing on effectiveness, is that everything that I put on “the List” is something I think is important. And then if I get a little behind I end up in a situation where my todo list for today has a time estimate of over 11 hours. And then I panic.

    Today I managed to convince myself that I’d forgotten my wallet. I spent half an hour waiting at the physio for my boyfriend to come by with his credit card (thankfully his office is across the road, but he was in a meeting). And then he rushed off and I walked home to find it. And I did – buried deep inside my backpack between my laptop and a pile of papers that I’ve been carting around for days but haven’t found the time to read.

    By the time I got home I’d calmed down, and when I found my wallet I felt so stupid. I don’t, typically, see myself as a person who forgets important things. However I’d got so frazzled that I had believed it when emptying out my backpack would have shown me that no, I am not that person. I thought about concealing it from my boyfriend, but I opted not to. When I called him to confess, he laughed. For some reason he finds it endearing when I’m really dozy. I think it’s best not to question this.

    Getting overwhelmed is something I need to focus on. When everything is important I don’t prioritize as well as I should do. My “List” is a mix of things that need to happen today, with things that make long-term easier. Such as reading a paper every day – I don’t need to do that today, but when I have to do something like write a project proposal (like I did last week) it only took a couple of hours because I’d laid all the ground work ahead of time – in the piles of annotated papers on my desk and the references organized (with notes) in Zotero.

    So, he’s my plan for staying calm and getting on with things. Because one thing is for sure, when I’m overwhelmed and freaking out, I’m not being productive!

    1. Breathe
    2. Do what’s possible, starting with things that need to happen today
    3. Forgive myself for taking a break (I needed it!)

  • Effectiveness, not Efficiency

    Someone once described me as “scarily efficient”. I have to say, I took it as a huge compliment. However after reading The 4-Hour Work Week (Tim Ferriss – Amazon) and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R Covey – Amazon) I’ve been focusing more on Effectiveness. There’s an important distinction. You can be efficient at doing trivial things, effectiveness is focusing your energy on things that will allow you to achieve the most important things.

    One of my friends was talking to me this evening about how she’s not achieving what she wants to, and about how she feels like having a personal life eats into her “work time”. I hope I gave her some reasonable advice, so I’m going to reproduce it here.

    1. Get Some Perspective

    Read The 4-Hour Work Week and 7 Habits (Amazon) and learn the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Think about the things that you do that are efficient, rather than effective, and whether it’s possible to eliminate them.

    2. Don’t be Overwhelmed

    My friend has big problems keeping up with her RSS feeds. But if you’re overwhelmed to the point where you’re not reading anything, you’re not keeping up with what’s important. Incidentally, if you’re getting more articles than you can read a day and you stop trying to keep up, you’re still getting more articles than you can read a day and ultimately it won’t take long before you’ve got more than you’ll ever catch up with. Don’t just declare “RSS bankruptcy” – eliminate ruthlessly and keep just the important feeds. Learn to skim – if you start reading something and it’s not interesting, or relevant enough,  don’t waste your time reading to the end – move onto the next thing.

    3. Set Manageable Goals

    If you have a full time job and work 50-60 hours a week are you really going to spend your weekend reading an entire text book? I really hope not! Get a proper todo-list manager (I’m liking Remember The Milk) and make some lists. Set repeating tasks that are manageable. Manageable is key, because once you get behind you probably won’t be able to catch up. I feel that a backlog of a week’s daily repeating tasks should be able to be cleared in one day focused on them – but that’s not a scientific measurement.  Also, as a grad student my schedule is somewhat different.

    A really useful aspect of a todo list, is if you get home feeling drained knowing you should do something productive but incapable of deciding what – the todo list will decide for you. Do it, and you’ve achieved something more than just watching TV. Consider the warm glow this gives you a gift. I do this when I’m feeling overwhelmed, just pick the top-priority task of the list. Or pick an easy “repeating” task to warm up and gear me up to being productive.

    4. Put Those Goals in Public

    I’m finding my Week in Brief really helpful. I put my goals in public and that makes me accountable. I also evaluate what my high level goals for the week are. As a graduate student, I only answer to my supervisor but he’s just concerned that I’m making progress – he doesn’t prescribe what that progress should be. Once I’ve written the list for the coming week I can evaluate how the tasks I’ve set myself fall into my “roles” (grad student, TA, blogger, President of WISE). At the end of the week when I evaluate what I’ve checked off and what I haven’t managed, I can see whether I’ve devoted too much time to one “role” at the expense of another, and when I look at what I have managed I can take a moment to be proud of what I have achieved this week. A Masters Thesis is this big, long-off goal, but I know that if I chip away at it week in week out, I’ll get there.

    If you don’t want to announce your todo list on your blog, you can always share it with a friend and get them to motivate you!

    5. Focus on What’s Important

    Now you’ve got your life in order, you need to stop it getting out of hand again! New opportunities, people, and activities are great but do they help you achieve your longer-term goals or distract you from them? For instance, I get really drained by people who enjoy an argument. Not, as in, a good debate, but deliberately taking a (relatively unimportant) point of contention and making it into a time consuming argument which just leaves me frustrated and bored. One of my friends really enjoys these, but after I finished one the other day with “I’m going to go and have a more productive conversation with a brick wall” we’ve agreed that he’ll stop having them with me.

    6. It’s not All or Nothing

    Finding a degree of balance in your life is hard, and there’s debate on whether or not it’s a good idea (I wrote more about my personal findings on happiness in this post). But I really don’t believe that having a boyfriend or girlfriend need negatively impact your professional life. My boyfriend is incredibly supportive with everything I do for WISE, and honestly I wouldn’t have achieved as much there without his advice and support. He’s President of IGADI (CS Grad Association), and I encouraged him to go for that. He wasn’t wild about me going to China, but he supported me in it (and never said “I told you so” when I got frustrated). I’ve dated more than my share of idiots and possessives, but my experience in a stable and balanced relationship is that we build each other up and achieve more.

    7. It’s OK not to be Super-Human

    I’ve been reading Stumbling on Happiness lately and it’s really insightful. Losing control did make me miserable, and I’ve realized that when I imagine the future it’s one where I sleep a maximum of 4 hours a night (I think I’m fairly productive, but in my imagined future I achieve new, unimagined levels of productivity and there are never unforseen setbacks). I’m starting to try to imagine the future in a more rational, balanced way. I probably won’t become an uber-productive cyborg, but that’s OK. I expect uber-productive cyborgs don’t have that many friends, anyway.