So my first quarter of school, I thought I could finally put all those tips I’d gleaned from places like Lifehacker and 43folders, to try to maximize my productivity.
In terms of how effective or efficient I was this quarter, I don’t have any bar graphs or charts, or any empirical evidence of how such-and-such thing helped, really (no data, for starters, but also, no control group – I’ve never gone through a quarter of grad school *without* these things, and I never will) but I think I can give a subjective summary of how various tools and tips aided or hampered me.
- Gmail: Yes, yes, yes. Especially on campus, when internet is readily accessible, it is hugely helpful to have a portable, web-based email client. I still use Thunderbird (the open-source equiv of Outlook Express) to download email in case I’m ever offline, and to keep sort of a personal archive of messages on my machine, but at this point I can trust that Google will likely never lose my data. I still find Thunderbird’s folders useful, especially since my life is still neatly compartmentalized and folder-friendly right now, but I’m starting to see the usefulness of Gmail’s search box, the conversation thread groupings, labels, and filtering capabilities. All my email addresses go here, which is great because UCLA’s email interface sucks donkey balls.
- Google calendar: Earlier in the quarter I tried to go off gCal and use Mozilla Sunbird, but the latter program is still just too rough to be much use. And it was a pain to get things synced up between Sunbird and iCalx (which is what I had to do if I wanted the calendar to be viewable online). So I went back to gCal. And it’s fine.
Recently I realized how important it was to keep a calendar with me at all times, and I thought about asking my parents to get me a cheap-o PDA or something, but then I discovered a neat little program, getCals, that lets me download my .ics (ical format files) to my iPod, so I don’t need an electronic PDA after all. Yay!
- Hipster PDA: Its usefulness comes and goes. At a certain point, I was juggling so many unfinished index cards that it became difficult to manage – but that’s probably my fault: I like to list multiple things on an index card, just to save paper, and that kinda defeats the whole purpose of a hipster PDA, I think. I’d cross out half the items, realize I couldn’t do the other half til way later, and that didn’t make me feel at all accomplished. Anyway, I still use index cards and post-its for grocery lists, and daily to-dos, but that’s about it. It’s not as wonderful as Hipster proselytizers would have you believe. Also, I’ve switched to a rubber band. But honestly, I don’t know if my Hipster PDA will outlast next quarter. It might, if I still can’t cross off all the things I’ve written on those damn cards!
- del.icio.us: About as useful as you might imagine it to be. Portability again was a large factor. Tagging also helped. The only complaint I might have is that a folksonomy is just TOO anarchical sometimes, but I mean, that’s not really fair. I tagged things by class name and project name, and that was usually enough. Oh, here’s a legitimate-ish gripe: why is the site so slow? And I wish there were other ways of sorting my tagged links, instead of just chronologically.
- Excel: I’ve been using Microsoft Excel to do my budgets since 2002, when I saw my friend meticulously tracking all her expenses and was inspired. I’ve got a general template now that lets me track my spending, almost down to the penny. I also use it to record my paychecks and other things. I mean, all you really need is the ability to type things in and add them up, and Excel is just fine for that.
- Backpack: Since I’m stingy, I’m not willing to pay for the services that might make this program super useful, but it’s still handy-dandy for things like long-term to-dos, notes that I want to keep and not lose on paper, and recipes. Lots of recipes I will not be using because our oven is broken right now.
- Basecamp: I started out using pbWiki, naïvely thinking I could type up notes I took in class online, and also organize my various projects for my various classes. The note-taking idea died a quick, painless death, and I switched to Basecamp because of the way it neatly lays out to-do lists, milestones, and messages, which I used to copy and paste notes from research I did online. Each note/list was keyed to a class assignment, which itself was a milestone.
Granted, Basecamp is more for coordinating multiple-person projects, so I don’t really know what I expected to get out of using it. The most useful feature for me was the milestone thing, which helped me figure out intermediate steps for getting my projects done (also, I could easily import Basecamp’s calendar to gCal and my iPod). The message feature was less helpful than I thought, mostly because the formatting was not really meant for note-taking. But I’m gonna try Basecamp again for quarter 2, and also for any group projects we might have to do. I think with some tweaking it could be worth it.
- Keynote: This I discovered pretty late in the quarter, after my Basecamp message system started driving me crazy. I looked for notetaking programs on AskMe and found Keynote (which is not the Mac program, btw). It’s got a retro interface, and I’m actually not crazy about the RTF formatting, but it’s definitely way more suited to coordinating notes and such, with its tree system. It could be more intuitive (which is why I wish I’d discovered it much earlier), but now that I sort of have the hang of it I’m going to use it for Quarter 2. I might look for other notetaking programs as well. But even if I did have all my notes neatly organized, it was still hard to have to flip between this program and my Word doc. An extra screen would make this program really worthwhile, but for now, it’s just okay.
- Lifehacker’s “Invisibility Cloak” Greasemonkey script: I’m sorry to say this program worked way too well. When you try to visit a page that you’ve previously blacklisted, the Greasemonkey script makes the page go blank and gives you a popup telling you to go back to work. I implemented this on Flickr, Yelp, and Metafilter, and it did keep me from mindlessly surfing, most of the time when I was supposed to be working (namely, after 1PM). Note, however, that I did not block Salon, Youtube, the NY Times, Slashdot, or delicious popular, which might have helped me a little more. Now that school’s done I’ve disabled it entirely, but this script’s definitely a keeper. (Also, during writer’s block emergencies, I could just disable Greasemonkey and surf at my leisure – the sad little monkey face in the corner is enough to keep me from doing this too often).
- Subversion: This program really helped get my USB key and my machine well-organized and in sync. Instead of worrying about which one had the later version of a paper, I just had to update and commit as usual. I didn’t have to rely on reversion at all, but that’s not the way I work anyway. When I’m about to rehaul an essay I’m writing, I just start a new file, like paper2.doc. What SVN was also very useful for was keeping all my PDF research articles straight, between everything I’d downloaded between on-campus computers and my own machine. I’m definitely using this system again, and I only wish I could install svn on my account in the school’s Mac lab. That would save me even more time.
A few other things I’ve learned:
- Reading articles on a computer monitor is a HUGE pain. Sorry, trees, but it’s much better to print everything out to paper, because then you can highlight, and also have the physical thing to flip through, tear up, lay out on the floor, and you can read it while writing your paper on your PC.
- That said, I could still definitely use another monitor. Two screens are always better than one, and three screens would be terrific! (Hint, hint, to all you generous/rich people, or anyone who has a spare LCD they want to get rid of).
- The ability to sync between my machine and any other computer is a huge boon, because I can do my research from anywhere I please (with Internet, or at least a USB port). Also, keeping things on USB makes me feel like I have *some* kind of backup for my work, since my spare hard drive is offline and not readily accessible to do frequent backups.
- It’s important to have just one place to keep one’s notes. I tried using Yahoo stickies (post-its for your computer) but it was way too hard to coordinate those with the ones I’d leave on my hipster PDA, or in my notebook, or on various other scraps of paper, or in Backpack. I think the Hipster PDA was the best place for these scraps, but I’d like a better long-term solution.
- I need to re-learn RefWorks or one of those other bibliography tools. I’d gotten a crash course in it during my last semester at Berkeley (which, incidentally, was the only undergrad class I took that ever brought a librarian in to teach us how to research! Damn the others!), but I don’t remember which program they used there. But yeah, it’s not fun writing a paper for 3 days, and having to spend the last two hours before it’s due scrambling to build a properly-formatted bibliography from scratch. (And then having your printer run out of paper, forcing you to run to the campus computer lab to print your 15 pages, hoping fervently it’s not crowded with other people all wanting to do the same).
