Podcasting Conference

I’m attending a day long conference of educators talking about podcasting at Kansas University today. At lunch it was very interesting to hear the professors talking about how their students approach to learning has changed after coming out of No Child Left Behind style education.  They felt that current students tend to take much less responsibility for learning than students from 3 or 4 years ago.  One teacher said he had 5 students go to the dean because they had attended every one of his lectures and didn’t understand how they got an F in the class.  Their grades were evidently less impressive than their attendance records.  

Tuesdays Tip: Time for Reading

This might be a personal idiosyncrasy, but I bet I’m not the only one it applies to. When I don’t spend some regular time reading, I start feeling drained of creative ideas. And I’m not talking about spending some time reading articles on the web, I’m talking about sitting down with an actual physical book and doing some good old fashioned reading.

I suppose this makes sense. If you are constantly trying to produce using the creative part of your brain you need to be feeding it new stuff, but I suspect that the effect goes well beyond just having some new ideas to think about. Reading (at least for me) seems to trigger new ideas about totally different subjects. So spending some time reading about biology helps me come up with ideas for articles here at this blog.

My guess is that when we read new material, our brains fire off connections that haven’t been fired before. When we approach other problems, the previous exercise helps us make new and different connections–even when it isn’t at all related to the material we were reading.

So my strategy for dealing with a feeling like I have no more ideas is to spend some time reading a good book and some time exercising. Does this seem to work for anyone else besides me?

Habit List Course Beta

As I mentioned before, I’m testing some email based courses as an added feature here at Productivity501. I have a very limited test going on for the Procrastination Prevention course right now.

The second course I’m working on is for the Habit List. I know many people downloaded the Habit List, printed it out and promptly buried it under a pile of other papers. The course helps walk you through the different uses of the Habit List by sending you a very very short email for 10 days.

The idea of the course is to help motivate people to actually use the tool simply by keeping it on their mind for a week and a half. I’m going to do a slightly larger test for this course. You can signup with the form at the bottom of this post. (It uses Javascript, so you may not see it from a feed reader.) The form will only be available until I get enough people signed up for the test period. The last course test filled up in just a few hours, so if you want in sign up now.

Once you submit the form, you will be sent an email asking you to confirm. This is to keep people from getting signed up who really aren’t interested. Once you confirm, you’ll get the first email along with the Habit List PDF as an attachment.

Edit: We quickly ended up with well over 100 people signed up, so I’ve shut off the beta sign up until we can run the first group through the test and correct any problems we find. We should have everything ready to go live in January, so watch for an announcement.

Looking For Procrastinators

I am experimenting with a simple 10 email course designed to help break habitual procrastination. If you are interested in previewing the course and providing feedback, please send a a note to list@productivity501.com and ask to try the Procrastination Prevention Course.

At this point, I would ask that you only try it if you are willing to provide some feed back at then end and let me know what you liked and what you didn’t. I’m looking for about 10 people to try it out.

Edit: Well that didn’t take long. :)  I have everyone I need for testing.  If you are interested but were not able to be part of the testing phase, keep an eye out for the official release in the near future.

One Laptop Per Child

The one laptop per child project really sounds like a great idea.  Design a computer that can be mass produced for around $100 each, give them to millions of kids in developing countries, viola! instant smart kids.

While there is a lot of value in learning how to use a computer while you are young, most of the true educational value won’t come through the hardware itself.  This type of mindset is very common when it comes to technology.  People like to focus on the hardware instead of the software.  Focusing on what a piece of equipment is theoretically capable of is a lot more exciting than focusing on how you can actually use it today.

In the US educational system there are many computers.  The problem is that teachers are ill equipped to really use these computers as educational tools.   Sure, computers are a great way to learn how to type, do research, write papers, etc. but most of the time they are acting as little more than replacements for books, pencils and paper.

Technology is capable of so much more.  We should have systems that actively teach kids in an individualized way.  Computers should be able to learn how to teach by looking at the results on an individualized level as well as aggregate information about all students.
I like the OLPC project and I really want it to be successful, but technology is only as good as what it allows you to do.  Buying a Pocket PC or new desktop computer only helps your productivity if it has software that lets you do more in less time.  This is especially true in education.

Papers - Paperless Office for Academics

A helpful reader pointed me to Papers.  It is a well thought out program for managing academic papers on OS X.  I’ve looked it over briefly and it looks pretty impressive.  It integrates with  PubMed and other online repositories allowing you to search and download PDFs while autopopulating all the metadata fields.

Papers also allows you to take notes as you read articles and keep them with the PDF.  It seems to be setup for working with existing PDFs, so there doesn’t seem to be an built in OCR capabilities.

If you are looking for a way to organize your research Papers is worth checking out.

Tuesday’s Tip: College Records

When I was in college I quickly learned how important it was to keep records. You can’t rely on your university to keep track of everything correctly. Maybe they will, but just in case they make a mistake you need to be prepared.

One habit I formed early on in college was to get a copy of my transcript each semester. One semester there were an extra 15 hours of credits on the transcript for classes I had not taken. After doing some checking, it became clear that they had accidentally given me credit for someone else’s work. I explained it to the university and they straightened out the records. However, I imagine it was much easier to get something taken off than it would be to get something added. By keeping a copy of my transcript, I had a very simple way to prove what classes I had taken if my credits ever accidentally were given to someone else.

About eight years later I was taking classes through Harvard’s extension school toward a second Master’s degree. One day I was looking over the requirements and discovered that all of the work I had done wasn’t going to count. There was a requirement that you take your first 3 courses in a particular order and I hadn’t done that. Obviously I was very concerned because I had already earned about 20 hours toward the degree.

I went to my file and found a dated print out of the same page that listed a different set of requirement–requirements that I had followed. I went to the office and showed them my printout and asked if the requirements had changed. They said yes it had and I would only have to meet the old requirements for my program.

I could have probably gotten it straightened out without having my print out, but it was much easier to deal with since I had kept good records.

What Is Your Current Work Zone?

If you are really focused on expanding your capabilities, your salary is probably a secondary motivation when it comes to employment. Your major motivation is going to be your learning opportunities. The graph below shows how learning opportunities change over time.

At the beginning of any job, you will have many opportunities to learn. This section is marked by the green zone. Every day will involve new experiences and learning new things. As time goes on this tends to level out as shown by the yellow zone. Sometimes the yellow zone is only temporary and you will be given new responsibilities that will have new learning opportunities and you’ll basically start the cycle over again.

However, if this doesn’t happen and you remain at a reduced learning rate for a period of time, you’ll move into the red zone. The red zone is particularly dangerous because it means you are becoming accustomed to a lack of personal growth and a lack of challenges. If you stay in this zone for too long, you will actually reduce your capabilities to take on challenging assignments.

So when should you look for a new job? While you are in the green zone, you will be facing a lot of challenges. Some of these will be difficult and sometimes you might even fail. This is not an indication that you should move on. It means you are still growing. One mistake I see people make is leaving jobs where they are still learning just because it isn’t easy.

When you get into the yellow zone, it is time to start re-evaluate things. You need to honestly access the chances of you getting different responsibilities that would move you back into the green zone. You also must consider your potential for salary growth. If you are at the high end of the pay scale, continued growth may not translated into growth in pay. When you get to the yellow zone, you may need to sit down with your employer and talk about your future at the company to get a feel for what opportunities might become available if you stick around.

At a previous employer, I had been in the yellow zone for about a year. I finally sat down with my boss and asked. “What are the new challenges I’m going to get to experience in the next 6 months?” He told me that there wasn’t really anything they wanted me to do other than just keep things running they way they were. A few days later I submitted my resignation. For me the challenge was getting things to the point where my department was running smoothly. Simply maintaining the status quo would have been easy. The organization was pretty flexible with work schedules as long as things were getting done, so simply maintaining things would have translated into a lot of free time for me. The idea of not having new challenges scared me because I looked around and saw a number of other employees who were basically on cruise control. They had nice non-stressful jobs, but it had been years since they had ever attempted anything challenging. My fear was that I would become like that.

I took a job with another company where I figured I had about a 60% chance of being able to be successful and a 40% chance of failing. The first few months were extremely difficult, but I learned a tremendous amount. More importantly I raised the bar on what I was capable of doing. This experience has served me well. There are many small and large successes I’ve had in life that I can directly trace back to the decision to leave the easy job and take on that would challenge me.

Maximizing Benefits

John posted an article about Multiple Positives which he defines as doing activities in a way that give you multiple benefits. This got me to thinking about ways that I’ve been able to stack things together in order to get the most benefit. In general, I consider multitasking to be a bad habit. However, there are times where “multibenefiting” is highly profitable. The difference is that with “multibenefiting” you are concentrating on a richer outcome. With multitasking the focus is just on doing things at the same time–even when the outcome is less productive.

Here are some examples:

1. Mowing the Yard with a Book

I hate mowing.  To make things a little more bearable, I started listening to audio business books while pushing the mower around the yard. So when it came time to cut the grass, I was getting exercise, taking care of the yard and learning about businesses at the same time. This kept it enjoyable so I actually wanted to go mow to listen to the rest of my book.

2. Exercise with a Television Series

I like to exercise, but if I’m bored I won’t stick with it. A few years ago my wife bought me a ski machine (for $5 at a yard sale). I really like using it, but after about 15 minutes it is very difficult for me to stay focused. I’ve found a perfect solution. I like watching a few weekly shows, but since we don’t own a television I rarely see them when they are broadcast. I’ll get a set worth of shows on DVD and only watch them when I exercise.

This has worked pretty well for me. I don’t spend any time watching commercials and since most shows are designed to grab your attention for the next week, it is easy to come back to exercise the next day.

When a new television series comes out that looks interesting I automatically think “I’ll have to get that to exercise next year”.

3. Working for Education

Before I started my own company, I took jobs not based on how much they paid, but based on their educational opportunities. This led to leave a job for another that paid $30,000 less. The lower paying job provided more reimbursement and time off to pursue a second masters degree.

By looking for ways to maximize the benefits of my employment, I’ve been able to derive much more value than my coworkers. If a coworker and I both made $40,000 per year it may seem like we make the same amount. But if I took advantage of $10,000 per year toward college classes, weeks of time off for study and my degree will allow me to charge $145 per hour for my services in the future the total value I’m getting is much greater than my coworker. In this case I was getting the benefits of a job (a salary) along with the benefits of a free education.