Posts for the new year.

_posts/2019-01-05-know-thyself.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Know thyself. The New Year's resolution that underlies all productivity advice
+author: Charles Sutton
+tags:
+- advice
+- how to think
+- creative productivity
+date: 2019-01-05 16:40:00
+---
+
+I'm a sucker for New Year's resolutions.
+Every year I make up a half dozen resolutions,
+usually the same ones each year, and carefully track
+my progress for at least two or three months
+before I get busy and forget all about them.
+And in all seriousness, I'm happy about this, because
+sometimes, for maybe one resolution in four,
+I'm still able to make a lasting
+change in my habits. That's more than enough
+to justify the effort,
+as long as I take the failures in good humor.
+
+You don't have to be as silly about resolutions as I am,
+or even to have any resolutions at all, but the underlying
+principle is important for any creative work.
+You could say that it's the underlying principle
+behind all of the advice in this blog.
+
+You need to know yourself, understand the way you think,
+adapt the way you work to the way you think,
+and always keep looking for ways to work better.
+
+You will have all kinds of little
+preferences about when you are most alert, creative,
+and productive. Maybe you like to work in the morning.
+Maybe you like to have a bit of background noise,
+like in a coffee shop. Maybe you need almost absolute
+quiet. Maybe you like to work from home, or maybe
+you prefer the structure of having an office,
+where your work space is separate from home.
+Maybe you like to pace around the office,
+talking to yourself and gesticulating wildly.
+Or maybe that's just me. Ahem.
+
+Whatever it is, you need to learn what makes
+you think most effectively, and seek out that environment.
+No one can do that for you. Your best work space
+will be different
+for you than it is for me. (And good thing, too, otherwise
+  all of Google would be people bumping into each other
+  in the hallways
+  because they were too busy talking to themselves.)
+The only way to know is to experiment and find out what
+works for you.
+
+And it's also vital for us to keep experimenting,
+no matter how senior we are in our careers.
+One reason is (I think this is from David Allen),
+"The better you get, the better you'd *better* get."
+As you become more accomplished, you gain a reputation
+which means that more demands are placed on you.
+Another reason is that no matter how good you are,
+you haven't learned all of the tricks.
+Your mental rhythms change as you get older,
+just as an athlete in his thirties trains differently
+than a teenager. Finally, the creative challenges change
+as you get later in your career, as you need to learn to
+adapt to the way that the field has changed in twenty years.
+
+What's always appealed to me about the research
+career is that you never stop learning.
+This is as much true for how you set up
+the environment of your work as it is for the
+content of your work.

_posts/2019-02-02-phd-comics.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: The three PhD Comic strips that are actually good research advice
+author: Charles Sutton
+tags:
+- advice
+- advice in popular culture
+- phd comics
+date: 2019-02-02 16:40:00
+---
+
+If you're reading this blog, then you already know about
+[PhD Comics](http://phdcomics.com). If you really haven't
+seen them before, click the link and read them now.
+They are more insightful and funnier than anything
+in this blog.
+
+It goes without saying, however, that
+you should not model your own career
+on the characters in the PhD comics strip.
+For one thing, they've been in grad school
+for more than 20 years.
+
+Amazingly, though, there are three PhD comic strips,
+and probably only three,
+that are actually good research advice:
+
+* [Writing your thesis outline.](http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=715)
+A thesis is daunting. How do you write an entire
+book over five-plus years? Instead, I like to tell my students
+to think and plan at the level of individual papers. Basically,
+you have three content chapters of your thesis, and
+so if you have three strong papers that fit together
+thematically, then you set up one paper per each chapter,
+and there you are! No sweat.
+I call
+this the "PhD Comics Guide to Writing Your Thesis."
+
+* [Amount of time writing one email](http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1047). I saw this comic
+when I was a junior professor, and
+I immediately realized: (a) this is so true,
+and (b) I needed to act more like the professor
+in the comic strip. This is how I learned
+that when you have
+many things to decide, you must decide quickly.
+
+* [The evolution of intellectual freedom](http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1436).
+Sometimes you have
+to take big risks in your work
+and follow your own star. Once you learn
+the basic technical skills needed for research, it is so easy
+to do only incremental work, follow what the cool people are doing, and focus on what's likely
+to get you jobs and funding. There are good reasons to do
+some of this, but if this is all that you do,
+then why are you in research?
+
+  An alternate way to interpret this comic is based on a
+comment I heard in a talk from Daniel Marcu.
+Even in academia, you always have customers for your research,
+just as businesses have customers and artists have
+an audience.