Summer plans: Big projects and small habits

I've tried two alternative paradigms of productivity in the past year. 

First I used the "drip" method, where I try to do a little each day on all of my goals. Most importantly, this helped me build habits. It reduced procrastination because I just told myself I only had to do a little bit. But as I discovered, "drip" creates too much anxiety, and costs mental energy and time for every switch to an unrelated task. Because it takes time to get fully adjusted to a new task, this meant my actual results output was often minimal unless it was a particularly good day.

Therefore, I adopted the "burst" method where I focus exclusively on one project for a half or full day. This is the only way I could've finished multiple major projects with tight deadlines. This change also coincided with getting a decent handle on applying the Pareto Principle, forcing myself to focus on the 20% of work that yields 80% of results. It is worth obsessing and enduring mental pain for that work. Everything else gets done in a rapid-fire batch, but poor quality is perfectly acceptable.

However, even the Pareto-Driven Burst is flawed. I definitely excelled at my 3 most important projects, and all the small tasks were completed efficiently. But I stopped developing productive habits, because they got mixed in with the small tasks. I started wasting time on the Internet again during my free time. I stopped writing in my journal, meditating, generating ideas, practicing gratitude, and eliminating negative thought patterns. Obviously I stopped writing on my blog. I stopped practicing good eye contact and thinking about how I interact with people. I had no time to examine my habits on a daily basis.

Bursts get results, but they are hard and can easily burn you out. That's where habits come in. They manage stress. Productive habits serve as a solid base from which you can launch your most-important projects. There's no way I could've managed the "burst" period without the thought patterns, personality changes, and habits that I developed during the "drip" period. I would've procrastinated and self-doubted at every turn.

So, it is time to combine drip and burst. Let's examine how we can add habit formation to my current method.

Burst-only (current method):

1. Pick a most important project, work on it. Another day I'll work on another project.

2. Put everything else in one pile. Once the pile is large enough, spend a half day doing it and get it out of the way.

I had a pretty full schedule before. But if I can isolate most-important projects and batched tasks to particular time slots, I will have more time. This will be accomplished by scheduling. This should be made easier this summer since I have fewer batched tasks like meetings and required seminars.

Burst/drip combo (new method):

1. Each week, schedule continuous lengthy work sessions on most important projects, >3x per week. Once scheduled, no last-minute interruptions will be allowed.

2. Assign time each day for habits (early morning, usually). Accomplish as many as possible, then be sure to do the rest later in the day.

3. Fit everything else into batches of 30+ minutes. This includes e-mail.

There's nothing glamorous about habits. They don't advance your career. But they are reliable and will get you ready for the big time.

Next time I'll lay out my exact plans and accountability scheme to test-drive this method.

Iguazu Falls: Simple vacations are better

26 hours and 5 airports later, I peered out into the subtropical rain forest. It was dark already. A van picked us up, and we bolted down long windy roads through the jungle. Finally, a building appears as we enter town. But we veer right off onto a completely unlighted dirt road which the van can barely fit through. We brake every 20 feet to carefully dodge a tree. 15 minutes later, a 5-star hotel rises out of nowhere.

We are there for my dad's conference. There are some hiking paths nearby, but absolutely nothing else except solid rainforest for miles. Since it was hard to get out, and my dad was occupied, my mother and I spent most of our time in the hotel. I ended up reading 3 books and leaving the hotel only once to go see Iguazu Falls. Speaking of which…

Exploring Iguazu Falls (2 min)

Argentine side of Iguazu Falls

Up close

Devil's Throat

More pictures at the bottom.

At first, I felt a little lame. Aren't vacations supposed to be full of seeing and doing? I imagined answering the question, "why fly 10,000 miles just to sit in a hotel and read books that you could read anywhere?" I had frequent urges to organize a group to get a taxi and go exploring, but honestly I just wanted to sit back and think. 

Every morning, I wrote for 30 minutes, meditated, explored various thoughts and ideas in a handwritten Moleskine journal. I also tried to check e-mail/Facebook/news together one single time each day- a practice I intend to continue. I didn't need to network, but I attended events primarily to accomplish one thing: practice good eye contact. Interpersonal skills tend to suffer when you're lost in your own thoughts while working in lab for extended durations.

Relaxing by the pool

I reflected back on some of my previous vacations- taking whirlwind tours around various cities, staying in a different place every night, frantically trying to catch a ferry or train or bus, always on the move, always trying to plan the next destination, meal, or shower. Honestly, I don't remember very much about them, other than a few key moments.

I see no reason to trade a busy worklife (which I always need to simplify further) for a busy vacation. Relaxing, clearing my thoughts, attaining some distance, and then dispassionately examining my own life. That's what I needed, and that's what I did.

And suddenly, I started making progress on everything I had been stuck on.


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More photos

Mulling a true return to blogging

I started this blog around this time last year, so perhaps this is the right season for a little writing and self-expression. You probably assumed that I've been too busy to blog, and that's essentially true. This semester I barely had time for my reading project- I'm now 5 books behind and I made a pledge I wouldn’t be taking on more unless I could fulfill this goal. Of course, those of you who have followed my blog in the past know that not having time is a false excuse.

So what have I been up to?

Well, I'm sitting in my hotel in the middle of the jungle in... Argentina! I'm with my parents at one of my dad's conferences at Iguazu Falls. Eleanor Roosevelt reportedly remarked "poor Niagara!" upon seeing Iguazu. I'll try to post some pictures when I get back. 

For now, here's one ripped from the web:

I intend to focus on catching up on books for the first few days. The idea is to create some mental distance, and not think about my past semester or future plans at all. To create true peace of mind, I'm going to write it all down, publish this blog entry, and be done with it.

This is the perfect time for a break. It's the start of summer. I just finished one of my projects, and now I'm gearing up for a final push on a second. And so after I've completed my trip, it's high time to carefully re-examine my goals, work habits, and life pursuits. Blogging will probably be essential.

My craziest semester ever

A quick update on what I've been up to, plus some thoughts:

Manuscript: I wrote my first first-author paper ever, and the revision was submitted yesterday! I mastered techniques an adapted my work habits to dramatically increase the number of experiments I could perform in parallel. My procrastination levels were by far the lowest in my entire life. However, I quickly became aware of my next challenge: I was too busy churning out data, and had not nearly enough time for high-level thinking. In other words, "needs to read more." Time to stretch my abilities, acquire new skills, and experience some discomfort. The goal is to come up with a big idea that I can call uniquely mine.

Presentations: my lack of time for high-level thinking became obvious once I had to prepare my first hour-long presentations on my own research. I struggled to meet this challenge. My earlier presentations were much shorter, and only involved generalities. Even for those, I had to space out my revisions over the course of a month or more. Now I had one week. Of course, feelings of self-doubt arose. Do I truly belong in a PhD program? But I fought through it, and my time invested last year in cultivating productive thought patterns paid off. I took brutally honest feedback to heart. And therefore both presentations ended up as resounding successes.

Teaching: I love teaching. I refuse to blow off teaching as a distraction from my oh-so-important research. So I deliberately approached the department where TA's have the heaviest teaching responsibilities. Yes, there is a hardass professor and a few whiny pre-meds. But most teaching headaches can be addressed by breaking away from institutionalized teaching methods. If one dares to do things unconventionally, one can have the best teaching experience ever. I came up with fun silly metaphors for abstract concepts without any idea of how students would receive them. They were making their own metaphors by semester's end. 

When the professor deliberately made the first exam incredibly difficult to force students to work hard for the rest of the semester (the average was a D and the class is not on a curve) I told my students a personal story of failure and the lessons I learned. By teaching them methods to study more effectively, I convinced them that they need not feel guilty about not being smart enough or not working hard enough, because those were not the core of the problem. They only needed to learn how to learn more effectively, and with that message they became more motivated than ever. No eye-rolls. The result? For final grades, 12 out of 16 A’s and A+’s were in my section. They even made me a card, and I honestly cried when I read it.

The most useful tactic for tackling multiple big projects

From reading above, you might imagine I was hectically moving from one task to the next. After all, student emails arrive at random times, multiple overlapping experiments are going at once, and I have random meetings and seminars at all times of day.

But probably the best advice I got was from Cal Newport, who advises doing everything in series, not in parallel. No rapid switching between teaching and research tasks. One day is entirely devoted to research. One half-day devoted entirely to teaching and answering student e-mails, or one half-day devoted entirely to meetings and small tasks. Labwork needs to be done everyday, so I can't devote a full day to other things, but I try to reach the ideal as much as possible. 

If anything, this greatly decreased my stress levels. Every activity comes with its own anxiety traps, and trying to juggle them all at once causes those anxieties to compound, so its impossible to focus on one thing and do a good job. Better to tackle one mine at a time in an obstacle course than to navigate a whole minefield.

A return to blogging?

With me adding more plans on top of what was a very busy schedule, you might think returning to blogging is ridiculous. But as I recently read, blog material is a natural byproduct of what you do during a PhD, and it takes minimal time to transform it into blog format. In fact, it may even speed up your work, since communication and teaching rapidly clarifies your thinking. As I taught my students, explaining things to others is the best way to make something stick.

A Story Not About Passion

Left for dead on the day she was born because she was a girl, Fawzia Koofi is now the deputy speaker of the house in Afghanistan and running for president in a society where many still do not believe that women should even be educated. She has perservered despite being on the run for much of her life, first from the mujahideen, who killed her father, and then the Taliban, who took away her freedoms and killed her husband and many other family members. Her soul fell as she watched all the progress towards modernization and women's rights crumble under civil war and Taliban rule. She has faced death many times throughout her life, and she still withstands regular assassination attempts.

Clearly, Fawzia Koofi is a remarkable person. But millions of Afghans have gone through virtually identical experiences. How did she become remarkable?

When you listen to Fawzia Koofi now, like during her appearance on the Daily Show, you might think that what makes her remarkable is her mission. The significance of her mission is obvious: poverty, women's rights, political reform, ensure her duaghters do not suffer as she did.

Technically, it is true that Fawzia's mission makes her remarkable. Unfortunately, it would be all too easy to take the wrong lesson from her, just as many people took the wrong lesson from Steve Job's Stanford speech.

Too many people, including me, thought that the lesson is "Find your passion."

"Find your passion" is a terrible, terrible advice.

Or rather, it is highly misleading. Fawzia Koofi and Steve Jobs did not START by finding a compelling mission or purpose. Fawzia started by insisting that she receive an education, even while on the run, and much to the resistance of her family members. She had no time to think of a mission- she was only a child when she had to start fleeing from death on a regular basis. And it was this education that made her unique. At a time when it was nearly impossible for a woman to get an education, she got one. In other words, she had rare and valuable skills.

Notably, she did not originally intend to go into politics. The idea developed relatively late in life. But her skills got her noticed, and she was given the opportunity to run for Parliament, mostly made possible by chance events. Her mission only started developing in earnest many years after she began developing her skills. Even when she was well on her way to fame, she said she felt "mentally lost" and "purposeless."

During this time, she still had to build her skills constantly, in particular in giving speeches. This ability is what ultimately gave her the power to start building women's education centers in conservative villages, to start standing up vocally for women's rights, to get on the international stage. Only now does her mission seem clear. Her passion was a side effect of getting really good at what she does.

In summary:

Wrong: Look inward and decide passion => go follow the passion

Right: look outward and see what skills might allow you to offer value to others => develop skills => explore many missions while developing more skills => find passion. Or rather let passion find you.

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I Know My Passion... Not

I'm 7 books into my effort to read 52 books in 52 weeks. This blog entry was my attempt to explain Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You using the example of another book, Fawzia Koofi's Favored Daughter. He uses many case examples to rigorously debunk "Follow your passion."

You may remember my blog entry "I'm lost. What's my purpose in life?" Cal Newport's book pretty much solves everything. I don't need to feel bad that I haven't found a purpose, because a purpose is only possible after I've spent decades developing valuable skills. My most meaningful career accomplishment will likely be something I never imagined.

I also noted that Cal Newport, being an academic, provided really really good advice for graduate students (and in general, anyone who is trying to create knowledge). I've already begun implementing his paradigm into my work (see below).

Below, I've copied my notes on Cal Newport's book. But seriously, go buy So Good They Can't Ignore You right now.

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So Good They Can't Ignore You

Popular paradigm: look inward and decide your "passion," develop the courage to leave your job and go follow your passion. Then develop passion-oriented skills and do what you love.

New paradigm: Pre-existing passions don't exist. Even if they did, you would first need rare and valuable skills to back them up, called career capital, or you will fail. To find a compelling mission for your life, you need those skills first so you can explore many possible missions. You can develop career capital in nearly any job, because you can usually apply skills to other fields. Start NOW, in your current job. Careful: the more skill you acquire, the more others will try to convince you to help them or follow a traditional path, but stay focused on what you believe will make the most impact. Use your value to demand more autonomy and surround yourself with people you like and work well with. Then, use your autonomous time to develop your own missions. These are tentative missions - anything that seems interesting and important at the time. Your mission will constantly change, so be comfortable with it. Some missions will reveal themselves serendipitously- if you have the skills then you can take advantage of opportunities. Others will be brought to you because of your skills- people want to work with you. Learn as much as you can, brainstorm ideas, and put them into action in small projects. This will allow you to continuously expand, refine, or replace your missions until you believe that you are both working right and doing the right work.

Important: these are not a series of steps. They define a lifestyle. Different aspects are more important to focus on a different times. Career capital is most important for a 20-something, for example.

What Can You Actually Do Right Now?

Bold: Goals

Italics: specific activities that bring you closer to the goals. Do these on a regular basis.

General principles

• Develop career capital - rare and valuable skills that make you so good/interesting that others cannot ignore you
• Explore possible life/work missions - these will allow you to constantly refine your skill set, explore opportunities and develop a mission
• Time tracking - track time spent towards high-yield activities, i.e. those that develop career capital and explore possible missions. These include deliberate practice and feedback, background research, little bets, serious study of others and others' work
• Autonomy - YOU must make time for high-yield activities
• Prioritize these over simple productivity
• Turn down prestigious positions that saddle you with responsibilities
• Surround yourself with likeable and talented people who respect your autonomy

Career capital

• Identify rare and valuable skills that make the most difference in your current field or are generally applicable to any field
• Study people who have rare and valuable skills
• Develop rare and valuable skills:
• Deliberate practice - strain yourself and embrace discomfort and ambiguity
• Seek immediate, clear feedback, esp from mentor/coach

Mission and impact

• Mission: Determine a tentative mission
• Study people who have compelling missions and interesting careers
• Cutting Edge: Do research and constantly scan for your field's next big idea - the "adjacent possible"
• Background research: Learn new ideas in your field through reading, meetings, talks
• Research Bible: Summarize idea-of-the-week in your own words
• Idea notebook: brainstorm own ideas
• Daily walk: free-form brainstorm related to the tentative mission
• Little bets: small exploratory projects (<1 month) to test your ideas
• criteria: must do at least one of the following:
• force yourself to master a new skill
• produce novel results
• grasp the attention of others (i.e. be remarkable)
• Seek concrete feedback, especially from others
• obsess over self-imposed deadlines
• publicize your little bets in a setting where word can quickly spread if the idea is good enough
• Reflection: Evaluate concrete feedback from little bet, alter or replace tentative mission, guide further research, plan next little bet
• Take 1 full day off per month for reflection

The best way to start the day

Today is a ridiculously busy day. I still need to prepare my lesson for teaching at 1pm, and today is one of the few days this week that harbors a continuous block of time to get lab work done. And I want to read some papers and get some planning done. And all this needs to be done before I pick up the guest I'm hosting for PhD recruitment weekend. Since I need to take him around campus tomorrow to all his interviews and events, I won't be able to do much tomorrow other than grade papers and maybe read my 5th book. Anxiety is rising.

But I'm taking a little time to slow down and gather my thoughts for this morning on this blog. I went down to the cafe, selected their newest roast, and sat down in the comfortably spacious common area. I suppose I could've looked out at the heavy snow and temperature drop from 50 to 20 degrees as a frustration and a blockade to productivity. But I'd rather gaze out of the big bright windows, see the beauty from my warm chair, and purposefully enjoy my coffee. I let my mind settle on comfort and charm of Ann Arbor and the feeling of being at home. Simultaneously, I wonder about everything else out there on this planet and all the experiences awaiting me in life.

I like slowing down at the beginning of the day. It is all too easy to see one's massive to-do list and rush straight into work. But paradoxically, this leads to less work getting done. It's hard to focus on one's work if you just think "I have to do this today," rather than "I want to do this today." It's hard to be creative unless your mind wanders a little and brings new resources to bear on the problems you're solving. And without taking some time to think, it's easy to fall into the trap of doing urgent stuff, rather than important stuff. And that is a form of procrastination far worse than delaying your work for 30 minutes.

Since sitting down, I've determined the #1 thing I need to do this morning is perform a literature search and determine the list of gene expression assays I want to design. Then, the #2 thing I need to do is plan my teaching. Also, I need to go to the gym since I won't be able to go later. Exercise is not something I'm willing to compromise on, no matter how I busy I am. That's it for this morning until my discussion section. Nothing else will enter my mind.

Taking some time to prepare the mind will cause one's most important priorities to float to the top, where they are ripe for picking.

High-Yield Practices to Prepare Your Mind
Sometimes one can get up without direction for 30 minutes and stumble upon an idea or practice that changes one's life. Not likely, however. Some default choices for what to do to gather one's thoughts for the rest of the day:

Create. 

I created this blog entry this morning. Write, build, draw, create a connection with another human being.

Focus on a simple joy. 

Just for a few minutes, nothing else in the world can get between you, your cup of coffee, and your thoughts.

Exercise.

Work hard enough to feel discomfort. Embrace the discomfort- that attitude makes you feel ready to tackle challenges for the rest of the day. Eat some protein afterwards.

Make something sparkly clean.

But don't rush it. Consider your environment's effect on your mind.

Read something unrelated to your work.

Try to learn a new idea. Or engage yourself in a new story. Important: Don't read the news.

Generate ideas.

Doesn't matter how stupid they sound. Write them down. Create. If nothing comes to you, read something first and really consider it. Anyone can become creative if they practice being creative.

Finally, after you're all done, either plan the rest of your day, or go straight into your #1 most important and most difficult task of the day. Look at it as an opportunity.

Update: 2013 Reading Goal

It is now January 10. I am 10 days into my goal of reading 52 books in 2013. Last night I finished Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill, which was decent. I already agreed with the author that happiness is a skill (see prior blog post), and many of the chapters seemed redundant. If you're looking for a better and more succinct version, read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I did however enjoy the science chapter where they use fMRI and EEG to understand the physical basis of happiness. The author is a scientist-turned-monk, after all. Before that I finished The 4-Hour Chef, which gave me a lot of ideas on how to learn to read more effectively (it's a book about learning, not cooking per se). I have lots of ideas for holding myself accountable, making the project interesting, and deliberately improving my reading skills.

For the rest of the month, I intend to read two of the following:
The Emotion Machine
To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion
Catching Fire
The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People
So Good They Can't Ignore You. I hear this one is a good read if you're trying to "Find your passion" and are getting nowhere.

If I find a book is very long, I may give myself two weeks to read it. And then I will make that up by reading 2 short books in 1 week.

I've been pretty busy between research and teaching, so I haven't been able to write up a post on the specifics of my goal plan. But it'll come. I promise!

Let's try an experiment

Let's do an experiment. If no one responds, I'm happy. If a hundred people respond, I'm happy. I've never asked for a specific response to a blog post before, so simply asking is a victory.

Today, I will share the ideas that influenced me in 2012- the ones that I considered, tried, and kept. The Internet is a deluge of information, and I've encountered a lot of BS in process. Right now the best way for an average Internet user to promote another person's idea is to like it or share it (or maybe collaborate with them). So share it I will.

I'd like you to pick one of the 5 links I've listed below, read the article or watch the video, and post your response as a comment (or you can e-mail me at albertchen42@gmail.com). You can simply write a one-sentence summary if you want. Or, what do you think of the idea? Enlightening? Unrealistic? Naive? What's your favorite?

The List:

Altucher Confidential 

Scott H Young

TED talks (Amy Cuddy) 

Zen Habits 

7 Habits of Highly Effective People (this is a book, so extra credit if you do this one! Assuming you haven't read it)

I'd also recommend exploring the other articles/videos on these sites.

Top: James Altucher, Scott H Young, Leo Babauta.
Bottom: Amy Cuddy, Stephen Covey
Oh yeah, and there's Usain Bolt.

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Altucher Confidential 

I don't agree with some of Altucher's specific ideas, but I support anyone willing to publicly challenge conventional wisdom. James Altucher's method is the best way to get unstuck. When I have momentum in my work and in life, I have no problem. But eventually I get in a rut and do almost nothing for a week. This is usually because I burn out in one or more ways: physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually (in the loosest sense of the term). With a mindset resembling the Daily Practice, I tell myself I just have to do one thing to take care of each of these dimensions. Very little demand, since I'm burned out. But then I rebuild the momentum and it gets easier and easier to do more and more.

Scott H Young

There are advanced techniques out there for learning. Watching video lectures, reviewing notes, and rewriting notes are some of the least effective methods, yet they seem to be staples among students. Scott H Young is dedicated to educating people on how to learn far more effectively so they can recall the information years later. He also rejects that an official diploma is the right fit for anyone trying to learn a major new skill or field. It's nice, but not necessary. That a diploma takes too long and too much money to obtain shouldn't be an excuse not to just learn the material yourself. Scott and his MIT challenge was one of the main inspirations that reignited my love for self-learning this year.

TED talks (Amy Cuddy)

One of the most touching talks I've seen all year. The practical, scientific information in this talk will instantaneously improve one's body language and help one deliberately engage others in any situation (one of the most important skills in life that I unfortunately neglected all my life). I do this whenever I'm feeling down and I need a quick boost in a social situation. But this talk has an even better inspirational message on becoming the person you want to be.

Zen Habits

The best ideas are the ones you initially resist. When I read this post I almost unsubscribed. Live a life without goals? Then how can you ever get what you want? How can you ever move forward? But I was wrong. I initially thought No Goals = Sitting on My Butt- because that's where I was coming from. When I encountered Zen Habits, I was in the process of getting off my butt. If you're going to follow a "No Goals" philosophy, you need to already be off your butt.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Obviously, a longer read, but a good one to start off 2013 with if you've never heard of it. This book revealed to me that most if not all of the misery that people experience come from themselves, or more specifically their own reactions and perceptions to what happens to them. It is all too easy to brood over both real and perceived insults from other people, to spend time wondering why other people can be so irrational or horrible, to devote more energy to wishing that life was different than energy actually living life. Usually this persistent mood does far more damage to your mental well-being than anything the world can throw at you. Think about it this way: if someone tries to hurt you physically or emotionally, they are really trying to hack into your sadness system and cause it to fire incessantly. Don't let them do that. Just because someone who you depend on is being a jerk to you and completely violates your trust, doesn't mean you need to be sad. It might be really really difficult to not be sad (especially in cases of clinical depression) but it's doable. I've been fortunate enough to have a pretty good life, but I know that I blow some small things way out of proportion. The only way to fix that is to deliberately change my own perceptions. This is a truly freeing idea: that you control your own happiness.

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There are some more ideas from other sources that I'm still pondering. They may be the subject of future posts.

I'll end with an observation. If you explore more of these authors' articles, you'll start realizing that they often touch on each other's themes but in differnet ways. Could it be that I liked one of them and started seeking out similar ideas, or they all inspired each other? Or my brain is fusing very different ideas into one big picture, so that it just seems like they're saying the same thing? Or is there something more fundamental going on...