In my quest to find good productivity books, I came across The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. The author describes some of the most successful organisations and how these cultivate productive skills: Pixar, sport teams and even the Navy’s SEAL team being under investigation. Coyle identified three key skills that are needed for successful cooperation….
So how do you organise your inbox? Where do you put things you need to do? For a long time, I just put everything on my table. After that, I organised everything in piles and at some point, I bought myself a tray organiser. Hot stuff right? Nevertheless, after reading Getting Things Done by D….
Academic productivity is many things, but to be productive you also need to be relaxed. Even if all the circumstances are right and you know how to ask the right questions, you still need the energy to be productive. The problem is, you can’t keep up with the energy, if you work 8 or more hours a day straight. To be productive, especially in academia, you need to know when and how to take breaks.
I have already written about how discussing is better than asking questions, because you get a long-term benefit instead of a short-term solution. However, sometimes asking questions is the only thing to do, and sometimes it is the right thing to do. Not to get help from someone else, but to help yourself! Thinking about…
This is a multipart article about academic productivity. The first one was concerned with the workspace. This is the second article and the third one is here. When talking about academic productivity, we have to talk about many different things. While the workspace as part of a well-defined environment is one of them, colleagues and…
Who wants to drink a coffee? I would argue, nearly everyone. Coffee has been part of my life since I was going to school and that is a long time ago. If you meet new colleagues, a coffee is the perfect way to start a conversation. Also, when going to a conference, the coffee break…
For a long time now, I have wondered what it actually means to be productive as an academic. I know my fair share about productivity in the world of freelance and I know my fair share of the work ethics in the academic world. They work quiet differently and I think, that we can’t apply freelance or corporate productivity to university-level work.
I consider myself as someone, that is pretty stoic. I rarely get upset by things and “keep my cool” most of the time. To outsiders, who don’t know me well, this most often seems as if I would not care. But these are two different things: accepting things as they are is something fundamentally different…
So last time we started to organise our students with Notion in a very simple, but effective way. Today we want to go one step further and create a publicly available class website. In other words: We want to organise our classes with Notion. On it, you can put forward information about your class for…
Writing papers, presentations or books is part of academic work. But usually this is not taught to us, we kind of learn by doing. Some are talents and some are not. I definitely needed a lot of time to wrap by head around writing and I still do, learning in the process. There is one…