Academic/researcher needs advice

[LJM]

There's no clear policy on how long we are supposed to keep papers etc. from past terms and the teaching load at my school is relatively high ( I had 5 courses last semester). So the space occupied by finals alone is growing quickly.

Could you pull Finals and Student Papers (and any other clearly idetnifiable, archival category that you feel you need to keep, but rarely need to go back and access) out of the file cabinet and into banker's boxes? (I mean, how often you you really need to access Jane Smith's 516 final from 2004?)

It should be pretty easy to organize them by class and year in the boxes. Then they're segregated into a clearly marked and organized space where you can find them if you need them, but they're not getting in the way of your more commonly accessed files. (An added bonus would be if there was some sort of archive space at the school where you could store the boxes-- but even stacked in a corner of your office, they'd probably still be less in the way than they are scattered through the file cabinet.)

PS-- for filing published academic papers I'm using for research, I file them in their own file drawer by first-author's last name. If I want to search by anything else, I do the searching in my bibliographic software, which will then pull up the citation(s) and tell me what the first author(s) last name(s) is/are for the relevant paper(s).

 

[moomoo]

Thank you for the suggestions. I have thought about subdividing by broad category, but when I set up my system while first reading DA's book. His idea of filing everything in A-Z seemed correct to me, at least intuitively. I'm going to spend some time pruning files over break; I hope that will help, as well.

 

[mmurray]

Thanks for the replies.

Re Finals. In Australia there is an exam per subject and my university has a definite policy that we only need to keep them for 12 months. I box them up in old white paper boxes (one thing we never lack!) and store them elsewhere in the building and then place in secure waste after 12 months. See if you can find out if your institution has a policy on storage and archival times. I would have thought that legally they should have.

On research papers I personally wouldn't do broad category as one paper can be in a number of categories. I usually know them by author but again the volume of stuff grows quickly. For recent stuff I tend to just download the pdf and store on my computer. Unfortunately I am not so organised as have everything on bibliographic software.

Do you put one paper per file with a printed label ? Or a file per author ? Or a file per author until it gets too big !

Michael

 

[kewms]

On research papers I personally wouldn't do broad category as one paper can be in a number of categories. I usually know them by author but again the volume of stuff grows quickly. For recent stuff I tend to just download the pdf and store on my computer. Unfortunately I am not so organised as have everything on bibliographic software.

If you have a desktop search tool that can see inside PDFs, that should be all you need to find whatever you want. Search by author, search by keywords, whatever. (Obviously bibliographic software has other features, too.)

Many journals have at least their abstracts online going back quite a long way. If you're really motivated (or have a bored grad student handy), you might download at least the abstract records for the stuff that you already have on paper. That would give you an electronic record for everything, allowing you to search it all at once.

On the Mac, DevonThink seems to be pretty popular among academics. It's a free form database with good classification and "see also" AI features. To my knowledge, there's nothing like it for PCs, or at least nothing in its (very moderate) price range.

Katherine

 

[LJM]

Thank you for the suggestions. I have thought about subdividing by broad category, but when I set up my system while first reading DA's book. His idea of filing everything in A-Z seemed correct to me, at least intuitively. I'm going to spend some time pruning files over break; I hope that will help, as well.

I think categorization is a tool that is very easy to mis-use and over-use, which is I think where DA is coming from. (For instance, when I was an undergrad, I tried to arrange my file system by categories, but it frequently broke down-- for instance, it wasn't obvious whether the student loan forms should be under "school" or "finantial". -- this is exactly the kind of ambiguity DA was arguing against, and I think he makes an excellent point.)

But even DA admits in the book that if you have a hard-edged category that takes up more than half a file-drawer, it makes sense to file it seperately. (e.g his wife is an avid gardener and has a drawer dedicated to "gardening" files, whereas he is a more casual gardener and just has a couple of files about gardening in his general file system.)

I think the hard-edged is key. The "Finantial", "School", etc that I tried to use as an undergrad were too ambiguous. The key is to have something where the division is clear enough that you could breifly describe it to a random person, and trust them to know which category any given paper goes to, without having to come check with you for how to handle unexpected files.

My current reference file system consists of three categories:

* General A-Z reference (the default for anything that doesn't fit below.) -- two designated File drawers.
* Finantial Archives: Bank statements and Credit card statements that are from the previous calender year or before, and tax forms prior to the batch most recently filed. -- Banker's Box, first by year then by type (e.g. 2005 bank statements, 2005 credit card statements, 2004 tax forms, 2004 bank statements, 2004 credit card statements, etc.)
* Scholarly papers that I'm using for research. -- another dedicated file drawer, by first-author's last name.

(I also use a couple of small, portable file-tubs to help me keep track of notes related to "current active projects" and "someday-maybe ideas", but since these don't count as "reference materials" in the GTD sense, they are seperate from the file system described above, and I won't try to describe them here.)

Another example would be Client/Prospect files, if I were in a position that required them. (I read an idea somewehere about keeping clients and prospects in the same alphabetical-by-name system and differentiating them by tab position-- then when a prostpect becomes a client, you just move the tab if it's a hanging file, or turn the folder inside out if it's a manilia file. If I had "client files", this is what I'd do.)

Basically, DA's suggestions are common sense, not gospel. You need to do what makes sense for your specific situation, not follow DA's suggestions to the letter on a faith-based basis. He has excellent suggestions-- but they aren't custom tailored to each of our individual situations-- it's up to us to do that.

 

[rachel134]

filing stuff

Articles I file by first author's last name. When I started, I had subject files, but I quickly realized it involved too many decisions, and I could never be consistent (a study which compared fatigue and sleep in arthritis and lung disease--did it go in the fatigue, pain, or lung disease file?). Now that I have bibliographic software (how did we ever manage before THAT came along?), it is always easy to retrieve the name of the author, and then the article itself. If someone is very prolific, I will devote a file to that one author (for example, one file labelled A, and one labelled Asimov).

Student records are a different animal altogether, since a student can protest an exam grade for 12 months, and a course grade for 5 years. Therefore, tests, answer sheets, grade records, and student emails have to be kept in a secure file for quite a while. I file them in a box labelled "course number, term, year." My own course-related material (syllabi, my notes, hardcopy of lecture notes,) also go in files labelled course number-term-year, as well as being kept on my office computer and flash drive (yes, I am a compulsive saver, but it does come in handy).

Research has its own drawer--subject records filed in numerical order of ID in red folders, IRB applications and information in green folders, instructions for Research Assistants about equipment and software in yellow folders, my own writing about the project in blue folders, financial forms in white. Color coding this way makes it easier for me as well as for the rotating RAs.

And of course there's the tenure-related file, in which continuing ed certificates, student evaluations, thank-yous for committee work, etc go. Pertinent stuff gets thrown in this file and once a year I photocopy the important papers for the backup file and oraganize the new material.

Rachel

 

[andersons]

I do use latex (you inferred my discipline correctly). I use emacs as an editor on a linux system. A small GTD tip that's helped me tremendously is to learn the short-cut keys for frequently used programs. - like for me firefox and emacs. The computer reacts faster, and it saves on reptitive use stress. I guess I still need to learn more about emacs capability, or, perhaps its time for an editor upgrade.

Upgrade to vi!

(Little computer geek joke. There used to be an editor debate about emacs versus vi. With vi, all editing can be with keystrokes extremely fast.)

 

[Pedro Kroger]

Nice thread!

This is a very nice thread! I'm also an academic and I wish there was more material about organizing academic related stuff. Can anyone recommend a book on the subject? I mean, it's easy to find books on research, but they tend to be more how to find a research problem and how to conduct a research than how to organize stuff, and how to jiggle teaching, researching and administrative chores.

 

[mmurray]

Email

Hi

It seems to be one of the big issues facing academics is dealing with email.

When I was Head of School the amount of email was massive. I used to stop at an internet cafe each morning on the way into work and process email for an hour. That was a GTD type process where I only answered the two minute ones!

Now I am back to a regular job there will be less email from administration but increased email from students. Email from students is a real growth part of the job at the moment in Australia.

So what do you do with it ? Do you leave the email turned on (some of my colleagues use it for quick responses so I am expected to leave it on) ? Review it once a day, more often ... ?

Thanks -

Michael

 

[Pedro Kroger]

So what do you do with it ? Do you leave the email turned on (some of my colleagues use it for quick responses so I am expected to leave it on) ? Review it once a day, more often ... ?

Well, it depends on how you expect to solve things with email and what people (colleagues, students, etc) expect from you. Anyway, I never configure my email program to notify when I get email because it's too distracting. If you are writing an article or reading a complicated paper you don't want to be distracted, specially if the email is not important, or worse, it's a spam. I few ideas:

1. check your email from time to time (let say, every hour) to see if there is something important and that could be answered using the 2 minute rule

2. if you have lots of things to do, check your email only a few times a day (2-4 times) but give time to answer more emails.

3. if you really have to be available online most of the time, you may consider using some instant messenger program instead of email. gaim is a nice program for this:

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

Anyway, I believe that most email communication that is supposed to be "urgent" can wait a few hours, so I only check emails a few times a day.

 

[rachel134]

emails

I agree that having email arrival notification on is much too distracting, so I leave it off most of the time.

School policy dictates answering student emails within 24 hours, but students want answers faster than that. Students send the teacher email around 11 at night, and when they haven't received an answer by 9 am, they immediately complain to the dean. So I check my email first thing in the morning (to make sure there are no fires that need to be put out). My major email times are usually right after lunch and again around 5 or so. I also make a quick check just before leaving the office.

Saving email: I have about 10 files for saving emails (course-related, research related, committee work, etc) At the end of the quarter, all student email about courses I taught get saved to the course-related general file.

Rachel

 

[ActionGirl]

School policy dictates answering student emails within 24 hours, but students want answers faster than that. Students send the teacher email around 11 at night, and when they haven't received an answer by 9 am, they immediately complain to the dean.

I hope the dean doesn't consider that a reasonable complaint!

 

[mmurray]

To continue the academic/researcher thread I have two questions on filing:

(1) I have recently managed to sort through my files and divide them into Active and Archive. At present I have all the collections of other academics papers, preprints etc in Active. I could separate them out as Support material but that seems potentially too complicated ? What do others think ?

(2) I am using hanging files because that is all I have. But if I went to just a draw file of A4 folders I would have a problem. A number of my collections of preprints for a given person are too big for one A4 folder ? What do people do about this ?

Thanks - Michael

 

[unstuffed]

Hey, Michael, I thought that was you

I'd guessed if there was anyone who'd cottoned on to GTD in the Maths Department, it would be you. ;-)

(1)At present I have all the collections of other academics papers, preprints etc in Active. I could separate them out as Support material but that seems potentially too complicated ?

Do you have some that you're working with currently, and others that you've set aside for later on? Because if so, you might be able to separate out the 'live' ones into a more active container, like one of those weeny 5-drawer trays to sit on the desk.

Alternatively, you could devote, say, the top drawer of your filing cabinet to 'live' stuff, leaving the rest as reference or support.

(2) I am using hanging files because that is all I have. But if I went to just a draw file of A4 folders I would have a problem. A number of my collections of preprints for a given person are too big for one A4 folder ?

When you say the collections are too big for one folder, do you mean dimensionally, or numerically? If it's numerically, that is, you have too many of one kind, you can just separate them into distinct classes and use multiple folders (labelled appropriately). You could have, say, a folder for each year, or for each type of preprints, or by some other arcane method of your own devising.

I use the A4 folder system, and it's extremely nice. The screaming sound of those hanging files still haunts me today.

Now I am back to a regular job there will be less email from administration but increased email from students. Email from students is a real growth part of the job at the moment in Australia.

Couple of things I can say here: first up, the CS department uses their web site as a forum. Students direct questions to the lecturer, and the answers (if they're subject questions) go on the forum. Saves repetition, and quite often the students answer each others' questions. Talk to Cheryl Pope about it.

Second, that email alert is a major distraction and time-sucker. Check it two or three times a day, and train your colleagues to expect that from you. I know what they're like, but they'll come around. ;-)

Also, there's some great, great stuff about becoming an email ninja on Merlin Mann's site, 43 Folders . In particular, he has a great short series, Inbox Zero. There's also some useful things on Gina Trapani's site, Lifehacker.

 

[unstuffed]

A different slant on saving emails

Saving email: I have about 10 files for saving emails (course-related, research related, committee work, etc) At the end of the quarter, all student email about courses I taught get saved to the course-related general file.

Now that I've gotten over my shock about the expectation that you'll answer student's emails in 24 hours (yikes!), I can add a bit here. Have you seen the discussions about saving time on saving emails at Merlin Mann's 43 Folders site? He suggests throwing all the Archive emails (that is, ones that are dealt with, so they have no NA) into one Archive folder. This works because of the ubiquity and quality of the search tools we have now.

I confess, I'm still reluctant to go all the way with this, but I've started dissolving some of my archive folders, and it's going okay so far.

 

[unstuffed]

A couple of comments

For example, my two (parallel) next actions for a course are to 1. finish grading weekly assignments and 2. write the final exam. Each of these will take 2-3 hours to do, and they both need to be completed by Wednesday. At the same time, for my research I need to 1. revise the consent form (by Tuesday) and 2. have a certain person a half hour away sign a form (also by Tuesday). Of course, I also have to start reading for next semester's course and contact equipment vendors to get prices, and then order it so it is ready to use in early January.

These really aren't Next Actions. I'd classify NAs as things that involve using your hands in some way: writing, reading, typing, whatever. Those are the verbs you should be using: 'finishing', while it's a delightful thought during marking time, isn't an active verb. The out clause here is that marking is something that you just crank through, whereas 'write exam' is not.

Writing an exam requires things like determining which topics to cover, which in turn requires looking back at the course materials to assess relative weights, and so on. Then there's how much weight to assign to each topic, how to break that up (multiple questions vs one big one), which sub-topics you want to cover and their relative weight, assigning a marking scheme, checking the validity of your solutions and mark scheme (and typing!), and so on.

You may find that if you break it down into the crankable widgets, you can step through those in much smaller periods of time, so interruptions don't have such an impact.

One of my problems is that every time I get everything in order, something happens to mess up my neat schedule--a student in crisis uses up the time I set aside for writing an exam, or something I finished needs unexpected revisions.

So....my question is, how to you organize this sort of mess, so that everything gets done at the appropriate time, while still having enough flexibility to handle sudden demands and crises?

A couple of comments here. I'd say that GTD has the flexibility inherent in it: the decision of what to do next is based on the context you're in, not what you'd previously planned. I suspect that you may be trying to schedule too much, when the work requires you to be light-footed enough to decide what's the best thing to do right this minute.

Breaking it down into smaller, crankable, widgets helps, and having all your NAs in context helps, as does staying flexible rather than tying yourself to an unnecessary schedule. You might try the time estimate idea, where you estimate how much time each task will take (be generous), work backwards through the steps, and put 'absolutely must have completed sub-task X by this date' in your tickler file. That helps to decide on priorities when you're at the coalface.

I'd also suggest that you can make yourself scarce while you mark, or write: stop the interruptions from messing up your workload by stopping the interruptions. ;-)

 

[mmurray]

I'd guessed if there was anyone who'd cottoned on to GTD in the Maths Department, it would be you. ;-)

I'll take that as a compliment!

Do you have some that you're working with currently, and others that you've set aside for later on? Because if so, you might be able to separate out the 'live' ones into a more active container, like one of those weeny 5-drawer trays to sit on the desk.

Alternatively, you could devote, say, the top drawer of your filing cabinet to 'live' stuff, leaving the rest as reference or support.

I have always followed the philosophy that anything on the desk you aren't looking at immediately is a distraction -- a little nag that you haven't done it even though you have plans in place for it. So I would rather keep only the thing I am working and support material on the desk. Of course I could use a filing draw in the desk or follow your alternative.

When you say the collections are too big for one folder, do you mean dimensionally, or numerically? If it's numerically, that is, you have too many of one kind, you can just separate them into distinct classes and use multiple folders (labelled appropriately). You could have, say, a folder for each year, or for each type of preprints, or by some other arcane method of your own devising.

Numerically. So your idea is best. This kind of thing has a strange status at this moment in time as preprints are increasingly electronic and stored on my computer. This is not just forwards in time but backwards as things get archived. In an ideal world I could employ someone to go through my paper collection and check it against J-Stor or whatever and save the scan on my computer and dump the paper.

I use the A4 folder system, and it's extremely nice. The screaming sound of those hanging files still haunts me today.

I did it for awhile and agree it is good but I was using bookends to hold the folders. Where did you find the right filing cabinets in Adelaide ?

Thanks very much for the other hints and the long post. Handling student emails can wait until 2008 when I come off study leave

Regards - Michael