24 Hour Buddies

Photo by: oknovokght

Mike over at Getting Things Done in Academia suggests that we should all cultivate our 24-hour buddies.

He’s not advocating incredibly short-term friendships. No, he’s making the case for creating a group of academics (preferably with different specialties) who are willing to read and informally review each other’s papers on with a 24-hour turnaround. It sounds like a great idea to get speedy feedback and light a fire under yourself when necessary.

Cultivating your 24-hour buddies
[ from Getting Things Done in Academia ]

Filed under: Academia, Advice, Colleagues, Motivation, Research, Writing

Maple and other Windows outliners

I’ve been looking for a lightweight outliner program to handle my piece-meal thesis work. I discovered Maple, which seems to be what I was looking for, from this list of outliner programs for Windows.

It lets me organize my writing into manageable sections, then easily work on each once I have the sources at hand. Also, I can export the tree as a flat file in doc, txt, html, or rtf.

In my ideal world, it would have support for footnotes or endnotes, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Maple
By Crystal Office Systems
Free 30-day trial, $21.95 US to buy

Filed under: Computer, Files, Organization, Research, Software, Thesis, Tools, Windows, Writing

Oh, Don’t Forget…

Send yourself text messages (for free) at prescheduled times. Good for remembering meetings, tasks, and so forth, if you don’t have a PDA.

Oh, Don’t Forget…
[ via Lifehacker ]

Filed under: Computer, Online, Organization, Time Management, Tools, Web

The Carnival of GRADual Progress

Photo by: OldMainstream

The Carnival of GRADual Progress is a monthly roundup of blog posts of interest to grad students. Hosted at a different academic blog every month, the posts range from helpful to simply hilarious.

There are six carnivals so far:
1st Carnival
2nd Carnival
3rd Carnival
4th Carnival
5th Carnival
6th Carnival

Warning: to be approached with extreme caution. Definite time-sucker.

Filed under: Academia, Advice, Computer, Grad School, Motivation, Online, Reading, Research, Thesis, Time Management, Web, Writing

Learn how to get up early

Photo by: idreamofdaylight

When the sky is dark, the days are short, and it’s cold outside, I lack the motivation to get up out of my nice warm bed. In an attempt to get more out of my day, I’ve tracked down some good advice from fellow bloggers:

Waking up early and consistently
[ from Dave Cheong ]

Surefire Way to Wake Up Without the Snooze
[ from Glen Stansberry at LifeDev ]

How I trained myself to get up earlier in the morning
[ from Matthew Stibbe at Bad Language ]

Filed under: Advice, Motivation, Organization, Sleep, Time Management