Some good tips for us mortals. I have admired Donald Knuth for many things[footnote] but especially for his stance on email which I use here as a stand-in for distractions. I wish I had 10% of his discipline!
"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every six months. "
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
[footnote] I'm from the physical sciences, not CS, but the man transcends departments!
He started doing this after he was an emeritus professor, at which point he basically has no regular job duties. No need to go to meetings, no need to respond to anyone. The emeritus professors in my wife's department (also at Stanford) do not go in for meetings, do not teach classes, and do not have undergraduate or graduate advisees. Emeritus at Stanford basically means retired (though they can recall you to teach if they want to for a limited period of time).
So yeah, if you're in that position, you can decide not to do email. But for the rest of us...
edit: thanks for the correction below — he was nearly an emeritus professor when he stopped using email.
His site says he stopped email on January 1, 1990. This would have been before his formal retirement in 1992 or 1993 which was also unusual in that he was only in his early 50s at the time.
I agree that his is not a general case. Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi and all that.
Someday I would like to know how people like him develop and maintain that level of drive and focus. I've been able to do it for a few weeks at a time, maximum before bonking hard.
I think he came up at a time when departments had staff to work with faculty. Of course when one reaches his level of fame, funding comes without asking.
One downside of our computerized society is that people now have to do things because the tools supposedly exist for everything to be self serve. It marginalize the skills and talents of those who provided those valuable services in the past.
outside of CEOs personal assistants, I have trouble encountering any within last 5 years - and the secretarial staff was visibly getting downsized at university before that, handling mostly the mail room
Knuth's approach takes an extreme and of course someone like him can afford a secretary but for those of us that can't, Cal Newport's book Deep Work offers some pretty good suggestions on how to handle the plague of emails while being prolific in the work output that he generates. Key among the is the batching technique which others have mentioned but I'd highly recommend reading Deep Work to get a good balanced view on the subject
I've been working to overcome burnout that took me out of the game a year ago. What it basically came down to is that midlife crisis feelings had come to dominate my psyche. I found myself asking "what's the point?" about basic tasks that must be done.
The start of a cure turned out to be separating a task into writing the todo list for it and then doing it afterwards. The next evolution of that is to also separate your evaluation of the work from the work itself, so that you don't wallow in critical feelings as you work. Try to be zenful and just concentrate on the now.
Basically it all comes down to anxiety management. So for example, say you are cleaning and you get a text message to deal with an issue. I normally would make a mental note to remember to do it, since I lean towards intellectual pursuits. But it's better to add the item to the top of your todo list and stop thinking about it or the fear of forgetting it. Better yet, pause cleaning (since it's low-priority) and deal with the issue immediately.
I've found that mechanizing the thought processes that I had taken for granted until they failed me boosted my mood. If you think of it as a scale from 0 to 10, our default with stress is to hover below a 5 (say 3). It takes effort to get above 5. But there is a stable orbit around 7 if you can maintain it for a few weeks. I think this is why people with a positive disposition have so much difficulty understanding people with anxiety, because physically they actually feel similar, it's just that our subjective interpretation of them are different:
And that I had low thyroid function because I work out heavily but don't add salt to anything, and processed food doesn't generally contain iodine. So I began taking this last week:
I can literally say that when I started eating bacon and ham again (I gave up pork 20 years ago for ethical reasons) that my mood went from 3 to 5 within a few days, and when I began taking iodine, it went from 5 to 7. Note that these symptoms are similar to what vegetarians and vegans encounter after about 3 years without active effort to maintain their nutrition. I hit it because I had doubled my calories for the gym, but not tryptophan or iodine specifically.
Keep in mind that I also did the work of exploring ADHD, executive dysfunction, the impossible task and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for pretty much the last year.
So without medication, the answer is holistic. Fixing nutritional gaps might boost mood 20-40%, then each mental adjustment might add 10%.
I'll know that the orbit at 7 is stable once my income stabilizes and I have a consistent track record of having few negative thoughts for some number of weeks or months. But so far so good.
Huh. For about 15 years, the first thing I’ve done in the morning is a 25 minute “Administrivia” session, after rolling out of bed.
I used to do a full GTD system, but now honestly it’s opening my todos, cleaning out my inbox into todos, tidying them up, prioritising them, and then doing the remaining twenty minutes of them.
No more than 25 minutes, occasionally less than, and I think I’ve not been stressed about the (sometimes very large amounts of) admin bullshit that shows up in my life.
When I had a real management job I did a second one of these for work each morning when I got in.
Anyway, same system for 15 years, with occasional embellishments. These days I take two of them a week to do my personal and company accounts and budgeting instead.
> The University of Melbourne has run a GYLIO week once every semester for at least a decade. It usually takes place around the middle of the semester in week five or six, and while the academic programme continues, the extensive social and partying schedule is paused to help students shift their priorities.
The whole article falls apart right here for me, there's just no way this is true. I seriously doubt the University of Melbourne is in any way able to get its almost 50,000 enrolled students to stop partying for a week. They may run GYLIO events that week, but that doesn't mean it's going to get a bunch of college students to stop drinking.
It sounds like GYLIO is for all social events and commitments which can be a HUGE part of university life for many people.
I wouldn't equate it to just "not drinking and partying"
From the article:
“Given the many stimuli of life today, with students who are juggling the many opportunities colleges offer across all the areas from sport and culture to volunteering and leadership, having a week to ‘take a breath’ and get things done is essential,” she says.
Also, many universities have the social scene orientated around the university social clubs and the university student association(s). Events and parties are often organised and run through these. Having them suspended for a week could easily have a huge impact on the 50,000 students, depending on the social culture of the university.
I'd replace "methodologies" with "discussion topics." My ADHD doctor said something like 10% of those who attempt GTD stick with it. Turns out it's actually kind of complicated and takes quite a bit of focus!
"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every six months. " https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
[footnote] I'm from the physical sciences, not CS, but the man transcends departments!