The Fisher Files

MIT Physics professor Peter Fisher (with whom I took 8.033 12 years ago) produced two seasons of podcasts back in 2007 called the Fisher Files. Unfortunately something disastrous happened to the stylesheets or something because the website is basically unusable in its present state. I had stumbled across this a few months ago but was put off by the wreckage of the site. TFazio recently mentioned it and this time I put the effort into downloading all the actual podcasts.

The podcasts revolve around the Getting Things Done philosophy of how to collect and organize the myriad daily tasks which make up our lives. Fisher nicely applies GTD ideas to many specific scenarios of academic life, making the ideas more directly applicable to me. He also goes further than just discussing ways to be productive, though, and tries to bridge the gap between accomplishing today's tasks and the almost spiritual goal of loving one's work and balancing it with other parts of life.

I'm so glad I went to the effort of grabbing them, because they're incredibly relevant to me right now. And in the hope of making them more widely available, I've collected the links below. I hope others will enjoy them as much as I have begun to!

Season 1 (largely about GTD)

1. Introduction
2. Buckets & Weekly Review
3. Projects
4. ToDo
5. Calendar
6. Putting things together [broken link]
7. Email
8. Files
9. Feeding the Bad Wolf
10. Gadgets
11. Multitasking
12. Reading

Season 2 (the academic life)

1. Impostor!
2. Screwed!
3. Thesis
4. PostDoc
5. Travel
6. Vacation [broken link]
7. Junior Faculty
8. Giving talks
9. Tenure
10. Teaching
11. What to work on
12. Summary

Multitasking

Last week someone tweeted a link to this article about giving up multitasking. I have been thinking a lot lately about how to maintain focus (or 'flow') better at work, and how to lower my overall stress level, too. This piece is not only about both obviously distracting multitasking (reading emails while on the phone) but less obvious cases like thinking about work while talking to your kids. It didn't reveal much that I didn't already know, but the author nicely summarized his experience in giving up multitasking with six observations which all resonated with me (see the article for full exposition):

1. He was better able to enjoy the good things in life.
2. He made more progress on challenging projects.
3. He was less stressed.
4. He lost patience for activities which were a waste of his time.
5. He gained patience for worthwhile activities.
6. He lost no productivity by eliminating multitasking.

Reading it made me realize how much of the day I spend with random thoughts and distractions buzzing around in my head (again in addition to more obvious things like frequently checking email on my phone). There's a whole change of attitude possible here: take each moment and just do whatever you're doing in that moment. Today I stopped to listen to a thunderstorm, and was tempted to check mail while I was standing there, but I consciously resisted and kept with just one simple thing: listening. It may sound fruity, but it's a lot less stressful.