10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D.

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The attrition rate in Ph.D. school is high.

Anywhere from a third to half will fail.

In fact, there's a disturbing consistency to grad school failure.

I'm supervising a lot of new grad students this semester, so for their sake, I'm cataloging the
common reasons for failure.

Read on for the top ten reasons students fail out of Ph.D. school.

Focus on grades or coursework

No one cares about grades in grad school.

There's a simple formula for the optimal GPA in grad school:

Optimal GPA = Minimum Required GPA + ε

Anything higher implies time that could have been spent on research was wasted on classes.
Advisors might even raise an eyebrow at a 4.0

During the first two years, students need to find an advisor, pick a research area, read a lot of
papers and try small, exploratory research projects. Spending too much time on coursework
distracts from these objectives.

Learn too much

Some students go to Ph.D. school because they want to learn.

Let there be no mistake: Ph.D. school involves a lot of learning.

But, it requires focused learning directed toward an eventual thesis.

Taking (or sitting in on) non-required classes outside one's focus is almost always a waste of
time, and it's always unnecessary.

By the end of the third year, a typical Ph.D. student needs to have read about 50 to 150 papers
to defend the novelty of a proposed thesis.

Of course, some students go too far with the related work search, reading so much about their
intended area of research that they never start that research.
Advisors will lose patience with "eternal" students that aren't focused on the goal--making a
small but significant contribution to human knowledge.

In the interest of personal disclosure, I suffered from the "want to learn everything" bug when
I got to Ph.D. school.

I took classes all over campus for my first two years: Arabic, linguistics, economics, physics,
math and even philosophy. In computer science, I took lots of classes in areas that had
nothing to do with my research.

The price of all this "enlightenment" was an extra year on my Ph.D.

I only got away with this detour because while I was doing all that, I was a TA, which meant I
wasn't wasting my advisor's grant funding.

Expect perfection
Perfectionism is a tragic affliction in academia, since it tends to hit the brightest the hardest.

Perfection cannot be attained. It is approached in the limit.

Students that polish a research paper well past the point of diminishing returns, expecting to
hit perfection, will never stop polishing.

Students that can't begin to write until they have the perfect structure of the paper mapped out
will never get started.

For students with problems starting on a paper or dissertation, my advice is that writing a
paper should be an iterative process: start with an outline and some rough notes; take a pass
over the paper and improve it a little; rinse; repeat. When the paper changes little with each
pass, it's at diminishing returns. One or two more passes over the paper are all it needs at that
point.

"Good enough" is better than "perfect."

Procrastinate
Chronic perfectionists also tend to be procrastinators.

So do eternal students with a drive to learn instead of research.

Ph.D. school seems to be a magnet for every kind of procrastinator.

Unfortunately, it is also a sieve that weeds out the unproductive.

Procrastinators should check out my tips for boosting productivity.

Go rogue too soon/too late

The advisor-advisee dynamic needs to shift over the course of a degree.

Early on, the advisor should be hands on, doling out specific topics and helping to craft early
papers.

Toward the end, the student should know more than the advisor about her topic. Once the
inversion happens, she needs to "go rogue" and start choosing the topics to investigate and
initiating the paper write-ups. She needs to do so even if her advisor is insisting she do
something else.

The trick is getting the timing right.

Going rogue before the student knows how to choose good topics and write well will end in
wasted paper submissions and a grumpy advisor.

On the other hand, continuing to act only when ordered to act past a certain point will strain
an advisor that expects to start seeing a "return" on an investment of time and hard-won grant
money.

Advisors expect near-terminal Ph.D. students to be proto-professors with intimate knowledge

of the challenges in their field. They should be capable of selecting and attacking research
problems of appropriate size and scope.

Treat Ph.D. school like school or work

Ph.D. school is neither school nor work.

Ph.D. school is a monastic experience. And, a jealous hobby.

Solving problems and writing up papers well enough to pass peer review demands
contemplative labor on days, nights and weekends.

Reading through all of the related work takes biblical levels of devotion.

Ph.D. school even comes with built-in vows of poverty and obedience.

The end brings an ecclesiastical robe and a clerical hood.

Students that treat Ph.D. school like a 9-5 endeavor are the ones that take 7+ years to finish,
or end up ABD.

Ignore the committee

Some Ph.D. students forget that a committee has to sign off on their Ph.D.

It's important for students to maintain contact with committee members in the latter years of a
Ph.D. They need to know what a student is doing.
It's also easy to forget advice from a committee member since they're not an everyday
presence like an advisor.

Committee members, however, rarely forget the advice they give.

It doesn't usually happen, but I've seen a shouting match between a committee member and a
defender where they disagreed over the metrics used for evaluation of an experiment. This
committee member warned the student at his proposal about his choice of metrics.

He ignored that warning.

He was lucky: it added only one more semester to his Ph.D.

Another student I knew in grad school was told not to defend, based on the draft of his
dissertation. He overruled his committee's advice, and failed his defense. He was told to scrap
his entire dissertaton and start over. It took him over ten years to finish his Ph.D.

Aim too low

Some students look at the weakest student to get a Ph.D. in their department and aim for that.

This attitude guarantees that no professorship will be waiting for them.

And, it all but promises failure.

The weakest Ph.D. to escape was probably repeatedly unlucky with research topics, and had
to settle for a contingency plan.

Aiming low leaves no room for uncertainty.

And, research is always uncertain.

Aim too high

A Ph.D. seems like a major undertaking from the perspective of the student.

It is.

But, it is not the final undertaking. It's the start of a scientific career.

A Ph.D. does not have to cure cancer or enable cold fusion.

At best a handful of chemists remember what Einstein's Ph.D. was in.

Einstein's Ph.D. dissertation was a principled calculation meant to estimate Avogadro's

number. He got it wrong. By a factor of 3.

He still got a Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a small but significant contribution to human knowledge.

Impact is something students should aim for over a lifetime of research.

Making a big impact with a Ph.D. is about as likely as hitting a bullseye the very first time
you've fired a gun.

Once you know how to shoot, you can keep shooting until you hit it.

Plus, with a Ph.D., you get a lifetime supply of ammo.

Some advisors can give you a list of potential research topics. If they can, pick the topic that's
easiest to do but which still retains your interest.

It does not matter at all what you get your Ph.D. in.

All that matters is that you get one.

It's the training that counts--not the topic.

Miss the real milestones

Most schools require coursework, qualifiers, thesis proposal, thesis defense and dissertation.
These are the requirements on paper.

In practice, the real milestones are three good publications connected by a (perhaps loosely)
unified theme.

Coursework and qualifiers are meant to undo admissions mistakes. A student that has
published by the time she takes her qualifiers is not a mistake.

Once a student has two good publications, if she convinces her committee that she can
extrapolate a third, she has a thesis proposal.

Once a student has three publications, she has defended, with reasonable confidence, that she
can repeatedly conduct research of sufficient quality to meet the standards of peer review. If
she draws a unifying theme, she has a thesis, and if she staples her publications together, she
has a dissertation.

I fantasize about buying an industrial-grade stapler capable of punching through three journal
papers and calling it The Dissertator.

Of course, three publications is nowhere near enough to get a professorship--even at a crappy

school. But, it's about enough to get a Ph.D.
A thesis proposal is a contract
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Of the three official milestones1 in Ph.D. school--qualifying exams, thesis proposal and thesis
defense--the trickiest is the thesis proposal.

Qualifying exams are just exams. Students can beat them using the same tactics they used for
exams as undergrads.

A proper thesis defense should be a rigorous formality. No advisor should ever let her student
stand for a defense unless the advisor is convinced the student will pass.

Thesis proposals, on the other hand, rarely pass without an objection requiring a modification
to the proposal.

Students tend to invert the importance of the proposal and the defense: they see the proposal
as the formality and the defense as the challenge.

Faculty, however, treat proposals like contracts. When faculty sign off on a proposal, we are
giving up some of our rights to object later on. We are agreeing that if a student does X, Y
and Z, as outlined in the proposal, then we shall grant a Ph.D.

We are never going to yield such rights passively.

All good thesis proposals contain two ingredients: a clearly-defined thesis, and a specific plan
for demonstrating that thesis.

Everything else in the proposal (related work, prior work, challenges) exists to support the
plausibility of the thesis and the plan.

Done properly, a good proposal grants immunity against remarks like

• I thought you said you were going to do X,

• I'd like you to also do Y before I sign off, and
• So what?

during a defense.

A thesis proposal is an opportunity for students to obtain protection and assurance. It should
restore some of the certainty lost in the middle years of a Ph.D. Too few students take full
advantage of this opportunity.

If you need advice on how to do a thesis proposal, read on for guidance.

Thesis statement
A thesis is a single sentence.

More precisely, it is an active, declarative, defensible sentence.

The thesis is what the dissertation will exert its mass to defend.

The thesis proposal document and the proposal presentation should place the thesis statement
toward the front, so that while reading and listening, the committee can determine whether the
thesis is defensible, and whether the proposed research, if successful, would constitute a valid
defense of the thesis.

When a student doesn't provide an explicit thesis statement, each committee member will
infer a thesis statement that aligns with his or her prejudices, and then, some day, the student
will have to defend six theses instead of one.

My advice is to make the statement as short as possible: how much fat can you trim from it
before it's too general too defend with your work?

The thesis statement answers the question, "What did humanity learn as a consequence of this
dissertation?"

It's useful to carefully define each term in a thesis statement after it's given, just to make sure
the student and the committee are in total agreement about what the thesis means.

Example: My thesis

My thesis statement was, "Environment analysis of higher-order languages is novel, feasible

and useful."

This thesis segmented my dissertation into four parts: related work, theory, experimentation
and application.

1. Related work defends novelty.

2. Theory and experimentation defend feasibility.
3. Application defends usefulness.

My thesis statement doesn't say anything about what technical mechanisms I used to prove
environment analysis feasible. (I developed abstract frame strings, abstract counting and
abstract garbage collection to support my thesis. But, those were just the means. Environment
analysis was the end.)

The weakest part of my thesis statement is the claim of usefulness.

Of course, even if I took out that claim, my committee would still ask the questions, "So
what?" Putting it in my thesis forced me to explicitly defend against that question.

Utility is subjective, which meant I had to find an application of environment analysis for
each of my committee members.
Ultimately, I detailed 16 distinct applications of environment analysis, so that if a committee
member wanted to argue it wasn't useful, they had to argue that all sixteen applications were
useless.

None of my committee members were willing to take up the challenge.

The modifier novel is also unnecessary. Committees will look for novelty whether it is
claimed implicitly or explicitly. Again, putting it in my thesis forced me to defend novelty in
my dissertation.

Plan
Students need to realize that a proposal is a contract.

The plan details the conditions of that contract.

If a student words the plan right and gets it approved, her defense will go smoothly.

If she leaves the plan vague or inspecific, she leaves herself vulnerable to the committee's
interpretation of her plan.

Nothing of importance should ever be left to the mercy of a committee.

A good plan contains a fictional schedule--a list of remaining milestones and anticipated dates
of completion. The dates don't matter all that much. They just have to be there. Relative
spacing between dates signals the estimated size of the challenge for each milestone.

If the plan contains a claim to be validated, it needs to explain how the student will conduct
validation of that claim.

A good plan also contains contingencies. What if a claim ends up being false? What if it turns
out to be infeasible in time or in cost to perform the evaluation of one of the claims? A good
plan is not a sequence, but a tree. The leaves of the tree form a spectrum from "best possible
outcome, give me a Ph.D. and a professorship" at one end to "back to the drawing board" at
the other.

A plan should contain the possibility of failure.

Real research is inherently unpredictable, and failure is always a possibility. If failure is not
possible, it must not be research.

The proposal needs to create the impression that failure is unlikely.

A good plan also provides the criteria for recognizing the completion of a milestone, e.g.,
submitted for publication, accepted for publication, survey completed, chapter written.

Supporting ingredients
The remainder of a proposal exists to support the thesis and the plan. The other three
components in a good proposal are (1) a survey of related work, (2) a summary of prior work
by the student and (3) a review of research challenges.

A survey of related work supports the novelty of the thesis.

A summary of prior work gives the committee a sense of what the student is capable of,
which supports the plausibility of both the thesis and the plan.

A review of the research challenges and proposed circumvention strategies supports the
intellectual merit of the thesis.

Good proposals give the impression that between one-third and two-thirds of the work
remains to be completed.

Thesis proposals claiming that all of the work is already completed will be interpreted (rightly
or wrongly) as arrogant, and trigger intense scrutiny.

It's important to propose before all of the work is finished.

If it's truly all done, a student should pretend the last third of it isn't.

Wielding the proposal

At a student's defense, she should put the thesis statement up at the start, and then circle the
path through the plan she ended up taking.

Psychologically, it's going to be hard for the committee to say she must do more work after
they're reminded of the plan they agreed to.

Pragmatics
A good thesis proposal document can be structured like a proposal for NSF funding: a one-
page proposal summary, a fifteen-page proposal description and an extensive bibliography.

Proposals longer than fifteen pages are unlikely to be read in full.

The presentation itself should be about 30 to 45 minutes. As proposals drag on, busy
committee members get crankier. Cranky faculty members revert to their basest instinct:
being argumentative. Running long is a well-tested strategy for having extra conditions placed
on a proposal.

As a rule of thumb, each 5 minutes past an hour adds 3 weeks worth of work to a Ph.D.
3 qualities of successful Ph.D. students:
Perseverance, tenacity and cogency
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Every fall, a fresh crop of Ph.D. students arrives.

Since I'm actively looking for Ph.D. students, I get the same question a dozen times every
year: "How long does it take to get a Ph.D.?"

This is't the right question.

"Ph.D. school takes as long as you want it to," I tell them. There's no speed limit on how fast
you can jump through all the hoops.

A better question to ask is, "What makes a Ph.D. student successful?"

Having watched Ph.D. students succeed and fail at four universities, I infer that success in
graduate school hinges on three qualities: perseverance, tenacity and cogency.

If you're in Ph.D. school or you're thinking about it, read on.

What doesn't matter

There's a ruinous misconception that a Ph.D. must be smart.

This can't be true.

A smart person would know better than to get a Ph.D.

"Smart" qualities like brilliance and quick-thinking are irrelevant in Ph.D. school. Students
that have made it through so far on brilliance and quick-thinking alone wash out of Ph.D.
programs with nagging predictability. Let there be no doubt: brilliance and quick-thinking are
valuable in other pursuits. But, they're neither sufficient nor necessary in science.

Certainly, being smart helps. But, it won't get the job done.

Moreover, as anyone going through Ph.D. school can tell you: lots of stupid people make it
across the finish line and leave, Ph.D. in hand.

As my advisor used to tell me, "Whenever I felt depressed in grad school--when I worried I
wasn't going to finish my Ph.D.--I looked at the people dumber than me finishing theirs, and I
would think to myself, if that idiot can get a Ph.D., dammit, so can I."

(Since becoming a professor, I finding myself repeating a corollary of this observation, but I
replace "getting a Ph.D." with "obtaining grant funding.")
Perseverance
To escape with a Ph.D., you must meaningfully extend the boundary of human knowledge.
More exactly, you must convince a panel of experts guarding the boundary that you have
done so.

You can take classes and read papers to figure out where the boundary lies.

That's easy.

But, when it comes time to actually extend that boundary, you have to get into your bunker
and prepare for the onslaught of failure.

A lot of Ph.D. students get depressed when they reach the boundary, because there's no longer
a test to cram for or a procedure to follow. This is the point (2-3 years in) where attrition
peaks.

Finding a problem to solve is rarely a problem itself. Every field is brimming with open
problems. If finding a problem is hard, you're in the wrong field. The real hard part, of course,
is solving an open problem. After all, if someone could tell you how to solve it, it wouldn't be
open.

To survive this period, you have to be willing to fail from the moment you wake to the
moment your head hits the pillow. You must be willing to fail for days on end, for months on
end and maybe even for years on end. The skill you accrete during this trauma is the ability to
imagine plausible solutions, and to estimate the likelihood that an approach will work.

If you persevere to the end of this phase, your mind will intuit solutions to problems in ways
that it didn't and couldn't before. You won't know how your mind does this. (I don't know
how mine does it.) It just will.

As you acquire this skill, you'll be launching fledgling papers at peer reviewers, checking to
see if others think what you're doing qualifies as research yet. Since acceptance rates at good
venues range between 8% and 25%, most or all of your papers will be rejected. You just have
to hope that you'll eventually figure out how to get your work published. If you stick with it
long enough and work at it hard enough, you will.

For students that excelled as undergraduates, the sudden and constant barrage of rejection and
failure is jarring. If you have an ego problem, Ph.D. school will fix it. With a vengeance.
(Some egos seem to recover afterward.)

This phase of the Ph.D. demands perseverance--in the face of uncertainty, in the face of
rejection and in the face of frustration.

Tenacity
To get a tenure-track professorship after Ph.D. school, you need an additional quality:
tenacity. Since there are few tenure-track faculty positions available, there is a fierce (yet
civil) competition to get them.
In computer science, a competitive faculty candidate will have about 10 publications, and 3-5
of those will be at "selective" or "Tier 1" venues (crudely, less than 33% acceptance rate). A
Ph.D. by itself won't even get you a job interview anymore.

There are few good reasons to get a Ph.D. "Because you want to become a professor" might
be the only good one. Ironically, there's a good chance you won't realize that you want to be a
professor until the end of grad school. So, if you're going to do Ph.D. school at all, do it right,
for your own sake.

To become professor, you can't have just one discovery or solve just one open problem. You
have to solve several, and get each solution published. As you exit graduate school, an arc
connecting your results should emerge, proving to faculties that your research has a profitable
path forward.

You will also need to actively, even aggressively, forge relationships with scholars in your
field. Researchers in your field need to know who you are and what you're doing. They need
to be interested in what you're doing too.

None of that is going to happen by itself.

Cogency
Finally, a good Ph.D. student must have the ability to clearly and forcefully articulate their
ideas--in person and in writing.

Science is as much an act of persuasion as it is an act of discovery.

Once you've made a discovery, you have to persuade experts that you've made a legitimate,
meaningful contribution. This is harder to do than it seems. Simply showing experts "the
data" isn't going to work. (Yes, in a perfect world, this would be sufficient.)

Instead, you have to spoon-feed the experts. As you write, you have to consciously minimize
the amount of time and cognitive pain it takes for them to realize you've made a discovery.

You may have to go "on tour" and give engaging presentations to get people excited about
your research. When you give conference talks, you want them eagerly awaiting the next
episode.

You will have to write compelling abstracts and introductions that hook the reader and make
her feel like investing time in your work.

You will have to learn how to balance clarity and precision, so that your ideas come across
without either ambiguity or stifling formality.

Generally, grad students don't arrive with the ability to communicate well. This is a skill that
they forge in grad school. The sooner acquired, the better.

Unfortunately, the only way to get better at writing is to do a lot of it. 10,000 hours is the
magical number folks throw around to become an expert at something. You'll never even get
close to 10,000 hours of writing by writing papers.
Assuming negligible practice writing for public consumption before graduate school, if you
take six years to get through grad school, you can hit 10,000 hours by writing about 5 hours a
day. (Toward the end of a Ph.D., it's not uncommon to break 12 hours of writing in a day.)

That's why I recommend that new students start a blog. Even if no one else reads it, start one.
You don't even have to write about your research. Practicing the act of writing is all that
matters.
Contents
Jump to:

1. My philosophy: Optimize transaction costs.

2. Don't work from home.
3. Eliminate temptation to waste time.
4. Salvage dead time with technology.
5. Get rid of your TV.
6. Consolidate email accounts.
7. Work from a laptop.
8. Use a calendar system.
9. Power-use a smartphone.
10. Turn off instant messaging.
11. Minimize collaboration costs.
12. Use a citation/paper-management system.
13. Procrastinate productively.
14. Iterate toward perfection.

My philosophy: Optimize transaction costs

Distilled into empirically-wrought principles, my high-level advice is:

1. Reduce transaction costs to engaging in productive behavior.

2. Erect transaction costs to engaging in counter-productive behavior.
3. Minimize opportunity cost. Do what you're best at doing, and partner with specialists
when you need to do something else. [This is the hardest principle for engineers to
accept. We feel that if we can do something, we should.]

In short, mold your life so that the path of least resistance is the path of maximum
productivity.

People are shocked when I tell them I'm lazy. I don't try to change the fact that I'm lazy; I
exploit it. I try to make sure that the laziest thing I can do at any moment is what I should be
doing.

As an anecdote, I'll offer my experience with doing pull-ups. I wanted to start doing pull-ups,
so I attached a portable pull-up bar to the door outside our bedroom. Every time I passed by,
the transaction cost of a pull-up was near zero, so I did some pull-ups. Moreover, I didn't have
to remember to do pull-ups, because I saw the pull-up bar all the time. One day, for whatever
reason, the bar was taken down and placed on the floor. It's been on the floor for months, and
I haven't done a pull-up since. It would take about ten seconds to re-install the bar, but I'm
often in a rush, and that ten seconds has become a transaction cost.

Don't work from home

Home is full of distractions. Academics have flexible schedules, which makes it all the more
important to force yourself to go into work every day. Invest in making your work-space a
comfortable, productive, enjoyable place to be:
 1. Move your books into your work-space. This is a forcing function more than
anything else. It's hard to do work at home when references are at work.
2. Get an ergonomic office chair. Nothing beats the Aeron chair.
3. Get a high-quality ergonomic keyboard. I highly recommend the Kinesis Advantage
.
4. Decorate your work-space. Make it a fun place to be.

Eliminate temptation to waste time

I developed a serious post-9/11 online news-reading addiction. I read everything: mainstream
media sites, forum sites, voting sites, blogs, etc. My default behavior when I wasn't doing
something else became to reflexively type cnn.com, fark.com, reddit.com or boingboing.net
into my browser. Somehow, I've never developed the Facebook addiction others seem to
have.

To stop losing time to these sites, I started blocking access to them completely by putting
them into my /etc/hosts file. But, inevitably, I'd want to check on some news, and then I'd
unblock a site, and I'd fall quickly back into my reading addiction. As always, learning
moderation is key. Three techniques have helped me manage the habit:

1. Restrict access to sites to optimal hours. My brain is slowest in the morning and
right after I get home from work around 6pm - 7pm. I use LeechBlock for Firefox to
limit browsing my time-wasters to exactly these time periods, and on top of that, I
limit myself to 45 minutes maximum per day across all of these sites. I also use
SafariBlock for Safari to block access to the sites I regularly visit. Others have
suggested using Apple's parental-control features on yourself, but I haven't had to take
it to this level.
2. Dump polling as a web-surfing style. Periodically polling web sites for updates is
inefficient, and it's habit-forming. You may check a site 100 times with no updates,
but on the 101st check, you get a nugget, and the habit gets reinforced. Psychologists
have long known that randomly rewarding a subject for good behavior leads to the
strongest conditioning, with the longest period to extinction when the reward is
removed. (It took me months to break the habit of typing in my favorite URLs, even
when I knew I would see a blocked screen.) Now, I use RSS and Google Reader to
funnel all of the sites I read into a single stream. Once LeechBlock lets me in to my
sites, I just check the reader stream, and I can tear through hundreds of headlines and
snippets, selecting just the few I want to read in more detail, in a few minutes.
3. Subscribe to dead-tree newspapers. I read the Wall Street Journal and the New York
Times during the week, and the The Economist on weekends. It's hard to find online
news that matches the caliber of these newspapers in their reporting, which makes it
less tempting to go looking.

One last piece of advice for breaking a browsing habit: prepare yourself for withdrawal
symptoms. I found myself sorely tempted to circumvent my own blocks on an hourly basis
after I first put them in place. Utilize every anti-circumvention feature available at first, and
slowly disable them once you've "detoxed" from your browsing habit.

Salvage dead time with technology

Life is full of dead time: waiting in offices, waiting in airports, waiting before a lecture,
waiting on the bus. Over the course of a year, dead time adds up to weeks, and for some, to
even a month.

Fortunately, there are now low-transaction-cost devices which make it easy for an academic
to be productive the moment dead time begins: eReaders like the Kindle, the iPhone and, of
course, the iPad.

Being able to carry around a small, thin tablet holding all of the research papers you have read
(and the ones you want to read) salvages a lot of otherwise wasted time.

These devices reclaim a lot of dead time with productive reading, particularly peer-reviewing
for conferences and journals.

In my opinion, the iPad is better than the Kindle for almost everything. But, for reading, the
Kindle's crisp digital ink still has the edge.

For extended reading on the iPad, use the Accessibility controls to invert the display to white
on black. Your eyes will thank you.

Get rid of your TV

I noticed leaving the TV on in the background could sap productivity all day long. With sites
like Hulu, Netflix and iTunes, you don't really need a cable bill anymore. I don't miss TV at
all.

Consolidate email accounts

All of my email accounts forward into GMail, so I have one place to check, and I don't miss
emails. Through IMAP, I keep all of my emails synchronized with my iPhone and backed up
to my hard drive with Apple Mail. I even uploaded eight years of email history to GMail so it
would all be quickly and easily searchable.

For years, I tried about one new email client each year: Outlook, hotmail, pine, Evolution,
Thunderbird, Apple Mail, mutt. Originally, I set up GMail as a spam filter for mutt, but I
quickly grew to prefer its interface. For the last four years, I've been totally satisfied with
GMail:

1. GMail takes a major step out of migration to new computers.

 2. Accessing email while away is easy, and a lost/stolen laptop is less catastrophic.
3. GMail can view PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files without an external viewer.
4. GMail respects power users with flexible filters and keyboard shortcuts.
5. GMail has a public, documented Greasemonkey scripting interface. If something
about GMail bothers you, you can fix it rather quickly. Many Greasemonkey scripts
for GMail already exist.
6. GMail allows export through POP, so you can keep personal backups of all your
email.
7. GMail allows synchronization through IMAP, so you can share the same view of your
email through multiple computers and multiple clients. For instance, if I send, read or
sort email on my iPhone, the changes are reflected immediately on GMail and vice
versa.
8. Labels are strictly more powerful than folders for email cataloging.
9. GMail has excellent spam filters. I get 100,000 spams per month. About 100 of those
reach my inbox.
10. Google Apps is a simple way to manage email for a private domain (like might.net).
Until recently, I used to run my own SMTP/POP servers for my domains. Then, my
virtual server went down after four years of uptime, taking half a day's email with it. I
had all my domains back up and running within a couple hours after setting them up
on Google Apps. This makes it a lot easier to upgrade my server now, too.

The same advice for web-browsing also applies to email. Install a notification tool (like
GMail notifier), so you only check your email when you get a new one. Constantly checking
email wastes time.

Note to privacy hounds: If you object to handing a company like Google all of your email,
realize that your incoming and outgoing email passes unencrypted through multiple
intermediate servers and routers. Your ISP already harvests all of your packets for advertisers.
Google, and anyone else that wants it, already has most of your email. Prove this to yourself
by sitting done near a public wi-fi access point and running ethereal. If you "care about
privacy" but you're sending or receiving anything sensitive over email without encrypting it
with something like PGP, you are doing it wrong. If you have sensitive email (or any
sensitive information, really) on your laptop, and you're not encrypting your hard drive with
strong encryption and a good password, ditto. Properly encrypting your data is the only way
to keep it safe from prying eyes.

Work from a laptop

1. When choosing a laptop, optimize size and battery life for mobility; maximize hard-
drive space. Use a server for number-crunching.
2. Get an external keyboard, mouse and monitor. Big second monitors have been proven
to boost productivity.
3. Make your laptop your centralized data store to avoid synchronization headaches.
While I still had a desktop, I exported my home directory over NFS from my laptop to
my desktop. SAMBA or AFS works about as well.
4. Use your laptop as your primary hard drive, and backup your laptop on a weekly
basis. Apple's built-in Time Machine software makes backing up completely
automatic and transparent.
5. Buy a separate power adapter for every location where you regularly use a laptop.
Use a calendar system
As a graduate student, life was simple enough that I could keep what I had to do and all the
major deadlines in my head. As a professor and a father, my schedule is packed with a
random assortment of appointments and places to be. My wife and I synchronize our
calendars using Google Calendar. Using NuevaSync (free), we also have real-time, two-way,
over-the-air syncing for our calendars and our iPhones. This set-up takes a lot of the overhead
out of staying organized that lazy folks like myself are prone to avoid.

If you don't have to synchronize your calendar with someone else, the Filofax system is a
great pencil-and-paper alternative.

Power-use a smartphone
Smartphones like the iPhone and those running Android are a quantum leap ahead of their
predecessors in terms of capabilities. I'm partial to the iPhone, in part because there are apps
available to do just about anything you can think of doing on a small, net-connected portable
device with access to GPS.

Turn off instant messaging

Instant messaging technology is great, but it makes it too easy to be interrupted, and in
science, interruptions are fatal to good research. The people that actually need to be in touch
with you can call, SMS or email.

Minimize collaboration costs

1. Running a research group is a lot like running as small business. Make it real by
branding your research group: give it a name. (Like U Combinator!) If you're working
a project, give the project a product name or a code name.
2. Exploit collaboration tools for writing papers. CVS was the old standard. Subversion
(SVN) has been accepted across many academic disciplines. Tools like SVN and CVS
allow multiple people to work on the same document simultaneously. Most of the
time, it can integrate changes without asking the user what to do when two people
modified the same file.
3. Set up a virtual dedicated server to run services (ssh, email, shared disk, web sites,
forums, wikis, svn) for your research group. I recommend whatever the cheapest plan
on linode.com is for this purpose.

Use a citation/paper-management system

In grad school, I managed a BibTeX file by hand. Whenever I started working on multiple
projects with multiple people, this system would start to collapse, and my BibTeX file would
get out of sync. Fortunately, there are great citation-management tools to automate much of
the hassle now. I've tried Mendeley, Zotero and CiteULike. Of those three, I prefer
CiteULike:
 1. CiteULike supports importing citation information automatically from many existing
scientific databases.
2. CiteULike does the best job of accurately importing citation information.
3. CiteULike makes group collaboration easy.
4. CiteULike BibTeX files for a user or group can be pulled from a URL on the
command line with tools like wget.
5. CiteULike exports in plaintext, so you can freely move or collaborate with another
citation-management system like BibDesk.

Procrastinate productively
If you must procrastinate, try to procrastinate on something with a later deadline rather than
something frivolous. I often spend the day before a submission deadline working on my next
paper or grant proposal.

If you can't bring yourself to procrastinate on work, try procrastinating on meta-work like
trying out things from the Academic Productivity Blog.

Iterate toward perfection

Treat perfection like a process, not an achievable state. Perfectionism is crippling to
productivity. I've known academics that can't even start projects because of perfectionism. I
know some academics that defend their lack of productivity by proudly proclaiming
themselves to be perfectionists. I'm not so sure one should be proud of perfectionism. I don't
think it's bad to want perfection; I just think it's unrealistic to expect it.

The metric academics need to hit is "good enough," and after that, "better than good enough,"
if time permits. Forget that the word perfect exists. Otherwise, one can sink endless amounts
of time into a project long after the scientific mission was accomplished. One good-enough
paper that got submitted is worth an infinite number of perfect papers that don't exist.

The publication structure of computer science even rewards the iterative process, as I'm sure it
does in other fields as well.

1. Mold an idea until it's well-formed; provide some examples and motivate intuition; if
there's time, do preliminary empirical validation. Send this to a workshop to get
feedback on the idea. Also, keep in mind that workshops are meant for preliminary
research, not preliminary papers. A workshop paper still has to be a complete, well-
written paper.
2. If the idea looks like a good one, empirically validate it and firm up the theory. Send
this to a good conference. [In computer science, RPT is based on good conferences
rather than good journals.]
3. If enthusiasm for the idea is high, write the journal article a year or so later, when
you've had time to distill the essence and the impact of the work.

To achieve an iterative work-flow, make iterations easy:

1. Once you know you're going to do something, start on it right away: create a blank
document file, create a blank presentation file, start drafting the email (with To: field
 blank). Then, if at any point in the future, you're moved to work on it, the transaction
cost of doing a little more work is near-zero.
2. Work on a project whenever you're moved to work on it. Don't pay attention to
deadline ordering unless it's an n-day project, and only n free days are left.