I have a question on which I’d like any opinions… this has been coming up for me lately, as I assess what I can do in the future to develop a more efficient, faster research/writing process.
Here is the type of situation I wonder about. I’ve made up a hypothetical one:
Let us say I […]

It’s difficult for me to read anything dense if there is music or other auditory distraction. Sometimes I’ll play nature sounds to drown out other sounds. Ocean and Storm are my favorites.
For writing, however, music is essential. Somehow having music playing entertains some over-analytical and busy part of my brain that gets in the […]

The Academic Word List (AWL) - developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. 570 word families that appear frequently in academic texts, but are not in the most frequent 2000 English words. Divided into 10 sublists based on frequency.
Effective Use of Microsoft […]

I’m pretty psyched about Zotero. It’s not yet developed to the point that I can use it. I really need batch record editing to get anything done (and to import my thousands of already-gathered-in-Procite citations).
Where this might come in handy for me now is gathering citations from the web. Then I can export them […]

Today I started re-reading Lakoff’s Women, fire, and dangerous things.
The first time I read it was in the first year of my masters program (2001-2). It was hard slogging through.
And now… I zip on through. I guess maybe I haven’t actually been getting stupider, despite the way it feels sometimes.
  affective state: full of cookies and […]

I filled up the entire journal re-shelving shelf with print journals from which I copied papers not available online.
I think I gave myself “stapling elbow.”
Now home to update the Procite db, eat, and read read read.
  

A day in the life of a (dissertating) academic.
8:36 Time to dissertate! Stare at piles of books. Read through last four or five pages written yesterday. Despair at own stupidity. Stare at piles of books.
  

My (quite new) laptop didn’t want to start up this morning. So instead of working on going through all the abstracts I downloaded yesterday, I’m running diagnostics on the computer. All crossable appendages crossed.
That’s today’s productivity killer.
Yesterday’s was using the record export features of ISI’s citation databases to tranfer all those records I should be […]

Last night I set up activeCollab on my website. I did this for two reasons.
1. Backup. I’m uploading each thing I work on to my webspace every day anyway. Now I will just do it through activeCollab, and it will be more organized because of…
2. Simple version control. I’m the only one working on these […]