Industry work usually energized me. My subconscious worked on it during evenings and weekends, and I was charged up on Monday to *continue* where work had left off on Friday. In grad school, I don’t continue. I restart from zero, over and over and over.

Sometimes in industry I had to negotiate to fight off pressures to defocus. A couple times I quit, and a couple times we worked out a new arrangement, which kept me focused as well as kept the company’s work getting done. Maybe the problem is that I don’t know how to negotiate in the academic world. All my jobs were at small companies, where negotiation is straightforward: the decision-maker is the person who hired you, you talk with that person every day about what’s going on, and every day, you smooth out the current small difficulties. In grad school (and maybe in big companies), there doesn’t seem to be a person you can negotiate with. Or even people you work with. There are just some mysterious “policies”. Maybe the trick is to find out who is behind those policies.

[...] 7. Take a 10 minute blog break. Make a little treat for yourself; let’s say you work effectively for two hours and then you can reward yourself with a 10 minute blog break! Works at home, and if you’re at the office, make sure no one sees you!  Visit decor8 or Daydream Lily. And if you want some productivity boost, visit zen habits: Take lots of breaks to get more done, Think simple now: The 4 hour workday or Study Hacks: Fixed Schedule Productivity [...]

[...] too many typos. I am learning to work only 40 hours a week (radical!). I am experimenting with Fixed Schedule Productivity and Completion Centric [...]

[...] WEEK: If your work day and work week tend to get away on you, give Cal Newport’s article on Fixed-Schedule Productivity a read. Cal is an MIT post-doc student who “explores strategies for building a remarkable [...]

I discovered just how important a work schedule was once I had a baby. I’m a grad student in a challenging program (physics); my daughter is now in preschool during the day, so the ONLY time I have to get anything done is during the day when she’s in school. Where before I just did stuff whenever, wherever–even pulling an all-nighter, if need be–now I’m hyperfocused on getting as much done during the school day as I can. No surfing the net, no Facebook, no procrastination. Get into the lab, or sit down at the desk, and WORK!

Funny thing is, I get more done now as a mother than I did when I was childless. It’s all about focus and efficiency.

[...] que é? Inspirado pelo texto do Cal Newport no Study Hacks [3], adotamos um cronograma de trabalho que consiste em foco no trabalho durante toda a manhã e tarde [...]

[...] post-graduation, but which make you a non-boring,fully-functional human being.So, inspired by this blog post, I’ve decided to strike back. It’s hard, but I’ve had somesuccesses: for the first [...]

[...] Cal Newport over on the Study Hacks Blog; you can read about it (and many other great things) over here. Basically FSP is a response to the notion that work will expand to fill the time you have allotted [...]

[...] that semester and throughout their lives. Hopefully, the students will learn to creat powerful fixed schedules (as described by Cal Newport [awesome blog by the way]) and do a bit of everything every single day [...]