One of the characteristics of academic work is that it is often portable and can occur in a variety of settings.

Here are tips and ideas from the ProfHacker archives about the various spaces in which academic work happens. Where to you like to work?

The office

As most of us have returned to the semester's routine, it seems that offices have been on the ProfHacker mind: Erin asked How is Your Workspace Furnished and George asked an Open Thread question What Does Your Office Door Look Like.

I wrote about Organizing Your Teaching Materials, which can often take up a significant amount of space in your office, as Jason points out in What Will You Throw Away Today.

Jason shared a picture of his workspace and linked to those of a few others. Some of our readers joined in the fun and posted pictures to the ProfHacker Flickr group. Of course, if your primary office is at home, you may have more...

[Each week at ProfHacker, George Williams hosts "Open Thread Wednesday," a discussion forum in which readers are invited to share their answers to a particular question. The Commenting and Community Guidelines still apply.

You can suggest topics or ask us questions via email: ProfHackerCHE@gmail.com. —Ed.]

In a comment on Mark's recent post about business cards, I happened to mention that I always keep a few on my office door so that people can take one with them if they come by and I'm not there. This got me thinking about ways in which we do (or don't) use our office doors to share information that people need to know.

I've always put my semester schedule on my door—actually, we're required to—and I also used to tape various flyers for student organizations as well as articles or images I thought were interesting. Then I began to think about my office door as a parallel version...

Early in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, the sight of a colleague's elegant new business card sends the narrator and sociopath Patrick Bateman into a panic attack. As his Wall Street buddies debate the merits of a Silian Rail font on bone-colored stock versus a Romalian typeface on eggshell, Bateman's world closes in on him: "Suddenly the restaurant seems far away, hushed, the noise distant, a meaningless hum, compared to this card."

Ellis's novel is of course an unrelenting, purposefully over-the-top satire of the 1980s. At its heart, American Psycho is a novel of manners, basically Jane Austen with a chainsaw. You can't imagine anybody getting so worked up over a business card these days, even a clincally self-absorbed monster like Patrick Bateman.

Nonetheless, business cards are a standard accouterment for academics, even in this world of Bump, texting, and direct messaging....

I recently went on a weekend camping and mountain biking trip with a friend of mine, and the experience caused me to reflect upon the importance (or lack thereof) of having the lastest and greatest gear to get done what you need to get done. We camped next to some guys who had very nice, very expensive bikes, but who didn't seem to do any actual mountain biking, as far as we could tell. Instead, they would drive into town for pizza at mealtimes and then come back to camp and sit around their campfire drinking a lot of beer and smoking a lot of... well, let's just say that there was smoking taking place over there.

Now I don't have the nicest bike in the world. In fact, it's really just an affordable commuter bike that's been tweaked a bit so I can ride it on trails. However, I actually do ride it, although I sometimes wish I had a fancier (lighter, better equipped) bike. But this trip...

I've long been interested in systems of personality or temperament typing, ranging from the Keirsey Temperament Sorter to the Ayurvedic doshas to any number of magazine or Facebook quizzes. As I've mentioned before, I've found the Myers-Briggs system very helpful in my personal and professional life—much more so than the quiz I took about which kind of pirate I would be. But all such quizzes and systems offer maps of difference. For instance: in learning that my dosha is pitta-kapha, I also realize that I have no vata traits—which are in fact the very physical and temperamental traits that characterize one of my best friends. The system of doshas offers a way of understanding the differences between us and why we prefer very different kinds of food and activity. The utility of any such system depends upon how detailed its maps of difference are and upon the context in which...

Here at ProfHacker, we've previously polled you about what's in your bag.

Let's make the question even more basic: what type of bag do you carry for your academia needs?

After having two successive bags begin to show wear and tear within a month of purchase, I decided it was time to invest in something of better quality.

To help with the decision-making process, I made a list of criteria that were important to me.

Here's my list.

• Size: not too large, not too small. I wanted the bag to be able to carry a laptop, a legal pad, a Moleskin notebook, maybe a book or two, pens and pencils, cell phone and iPod Touch, a wallet, and a pouch that I use to store a Flash drive and some other miscellaneous small items. Clearly, carrying this number of items would necessitate the bag being somewhat large. However, I also wanted it to be small enough to look reasonably like a regular ...

We at Profhacker like our gadgets. Much of the time, we talk about our digital tools or the things we use when we are online to make our lives easier. There is one analog tool, though, that I'm not sure I could live without, and I know I could not travel without it: my air machine. As I think about it, it might have been fellow ProfHacker Natalie who first told me years ago about traveling with one of these. I know for sure that I first used it while traveling to the Modern Language Association conference in 2006, and it changed my travel life forever.

That may sound a bit dramatic, but it's very true. I am an incredibly light sleeper. Any shift in noise or light is likely to disturb me. At home, my partner and I have created a bedroom that works for both of us, but travel has always wrecked havoc on me. That year at MLA in Philadelphia, I slept amazingly well.  Even though...

One of the most popular posts on ProfHacker is Nels's An Introduction to GTD (Getting Things Done). Many of us on team ProfHacker rely at least in part upon David Allen's model for increased productivity, which was first introduced in his 2002 book Getting Things Done, and many of our older posts relate to different elements of the GTD approach. In his introduction, Nels boils down GTD into four key elements which I'm going to use here to organize this survey of our archives.

Get Your Thoughts Out of Your Head

One of the appealing aspects of GTD is its simplicity, and in fact many GTD coaches warn against the impulse to over-complicate Allen's framework. The essential elements of a GTD system include a calendar and four lists: Projects, Next Actions, Waiting For, and Someday/Maybe. These lists can be maintained on sheets of paper, on document or spreadsheet files on your computer, as ...