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Author Archives: Natalie Houston

May 24, 2012, 8:00 am

Why 15 Minutes?

By Natalie Houston

number 15Hands down, my favorite productivity tool is a simple digital timer. I’ve written before at ProfHacker about some of the ways I use it for writing, for exercising, and for household chores. (If you don’t have a physical timer handy, you can use one of these online versions, or download one for your phone.)

One of the questions I frequently get asked is: how long should my timed interval be?

The answer depends on what you’re doing and how you want the timer to help you.

For instance, a quick five-minute clean up can be a great way to tackle a messy desk.  When I’m engaged in serious writing, I’ll often set my timer for 40 minutes for concentrated effort. But many tasks fall somewhere in between.

My go-to midway timer setting is fifteen minutes. Here’s why:

  • 15 minutes is familiar: you already have a good internal sense of what a quarter hour means since it’s an interval we…

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May 15, 2012, 8:00 am

Pinterest and Link With Love

By Natalie Houston

Founded in 2010, Pinterest has rapidly grown in popularity over the past 18 months. Pinterest is a social network based on image sharing. User “pin” images they like to “boards,” and can comment and follow the collections of images created by other users. Some of the popular uses for the site include collecting ideas for major purchases, event planning, and theme boards (because the internet needs more pictures of kittens!). As Erin mentioned in her post on Pinterest, she found herself using it not only as “a fun way to pass time” but also “to collect ideas for my home office . . . to gather recipes, and as a place to get inspired for various creative DIY projects.”

Many Pinterest users describe their image collections as “inspiration boards” and it’s a useful tool for writers, designers, and teachers to be familiar with. But several concerns have been raised in recent months about…

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May 7, 2012, 8:00 am

What do you want to ignore?

By Natalie Houston

catPeter Bregman’s recent book, 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done offers many excellent suggestions for setting your priorities, managing your time, and creating a healthy work/life balance.

The title of his book refers to his suggested plan for integrating reflective planning into your workday: five minutes at the start and end of the day, and one minute each hour to check in with your goals and priorities and ask yourself if you’re actually doing what you want to be doing. Of course, that figure reveals his focus on people who work in a traditional business office environment, rather than academics and writers whose work hours rarely conforms to that eight-hour template. But many of his ideas and strategies can be usefully adapted to any kind of work and work setting.

One of his ideas that I’ve found very helpful is the to-ignore list. A …

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April 26, 2012, 11:00 am

When Cell Phones Are the Book: some observations on e-readers

By Natalie Houston

cell phoneOver the past few years, increasing numbers of students in my classes have been using e-readers of different sorts. But this semester marks something of a turning point in that trend, as I’d estimate at least half of my students in each of my two literature courses this semester have been using e-readers. As I’m wrapping up the semester, I thought I’d share a few observations about this trend and its impact in my classroom.

The Classroom Context

First, I should make clear that I’m simply describing my own experience in two upper-level literature courses this semester. I teach nineteenth-century British literature, so all of the texts I teach are in the public domain and hence available for e-readers. These are specialized courses that do not use a survey textbook . I do order specific paperback editions of the novels and poetry for the course, and recommend them to students, but I …

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April 16, 2012, 11:00 am

From the Archives: CVs and Annual Reports

By Natalie Houston

paperAlthough the academic curriculum vitae (CV) and annual activity report often differ in scope and format, both documents attempt to describe and/or document the range of professional activities faculty and staff perform. On some campuses, the annual report may in fact consist only of an updated CV; on others the CV is only one part of an annual reporting effort that may also involve the completion of forms or spreadsheets.

Although updating and completing these documents can feel like a chore, especially at busy times of semester, they offer important rhetorical opportunities to convey the variety, depth, and scope of your professional work. Joshua Eyler’s excellent recent essay The Rhetoric of the CV considers this point in relation to graduate students’ self-presentation on the job market. Here at ProfHacker, we’ve discussed some other important aspects of CVs and annual reports:

…

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April 10, 2012, 8:00 am

What Do You Wear to Do Your Best Thinking?

By Natalie Houston

A recent article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky suggests that items of clothing can have an impact on the wearer’s cognitive performance. (See summary.) They offer the term “enclothed cognition” to describe the effects, which in their study seem to result from a combination of the symbolic associations with particular clothing and the actual wearing of the item.

Study participants were asked to perform a Stroop test, which measures the reaction time to tasks requiring attention (identifying colors where the display color doesn’t match the word — for example, the word “green” displayed in blue). Students who took the test while wearing a white coat lab coat performed significantly better than those not wearing the coats. Participants who took the test while wearing the same coat, but who were told it was a painter’s coat did not show…

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April 5, 2012, 8:00 am

Using Twitter Lists

By Natalie Houston

birdI don’t know whether it’s a symptom of the mid-semester crunch, or a social media version of cleaning out one’s closet for spring, but over the last couple of weeks, several people in my tweetstream have mentioned that they are feeling overwhelmed by how many people they are following. Several have started culling their lists and issuing general apologies for any hurt feelings caused by unfollowing.

Now, I’m all for clearing clutter and sometimes trimming your social media lists on Twitter, Facebook, or other sites is a good idea, particularly if your usage of these services has changed over time. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed but don’t want to unfollow anybody, you can use Twitter’s built-in list feature to help you manage an unwieldy number of tweets. Lists can also help you deepen your areas of interest so that Twitter remains fresh and engaging.

How did I get here?

When…

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March 21, 2012, 8:00 am

What’s Going Well?

By Natalie Houston

My training and experience as both a teacher of literature and as a personal productivity coach have shown me time and time again the value of asking simple questions. A good question doesn’t have to be long or complicated. A good question shouldn’t be an argument misleadingly packaged as a query. A good question often opens up other questions.

So here’s today’s question: what’s going well for you right now?

I like this question for several reasons:

Most people don’t spend enough time thinking or talking about what’s going well. At a deep neurological level, our brains are designed to pay more attention to potential danger than to neutral or beneficial things. Learning to pay more attention to the good stuff, even just with simple journaling exercises or breathwork, can help create new, more positive neural pathways.

Most people find it easier to focus on or complain about…

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March 13, 2012, 8:00 am

Using Invert Bookmarks in Your Text Editor

By Natalie Houston

bookmarkA good plain text editor is like the Swiss army knife of software: it’s a knife, a screwdriver, a scissors, a toothpick, and so much more all in one.  If you’re drawn to simplicity, then plain text is for you.  Plain text can also form the basis of a whole productivity system, as Caleb McDaniel explains.

Recently on ProfHacker, Lincoln and Konrad have sung the praises of working in plain text. As Lincoln pointed out in his post on Markdown:

plain text is a great format to use because (1) it can be read by any computer or device; (2) it’s future proof, since computers will always be able to read it; (3) it can be synced to all your devices; (4) it can be converted to virtually any format

Konrad’s been demonstrating the efficiency of regular expressions which are typically built into a full-featured plain text editor, like Notepad++ or TextPad for Windows, or TextWrangler or

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March 5, 2012, 8:00 am

From the Archives: Email (II)

By Natalie Houston

envelope
It’s been over a year since our first From the Archives post on email. This post looks at some of the tips and tools we’ve covered since then.

Manage Your Inbox

Amy tried Using OtherInbox to Tame her Email a service that organizes and digests your incoming messages.

Brian discusses using email forwarding tools to help with Managing Email While On Leave

Schedule Email and Reminders

I wrote about how to Set Email Reminders with Nudgemail, a free service that allows you to send email reminders to yourself or others at prescheduled dates and times.

Amy wrote about Boomerang, a plugin for Gmail and Outlook that allows you to write an email and send it at a later time.

Clean Up, Lock Up

In a Wednesday open-thread discussion, readers offered suggestions about how they Archive Old Email

Konrad wrote about how to Secure Email in Thunderbird and Apple Mail using…

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