Tweeting to the Void

I've previously written about how I turned off Facebook's news feed. I keep an account with Facebook because people occasionally contact me there. It is also an unfortunate truth that many companies in Jordan (where I live) or in the wider Middle East only have representation on Facebook instead of their own website. (Why they insist on doing this baffles me and is perhaps a topic for a future post).

I have long preferred Twitter as a medium for filtering through or touching -- however obliquely -- things going on at any particular moment. I have no pretensions to actively follow every single tweet to pass through my feed. Rather, it's something I dip into every now and then.

Increasingly in recent months, I found myself growing dissatisfied with the pull it often has on me. It has become something of a truism to state that 'twitter isn't what it once was', but there's less and less long-term benefit in following discussions as and when they happen.

RescueTime tells me that I spent 86 hours and 16 minutes on Twitter in 2017 -- just under quarter of an hour each day. That feels like a lot to me.

Enter 'Tweet to the Void'. This is a Chrome extension. (For Firefox and other browsers, I have to imagine things like this exist.) When I visit twitter.com, the feed is not visible. All I see is somewhere to post a tweet if that's what I want to do. (There is still some value in posting blogposts and articles there, since I know some people don't use RSS). Of course, I can always turn off the extension with ease, but adding this extra step has effectively neutralised Twitter for me. 

Try it; see how you feel about having something standing in the way of your social media fix. Let me know how you get on.

Audio Courses with Language Transfer

For beginners, one of the most important tasks is to get a sense for how a new language sounds. You can do this by immersion and osmosis -- living in a country, perhaps -- but it's hard and you'll usually just get exposed to the same set of words and phrases: numbers, directions and greetings.

Another great way of hearing a decent amount of sounds and suitable materials is to quickly run through an audio-only course designed for total beginners. If your language of choice exists in Michel Thomas and/or Pimsleur, you can do those. They're a great way to get your tongue around the language. But they can be pricey, which is why I wanted to mention another option: Language Transfer.

These are free courses in eight different languages which follow a similar model to Michel Thomas in that they are recordings of a small group class in that particular language. The courses differ in how far they take you, but generally speaking they offer an overview of the grammar and some useful phrases and vocabulary.

If you're looking for a cheap way to get a start in something like German or even Turkish or Swahili, check it out.

Trello to Markdown: a Chrome extension

Turns out, whenever you need something on the internet, someone else has already made it.

I was looking around for a way to get several hundred Trello notes (and their descriptions) into a format where I could work on the texts in an offline format. (Trello doesn't have an offline mode.)

I found this excellent extension (made by 'Trapias') which allows you to get your data out of Trello. Click here for the Chrome extension itself and here for the source code over on Github. You can export to HTML, Markdown, Excel and OPML. This is a great set of options, and there are all sorts of advanced selections you can make.

To use:

(1) Go to the board menu -> more -> print and export

(2) a new button will appear called TrelloExport. (Previously there would just have been a JSON export option).

ClozeMaster: learn words in context

Clozemaster is a service I discovered recently while researching the resource guide for my new book, Master Arabic. Clozemaster is intended to be a next step for students who have mastered some of the basics of their language of study. It teaches the language through a game where you identify the missing word. Here's what one of their tests look like, for example:

You can see that it has a space where a word is blocked out. Four options are available below, from which you have to choose. Of course, number two is the correct option and by clicking it you move onto the next question.

The sentences are taken from a wonderful open-source project called Tatoeba. Tatoeba is a collection of sentences and translations which are curated and gathered through crowd-sourcing.

Clozemaster hooks into the corpus of sentences available in Tatoeba and serves up tests ordered by how commonly the word is found (i.e. its frequency ranking).

If you're wondering why this is useful, it helps to know a little about how we best learn vocabulary. The gold standard of vocabulary acquisition happens through context. You learn the word when it is used in a real sentence or scenario, and where you derive all sorts of clues from the words around it. This is how we learn words when we're growing up, and it's how we continue to learn words and concepts in adulthood.

Clozemaster, therefore, is a great tool for someone who has mastered the basics of grammar in their language of study but who wants to grow their vocabulary further. At that stage, it doesn't help to learn words in isolation like services like Memrise have you doing. Instead, learn through reading, or learn through services like Clozemaster. The service is free and would be ideal for someone who's just finished Duolingo in a particular language (for example).

Dinner Party Decision Matrix: A Python Tool

Some friends were coming round for dinner this evening and I couldn’t decide what to cook. I couldn’t decide because there were too many variables floating around that would impact the decision.

So I decided to make an app.

I wanted something tasty but that also was relatively hassle-free. I wanted something that didn’t take too much time to prepare, but it still needed to be different from the kind of food I’d cook in a rush at the end of a long day.

I’d come across the idea of weighted decision-making a while back, and really like its premise; you say how important various factors are to you and then rate all the different options according to those same factors. At the end, you’re left with a score that can be said to be more objective than just your gut feeling.

So yesterday morning I listed a bunch of the factors that were important to me in coming to a decision about what to cook. I figured I could get some coding practice by making a tool that would work to calculate the best option from any combination of choices.

I put the finishing touches on the decision-making tool this morning. You can check it out on Github, though you’ll need to know a little about how Python works to get it going for yourself. I’m fairly sure my code looks horrific to a seasoned professional. There are probably ways I could have standardised the flow of questions and improved the output, but for now, I’m satisfied.

The app ended up picking the following for dinner (photo below):

- Courgette, chickpea and feta filo pastry pie

- Roast beetroot and pistachio salad

- Kale, pomegranate and shredded chicken salad

- and a beetroot and chocolate cake

View fullsize

I learnt a bunch of things about Python while coding the tool:

1. When you run a x= raw_input(“Ask question here”) command, the information allocated to x will be in a string format. If you are collecting numbers, you’ll need to convert it to an integer format by using int().
2. Lists and dictionaries can be tricky, particularly when you’re looping over them or looping over certain keys etc.
3. It helps to test while you code. This particular function wasn’t too complex to understand, so I just pushed on without testing so much. At some point towards the end, I realised something in the middle was wrong: cue much debugging. I keep reading about the importance of having in-built tests. I’m not sure what that would mean / have meant in the context of this particular app, but I imagine I’ll find out in due course.
4. Coding is fun and appeals to the compulsive side of my brain. I rarely need to be urged back to the task at hand when I’m coding. This probably has something to do with the quick feedback loop that coding enables. In any case, I’m hooked (again).

Notification Zero

As I reach the final stages of a major project, I’ve been saying ‘no’ more often. I’ve been turning down work, conferences and all the little things that take away from my ability to focus for hours at a stretch.

The other day I realised that my usual clampdown on notifications on my various digital devices wasn’t as tight as I ideally prefer, so I turned them all off. (You can read how to turn off iOS notifications here, and Android notifications here.) I’m writing down the various parts of this in case it’s useful to someone else in the midst of a big project.

In practice, this means the following:

• no badges on apps on my screen. (The software on your phone is designed to be addictive, to make you spend more time using it. I already live my life in black-and-white so that’s a start, but removing app badges is the next step.)
• permanently set to airplane mode. (This is easy for me as my work or life doesn’t ever really involve receiving phone calls, but it removes the chance of business / telemarketing distractions.)
• all other apps’ notification permissions turned off. (If someone messages me on WhatsApp or Signal, I will never ever get a notification about it. My phone won’t make a noise, nor will there be any badge showing that there are people who tried to get in touch with me. The only way I’ll ever see if anyone wrote to me on a messaging app is to open up that app. I do this perhaps once a day, sometimes only a couple of times a week, but I’ve conditioned myself to this level of withdrawal over the past year or two).
• Email permanently disabled on my phone. (Email is the big focus killer. If I generalise, it amounts to a box of other people’s requests on my time. So I have no way to receive email on my phone. I have things set up that I can send email (i.e. I’ve installed the SMTP login details but not enabled IMAP), but no way to receive it.)

I have a fixed schedule for things like checking email: two windows from 12-1pm and 5-6pm. Outside those windows, my email is disabled (using Freedom) so there’s no way for me to access it. On my laptop, a whole bunch of other sites whose addresses are easy to type and get lost on, I pre-empt my worst self by just disabling them during the day. Problem solved.

Whenever I write a post on this blog, it auto-posts to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Tumblr. While the temptation might be to check to see who has commented on it and so on, by locking myself out on a specific schedule, this means I can choose to look at these things at the end of the day, if I really need/want to.

Different Uses for Spaced Repetition

[This is a cross-post via the Spaced Repetition Foundation blog, where it was originally published]

Maybe Spaced Repetition isn't the best word. It's only descriptive after the fact, once someone has explained to you about Ebbinghaus and his experiments learning sheets of random numbers during the 1870s. For a general audience, we probably need a better term to help people understand what you can do with Spaced Repetition. We also need better examples and models of people who use it in a variety of domains of their life.

The first use case or scenario in which many encounter spaced repetition software or uses is language learning. And yes, it is great for learning vocabulary in an efficient manner. You can see how people have found ways to blast through large numbers of words by using things like Anki or Memrise.

But it would be a waste to limit our understanding of what Anki or spaced repetition can do to just learning vocabulary lists. It can be used for so much more. Indeed, expanding people's awareness of the various possibilities is an important reason why Matt, Natalie and I decided to set up this foundation.

With that in mind, I wanted to take a few moments to write down some thoughts on how you can use Anki and Spaced Repetition in other areas of your life. This list isn't in any particular order. You'll find that most things involving information or learning can be somehow coupled with the use of spaced repetition software, and the extent of your use is basically only as limited as your creativity.

- Birthdays -- learn all the birth dates of your friends and family. This probably works best in conjunction with some other system like the major system for remembering numbers, but you might be able to brute force this through.
- Kindle Clippings -- using Anki's in-built cloze deletion tool, you can blank out key parts of your kindle clippings to remind you of things you read in previous months or years. This way, books that you've read needn't be confined to vague memories. You can be more deliberate about what you're learning. Even things like book titles could be something you could learn with Anki. Consider a card which tests me on the author's name and the title (based on a short description). This way I avoid having those moments where I forget the title of the book but remember the contents pretty well.

- Magazine articles / things online as you're reading
I do this a lot. Whenever I'm reading online articles -- in Instapaper, let's say, which is the place where I read most things -- I'll save the highlights of passages I want to keep in my reference library. At a later date, I'll go through those highlights and see what I want to remember for the longer-term. I'll then transfer the clipping or highlight into my Anki library.

- New English words -- I'll occasionally come across technical vocabulary that is new to me while readying. If it's a word that I find myself looking up often, I'll save that entire sentence into Anki and use the cloze deletion method to set up an appropriate test.

- People / Faces
Matt seems to use this far more than me, though I'm starting to do it more often. The idea is that you find a picture of people you meet in meetings or in work contexts (Google Images or Facebook works well for this) and test yourself on their names and maybe one or two key facts about them -- that they're a vegetarian, perhaps, or that they just had a baby, or whatever it is. You can even do this pre-emptively. I once did this prior to a conference/event on Afghanistan. The conference home page had everyone's name and photo (those who were speaking / attending) so I just downloaded the lot, made cards for everyone as well as what their job/specialism was. By the time I arrived at the conference I knew everyone's name and who they worked for and what they worked on. It was a far more relaxed and personable experience than previous events of that kind. I don't get invited to speak at such events any more really, so I have no use for this, but I imagine many readers would find this useful.

- Reference materials -- You probably have things in your life that you're perpetually looking up. The time in-between looking-up probably is a matter of months (or maybe years). Just long enough to forget, but not long enough to forget that you once knew this thing. With Anki, those tip-of-the-tongue moments can become a feature of the past. No more remembering that you once new something.
Some examples: perhaps the precise proportions of a recipe you make every  month or two. Yet every time you make the recipe you have to look up whether it is 1 part flour to 2 parts water, or 1:3. Anki can keep your memory fresh.
Similarly with important medical data, or phone numbers, or points of contact for certain work projects or people.

- Coding language -- I used this while studying coding this past summer, and have found it great for making sure that the conventions I learnt for one language didn't get forgotten while I worked on the next language / scenario.

- Revising things you should probably already know but maybe have forgotten
This, for me, is the subject of mathematics. I studied it at school, but since then have had less need for it. This past year I've returned to mathematics with the somewhat embarrassing realisation that even things like my times-tables aren't as solidly in my brain as I'd like. I can tell you what 6x7 produces, but I'll probably need to think about it for a few seconds. Enter, Anki. I've been drilling myself on times tables for a few months and have found a real uptick in the speed at which I can recall those answers.

- Geography
You probably did a certain amount of this at school, but since then haven't added to the knowledge (or some maybe has been forgotten). Learning all the capitals of all the countries of the world (and being able to locate them on a map) isn't just an abstract skill. Things like this enhance your ability to understand and interact with the world. Instead, when you read a news article referencing a number of countries, you can place them on a map and realise that Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso and that it's included in the article for that reason.

Other niche things I've used Anki to help me with:
- brewing times for different varieties of tea, and also the ideal temperature of the water
- Ayas for the Qur'an (i.e. learning to recite these by heart). I know many use Anki for learning Bible verses, too.
- Learning the periodic table (alas, many years ago, in a deck now since deleted from my phone)
- The Japanese Kanji

Others use Anki for learning med-school data.

As I wrote above, the limit to what you can use Anki for is basically limited only by your creativity and imagination.

Turn Off Facebook's News Feed

Judging by the stats generated by Google Analytics and Squarespace’s own tool, over 40% of those who read my blog come here from Facebook. I’m slightly astounded by that number. It also means if I left Facebook (as I’m sometimes wont to do), I’d presumably lose all of those Facebook readers since most don’t seem to use RSS readers or anything else similar.

All of this is just by way of preamble to point you towards a neat little tool called News Feed Eradicator. I’ve been using it for the past 5 or 6 months, and it has delivered many benefits. Its function is pretty simple: turn off the News Feed in Facebook. The only thing you’re left with is the bar on the top with the little red glowy number indicator (that you won’t be seeing as a red if you turned your screen to greyscale as I previously suggested) for all the millions of notifications Facebook seems to think are important.

I only use Facebook as a sort of broadcasting platform since I do know that some people exclusively use it as a source of news and reading material. But if I have to log in to post something, I don’t want to be confronted by my News Feed and its temptations (or dissatisfactions), then I have this Chrome extension to switch everything off.

So I write this now to encourage you all to turn off your News Feeds with the extension, even though I realise this might mean you might not see the next time I post something. (There are, in any case, many other ways to follow my writings/blog: RSS, twitter and via email newsletter, for instance).

PhD Tools: Freewriting and Journalling to Think Through your Work

[This is part of a series on the tools I used to write my PhD. Check out the other parts here.]

A few years back, I read a book with the (intentionally) provocative title, Write Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes A Day. I was travelling back to Afghanistan from a short stay in Europe, and I was sat in Istanbul airport, waiting for my connecting flight. I remember the moment quite clearly, because a long wait time plus a delay didn't phase me. I was sucked into the book and the idea that the author presented. (There's also another good one along a similar theme: How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul Silvia.

Basically, she explained how writing for a very short amount of time each day, taking the time to think through whatever was going on with your research, but on paper instead of your head -- was a trick that would really help your work. It's not a new idea, this technique of freewriting. When you take this time, these 15 or 20 minutes, you aren't writing a section of your thesis itself, you're writing almost a note to yourself about how it is going, what you think are important things you  need to consider, whether this is a useful line of inquiry and so on.

Since that day, I've incorporated this kind of writing much more often as a general practice. There's a great service run by all-round make-useful-things-for-everyone-to-benefit-from person Buster Benson called 750Words. It sends you a friendly reminder every day to write 750 words on its site. There's all sorts of gamification and encouragement of writing streaks etc, and while writing the middle sections of my PhD, I would check in to 750words.com every day at the start of the morning to journal out my current research position and think through whatever problems I was about to face in my work that coming day.

It may feel a bit redundant at times, but I've found the practice really useful. Give it a try. You might find that it works for you.

PhD Tools: Pen and Paper

[This is part of a series on the tools I used to write my PhD. Check out the other parts here.]

It's worth also talking in general terms about pen and paper. Readers of this blog would be right in considering me as someone who uses many different digital tools. Yet I am also a firm advocate for the use of paper and pen.

I've written before about my use of a four-color pen. This was one of the more useful discoveries of 2015.

Using pen and paper offers the opportunity for slowing down and thinking in different ways about particular problems. Needless to say, pen and paper as a tool is firmly 'distraction-free', perhaps unless you're someone who likes to doodle.

I like working on problems from different perspectives throughout my attempts to tackle whatever complexities arise. For this reason, I'll spend some time outlining, some time free-writing, some time structuring and restructuring things I've already written, some time talking things through with a third-party, and some time making mindmaps or lists of ideas with pen and paper.

The full handwritten overview of all my PhD chapters, glued to a large white sheet of paper

This cycling through different ways of composition / thinking on paper is something I developed over time, and it was in part a product of my time in Kandahar. Electricity was in limited supply, as was the internet, and some days there would simply be no way to write on a laptop. Sometimes even the laptop wouldn't start because the temperature in our little room on the roof was too hot. So I developed things to do during those downtimes, so that I wasn't completely hampered from working. The interruptions and lack of power was such a prominent feature of life that to allow yourself to be dictated by that would be to never complete anything.

So I would read books or articles on my Kindle. I would make lists in my notebooks. I would make lists of things to look up when the internet or electricity came back. I would make lists of tasks. I would outline sections of whatever I was writing. I would have focused discussions with Felix about a particular section or issue. Pen and Paper was at the centre of all of this, and I took that on to my life when I returned to places with constant streams of electricity and internet connectivity.

I've actually found that I'm the most useful and productive (in a holistic sense) when I'm in that disconnected mode, without the reliance on the internet to look everything up, and forced to just forge ahead with the hard work of thinking.

A particular model for this was the work of Erich Auerbach and his book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which he wrote from Istanbul during the Second World War without access to many sources. As Edward Said explains in his Introduction:

"He explains in the concluding chapter of Mimesis that, even had he wanted to, he could not have made use of the available scholarly resources, first of all because he was in wartime Istanbul when the book was written and no Western research libraries were accessible for him to consult, second because had he been able to use references from the extremely voluminous secondary literature, the material would have swamped him and he would never have written the book. Thus along with the primary texts that he had with him, Auerbach relied mainly on memory and what seems like an infallible interpretive skill for elucidating relationships between books and the world they belonged to."

My hunch is that the limitations on his work process, and access to sources, was one of the things that made that book so great.

Pen and paper don't need batteries. So give it a try. Go somewhere new, or somewhere you feel like your energy gets recharged, take a notebook with you and make notes. You can always type them up later on, but for now, just write and think.

PhD Tools: Vitamin-R and the Pomodoro Technique for Getting Going

[This is part of a series on the tools I used to write my PhD. Check out the other parts here.]

In my last post I mentioned the way I divide my work into timed segments. The ideal timing for me, I felt, was 45 mins on : 15 minutes off. The canonical division, however, is 25 minutes on : 5 minutes off. This is a technique commonly referred to as the Pomodoro Technique (named after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer, I think). You might find that starting off at 45:15 is too much at the beginning, particularly if you're not used to focused stretches of work, and that you have to slowly work your way up to that ratio, increasing the minutes incrementally.

I like the idea of splitting work into timed units as an alternative to the usual task-based approach. This way, you make sure to take regular breaks, and you develop a healthy appreciation for the fact that some tasks take longer than you were expecting. I used to be someone who would claim to work from 8am-6pm on a particular project. I now realise that that is an illusion. Nobody can concentrate for that long, and the work you'll be producing by the end of that session will most likely be worthless. Far better to have focused core sessions and then be honest about where you're spending your time. Working 8am-6pm day-in-day-out is also a surefire way to burn out from what you're doing.

Another advantage to pomodoros is that they are small enough to appear unthreatening to your emotional lizard brain. Confronted with two options (either working for 25 minutes on a particular problem, or an unboxed task instruction to 'complete this particular task') I know I feel far more comfortable taking a bash at starting to work if I just have to get through 25 minutes. If I place the entire responsibility and expectation of completing a section or a problem from the outset, I'm far more likely to find ways to avoid starting, to procrastinate (even if everything is switched off and I have no access to the internet; it's amazing how creative the mind can be at avoiding hunkering down and tackling a difficult task).

There are many (many) pomodoro timers available online. FWIW, the ones that I've used and found work well for me are: FocusTime, PomoDone (which hooks into Trello boards).

Around the time when I started my routine of 'Four Perfect Hours' each day, I discovered something called Vitamin-R. This is probably overkill for many of you, but if you're inclined to monitor your data and your stats and your progress, then it might be worth exploring.

The programme works on your laptop and your phone (though I almost exclusively used the Mac app) and you set up your time ratios (i.e. my 45 mins on, 15 minutes rest routine). You specify what you'll be doing during the coming 45 minutes. This is useful in forcing you to clarify what you will be doing, since being specific about this makes it likely that you'll make progress instead of just browsing about a bit in your sources and so on. It gives you alerts and alarms at the start and end of your pomodoros, as well as periodic 'tick-tock' noises at random moments to just remind you that this is a period of focused. Some people might find this annoying; I found it useful to occasionally break me out of a daydream or from going down some not-particularly-useful line of approach.

At the end of each session, it asks you how focused you felt while working. This is really useful for building up (over time) a picture of which times of the day are more useful than others in terms of your focus.

One of the charts that Vitamin-R generates

You can see that my early mornings were generally my core work time. You will usually have an instinctual understanding of this truth, but Vitamin-R allows you to confirm it and to keep track of just how many hours you're spending in 'Deep Work'.

I happened to have a Beeminder goal for 'Deep Work' at the time, and I filled it with data from Vitamin-R. At the end of every day, I'd update it with however many minutes Vitamin-R said I'd tracked as having been devoted to that deep work. That kept me honest, and it was also nice to see the cumulative core hours add up over time.

Here you can see the 187 or so hours I tracked in the first half of 2016

Most won't need or want this level of specificity or tracking. Any phone (even a dumb phone') comes with a countdown timer, and that's enough to get started with the pomodoro technique. I recommend it because it encourages regular breaks. If you find this useful, please do let me know. It's always good to hear from others in the 'trenches' of knowledge work.

PhD Tools: Backup Systems for Staving off Sadness

[This is part of a series on the tools I used to write my PhD. Check out the other parts here.]

Having some kind of backup system is essential for all PhD students (and probably anyone else using a computer for writing of one kind or another). The less friction to your backup system, the better. If you have to plug in a USB or Firewire external hard drive in order to start your backup process, you're probably not going to be doing it enough and you're probably going to lose files and data.

I've learnt the hard way how hard drives can fail. A few years ago, I lost roughly a decade's worth of digital photos when my backup system failed. My work files were ok -- because I'd taken steps to check that this was working - but for whatever reason I hadn't taken the same care for my non-work files. Cue sadness.

I use multiple types of backup. Ideally, you'll also use at least two. One should be a regular backup to a hard drive -- something like Apple's Time Machine in conjunction with an external disk -- and the other should be a cloud backup.

I use Backblaze and Spideroak for my cloud backups. You may find it overkill to have two separate systems for storing my backups in the cloud, but space and the services are cheap enough that it's possible. In fact, if I was living somewhere with faster internet I'd probably add in AWS Glacier as an additional backup service.

I also use SuperDuper to make a clone copy of my hard drive. I've been burnt by Apple's Time Machine backup in the past (see above) so I don't use it any more because I lost my trust. But I heard it's better now. Caveat emptor.

Programmes like Scrivener (see earlier blogpost) have built-in auto-backups. Use them, and test them to make sure it's doing what it says it's doing. You don't want to have to find this out after something's gone wrong.

In fact, I encourage you to make a recurring calendar appointment with yourself to stress-test your backup systems once every two or three months. Different scenarios to try out: your hard drive fails; try to get hold of your main PhD working draft from your backup system. Or, another good one, your laptop gets stolen; are you able to access all your files regardless, and eventually (once you replace your computer) restore your system as it was before the theft? Actually do these tests! I've often found that a system that I thought was working properly turns out to be failing in some small but essential way.

Towards the end of the writeup, your paranoia around file failure is likely to be sufficiently intense as to inspire all sorts of manual backup routines. Earlier this year while I was nearing that point myself, I would email myself zipped copies of the scrivener file as well as store copies on Evernote and Google Drive and Dropbox. This, note, in addition to the other backups I had going.

A lot of this is common sense. Backups are important. We all know it. But it's good to have a system that you know and can be confident works. Don't tarry! Take steps to set something up today, even if it's just a background cloud backup service like Backblaze.

PhD Tools: Mellel for Layout and Final Presentation

[This is part of a series on the tools I used to write my PhD. Check out the other parts here.]

Mellel is what I use for the final formatting of documents. It might be overkill for some, but in the case of my PhD, the extra features really saved me some time and headaches.

At first glance, there isn't much to distinguish it from something like Pages.app or Microsoft Word. Mellel is a word processor. It allows you to format how the text is presented on the page. The level of control over those decisions is what distinguishes Mellel over the free/default alternatives.

For example, styling formatting for certain types of text is easy in Mellel. Want to change the way all headings of a certain level are formatted? Mellel can do this. Want to manage the formatting of Arabic, Pashto and Dari text without worrying that things will come out the wrong direction? Mellel is designed to handle these right-to-left languages and scripts. Want to do things with bibliography formatting and scanning? Mellel plays well with Bookends and the other reference managers. Similarly with things like your Table of Contents: Mellel handles it all with style (literally!).

An alternative to Mellel is Nisus Writer Pro. As far as I can make out there isn't that much difference between the two. Mellel also has a version for iPad so you can work on documents on the go as well.