PhD Tools: The Secret to Finishing Your PhD

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

Four Perfect Hours. Repeat every day for two and a half months, and you have your PhD.

At least, that's how it worked for me. I was in Holland, living near a little town called Delft, full of picturesque waterways, bridges and historical buildings, and I had a deadline to finish my PhD. The previous months hadn't been too great in terms of sitting down to write. There had been quite a few distractions outside my control, some entirely within my control, and I hadn't managed to sit down and focus. Worse still, the times when I did focus would be offset by days (sometimes weeks) where nothing happened. So each time I rededicated myself to the PhD writeup I had to refamiliarise myself with sources and even the structure of what I was writing itself.

Cal Newport's book Deep Work happened to be released around that time, and while none of the ideas he was suggesting were wholly original, the combination and explanation hit me just in the right place and at the right time. (The book is excellent, by the way, and I'd recommend giving it a read, particularly if you have some sort of big project that you've been finding hard to make progress on, though I will try to outline some of the key principles below).

Newport's argument runs as follows: the ability to focus, to apply yourself to a particular creative task in a deep way, is a valuable skill. If you can manage to do this, you'll deliver better work, become more valuable a commodity to employers or to your community, and you'll feel more fulfilled.

The ways he suggests to reach that point are a collection of 'golden oldies' from the productivity world. Block off time specifically for your core work. Turn off the internet and anything that will distract you. Maybe try for a change of scenery. Don't think you have an unlimited capacity for work -- four hours is probably the limit. Take breaks, and take them regularly. (And so on).

I was glad Newport takes time in his book to tackle the 'always-on' expectation that many employers and people in general have. If you're not careful, you spend all your time replying to emails (and each email generates another email in response etc) or instant messages or pings on Slack or Facebook and so on. It's not hard to imagine this scenario, particularly if you're juggling a number of different projects or responsibilities. An increasingly connected world brings benefits, but you need to take efforts so that you don't find yourself becoming hostage to the demands of the system. And I don't use the word hostage lightly. Sometimes it really does feel like there is this responsibility to be continually 'on', to be responsive to all the requests coming your way -- requests on your time, requests on your emotional energy, requests on your skills.

The solution Newport is prescribing -- sometimes in a slightly preachy / curmudgeonly fashion, I'll admit -- is to abstract yourself out of this world. Not forever, and not as a non-negotiable proposition, but at certain times, for certain activities and to serve certain goals.

Hardly a week goes by without the announcement of some new study assessing the damage that comes from switching attention. I wouldn't stake anything particularly valuable on the accuracy of the specific numbers they propose (i.e. the 23 minutes proposed as the cost of disruptions before you return to a state of focus), but my personal experience and anecdotal evidence does strongly suggest that there is a cost to switching your attention from one thing to another. If you're writing about a complex issue, you're going to find it much harder if your phone is ringing or pinging messages the whole time. (For this reason, I've turned off almost all notifications on my phones. If someone messages me on Signal or Whatsapp, I want to see that message when I'm ready to see it. I usually don't want to be disturbed while I'm in the middle of something else. Obviously, this level of disconnection may be impossible for people with responsibilities, families etc, but consider employing it for specific times..)

Everyone tells you this when you start your PhD, and probably at every moment during, but it is true: the business of doing a PhD is connected with putting words down on a page. The more you do that, the closer (usually) you'll get towards that end point. Even if those words are just initial thoughts or reflections to yourself, they will still be useful. You'll be thinking on paper. And 'writing' doesn't need to be paragraphs of prose. I'm a big outliner -- though I concede that this may not fit with everyone's work style -- so I consider sitting down on a couch and drawing some diagrams of how ideas connect together, or doing a more structured ordered outline, to be useful work. With all these things, it's possible to spend too much time on them, but in general they are useful and contribute to the overall work at hand.

As a corollary to this, anything which takes you away from writing is something which is detracting from your ability to complete your project. You need data, of course, and you need to read and fill your head with ideas, and to become familiar with a number of different domains etc. But it's easy to get sidetracked into this 'work', since it is often exciting and interesting, even though it may not directly contribute to you finishing your thesis. Most of the time, the internet functions as a sort of crutch (emotional or otherwise) in many people's writing workflow. Every time you need to look something up, you go to Google (or, better yet, DuckDuckGo!) and then perhaps you get lost in a 30-minute black hole of discovery and cat gifs.

I'm a firm believer in separating out these processes. Writing is when you write. If you find there's some fact you don't know, you write a little comment to yourself in square brackets ([like this -- look something up about x or y]) and then you know to look that up later when your internet comes back. But in the meanwhile, you can continue your train of thought, you can keep writing, keep thinking on the page. Your internet excursions may be useful in some sense, but most of the time they are highly inefficient. If you separate the two processes (writing and internet research) you'll make much more progress with the former and streamline how much time you're taking on the latter.

The routine I settled on after reading Deep Work was as follows:

- I'd arrive at the coffee shop at 8am on my bike, just as the doors opened. I'd order a tea, settle downstairs and unpack whatever notebooks or papers I'd brought with me.

- At 8:15 on the dot, I'd begin writing.

- Freedom app has turned off the internet from 8am-12pm in any case, so there's no way I can use it, though the cafe does offer free wifi. I have no way out. I just have to write.

- I write for 45 minutes until my alarm tells me the session is over, and I have 15 minutes of break. In my break, I try to do things that refresh my body and my mind. I'll get up, perhaps walk around a bit. I'll do some light stretching to undo the fixed chair position I've been stuck in. Maybe I'll chat briefly with the cafe staff upstairs. But I'll be keeping an eye on the clock because at 9:15...

- I start another session. (Note that some people might prefer a 25 mins writing : 5 mins break setup to their work. I prefer to write for longer and take a slightly longer break. But each to his/her own). I work until 10am, then take another break.

- At this point I get another tea. (I'll be writing more about tea later, but for now know that I've noticed I have certain tolerances to how much caffeine or theine I can drink and still think usefully, so this is ideally calibrated to my body. YMMV.) At 10:15 I begin another session until 11.

- By this point, I'm nearing the limits of what I can usefully do in a day. Newport suggests the same in his book, that most people have around 3-5 hours of 'deep work' capacity per day. 4 was a stretch for me, but I just about managed. In the break before the final session, I make sure to be conscious of how my body and mind are feeling, take stock of where my energy level is at, and perhaps calibrate the task or section to be tackled in that final session accordingly. Thus, I'm more likely to save a difficult new topic for the start of a new day, when I'm fresh, rather than try to start it at the end of the morning.

- At 12pm, my work day is over. I sit back, feel good about what I've achieved (a little gratitude is often a good thing) and know that I don't have anything else to do for the rest of the day.

The deal I made with myself was this: if I sit in the chair and have my "Four Perfect Hours" in the morning, then the afternoons are mine to do with as I wish. Of course, these were often taken up with things like shopping, paying bills, washing clothes etc, though just as often I'd take my bike and ride around town in the sunshine, listening to podcasts. Or I'd go climbing in Delft's bouldering centre. Or I'd go see a film at the cinema.

The one work-related task I'd allow myself to do in the afternoon was reading or anything relating to outlining. I usually found that any work I do to prepare myself for the writing process the next day was useful. This could be as simple as making a list of the key sources I'd need to refer to, or a brief list of points that I'd do well to write about, or it could be something like selecting quotes to highlight from a certain source. Usually it was something that that wouldn't take more than 30-60 minutes, and it was never really 'difficult' mental work. But if I did that kind of work the day before, then I'd always find it valuable. (The problem was that I didn't always do it, or find the time, or have the energy, so this wasn't something I always managed to do, by any means).

I'd make sure to sleep at a reasonable time -- since if I didn't get enough sleep, the knock-on effect for my ability to write the next day would be significant. So sleep (as I'll write about in a later post) was key. This meant setting an alarm to start getting ready for bed at around 9pm. By 9.30 or 10 I was usually in bed and I'd either listen to a bit of a podcast or an audiobook for 15 or 20 minutes, or perhaps read in a novel or something completely unrelated to work. More often than not, I'd skip that entirely and just sleep. Deep work is tiring, and demands a lot of your inner resources. Luckily, it is extremely rewarding, too.

I hope I've made the case for having fixed times where you are writing. This applies in particular to those who are in the write-up phase of their PhD or writing project. The idea that you should wait to be somehow 'inspired' is less common in technical disciplines like non-fiction, but nevertheless it's worth a reminder that writing is work of some kind. The more you can do to preserve that time as a core protected space, the more you'll produce.

As a final side-note, post-PhD I am not in such a regimented routine. The six-days-per-week schedule of four perfect hours (Sunday was always completely 'off'; rest is important) helped me complete my draft and make the final corrections to get the text ready to submit to the examination board. Nowadays, I'm still writing, though less as part of a structured single project. I know, though, that when I take 2 or 3 core hours and I spend them in a focused way, I usually find this time to be of value. For this reason, I started the Amman chapter of the Shut Up and Write meetup group (it's sort of part of a wider, though unconnected, network of 'Shut Up and Write' groups around the world), where I get three hours to work on producing thoughts on paper. I think no matter what I end up working on, whether it's research or blog posts or fiction or even my language studies, writing is always something that will bring value to my life and make it richer, so anything that keeps me regularly doing that is useful for me.

[UPDATE: I currently do part-time work as a coach to help people working through big projects like learning new skills, large writing projects like PhDs and learning new languages. Please feel free to get in touch with me for more information.]

Starting the Spaced Repetition Foundation

When I first learned about the idea of spaced repetition, I felt like I'd discovered a magic trick or a secret of some kind. Here was a piece of research that could transform how quickly I learned new words (I was studying Pashto at the time) and how well I recalled them. On the other side of that elation, I felt a simultaneous frustration and sense of disappointment that this piece of pedagogy / educational science hadn't come up before in my schooling career. All those vocab cards I'd created for my BA degree in Arabic and Farsi! So much inefficiency! Not to mention all the things I had studied at primary and secondary school. Most of that specific knowledge remains but it is like the shadow of its original form. I've recently started studying Maths again and I'm painfully aware just how much I've forgotten.

Spaced repetition is a principle that advocates a specific series of intervals between reviews of a particular fact or 'thing' that you want to memorise. A German scholar called Herman Ebbinghaus discovered that there is a pattern to how most humans learn and forget materials, and he outlined a specific algorithm to ensure optimum recall and retention of whatever you are trying to learn. For that, we must be thankful for the (seemingly) boring experiments he had to go through to get to that piece of insight.

Anki is a piece of software that manages your study and recall of individual pieces of information. The spaced repetition algorithm or insight is at the core of how Anki works and helps you. I've used Anki to learn languages, to memorise smaller facts and useful pieces of information, to cement my understanding of broader concepts, among other things. It's pretty adaptable to whatever your specific learning needs are. This is why I've stuck with Anki over its competitors. (I've tried pretty much all of them, and continue to do so, but Anki remains the most customisable and useful IMHO).

Over the years, I've had the privilege to share Anki with others along my travels. Sometimes this has come in the context of language learning, other times like with the friend who wanted to learn all the names of all the bones in the human body.

In fact, Anki was the original bridge or glue that started my friendship with Matt Trevithick, Sources and Methods co-host and all-round busy person. I walked into his office in Kabul -- he was working at the American University of Afghanistan at the time -- and spied a huge stack of flashcards in a box in the corner. I pointed to them and he explained with great pride how he'd learnt them all. We talked through his process a bit and soon enough I was singing the praises of Anki and how much time he'd save and...and...

We've had many conversations over the years relating to language-learning, the different ways Anki can be used and our overwhelming and continuing sense of disbelief that the principles of spaced repetition aren't more widely adopted in the field of education. People who get deep into self-study eventually stumble on SRS, since you often try to find ways to get faster or better in the absence of a teacher telling you what to do. The Quantified Self movement has been instrumental in spreading the gospel of SRS, too, in their special sessions devoted to the topic in their yearly conference, or through the pride-of-place given to show-and-tell explanations of how SRS has allowed someone to learn Chinese, or hieroglyphics or so on. (Click here for the QS list of talks referencing SRS. I'd highly recommend dipping your toe into some of these talks. Most are extremely engaging.)

Bringing matters up to the present day, I have a bit more time and bandwidth for focus now that the PhD is finished and Matt and I had been talking about this sense that more people should be using SRS for a few years, so we have finally bitten the bullet and started something to try to make that happen.

The Spaced Repetition Foundation is our institutional first step to start to spread the lessons to a broader audience and to more varied contexts. Our mission statement reads:

"The Spaced Repetition Foundation, an independent, not-for-profit center, is dedicated to advancing the adoption of spaced repetition as a supplementary learning tool.

"Despite the scientifically proven ability of spaced repetition to vastly increase the retention of information in the brain as a supplemental learning tool, the use of this technique is, at present, largely restricted to select individuals and students for personal enhancement or academic achievement. To date, no single center exists to advocate for the increased adoption of this approach in educational settings at the macro level, to increase public awareness of this useful tool, and to serve as a focal point for interested individuals to come together and work on these issues. 

"Attempting to solve this problem, Natalie, Alex and Matt, long-time users of spaced-repetition applications, decided in the summer of 2016 to start the Spaced Repetition Foundation, which seeks to function as an independent advocate dedicated to increasing the adoption of spaced-repetition technology wherever learning is happening."

Note that we are not completely and exclusively technology-centric in our approach. At least part of the work involves outreach, involves testing use cases and scenarios, and if it really is to find a place in the broader world (away from electricity and flashy phones, perhaps) it must be adaptable to low-tech or no-tech approaches.

Going forward, we'll be spreading the word about the science behind spaced repetition (spoiler: it works), ways everyone can use some form of review-recall testing in their lives, and generally galvanising different communities to find ways to rethink their approaches to knowledge acquisition and long-term recall through spaced repetition. We have some specific first steps planned, but I'll hold off with those details until they are more pertinent.

I'm extremely glad, too, that we will get to work with Natalie McKnight, the other co-founder, who brings a wealth of institutional and practical educational experience beyond simply the solitary learner that Matt and I represent. Natalie is Professor of Humanities and Dean of the College of General Studies at Boston University. I'm excited to work together with her to expand the kinds of communities and settings we can reach.

If you have any interest in the work we're doing, please sign up for our newsletter here or if you are interested in learning more, please do get in touch. Full details are available on our website at http://www.spacedrepfoundation.org.

PhD Tools: Omnifocus for Managing your Non-PhD Life

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

Discussions of task management systems have a tendency to devolve into disagreement and discord, so I'll state upfront that the choice of how you manage the various projects and goals in your life is a very personal one. There is no one single 'best' software for task management; there is only the best one for you.

One problem when writing a PhD is that it is impossible to completely isolate yourself to the extent that might be optimal for the wiriting of the PhD. Even if you're lucky enough not to have to work while you're doing your research/writeup (i.e. you have funding), you still have things to plan outside the work of your dissertation: you have to shop for food, you have to pay your taxes, you have to workout, and so on.

If you're anything like me, it's easy to ignore these tasks and let them pile up in the absence of a system or a specific place where you're storing these different commitments. There are many different approaches to both the storage of tasks as well as the precise way of implementing those tasks (the order in which you do them, for example), but the one that I've found most useful in my work and personal life is the Getting Things Done (GTD) system proposed by David Allen.

You could lose yourself on the internet reading about approaches to GTD and advocates have the reputation of being a little intense in their zeal to convert you to its glories. Suffice it to say for now that the basic idea is pretty simple: split all your tasks down into the smallest possible component and assign each task an overarching project and a context (i.e. 'working on my laptop' could be a context, so could your phone, or a specific shop in town etc). Everything else is just icing on the cake.

There has been a lot of debate as to how suitable a GTD approach is for creative professions (such as PhD writing) and I've changed my mind on this a number of times over the years since first reading Allen's original classic book when I lived in Kandahar. My current position is a blend: I think GTD itself isn't probably the best single system for the kind of complicated 'knowledge work' that creative pursuits demands. In particular, there is a certain encouragement to reduce all tasks down to little 'widgets' that doesn't quite gel with how I write. (See the recent post by Kouroush Dini which examines some of this). That said, I do think that GTD is pretty excellent as a system to contain and support everything else that goes alongside your creative pursuits. Again, I don't have that much sense of the variety of everyone's approaches to task management, but I have enough going on (and I suspect you do, too) that I need a system that is more flexible than a big long list. In particular, I need something that can ping me about things that will happen in the future (or that I have to do in the future). I don't want to see those things in the interim period, mind you, so the system is already somewhat complex.

For me, all these tools are not important or useful in and of themselves. They are means to an end, or means to a series of interwoven goals. The whole point of having a task management system should, I believe, be to reduce friction and to give you back as much time as possible to do the important work to which you are committed. This means a system that is flexible and light-weight in terms of maintenance. It means something I can carry everywhere with me (from my laptop to my phone). And it means something that won't get in my way.

With regards to the various tasks that formed my PhD process, I moved most of those over to a Trello board (as I've explained in a separate blogpost here). I generally have a specific place for creative work -- either Trello, or Tinderbox, or perhaps just a specific notebook. Everything else goes in Omnifocus.

Omnifocus itself is a Mac-and-iOS-only programme. There's a popular competitor, Things, which others swear by and I used to use. For a more cloud-based approach, some love Todoist. All three offer are based around a GTD philosophy. I like how Omnifocus works, but it may just be because I've been using it for a long time and it's what I'm used to. All have a free trial period, but you'll only figure out whether they work for you over the longer term. I would not advise constantly changing task management systems. It takes a lot of time (relatively speaking) to get comfortable with how the software works (and how you fit it into your life and workflows). Moreover, these systems aren't cheap, especially once you shoot for the mobile versions / licenses alongside the desktop version. For affordability, I think Todoist is probably your friend. For power and if you really find you click with it, Omnifocus might be more suited.

With all of these approaches, having a broader sense of what you want the software to do for you really comes in handy. I don't think it is essential to read Allen's Getting Things Done prior to working with one of these systems, but I know my own use of them wouldn't have been the same without a sense of the guiding principles. It's a quick and easy read.

Three things that I found really essential and stimulating from his book:

1) The idea of splitting things down to smaller chunks and the 'next action':

Let's say you want to host a dinner party on the weekend. You could just write a line on a piece of paper, "prepare for dinner party" and be done with it. But, as Allen pretty convincingly shows in his book, without defining exactly what that means (using sentences that have verbs in them, in Merlin Mann's useful phrasing) then you're likely to procrastinate about that particular task. You're also likely to forget things, and you'll probably feel like you're juggling a thousand separate small balls prior to getting ready for the party.

Similarly with something in the knowledge work field. If you've ever had a task like "write article" or "write chapter" or (even worse) "work on PhD" in your task list, you're pretty sure to have avoided that at some point, probably often. It is the lack of specificity that really causes problems. So Allen encourages you to figure out what is the smallest single-action next step in order to move forward with your particular project. Maybe you need to read something before you can work on your next PhD chapter. But then you realise that you don't have a copy of the book at home, so you'll have to go to the library. But then you realise your library card needs renewing before you can take it out. Finding and specifying these chains of dependencies is a really great way, therefore, to get and keep moving with your work.

2) Regular reviews:

GTD encourages weekly reviews of your tasks and projects. Since reading Allen's book, I've sometimes neglected my reviews, but I am certain that when I do block out an hour or so to make sure I am on track (or figure out what went wrong) each week, I feel much more in control of what's going on. (I even have used Beeminder to make sure I keep doing my weekly reviews in the past).

Reviews keep you aligned with the various levels of goals that you have. Allen talks about the runway level (the individual specific tasks you have to do), then the 10,000, 20,000 ft all the way up to the 50,000 ft perspective. At 50,000 ft, you're starting to talk about your purpose as a human being on the planet. At 10,000 ft, this is your list of ongoing projects. And so on. At the beginning, I was much more focused on the day-to-day actionable side of GTD, but as the years have passed I've become more convinced of the use of having these higher-level goals and perspectives.

3) 'Capture', or an inbox to store random things during the day:

This was half from David Allen, half from Merlin Mann (who in turn was inspired by Allen). The idea here is that whenever you think of something that needs to be done, or an issue that you have to handle/tackle, make a note of it. If you just try to keep it in your head, you'll either forget it, or you'll lose energy and mental bandwidth because you have too many such items hanging around.

I have a digital inbox in Omnifocus where I'll make notes of tasks or things I need to handle as they occur to me. Adding it into my inbox is easy, and I know it won't be forgotten because I'm reviewing everything at least once a week. In reality, I'm sorting through my task inbox once every day or two as well, so as to stay on top of these tasks.

I also have a paper notebook, which I'll use to jot notes down when I'm out and about, or when I don't want to be using digital technology etc. I'll transfer any tasks or notes from this notebook into Omnifocus usually at the end of every day, but if I'm particularly busy then I'll just do it during my weekly review on Sundays.

This turned out to be a longer post than expected. I barely scratched the surface of my workflow around Omnifocus but I think you'll have to develop your own if it is really to stick. Let me know if you find these concepts useful, or if you end up having some success with a task management system like Omnifocus.

PhD Tools: Turn Off the Internet with Freedom

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

Freedom does one thing and it does it well: turning off the internet (or parts of it). It removes temptation by giving you a time slot where the internet is turned off (and no way to turn it back on) on both your laptop and your phone. [Note: at the current moment there is no Android version of Freedom, but it's been a long time coming so I imagine that will be released in the near-term future -- a recent twitter query suggested "end of the summer"].

You can run it on an ad hoc basis -- i.e. you decide that you want 30 minutes of 'freedom' starting now, click, and then you've turned off the internet. OR you can pre-schedule those times (my preference) such that you can say Every Monday-Friday, I want to turn the internet off from 5am-12 noon every day. That time will thus be core time for writing, reading or using in some other kind of productive manner, free from distractions and interruptions.

You can tweak the settings so that you're not turning off the entire internet. You can make your own custom blacklist of sites that you know are kryptonite for you. (RescueTime is a great way of coming up with that list of which sites you're sinking too many hours into, especially when you have a few months of data). I don't particularly like this selective blocking because there's always going to be a new site of some kind or other that I haven't preemptively added to my blacklist. I don't need any access to the internet for my work, actually, so it's easiest to just turn it off completely.

In short, Freedom is great for aligning your goals (i.e. write words for my PhD every day) with a reality in which there are many shiny sites and videos and social media streams to follow. If you can find a way to turn that all off (or down to as minimal a level as possible) you'll get a lot more done and feel better at the same time.

PhD Tools: RescueTime for Time Tracking

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

RescueTime is a passive activity tracker for what you do on your laptop (or Android phone -- limitations in Apple's iOS mean that it's not possible to have the same detail in app usage tracking from iPhones and iPads). It sits in the background, watching where you spend your time. You can visit the website to see your stats, or it also sends you a weekly summary of what you did.

I've experimented with various kinds of activity and time trackers in the past, and my experience is that if you have to actively turn it on and off when you start and stop what you're doing, you'll probably forget. Also, that method of time tracking isn't particularly good at noting when you go down a hole of Youtube distraction that one time you have to search for something online. With RescueTime, you can be sure to be delivered an accurate summary of all the ways you are inefficient and wasting your time. (So much shame).

So it's good for tracking the amount of time you're writing (tasks are rated from very unproductive to very productive on a 5-point scale) and it's good for tracking what sites you're visiting during the day. This can be linked up to other sites, like Beeminder, to enforce some kind of time limit. RescueTime also has a version of site blocking where you can say, for example, if I spend over 1 hour on "very distracting time" or "watching videos", block all my internet for the next 3 hours (or something like that). Or you can hook it up to Beeminder and say, as I did, if I'm not writing for 2 hours every day (as in, actually typing and adding words to the page (it knows when you're staring at a page versus actually typing, by the way) ) then take my money.

A lot of your PhD writeup and research will probably be digital-based, so RescueTime is ideal for keeping you honest as to exactly how much work you're getting done. It's easy to have a false sense of all the hours of work you're supposedly doing.

You can keep a little window open somewhere on your screen that shows your real-time 'productivity score' (also compared with the previous day or week). That way, if you're at all competitive, you'll try to beat your own score and try to keep your score high. It may seem stupid, but these little tricks are unfortunately necessary in some cases, particularly when dealing with a long multi-year project. You don't get any marks for having developed a useful workflow that allows you to get your work done, but still, PhDs are as much a test of your ability to carry out this kind of long-term research as they are a test of your specific research skills and argumentative/analytic capability.

One other thing I used from the RescueTime features: internet autoblock first thing in the day. This was before I discovered Freedom App (more later on this), mind, but it was a good substitute. I found that if I somehow managed to hold off from using the internet in the mornings, then my work day would be measurably better (better meaning I actually wrote things and got engaged in the tasks at hand instead of falling down some rabbit hole of distraction, or responding to some "urgent" email). So I set up RescueTime to turn off the internet for 2 hours once my computer had been on and active for 1 minute each day. That way, by the time my laptop had started up and I was ready to do things, the internet was already off. I'll talk more about how it's useful to turn off the internet in a separate whole post on "Deep Work" in a few days. Another good setting: allocating 30 minutes or 1 hour to "very distracting" sites per day. That way you have some leeway to waste time, but not enough that it's going to markedly ruin your ability to work that day.

RescueTime is free for most of the features I described above. Anyone working as a writer/academic etc of some kind ought probably to have it installed, I think, if only to be more aware of how they're spending their time. Go try it out! It's free so you have no excuse!

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.

PhD Tools: Bookends for Managing References

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

My PhD included references to 479 individual sources. It's well known that formatting issues often plague students just prior to submission of their dissertations. A reference manager can help solve most of these problems.

When I began my PhD, I was using Sente, a Mac-only programme, but towards the end I transitioned to Bookends. There's no particular reason for the change, mainly that Bookends is a slightly sparer-design.

Different journals and universities require different formatting of references and sources. Bookends (or whatever you choose) is an easy way to stay on top of these formatting issues.

It connects easily (via a shortcut) to Scrivener or many other word processing tools that are commonly used. If you have many references like me, you can colour code them to make it easy to see what's what at a glance (see the image above for part of the database I used for my PhD).

I don't, however, use Bookends as a repository for PDFs and documents. You can do this, technically, but it's not ideal. You're far better off keeping your reference manage for what it does well, and then having a separate file system for your PDFs and other documents (like DevonThink, for example).

PhD Tools: Scrivener for Writing Long Things

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

I spent several years with this particular file...

Scrivener is the go-to tool for anyone working on longer structured pieces of fiction or non-fiction. It's great for structuring your work as well as the writing itself.

When you write a PhD, it's important to keep word counts in mind from the beginning, otherwise you'll be left with hundreds of thousands of words and only 80,000 permitted to submit to the university and your examining committee. Scrivener allows you to manage the word counts of individual sections and their sub-sections (see the image above). It offers a variety of ways of displaying these word counts, setting goals and generally staying on top of this important metric. Of course, PhDs are more than just the number of words you manage to type, but I've met enough people who wrote too much to know that this is a common problem.

Scrivener also excels at structuring texts. You have 80,000 or maybe 100,000 words to write, so you split it up into chapters, but then those chapters must be split into chunks of roughly 500-1000 words as well. You can do this structuring using a corkboard-style visual interface (that I never use much and don't particularly like, but am fully willing to concede that some people do like and use it) or a more standard outline tool.

(Note, too, that there are 1001 other bells and whistles that come along with these core functions. It's highly customisable and adaptable to your specific needs. You can tag, show selective views of your text etc etc to your heart's content. There is also an iOS version for your iPhone / iPad that some people who are more mobile might find useful).

Another thing that PhDs seem to involve is references and footnotes. Scrivener works beautifully together with the major bibliographical reference managers (Bookends, Sente etc) so you can rest assured that you won't have any trouble there.

Finally, it's easy to get things out of Scrivener, when the time comes. Sometimes you just want a copy of a single chapter to show to your supervisor, minus incomplete footnotes and in-text notes or annotations to yourself. Such a custom export is easy to set up. Similarly, when you're finished with the drafting and want to work on the presentation (more on Mellel in a separate post) somewhere else, it's easy to export exactly as you want.

PhD Tools: Save your web links with Pinboard

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

Pinboard is the successor to Delicious and various other social link repositories. It's a service I get a lot of use out of because some parts of following the news, monitoring various government / non-governmental sites etc means reading lots of small articles each day. If, in the future, I want to return to a particular article, I generally don't want to have to go through the hassle of searching for it afresh (sidebar: use DuckDuckGo instead of Google! It's great!) so I just click a button to save a page in Pinboard when I think there's a chance I'll find this useful or I want to preserve it in some way. (Visit the 'tour' part of the site to learn more about how Pinboard works.)

Pinboard also auto-adds links, if I've starred, retweeted or saved anything in Twitter. Also if I've added a link from twitter or elsewhere into my Instapaper (Pocket is also used by some people, and is supported by Pinboard), then these articles are also autosaved into Pinboard. I reason that if I've taken the trouble to save it for reading later, then there was probably something in there that I might find useful in the future, or something that I might want to reference later.

The great thing about searching your repository of pinboard links is that you can do in-text searches. So you're not just searching the name and URL of the link, but you're searching the full text of the page. This is really useful, especially if you have many links saved. I just checked my account stats and see that I have over 60,000 bookmarks saved in my pinboard account. This is over 15 years worth of bookmarking.

Pinboard also offers a paid upgrade service where it will archive copies of a page and store that archived image. That way, even if the site is later taken down, or someone deletes the page, or anything at all happens to the page, then you still have a copy of the page and can search in it, can download it etc. Needless to say, this is really useful for monitoring the Taliban's websites, for example, which are frequently targeted in take-down attempts and where data is periodically deleted from servers or changed in various ways. I often double down and make a manual archive copy of important messages/pages to be stored in DevonThink, but I generally rely on Pinboard to handle the bulk of this work for me.

The creator of Pinboard, Maciej Cegłowski, is a smart guy and who writes interesting things, and the service reflects this. (Check out his interview on the Longform podcast). It's a paid service, but is relatively inexpensive as far as these services go. Moreover, the paid nature of the service means that there's relatively little (if at all?) creep factor to using it. Pinboard isn't selling your link database on to anyone else, they aren't marketing data profiles of their users etc. It's a solid service.

The interface is pretty minimal, which I like, but in case it's not to your taste you can browse your links in any one of a dozen or so apps which can hook up into your Pinboard data. Links are fully taggable, including tag nesting etc, so you're fully covered on that front. There's a social element to pinboard that I don't use much (mainly because I don't know many others who use pinboard for saving links) but I can see that that might be a useful feature if you have a community working on a particular topic or area.

Pinboard is easy to use, reliable and relatively inexpensive. It can save you time and help you find things you read on the web. Check it out here.

PhD Tools: DevonThink for File Storage and Discovery

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

Discovering similar notes in one of my DevonThink databases

I first heard about DevonThink in the same breath as Tinderbox. They go together, though they serve different purposes. Some people want to make an either/or decision about which to use. I see them as sufficiently different to assess them on their own merits and as per your usage scenario.

As with all tools, you should come to the decision table with a set of features that you're looking for. Don't just shop around for new things for the sake of newness or for the sake of having a really great set of tools. These programmes are not cheap. Luckily almost all of them come with generous trial versions or periods, but I don't recommend 'newness' as a feature of any particular merit.

Devonthink (I use the Pro Office version) is a place to store your files and notes. It can, I think, take any file you can throw at it. It comes with software for processing PDFs into fully-searchable documents (OCR software, in other words) which is part of the reason why the license for the Pro Office version of the programme is so expensive.

If you're anything like me, you're drowning in PDF documents. They all come with helpful names like "afghanistan_final_report_02_16.pdf" and unless you have a rigorous file hierarchy and sorting system, you'll probably be unable to find one file or the other. And using the basic file hierarchy system for storage doesn't help you with situations like when you want to store the same file in multiple folders (i.e. what if a report is about Afghanistan and Tunisia). (DevonThink has a feature which allows you to store the files in multiple locations, but without saving two copies of the file. Any changes or annotations you make in one file will automatically be transferred to the other).

You might ask yourself why you would need DevonThink and Tinderbox (see this post for more). The short answer is that they store different kinds of files/data, and that DevonThink is less about thinking than about storage (to a certain extent) and discovery.

One of the key features of DevonThink Pro Office is its smart searching algorithms, its ability to suggest similar texts based on the contents of what you are looking at, etc. It does this by means of a proprietary algorithm, so I can't really tell you how it works, but just know that it does. It works best on smaller chunks of text. In this way, I was reading through a particular source from the 3 million-word-strong Taliban Sources Project database and then I clicked the "See also" button and it had found a source I would never otherwise have read on the same topic, even though it didn't even use one of the keywords I would have used to search for it. It uses semantic webs of words to figure this stuff out. Anyway, beyond a certain database size, this power becomes really useful. It can also archive websites, store anything including text, do in-text searches on e-books etc etc. (Read more on how I use DevonThink for research in general here.)

I also used it a little as an archive for substantive drafts / iterations of the writeup process. That's another important part of the process: making backups of many different kinds. I never found any use for them, but at least they were there (just in case).

If you're a data and document hoarder at heart, like me, you'll soon have a Devonthink database (or several databases, split up by topic) that is bigger than you can fully comprehend it, or remember what was inside the files. At that point, search becomes really important. Not just a straightforward search, but the ability to input 'fuzzy' terms (i.e. if you search for "Afghanistan" it'll also find instances where it's incorrectly spelt "Afgahistan"), and boolean language, into your query is really powerful/useful. DevonThink is an amazing search tool. The company that developed the database software also make something called DevonAgent, which is basically a power-user search tool for the internet. Google on steroids, if you will. Fully customisable, scriptable... you can really go crazy with this stuff. I use it, but my PhD wasn't really about searching things on the internet, so I didn't use it much for my research or writeup. But it's a great tool, too.

In short, DevonThink is a research database tool that will help you store and find the documents that relate to your research, and do smart things to help you find sources and texts that maybe you'd forgotten you'd saved. Highly recommended for anyone working with large numbers of documents.

PhD Tools: Think better with Tinderbox

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

Tinderbox is a tool for writers and thinkers that can handle most things that you throw at it. Anything to do with thinking, it can probably do what you want. That said, there is a slight learning curve to the programme, and it may not be to everyone's particular style. With those caveats stated, let's dive in.

Any PhD student generally takes a lot of notes. Notes on books or articles you're reading, or notes about points you want to make in the argument of your text / writeup. There are purely text-based / database-style systems that can handle these kinds of notes (like DevonThink, about which more soon) but none with the flexibility or visual features of Tinderbox.

A list of notes, for example, can be transformed into a visual / spaced-and-linked map of meaning like traditional 'mind maps'. You can switch back and forth between outlines and maps easily (or even display both on the same screen/window) and display notes as well.

It's fast, it doesn't break or crash or slow down your computer, and it helps you think things through in the way that is best suited to your needs. Too often, software forces you to think in a particular way (i.e. the way of the software creator), but Tinderbox adapts to the way you were thinking and allows you to draft notes and structure accordingly.

I've written elsewhere about some things I've done using Tinderbox, so no need to mention all that here, but some things I found specifically useful for my PhD:

1. Small databases, constructed on the fly, while taking notes from books. An example of this is a database of key players or individuals from within the Taliban who occurred at various places in my notes. This grew to a pretty extensive document, but Tinderbox allows you to make these kind of structured data sets without needing to think too much about how the data might eventually be presented or used. Changing things is easy.

2. Timelines -- Tinderbox can display lists of events with start and/or end dates on a timeline. I used this to create the TalQaeda timeline, for example, or the list of moments where the Afghan or international military forces claimed to have killed or identified a Chechen fighter in Afghanistan (chechensinafghanistan.com).

3. Working through 'unstructurable' ideas -- There's often a gap between the ideas you think you have in your head and the ideas as they are expressed on the page. I have found Tinderbox extremely useful in allowing me to find a way to make the two align closer together, or to figure out a structure or a sequence to parts of an idea in a way that makes most sense.

You can also use Tinderbox as a day-planner or a task outliner (like I discussed in my post about Trello), though I think it might be less suited to this task when compared to Trello.

The forum for Tinderbox and related products is a great place to discuss method, process and different ways of structuring ideas. Users are a mix of complete beginners and others who have been drafting books, novels and essays using Tinderbox for years. I find the discussions in the forum are often stimulating; asking questions there is an interesting way to rethink a particular mental quandary you might find yourself in.

BONUS: Listen to my podcast interview with Tinderbox's creator, Mark Bernstein, for more on the vision behind the software and for some practical tips on structuring ideas.

PhD Tools: Visualise Structure and Kanban Flow with Trello

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

What was leftover by the end of my PhD submission process...

I used Trello for structuring my PhD argument and for tracking my progress during the drafting and redrafting of the final text.

Trello is primarily associated with the Kanban workflow / movement and as such it offers a fast and easy-on-the-eyes way to visualise structure, the passage of tasks through a particular workflow and so on.

It only works with an internet connection, however, which makes this a somewhat qualified recommendation. The mobile apps associated with Trello also lack an offline mode.

Tasks are split up into lists, and these are organised in a sequence. Thus for me, my lists at one point were my different chapters. It's easy to email things (links, notes to yourself, or anything else text-based) into your lists from outside Trello, so it can function as a useful 'bucket' where you can deposit things you want to research in the future, or just tasks that need to be performed for a certain chapter.

It's a way of seeing what needs to be done, or what you want to add to a particular chapter, at a single glance. Not essential, but I found it useful at certain junctions of the editing process.

Walking with Words

Earlier this year I glanced at my Fitbit stats and saw that I was walking less than usual. There were some reasons for this, but as always, the data itself functioned as a sort of reminder, a nudge in the right direction. I had a think about the main thing keeping me from writing and realised it was because I was working full-out writing my PhD.

Most of the second (rewrite)/redraft of my thesis was written in a little coffee shop in Delft (a small historic town in the south of Holland). Each morning I'd cycle to the cafe at 7:30, ready to start at 8am. I'd work for four hours and then cycle back home at 12. I'll write more about this particular workflow/pattern in a separate post, but suffice it for now to say that I had lots of time in the afternoons when I could be walking or finding more ways to be moving my body, but this wasn't happening.

When I tried to remedy this by going for more walks in the afternoon, I found I developed a strong antipathy to the time outdoors. It shouldn't have been that way. I was in the middle of nature, walking through nature preserves and forests close to home, but that apparently wasn't enough.

Podcasts and audiobooks offered a way through and round this problem. I took a bit of time to explore some different shows with regularly published episodes and I filled up my Audible queue with interesting books that I wouldn't otherwise read. It turns out that this was enough. (I feel like I've learnt this lesson in the past, albeit in slightly different circumstances. I guess some lessons don't stick as well.)

In case you're curious, four podcasts I still enjoy are:
1) The Frontline Club -- recordings of their live events in London. The quality is variable, but generally you learn something about a place or an issue that you hadn't considered (either ever, or for a very long while). Time well spent.
2) Invisibilia -- the first series was far better than the current one, but they're still almost always interesting and stimulating. The hosts discuss various aspects of psychology, behaviour and social activity.
3) Back to Work -- This might only make sense if you've been listening from the beginning, but Merlin Mann and co-host Dan Benjamin are an interesting pair to discuss technology, its role in our lives and a huge number of various connected issues.
4) Reveal -- this is connected with The Center for Investigative Reporting and each episode offers audio versions or discussions of major investigative reporting. Like with the Frontline Club, you learn a lot from this one. It's a little US-centric, but not exclusively so.

For Audible books, the sky is the limit. I listen to books at 1.25 or sometimes 1.5x speed (and podcasts at 1.5-2x speed), so even very long books can only take 12 or 13 hours to get through. That's one or two weeks of walks for a book you wouldn't otherwise have read. Get through a book or two every two weeks and you're reading a couple of dozen books a year.

Now when I think about whether I want to go for a walk, I am enthusiastic about going out. I'm happy not only to be moving, but also to be coming into content designed to inform and entertain. If you aren't moving as much as you feel like you might want, maybe see if you can add in some audio media to make the activity more pleasant.