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A Fruitful Summer at Los Alamos

This summer I transformed the way I get things done. A key part of the process was exposing myself to a variety of software tools and productivity hacks.

  • The pomodoro technique has given me a new way to keep track of my time and quantify my productivity. When I get to work each day, I begin my first 25-minute pomodoro and attempt to squeeze in as many as I can around meetings and other distractions. Every pomodoro and distraction is noted in a Google spreadsheet I use to track myself. The technique yields both active and passive benefits: I am more inclined to compete against myself now that my performance is measured, and I can see bad habits as patterns in the spreadsheet data.

  • Getting Things Done and other productivity techniques. I do not actually use GTD (“things” implies I have more than one task on any given day, which is not always true of the graduate student, and “done” implies I can determine when I am done, which is certainly not true of this graduate student).

  • Digital independence with LastPass and inbox zero. This 4th of July I decided to declare digital independence and make way on the two most stressful aspects of my digital life: password management and email clutter. In one weekend I went from thousands of emails across two Gmail accounts to zero inbox for both of them. I also used LastPass to change my passwords from weak and oft-reused to long, random, and unique for over fifty online accounts.

  • I have replaced Windows with Ubuntu. It may not be Arch Linux, but Ubuntu gives me more control over my computer than I ever had with Windows. I am going out of my way to use the command line and learn hotkeys for window management and any other task I perform on a daily basis. My favorite command to run is ipython notebook --profile julia, which leads me to my next point.

  • I have replaced MATLAB with Python and Julia. This switch merits its own post, and I plan to adapt an email I sent to a colleague in my research group for that purpose. The decision had an immediate liberating effect, and I believe the benefits will compound as time goes on. I have exchanged a (well-built, useful, but still) proprietary, dated tool maintained by a proprietary, obsolete development process for a language used by thousands of active developers, many of whom contribute their own tools back into it. The two things I like most: no more software license anxiety, and much greater visualization power.

  • The IPython notebook. I know I just talked about Python, but the IPython notebook deserves its own bullet. This tool has changed the way I do my research work, and has invited me to combine meditation, formulation, and documentation of all my code into one medium. I can be share all of this information, in perfect fidelity, with anyone who has a modern browser, and everything about the tool is free and customizable.

  • Sublime text has changed the way I edit text. Elegant but packed with shortcuts, Sublime is both approachable and powerful. As I continue learning tricks and shortcuts, I find the cognitive burden of organizing my code decreasing.

  • A number of graphical software ideas and packages, including SVGs, D3, Matplotlib and PyPlot for Python, Gadfly and PyPlot.jl for Julia, Graphviz and .dot files, Processing, and others. I will not get too sidetracked by this broad group right now, but I do intend to reflect on them in depth soon.

  • Other interests I have had in the past have returned. One such interest is the visual display of quantitative information, to borrow an Edward Tufte book title. The works of Scott Murray and Mike Bostock are exemplary: both provide free, detailed tutorials. My ongoing interest in typography was excited by Butterick’s Practical Typography, which I discovered via Twitter.

  • I have begun to do all my writing in Markdown. Markdown combines the portability of text files with the expressiveness of HTML. It also seems to be growing in acceptance; it is the lingua franca of many of the blogs I read.

  • My desire to have a personal web page has increased markedly. There is something appealing about building it myself from scratch rather than taking a WordPress approach. Google’s Polymer project seems like a cool direction to take, but at the time of this writing I am storing my blog posts as .md files in Dropbox.

As you can see, I am a Highly Distracted Individual™. The pomodoro technique has helped me manage this in my day-to-day work, and with a little luck (read: blogging) I think I can make something positive out of this digital wanderlust. Last week someone actually told me I should blog about the things I have found. I’m happy to oblige!