### Work-Life Balance Through Working Efficiently (Part 2)

In a previous post I presented a simple relationship between academic happiness and happiness, number of responsibilities and impact of the stuff you do. In this post I continue with some of the consequences of that simple relationship.
 Figure 3: A turtle. With a rocket on its back. Lookit that turtle go!
Learn to work smarter rather than harder

One of the best recommendation letters I've read stated that the applicant wasn't just smart, but she worked smart. The recommender went on to describe how the applicant was good at identifying projects that yielded huge impact (large $\eta$) relative to the amount of work invested. On the flip side, I know of a lot of extremely smart individuals who are stuck in postdoc positions because they focus too much on topics that very few people really care about. Don't get me wrong, you should pursue topics that move you. But if you are looking for a job, you have to offer something in return. Working on projects that don't help other scientists or that don't advance the field is not offering much in return for employment, which increases stress and decreases happiness.

Further, having projects with small $\eta$ reduces your cross-section for interaction with other scientists, which in turn reduces $\dot{S}$ because you can't build productive collaborations that help you get stuff done. A reduced scientific cross section also shields you from good luck because your opportunities to shine at the right moment are decreased.

ABW: Always be writing

I often get questions about how I manage to have time to write blog posts when I also have to write papers, proposals, recommendations, etc. One key to my writing success is that I live in a steady state of writing. But here I'm using "writing" as not just the act of putting words on the page, but the process of developing an idea, composing things mentally, and giving myself the space I need to take the idea from inception to final product.
 Figure 4: A scene from one of the best movies/plays ever featuring a wonderful cameo by Alec Baldwin. Always be clo...um....writing!
The first thing I do is I make use of dead time in my day to think about what I'm writing at the moment. Walking to work is great for this, as are long flights, waiting for "next" on the basketball court, walking from one place to another on campus. I've learned to make use of snippets of time, no matter how large or small, to compose things in my mind. Then, when I get to a computer I dump everything I've been thinking about onto the page with no regard to order, grammar, spelling, etc.

The second thing I do is once I have everything spilled onto the page (usually in Google Docs), I designate 30-minute writing blocks into my day. No longer, no shorter: 30 minutes exactly. During those half-hour periods I write from minute-one to minute-last. Writing in these sessions might be composing a section, writing a single paragraph, polishing something previously written, outlining at my blackboard, or just standing in the middle of my office with my eyes closed and headphones on envisioning the final product. The latter activity is really important for me because if I don't keep the problem in front of me, it tends to artificially grow more and more scary in my brain, which in turn initiates procrastination. However, if I separate the task at hand into a discrete piece, independent of all the other things I need to accomplish, I can spend 30 minutes doing highly efficient writing.

Now here's the magical key: once the 30 minute session is up, I stop. I walk right away from the Google Doc and go onto the next thing. If I go over time by 30 minutes, I start wearing myself out, which reduces the chance I'll want to get back to it tomorrow. And if I don't get to it tomorrow, then I'm hosed, because my train of thought is interrupted and I have to waste energy in the phase transition back into writing.

But if I string together 4 30-minute sessions on a writing project in a single week, I can look back and be proud of my steady stream of progress. The paper/proposal/chapter that I'm working on looks SO much better than it did on Monday, and the stress I felt on Sunday with that task hovering over my head, all big and scary looking, begins to dissipate harmlessly.

Finally, working in the steady state of ABW, I get way more practice than the average astronomer, which allows me to position myself and my group better for grants, speaker slots, prizes, fellowships, etc. The more I write, the better I become, the easier it is to write, and then I write more. It's a nice cycle to be in. You just need the initial investment of discipline.

For more on this, check out this book.

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Believe it or not, this whole blog post took only 2 thirty-minute sessions this weekend, and one was spent during an NFL playoff game (on TV, not at Gillette Stadium). Thus, $\dot{S}$ was pretty large, and R was constant because I've already decided to spend part of my time maintaining this blog.

Now the question to you, dear reader, is $\eta$ for this post large? Please sound off in the comments, or send me an email, or comment on the Facebooks. I met many of you at the AAS meeting, and you are all amazing people with good things to add to the conversation. Stop lurking and jump into the fray. Let's use this blog as a forum for how to change our field into what we want it to be.

Amy P said…
Your suggestion for 30 minute blocks of writing is excellent! I find 20 minutes to be about my max before I need to move on to something else. If I spend much more than that, I get bored with a topic, I miss critical points I am trying to make and I start writing like an engineer again. "Writing like an engineer" is what I think you call "Pous-ing Out" - provide every single bit of information you know about something, even if it's not relevant to your audience. Great set of posts, bro.
David Rodriguez said…
This is excellent advice for any project, not just astronomy-related papers, proposals, etc. I'll certainly have to try it out, since I tend to leave things for 1-2 hour blocks and then get too tired.
The concept of keeping the problem in front of you and fresh in your mind is also good advice as I've seen that when I have a ton of edits to do on a paper I tend to procrastinate thinking "it's too big for right now." Once I sit down and deal with it, though, it turns out I could have done it quickly and was worrying needlessly.

### An annual note to all the (NSF) haters

It's that time of year again: students have recently been notified about whether they received the prestigious NSF Graduate Student Research Fellowship. Known in the STEM community as "The NSF," the fellowship provides a student with three years of graduate school tuition and stipend, with the latter typically 5-10% above the standard institutional support for first- and second-year students. It's a sweet deal, and a real accellerant for young students to get their research career humming along smoothly because they don't need to restrict themselves to only advisors who have funding: the students fund themselves!
This is also the time of year that many a white dude executes what I call the "academic soccer flop." It looks kinda like this:

It typically sounds like this: "Congrats! Of course it's easier for you to win the NSF because you're, you know, the right demographic." Or worse: "She only won because she's Hispanic."…

### Culture: Made Fresh Daily

There are two inspirations for this essay worth noting. The first is an impromptu talk I gave to the board of trustees at Thatcher School while I was visiting in October as an Anacapa Fellow. Spending time on this remarkable campus interacting with the students, faculty and staff helped solidify my notions about how culture can be intentionally created. The second source is Beam Times and Lifetimes by Sharon Tarweek, an in-depth exploration of the culture of particle physics told by an anthropologist embedded at SLAC for two decades. It's a fascinating look at the strange practices and norms that scientists take for granted.
One of the stories that scientists tell themselves, whether implicitly or explicitly, is that science exists outside of and independent of society. A corollary of this notion is that if a scientific subfield has a culture, e.g. the culture of astronomy vs. the culture of chemistry, that culture is essential rather than constructed. That is to say, scientific c…

### The Long Con

Hiding in Plain Sight

ESPN has a series of sports documentaries called 30 For 30. One of my favorites is called Broke which is about how professional athletes often make tens of millions of dollars in their careers yet retire with nothing. One of the major "leaks" turns out to be con artists, who lure athletes into elaborate real estate schemes or business ventures. This naturally raises the question: In a tightly-knit social structure that is a sports team, how can con artists operate so effectively and extensively? The answer is quite simple: very few people taken in by con artists ever tell anyone what happened. Thus, con artists can operate out in the open with little fear of consequences because they are shielded by the collective silence of their victims.
I can empathize with this. I've lost money in two different con schemes. One was when I was in college, and I received a phone call that I had won an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas. All I needed to do was p…