Walk Around the Block

People increasingly live in cities. There's a good chance that if you're reading this, you live in a city. That's good for exchanging ideas and stimulating opportunities, but it often means we don't get as much movement as we'd like or as would probably benefit us.

So here's a little trick I've used for the past three or four years. First off, you shouldn't be working uninterrupted for much longer than 45-60 minutes at a time. When you take a break from work, get up and move your body. Ideally, leave the house or place where you're working, walk round the block or the building. That shouldn't take you much longer than 5 or 10 minutes. If you're working for 45-minute segments, it's an ideal amount of time and it'll refresh you physically so that your next session isn't hampered by waning energy levels.

Try it out and let me know how you find it...

Variations on a Pomodoro

I've recently started work on a large translation project (about which more in due course). This sees me grappling with the Arabic text for several hours each day. Early on, I tried replicating my '4 perfect hours' approach that had worked so well when writing my PhD dissertation.

Translation is hard work, and tougher on the brain in ways I hadn't first anticipated, not having done it full time before. So I've found myself adjusting my 45-minutes-work, 15-minutes-rest cycle to something closer to 25-minutes-work, 5-minutes-rest (with a longer 15-20 minute gap every 4 cycles).

For writing and anything where you're trying to hold lots of pieces of information in your head, it makes sense to go for longer stretches of time if you can. 45 minutes was ideal for writing my PhD, since any shorter and I felt like I was loosing too much time rebooting all the information at the beginning of each new session.

Translation is far more piecemeal, in a way. I can work on one sentence at a time, at least in this stage of the process, so shorter sessions work just fine.

This is all just an extended way of saying that customisation is important, and whatever you read online (or hear on a podcast or whatever) needs to fit into your own life, needs and patterns rather than the other way round.

Scratching Below the Surface with David Heinemeier Hansson

I’m part-way through listening to a podcast interview with David “DHH” Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, author of Rework and Remote and co-founder of Basecamp. I wanted to write down some brief notes on what came up so far before I forget. I may return to this thread after I’ve finished listening to the rest. These are just some of the points that stood out for me from the conversation; I’d strongly recommend you give it a listen yourself, especially if you’re interested in coding, systems thinking, improving and learning new skills and so on.

• Curiosity — this is a skill worth cultivating. There are various metaphors often used for curiosity, but in the podcast DHH talks about the need to ‘dig / scratch below the surface’. He talks about how finding the thing in the topic / skill / domain that interests him is often a case of just keeping burrowing down until you find it.
• Learn What You Need — DHH talks about learning to code as a way of solving a particular problem, and about learning only just enough rather than diving into that learning as a pure pursuit needing you to learn everything.
• Systems Improvement — this isn’t explored that deeply in the part I listened, but it was a good reminder that there is a way of thinking about improvement that sees improving the system as the way to improve the skill.
• Time / Flow — DHH talks about driving racing cars and how time really flies when he does this. This is an observation that this, for him, is a skill he is enjoying learning, and one that gives him a great sense of that satisfaction that comes from doing a rewarding activity at just the right level of difficulty.

More on this to follow (maybe).

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.

Fundamentals Versus Hacks

I was talking to someone a couple of days ago who pushed back a little against some of my recent posts. In particular, she was resistant to the idea that there were special techniques or skills that could be learnt that might help with writing, studying and learning.

I obviously disagree with the premise that we can’t get better at the things we do in a domain like learning, but it encouraged me to define the core principles as something separate from the less important lessons.

I’m writing something on the specific question of software — i.e. do we really need to buy all this expensive software to be able to do great work — so I’ll set that part of the problem to one side for now. For the rest, I think it’s useful to make a distinction between fundamentals and ‘hacks’.

The idea of a hack or ‘lifehack’ has garnered a decent amount of criticism over the years, often for good reason. Whole sites exist to tell you small things you can change — little tweaks to the way you’re already doing things — that will supposedly free you up to do the important work. My experience is that these are mostly cosmetic changes, and that they don’t deliver 10x (or more) improvements. The only time when you should be looking for tweaks of that kind is if you’re already in the 99.9% bracket for what you do.

For whatever reason, people seem to prefer the idea of hacks to fundamentals. Perhaps because fundamentals are harder to change, more ossified and because to change a fundamental belief or practice is to question who you are on some level.

A preference for hacks is why people think that drinking some new type of tea or a particular kind of food is better for their ability to make decisions in the long run than simply making sure to get enough sleep.

I have read a lot in and around the productivity / health domain, and there’s a strong tendency towards these small ‘hack’-like tweaks. But what are the fundamentals? I think often a lot of that comes down to things we already know:

• get more sleep
• eat more vegetables
• move your body more
• prioritise the long-term over the short-term
• Find a way to do the ‘hard thing’ earlier in your day

Some other principles that I’ve found useful:

• Subtract first, then add — if you can find a way to simplify your current process (or whatever it is) by taking something away, I’ve found that that really helps. This can apply to big things (like the conflict in Afghanistan and the international involvement there — see this for more) as well as smaller things (your daily work schedule).
• Perfect the process; think less about results — I’ve noticed this most profoundly in my exercise and movement work over the past few years. Whenever I’ve focused too much on the hoped-for results of a particular routine or programme, I’ve had things go wrong (either injuries or setbacks of other kinds). When I stay focused on the process, trying to make each movement as good as I can, trying to stay mindful of where I am on a particular day vs where I want to be, then I find this really beneficial.

The fundamentals are low-hanging fruit that offer big returns, albeit in a slightly less sexy packaging. Hacks are shortcuts that offer minute incremental improvements, at the expense of your time and energy.

There is a time and place for tweaks and fine-tuning and smaller productivity wins, but unless you’re finding a way to sort out your fundamentals, you’re missing a great opportunity.

Seeing The Forest But For The Trees: On Exist.io

So many services, so much data. How can I make sense of it all? You’ve probably had this thought yourself on occasion. You have your Fitbit data, your calendar data, your email data, your task management system, your last.fm music data and so on. All of these things exist in their own silos.

If you’re halfway intrepid, you’ve maybe even made efforts to liberate your data from these prisons. Best case scenario: you’re left with a half-complete .CSV file that is incompatible with all the other .csv files you’ve downloaded from other services. Now, if you want to hook all these files up together, you’ll have to clean them up, massage the various tables and forms so that they match up. And then you’ll have to perform a whole host of calculations in order to figure out how you’re doing, or what the data has to tell you.

Collating all this data and making sense of it can be a full-time job in and of itself. I admire those who give talks at institutions like the Quantified Self, telling tales derived from the past 20 years of financial tracking or weight data.

Personally, I don’t have time to do all of that. I need a service to help me out, something that will serve up platters of charts and correlations that address the main broad questions that I might address of these various data streams, notably:

• how am I feeling?
• how am I sleeping?
• am I moving enough?
• am I getting enough work done?

Now you might say that it’s easy to look at each of the services individually and you’d be right. I can look at a chart over at Fitbit.com and I’ll see something that shows me all the data for the past 12 months:

This is nice, but it doesn’t tell me a great deal, aside from the fact that I seem to be walking less in Amman than when I lived next to a huge forest in a provincial part of Holland. No surprises there. Also, a whole year is a bit too much for me to process. It doesn’t really help me calibrate my current actions and my plan going forward.

Enter, Exist. I’ve been using Exist for a little over a year now, checking in on the site pretty much every day. Their own explanation for what they do is:

“We turn numbers into insights. We collect data from the services you already use and find trends and correlations in the results.”

You hook up all your web services, and your Exist dashboard will be populated with pretty graphs, useful correlations and various other goodies. These are the services currently supported:

Your dashboard page has a bunch of different panels which aggregate data from different parts of your life. For instance, my activity panel for today looks like this:

I usually go for a walk in the evenings, so I’ll most likely end today with a higher count, but you get the idea. There are panels for activity, productivity, sleep, mood, workouts, health, location, social media, music and weather.

So the dashboard is where you can come to get a snapshot of the reality of your current short-term. Exist also offers correlations and suggestions based on its combination and number-crunching of all the various parts of your data stream. This is often most interesting when it comes to your mood data. Check out these recent correlations that Exist crunched from my self-reported mood data alongside the other automated streams:

There are so many different types of charts and graphs; it’s difficult to pick my favourite ones. Here you can see my slow but steady battle to increase the amount of time I sleep every day, for example:

The mood data is self-reported. Exist sends you an email every day at a time of your choosing and you respond with a number from 1–5 alongside some comments about your subjective experience of the day. These comments are also then processed into useful charts and prompts. Weird things I’ve learned from Exist’s number crunching:

• the less I sleep, the more likely I am to have a ‘perfect’ day (i.e. 5 on the 1–5 mood scale)
• the more it rains or snows, the happier I am

You can use Exist in a bunch of different ways, depending on what you hope to get out of it. For my own situation, I love how it encourages awareness of my current patterns on the short- to medium-term timescale (i.e. one week to three months). For things like sleep, where it’s easy to forget whether you’re managing to do what you seek to do (i.e. sleep more, or get up earlier etc), Exist is really excellent.

There's a sizeable userbase who actively contribute to shaping the future of the company / service through feedback. There are a bunch of things I'd love to see happen with Exist -- changing the 1-5 scale for mood feedback to 1-10 as a start -- but the site is actively developed, and I'm really happy with all the new features that have been added in the year or so since I signed up.

You can find out the future / expansion plans that Belle and Josh have for Exist here. There’ll be more services and correlations and integrations will be more usefully presented. All of this is as you’d expect. Belle and Josh are good people (together, they make up HelloCode which is the Australia-based parent entity that produces Exist, among other things). I spoke to Belle for a Sources and Methods podcast episode; that’ll be out soon, I hope, so keep your eyes out for that.

In my interactions with Belle / Josh I’ve been really impressed with the service that they offer through Exist and their other products. I put them in my personal category of ‘nice, kind people seeking to do good things in the world through offering really useful services’. Like the team who run Beeminder and GMB Fitness, Belle and Josh offer something that saves me time and adds meaning on a daily basis to my life. Exist is a paid service. If you already run a bunch of the services listed above in the diagram, you’ll probably benefit from Exist’s charts and correlations. I hope you’ll consider signing up for their free one-month trial.

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: 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.]

Upcoming Maniac Week

I hereby commit to doing a maniac week. This is inspired by Nick Winter and the good people at Beeminder, namely Bethany Soule and Daniel Reeves. The idea is as follows (borrowing heavily from a format over here):

• I will begin at 6am on Sunday December 6.
• I will continue until 6pm on Saturday December 13th.
• I will not be checking my email at all during the week. I will also be turning off and/or disabling all chat programmes and my phone.
• I will not use any social media websites or check RSS news. (This block will be handled by the StayFocused plugin and RescueTime’s Get Focused mode.
• I will ensure I am in bed for 7 hours every night. This will be tracked via Fitbit.
• I am allowed 3.5 hours every day for things which aren’t work (showers, preparing meals, eating, rest, meditation and walks outdoors). This will be tracked using TagTime using the tag “notwork”.
• The remaining time will be for my work. This will be tracked using TagTime and RescueTime, and my main focus during this week will be my PhD dissertation.
• As with others’ maniac weeks, I’ll be recording the whole week using time-lapse photography, though I’ll see how much hassle it is to assemble a video after the week is finished. Also, part of my work will involve me away from the computer, writing and outlining things by hand, and anything involving interview transcripts etc will obviously have to be blurred out or blacked out. Thus, I’m not committing to posting a video, but I will publish a post-maniac-week blogpost during the week that follows.
• I reserve the right to tweak these rules (by editing this post) up until the evening of December 5. After that point it’s time to work, and I cannot change the rules any more.

No, I am not crazy. Yes, you can do one too.