My new book: The Taliban Reader

My new book is out (finally). The Taliban Reader is somehow the culmination of years of work to drive studies of the Taliban back to primary sources. Some of this work was accidental; more recently it was more purposeful. The book I produced (together with Felix Kuehn) is long and detailed.

Comments and feedback prior to publication were extremely positive. It'll presumably take readers a while to start getting some real independent reviews in, but I look forward to feedback and whatever conversation is generated off the back of it all.

You can pick up a copy at any good bookshop or from Amazon here.

Pre-Order Now: 'Master Arabic'

We're getting closer to finalising the materials for our new book and resource guide, 'Master Arabic'. The full description of the book reads as follows:

This will be my thirteenth year studying the Arabic language. I've tried everything: university programmes, intensive courses, self-study and more.

My Arabic level remained at the intermediate level for years, a learning plateau, and I felt like I wasn't progressing. I spent the last three years getting to the advanced level and I'm now (finally) able to communicate comfortably in a dialect and tackling contemporary fiction.

I've decided to write up some of the techniques, attitudes and resources that are available to the intermediate student of Arabic. This is the condensed product of years of experimentation. This book contains advice on how to improve your reading, writing, speaking and listening skills and also offers suggestions for resources you can use to tackle each particular skill.

The premium package includes over a dozen interviews with leading educators, Arabists and students who impart their secrets on how to pass through to advanced materials. It also includes life-time access to an online resource database of materials to study Arabic.

As a way of saying thank you to all those who subscribed to the mailing list and to ring in the new year, 'Master Arabic' is now available for pre-order. A discount code is provided below that will allow you to purchase the book for 10% off.

There are two editions:

- Basic Edition -- You'll get a copy of the e-book in PDF format. You will also receive access to an exclusive curated guide to materials, content and study aids for students of Arabic.

- Premium Edition -- You'll get everything in the basic edition, plus multiple formats of the ebook to suit various e-readers. You will also get access to over a dozen interviews with students, teachers and experts from Egypt, Jordan and the United States who have unique insights into learning Arabic.

Feel free to email if you have any questions about the book, the materials or have a topic that you really feel we should cover in the book.

USE DISCOUNT CODE 'preorderthankyou' for 10% off. This one-off discount will no longer be offered once the book is released at the end of January.

Notification Zero

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

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

In practice, this means the following:

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

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

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

Reading the Taliban: Himal Magazine article

An article I wrote for Himal Magazine back in 2014 has just been released on their website in a digital format. It’s a bit dated, and there have since been a number of significant developments in terms of the availability of primary sources, but I wouldn’t change the overall shape of the argument. The nub of what I tried to say was this:

“These sources allow for a far fuller and rounded portrayal of the Taliban, both as individuals and as a movement. It is only through understanding the viewpoints of those in senior leadership positions – as expressed in statements, poems or internal memos – that one can arrive at an understanding of why certain decisions were taken, and get more of a sense of the Taliban’s social identity. It is not enough to view the Taliban through an Islamist lens, or a Pashtun lens for that matter. From the 1980s onwards, the Taliban’s identity was subject to change, with different groups and individuals following different paths in the ever-changing environment the movement found itself in. These processes continued after 9/11, and a nuanced and detailed understanding of the evolution of the Taliban and their identity will prove to be a valuable and instructive exercise.”

This also happens to be the justification for my current work finishing up The Taliban Reader, a sourcebook and reference tool which will hit bookshelves in the spring. For the full Himal article, go here.

Learning Without Seams

We’re often told to learn from others, to take (role) models and to emulate either the path they took, or some of the key lessons they learnt along the way. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to figure out how someone reached a particular goal, or they actively work to prevent you from seeing the struggle that took them there.

This is as much the case for sedentary pursuits like fiction writing as it is for active things like climbing. You can watch a video of someone like Alex Honnold, someone known for his lack of self-aggrandisement and who always seems to downplay the stakes of what he’s just done, and find it hard to see the work, the sweat, or the basic realities of what he did to reach this point. (In his case, years of practice/experience possibly combined with a disposition towards risk-taking.) His book was frustrating for exactly that reason: you had only a minimal sense of the stakes of what he did.

For fiction or many other kinds of rewriting, the whole work of editing, rewriting is more or less deliberately geared towards removing the friction, removing the sense that someone toiled to put this story together. As readers or consumers of stories, we don’t want to sense the seams, don’t want to be aware of how something was constructed. But as practitioners or artists, we need to see those seams to be able to learn our own craft.

So there’s a tension, and that tension instructive in helping you find good models. I’ve been trying to write more about my own failures on this blog so as to balance things out. Whenever I’m learning a new skill, I try to find different types of models. Firstly, people who have reached the heavens, who are trailblazers and who break new ground in their particular skill / discipline. Secondly, those who are a few steps behind, and who really have had to work to get there. It’s this second kind of model where you’re more likely to see the seams of their journey, and you’ll most likely be able to learn from them.

PhD Tools: "Always return to your primary sources"

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

This phrase became a kind of mantra for me during the final write-up of my PhD. Friends and colleagues have since become accustomed to my frequent invocation of this phrase. I wrote up a longish blogpost which stemmed from my frustration at the takeup of primary sources and their use by fellow researchers and analysts in the Afghan context.

With regards to my PhD, I often felt that when I reached a point where I was stuck, the thing that would unstick me was a return to the primary sources. For my specific project, I was lucky to have a rich variety of sources on which to rely. Some may not have this luxury, but for all but the most stalwart of abstract theorists, there is going to be some kind of primary data on which you are basing your research work and writeup.

Thus, whenever you get stuck or you feel your writing starts becoming too self-referential and circular in its logic, go back to the primary sources. I think you'll find this helpful, and you'll return to your writing reinvigorated with new ideas and approaches.

PhD Tools: Freewriting and Journalling to Think Through your Work

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

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

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

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

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

PhD Tools: Pen and Paper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the charts that Vitamin-R generates

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

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

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

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

PhD Tools: 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.]

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.