PhD Tools: Think better with Tinderbox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PhD Tools: Visualise Structure and Kanban Flow with Trello

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walking with Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PhD Tools: Beeminder

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

I feel like I've mentioned the end of the PhD several times in recent posts (PHD IS OVER!). It occurred to me that it might be useful to go through some of the tools and principles that I found most useful in completing the doctoral thesis, the research and the work in general. Part of this is by way of giving thanks to the application or methodological creators, and the other part is me thinking that others (future / current PhD students?) might find this useful.

It took me many years to finally settle on these tools. It would probably be unwise to adopt my entire writing style and process for yourself, because everyone's unique. I read a lot of books, blogposts and discussed things in forums and at meetings with others. This is all the product of a lot of procrastination (some active, some just resulting from hanging out on twitter or subscribing to a bunch of productivity-related blogs in my RSS reader).

Each post will vary in size. For some I'll go into a bit more detail because the principle will be somewhat unknown. Others are mega-players in the tech world so I'll just tip my hat in their direction.

Minding the Bees

My first pick is, of course, Beeminder. (I've written about Beeminder before here.) The principle behind this service is pretty simple: you commit to doing a certain thing (or things) by a certain date (or regularly each day etc) and if you don't do them, you're penalised with money taken from your credit/debit card. The amount of money taken depends on whether you're a first-time offender (free, or $5), but then it increases exponentially. Pretty soon you'll be facing $270 or even higher fines.

Needless to say, this is a pretty strong motivator. You can hear about some of the nitty-gritty details in a podcast interview I did with Matt Trevithick and the founders of Beeminder, Bethany Soule and Daniel Reeves.

I have used Beeminder for a really wide variety of things -- not just for my work but for my personal life, too -- but in terms of my PhD, I had three main goals it supported:

1) tracking the amount of time I spent writing. You can hook up RescueTime (a passive activity tracker on your laptop) to feed into Beeminder. I can then say that I want to make sure I do a minimum of 1 hour of writing in Scrivener each day (for example), and Beeminder keeps track of the rest. This is a good thing to track because, ultimately, the PhD is all about keeping writing. You can get lost in the research, but after a certain point you just have to deliver it and ship the damn thing. This keeps you honest about the writing part, the sitting down in the chair and putting words on the page.

2) words drafted -- this one's a bit more delicate, since often when you're starting out, drafting a new section or chapter, the words that come out are useless drivel (or replace with a far less charitable way of describing their quality, and say hi to my inner voice while you're there!). At the beginning, doing basic drafting, it's hard to get started because you feel everything has to be perfect. The best antidote to this is to work on a 'shitty first draft'. Here, the idea is simply to churn out enough thoughts to fill the blank space in the outline, or book, or chapter or wherever.
A specific example: I flew to Karachi in late 2012 to hammer out the first draft of my dissertation. I setup a Beeminder goal of having 100,000 words of text (approx the maximum word count allowed for submission to the university) and a date 6 weeks in the future, and I got writing. Beeminder calculates and tells you how many words you have to get done each day in order to stay ahead of the curve. (There are graphs. They are awesome). As long as you keep writing, you're ok. And I did it. Most was horrible, and some of it was inner conversations between myself and myself about the subject under consideration, almost all of which I had to rewrite in some shape or form later on. But... it was words on the page, and it was me thinking through the issues. It was essential.

3) Sources Read -- this might be unique to me, but at some point I had to return to the newly-gathered sources of the Taliban Sources Project. I looked in my DevonThink database (about which, more to come in a future post) and saw I'd flagged 1000+ articles to reread, catalogue/tag and integrate into the main thesis argument. So I plugged those numbers into Beeminder, gave myself a workable daily rate (50 or 100, I think) and then it calculated the rest and kept me honest.

So, to sum up:

• Beeminder forces you think backwards from your goal if you have a specific endpoint in mind. This is extremely valuable as it makes sure you're not being overambitious.
• Beeminder gives you accountability. It keeps you honest. This is what I initially found was most valuable, but later on I needed this less. YMMV.
• The community of Beeminder users is wonderful. The forum is a great place to get ideas, discuss approaches / failures etc.
• It works! Many people have had great results using Beeminder.

I'm not going to say I couldn't have written my PhD without Beeminder, but I'm almost saying it. Go check it out!

Remove Your Colour

This is just a quick little trick that may or may not be useful for you. I can't seem to track down the site where I originally read about this, but if I discover it subsequently I'll be sure to credit the author/blogger because I've derived a lot of benefit from this.

The idea is simple: switch all your digital devices' displays to black/white or grayscale (i.e. turn off all colours). This includes phones and laptops and whatever else may have a bright colourful screen that allows you to change the colour configuration. You do this because, as I discovered, so many of the (cheap) tricks employed by websites and computer systems to get you to keep using them, all of these things use colour as a key tactic. By turning the colour off, you take away a lot of the emotional pull that these services have on you, and thus are more able to switch off, detach and so on.

Readers of this blog will know that I've been a long-standing advocate of turning everything off. My phone is on Airplane Mode for almost the entire day, usually, and my laptop is only connected to the internet if there's a particular reason. Connection to the internet, for me, is a privilege not a right. It's a rule that I've defined for myself -- (this will / may not work for you!) -- but it's one that I've defined because I had problems with these things in the past. For someone interested in learning more, with half an iota of curiosity about the world, the internet is a feast of opportunity and possibility. Social media more so: every connection is an opportunity to discover something new, and the stream never ends!

So I've become pretty good about switching these things off, but sometimes you have no choice. Having all screens as black-and-white means that I have a bit more objectivity, or power to stand back from the allure of programme x or service y.

You really notice how much colour plays a role in keeping you using your phone or a particular app when you turn the colour back on after a few days with it turned off. (Occasionally you have to identify a particular colour in an emailed photo, or some such). Suddenly everything is pretty. Reds and blues and greens glisten. The screen on most modern devices is really a marvel, and it's clearly designed to work well with colour.

Still, turn it off. That's how they get you. (Instructions for Macs here, Android phones here, PCs here (sort of), and iPhone/iPads here). You might be surprised how it gives you a bit more power over your own choices.