Highlights + DevonThink = Pretty Great

I’m late to the Highlights party, but I’m glad I got here.

Like many readers of this blog, I get sent (and occasionally read) a lot of PDFs. In fact, I did a quick search in DevonThink, and I am informed that I have 52,244 PDFs in my library. These are a mix of reports, archived copies of websites, scanned-and-OCRed photos and a thousand-and-one things in between.

Thus far, my workflow has been to read PDFs on my Mac. Any notes I took while reading the file were written up manually in separate files. I would laboriously copy and paste whatever text snippet or quotation I wanted to preserve along with its page reference. These would be fed into DevonThink’s AI engine and magic would happen.

Now, post-Highlights-installation, my workflow is much less laborious. I can take highlights in-app, export all the quotations as separate text or HTML files and have have DevonThink go do its thing without all the intermediary hassle. If you’re  a professional researcher or writer using DevonThink as your notes database — and quite frankly, if not, why not? — the Highlights app will probably please you.

Encrypt Your Dropbox Files

Much has been written about securing your digital life since the conclusion of the US election. (This was one of the better posts, I thought.) It's worth doing this regardless of whatever is going on in the politics of country x or y. If the country is big enough, it's going to want to suck your digital life up into its archives one way or another. So why make it easy for them?

Encrypting your Dropbox is one of the low-hanging fruit when it comes to securing your digital life. Most of us store various files in the Dropbox cloud, and they're just sitting there unencrypted unless you take specific action. Moreover, Dropbox has been hacked before (more than once).

Fortunately, Boxcryptor exists to package everything up in an encrypted form. It's a paid service, and worth every cent. Sign up by clicking here.

Squarespace Goes SSL

This news is a few days old, but it's worth restating. Squarespace is the name of the comapny that hosts this blog and most of the other websites that I currently manage. A few days ago, they announced that they'd be offering SSL for all Squarespace sites:

Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, is a technology that secures the connection between your browser and the website you’re visiting. It allows you and your website visitors to feel confident that their information is secure. And we believe that confidence is an important part of your online identity. So, starting today, we’re proud to offer free SSL on all Squarespace websites. Website owners should not have to pay extra or wrestle with complex technical issues to offer this basic security to their users. Every website can enable SSL, which will automatically direct users and search engines to a secure version of that site. The result is that millions of more domains on the Internet will be secured via SSL, our customers can take advantage of the confidence that secure websites bring users, and we will have helped the Internet take a huge step forward in promoting security by default. As an added benefit, websites hosted on Squarespace may enjoy a boost in search rankings. Squarespace is taking care of almost everything, making this an easy transition for customers. To seamlessly manage SSL certificates for all of our websites, we’ve partnered with Let’s Encrypt, a free and open certificate authority (CA) run for the public’s benefit that provides free SSL certificates.

This is great news, and they deserve some credit for rolling this out. Google is making a push to encourage most websites to be secured in this way -- not doing so may even harm your search rankings -- so it's probably a trend that's coming for most people eventually. In any case, if you're using Squarespace as your host, make sure you turn it on!

On Completing Udacity's Intro to Programming Nanodegree

Add this one to the drawer of semi-meaningless certificates!

This took me several months longer than I had expected, but it’s done now: I graduated from Udacity’s Introduction to Programming Nano-degree or IPND. I’ve always liked Udacity’s free courses ever since I did their very first offering, “Intro to Computer Science” or CS101. They make sure to intersperse lots (and lots) of practice with the fun bite-size videos explaining concepts or techniques.

The IPND (estimated to take around 190 hours to complete) takes you on a tour of a variety of languages, programming tools as well as ways of thinking about coding. You learn basic HTML and CSS (for making standalone websites), Python to do more tricky computational things, and some ways to use Python and HTML/CSS combined together. Each unit is divided into a learning stage and then a practical project that you have to build on your own. This is where you prove you’ve mastered the skills that were taught, and you get lots of useful feedback from the examiners / reviewers of the projects.

At the end of the project you get to choose an ‘elective’, a specific area of programming that takes your interest. Current options include:

• Front-end developer
• Back-end developer
• iOS developer
• Android developer
• Data analyst

I wrote earlier that I had chosen the data analyst elective, but this turned out to be far harder than I’d expected so I changed to the back-end developer part. As part of this elective, I learnt about databases, SQL and how to code so that my databases were interacting with Python code.

The course as a whole was — with the exception of the data analysis elective — pitched at just the right level: not too hard but also not too easy. I enjoyed pretty much the entirety of the materials and I really felt like I was growing my skill and capacity as I went through the course.

Of course, spending a few months doing a nano-degree for an hour or two every day does not make a functional programmer. I have a small project I want to code with what I learnt so far, so I’m taking time to do that. I’m also trying to keep my Python fresh by tackling a challenge problem each day over on Codewars.

When learning a skill like coding, there’s a strong temptation to just keep doing more courses. It’s a little like riding a bike with training wheels. It feels safe, protected from the ‘real world’ somehow. But ultimately that’s not going to help me grow, so I’m forcing myself to actually do something practical with my skill before I take another course.

Udacity’s IPND is not cheap at $200 / month, though if you finish the course within 12 months they give you 50% of the tuition money back. That means that you’re actually paying $100 / month for the course, and it’s a strong incentive towards completion. I took a little longer than three months to complete, but you could probably get it all done in two months if you didn’t have a lot of other things going on at the same time. You can do all of the courses they offer for free, though you miss out on the practical side of the tuition, the interactions with one-on-one mentors and the forum support. I used all of that stuff a lot, so all in all it was worth it for me.

There are lots of ‘intro-to-programming’-type courses and materials available, so you should do your research first depending on what you want to do with it later. I really want to do the data analysis nano-degree; this is a full degree requiring an average/estimated 380 hours of study time. It made sense for me to do my initial studies within the Udacity ecosystem, though in this interim period I’m making sure that I’m getting exposure to other resources:

• DataCamp has a great set of Python and R tutorials which I’m looking forward to exploring
• Codewars (mentioned earlier) offers many challenges which test my command of code as well as of maths, logic and reasoning.
• FreeCodeCamp’s excellent (free) course will help me become more comfortable with coding web-facing projects, with the added bonus of connecting coders to non-profits along the way who could benefit from my skills.

For the moment, that’s enough to be getting on with before I start the next nano-degree…

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.

Bots: Part of the Future of Language Learning?

Duolingo just released a new feature on their iOS app called 'Bots'. (In case you don't know it already, Duolingo is a really useful free resource for learning a bunch of different languages in a systematic and structured fashion). Their new Bots feature only works for Spanish, French and German languages/courses at the moment.

Their press release included a sample picture (the first one on the left) suggesting the kind of conversation you might have with their bot.

I tried the app out this afternoon, using the French version as I don't speak Spanish (yet). You can see (the beginning of) my conversation in the second image.

What I hadn't realised (and the press release and the deluge of news articles that recycled said press release didn't help with this) was that the app functions on rails. Which is to say, you can't actually have a free-flowing conversation with the bot. You can't even say "I am sad" in the universe of Duolingo's bots. As you can see from the picture above, triste is "not an accepted word".

Clearly this is early days for the technology. It'll get better, and they'll offer it for the rest of their languages and it'll all be wonderful. (Maybe).

I'll be curious to see how people end up interacting with these bots. There have been some great stories / podcasts on how this kind of thing turns out, like the Radiolab 3-parter or the reporting on Microsoft's 'Tay' bot.

And if chatbots increase, so will ways to speak to computers via voice recognition. Different ways of practicing language are to be welcomed, but, as my brief time with the Duolingo bots suggests, it's early early days...

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.

Turn Off Facebook's News Feed

Judging by the stats generated by Google Analytics and Squarespace’s own tool, over 40% of those who read my blog come here from Facebook. I’m slightly astounded by that number. It also means if I left Facebook (as I’m sometimes wont to do), I’d presumably lose all of those Facebook readers since most don’t seem to use RSS readers or anything else similar.

All of this is just by way of preamble to point you towards a neat little tool called News Feed Eradicator. I’ve been using it for the past 5 or 6 months, and it has delivered many benefits. Its function is pretty simple: turn off the News Feed in Facebook. The only thing you’re left with is the bar on the top with the little red glowy number indicator (that you won’t be seeing as a red if you turned your screen to greyscale as I previously suggested) for all the millions of notifications Facebook seems to think are important.

I only use Facebook as a sort of broadcasting platform since I do know that some people exclusively use it as a source of news and reading material. But if I have to log in to post something, I don’t want to be confronted by my News Feed and its temptations (or dissatisfactions), then I have this Chrome extension to switch everything off.

So I write this now to encourage you all to turn off your News Feeds with the extension, even though I realise this might mean you might not see the next time I post something. (There are, in any case, many other ways to follow my writings/blog: RSS, twitter and via email newsletter, for instance).

PhD Tools: Goodreads for Cross-Pollination

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

During the period I was working most intensely on my PhD writeup, I read over 100 books. I put that number out there not as a confrontation, but as an illustration that reading is important to ensure you don't get lost in a small box of your own creation. Judging purely from my own experience and from sporadic conversations with a loose handful of fellow PhD candidates, this can be a real problem.

Reading widely and about issues and problems wholly unrelated to your field of study is, I believe, the hallmark of a curious mind. If I meet someone for the first time and I'm assessing their work, I'm far more likely to be interested in the last ten books they've read than many other data points. Even the fact that someone is taking time to read, and to read diversely, is an important indicator for me.

I think I can date my adoption of this books-and-ideas-for-cross-fertilisation to when I read Steven Johnson's book Where Good Ideas Come From. He makes a strong case for a more deliberate approach to how you develop and cultivate ideas in your thinking life. (The book is short and highly suggestive of specific approaches to work. I'd recommend it if this kind of thing interests you).

I've found that things that I don't track and monitor tend to fall beside the wayside. Hence Goodreads and Beeminder and a number of other tracking tools. Goodreads allows you to set how many books you want to read each year and then keeps a convenient little widget reminding your how far ahead or behind you are of your goal. If you want a bit more of a 'sting' for non-compliance, you can hook up Beeminder and you'll be kept honest that way.

Reading books on unrelated topics was something I would do in the afternoons or evenings after my Four Perfect Hours. The time would be mine and I could read without any sense of guilt or that I wasn't making progress on my PhD writeup. No, I'd done my work in the morning, so now I could read to my heart's content.

Encounters with books are encounters with other ideas, other minds. It refreshes your approach and your sense of perspective -- both so important for your PhD. Give it a try! See how you can add in some reading time to your daily routine. Even 30 minutes before bed each evening adds up in the end.

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.

Starting the Spaced Repetition Foundation

When I first learned about the idea of spaced repetition, I felt like I'd discovered a magic trick or a secret of some kind. Here was a piece of research that could transform how quickly I learned new words (I was studying Pashto at the time) and how well I recalled them. On the other side of that elation, I felt a simultaneous frustration and sense of disappointment that this piece of pedagogy / educational science hadn't come up before in my schooling career. All those vocab cards I'd created for my BA degree in Arabic and Farsi! So much inefficiency! Not to mention all the things I had studied at primary and secondary school. Most of that specific knowledge remains but it is like the shadow of its original form. I've recently started studying Maths again and I'm painfully aware just how much I've forgotten.

Spaced repetition is a principle that advocates a specific series of intervals between reviews of a particular fact or 'thing' that you want to memorise. A German scholar called Herman Ebbinghaus discovered that there is a pattern to how most humans learn and forget materials, and he outlined a specific algorithm to ensure optimum recall and retention of whatever you are trying to learn. For that, we must be thankful for the (seemingly) boring experiments he had to go through to get to that piece of insight.

Anki is a piece of software that manages your study and recall of individual pieces of information. The spaced repetition algorithm or insight is at the core of how Anki works and helps you. I've used Anki to learn languages, to memorise smaller facts and useful pieces of information, to cement my understanding of broader concepts, among other things. It's pretty adaptable to whatever your specific learning needs are. This is why I've stuck with Anki over its competitors. (I've tried pretty much all of them, and continue to do so, but Anki remains the most customisable and useful IMHO).

Over the years, I've had the privilege to share Anki with others along my travels. Sometimes this has come in the context of language learning, other times like with the friend who wanted to learn all the names of all the bones in the human body.

In fact, Anki was the original bridge or glue that started my friendship with Matt Trevithick, Sources and Methods co-host and all-round busy person. I walked into his office in Kabul -- he was working at the American University of Afghanistan at the time -- and spied a huge stack of flashcards in a box in the corner. I pointed to them and he explained with great pride how he'd learnt them all. We talked through his process a bit and soon enough I was singing the praises of Anki and how much time he'd save and...and...

We've had many conversations over the years relating to language-learning, the different ways Anki can be used and our overwhelming and continuing sense of disbelief that the principles of spaced repetition aren't more widely adopted in the field of education. People who get deep into self-study eventually stumble on SRS, since you often try to find ways to get faster or better in the absence of a teacher telling you what to do. The Quantified Self movement has been instrumental in spreading the gospel of SRS, too, in their special sessions devoted to the topic in their yearly conference, or through the pride-of-place given to show-and-tell explanations of how SRS has allowed someone to learn Chinese, or hieroglyphics or so on. (Click here for the QS list of talks referencing SRS. I'd highly recommend dipping your toe into some of these talks. Most are extremely engaging.)

Bringing matters up to the present day, I have a bit more time and bandwidth for focus now that the PhD is finished and Matt and I had been talking about this sense that more people should be using SRS for a few years, so we have finally bitten the bullet and started something to try to make that happen.

The Spaced Repetition Foundation is our institutional first step to start to spread the lessons to a broader audience and to more varied contexts. Our mission statement reads:

"The Spaced Repetition Foundation, an independent, not-for-profit center, is dedicated to advancing the adoption of spaced repetition as a supplementary learning tool.

"Despite the scientifically proven ability of spaced repetition to vastly increase the retention of information in the brain as a supplemental learning tool, the use of this technique is, at present, largely restricted to select individuals and students for personal enhancement or academic achievement. To date, no single center exists to advocate for the increased adoption of this approach in educational settings at the macro level, to increase public awareness of this useful tool, and to serve as a focal point for interested individuals to come together and work on these issues. 

"Attempting to solve this problem, Natalie, Alex and Matt, long-time users of spaced-repetition applications, decided in the summer of 2016 to start the Spaced Repetition Foundation, which seeks to function as an independent advocate dedicated to increasing the adoption of spaced-repetition technology wherever learning is happening."

Note that we are not completely and exclusively technology-centric in our approach. At least part of the work involves outreach, involves testing use cases and scenarios, and if it really is to find a place in the broader world (away from electricity and flashy phones, perhaps) it must be adaptable to low-tech or no-tech approaches.

Going forward, we'll be spreading the word about the science behind spaced repetition (spoiler: it works), ways everyone can use some form of review-recall testing in their lives, and generally galvanising different communities to find ways to rethink their approaches to knowledge acquisition and long-term recall through spaced repetition. We have some specific first steps planned, but I'll hold off with those details until they are more pertinent.

I'm extremely glad, too, that we will get to work with Natalie McKnight, the other co-founder, who brings a wealth of institutional and practical educational experience beyond simply the solitary learner that Matt and I represent. Natalie is Professor of Humanities and Dean of the College of General Studies at Boston University. I'm excited to work together with her to expand the kinds of communities and settings we can reach.

If you have any interest in the work we're doing, please sign up for our newsletter here or if you are interested in learning more, please do get in touch. Full details are available on our website at http://www.spacedrepfoundation.org.