The Productive Professor

Enter the Hyper Key

One of my productivity aspirations (read: not a goal) is to get better at utilizing the keyboard for quickly completing or automating tasks. macOS has great support for keyboard shortcuts, and I've also been playing with Keyboard Maestro and PasteBot quite a bit lately. One of the challenges of building

Productive Professor Digest #001: Podcasts

Reading and reviewing with Readwise.io

During the next academic year, I will go through my institution's equivalent of the tenure process. (We don't have tenure, but that's a story for another day.) As a part of the process, candidates write a significant paper reflecting on the institution's mission and the ways in which have grown

Plans

One of the things I've been thinking about is building a regular, sustainable use for this space. At the moment, I've settled on the following. On the first Tuesday of the month, I'll aim for one longer, original column or exploration of an aspect of productivity, especially as it pertains

Thinking About Inputs

An effective personal productivity system is all about having a plan for your stuff, defined broadly. This implies that it's not just about managing a few to-do lists. Instead, you need a plan for what to do when a thing enters your life. Following on Cal Newport's essay in The

A Review of "Can't Even"

A couple of weeks ago a review I wrote of Anne Helen Petersen's Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation went live on Dordt's inAllThings publication. For readers of this site, it's worth noting that Petersen is a former college professor with some sharp thoughts on productivity, work, and

tools

Tools and Workflows: Building Spring Courses

As our fall semester mercifully winds down, the time has come to transition from the brainstorming phase to the creating phase for spring courses. I wanted to highlight some of the tools I'll be using.

Brian Phillips on Monolith Fatigue and the Attention Economy

One of my favorite creative nonfiction writers working today is Brian Phillips. I started reading him at Grantland (RIP), especially when he'd write about my favorite sport, tennis. (His essay collection, Impossible Owls, was a joy to read when it was released a few years ago.) He has a new

productivity

Cal Newport on the failure of Getting Things Done

Late to the party on this one, but I wanted to highlight Cal Newport's recent piece in The New Yorker on the failure of David Allen's seminal productivity system, Getting Things Done. I practice a flavor of GTD, and part of what intially drew me in was Newport's focus on

Email is a dumpster fire

Send an email and watch it burn in a perfect coda to 2020.

A Confession

My experiences this semester will have a lasting impact on my relationship with time management and personal productivity systems.