Where Does It Go?

Wow, I can't believe it has been nearly a year since I last wrote here.  That is very poor given that the point of this blog is to practice writing in preparation for writing up my thesis.  The thesis is now clearly above the horizon.  It will be due in a year or so.  That is a daunting prospect.

It is not that I have achieved nothing since my last post.  I have had a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.  That was a lot of time invested in writing, and one of my targets for my PhD achieved.  However, I have a long way to go yet.  I need to get some more papers out in the third year of my PhD.  I have two under development and they should be submitted before the end of 2010. If I manage that then I will feel happy.

However, any feelings of progress will be tempered by a recent blog post on matt.might.net which worried me greatly.  It identified a key reason for failure to obtain a PhD was a lack of writing practice and put the amount required at about 10,000 hours. This is given as about 5 hours per day, but that is based on a 6 year graduate school experience, such as I understand is typical in the US.  Getting 4 years in the UK is a luxury.  Indeed, with the 3.5 years that is typical this breaks down as nearly 8 hours of writing every day (including weekends and holidays), so spending this amount of time on writing would mean never doing anything else.  I just hope that as a mature student my 20 years in industry has given me the writing skills I need.

I worry about though that the opposite is true.  Over the last 20 years business communication has become dominated by PowerPoint, or to be more accurate, by the presentation.  When I started work in the 1980s I would get written memos telling me what I needed to know to do my job, by the time I left this had changed to emails with a presentation attached.  I had to trawl through dozens of slides to find the two or three relevant to me.  Then I had to put back all the detail left out by the author so that his or her message could be boiled down to a dozen bullet points.

I am not saying I am innocent in this.  I did it as much as anyone. I like to think that my graphs and tables where above average and properly conveyed the message, but I was an enthusiastic adopter of the bullet point.  It is a great time saver to précis a paragraph or two as a 12 word bullet. It is also very useful to have the ambiguity of interpretation that such brevity allows.  A bit of room to wriggle is usually useful in business.  It allows the reader to interpret the message in the way most relevant to them, making them more likely to accept the message.  Finally, when writing to busy senior managers it is often the best way to get your ideas read.  Half a dozen slides are far more likely to get a cursory scan than page of text.

Getting back to writing prose, being meticulous about the meaning of what I write, valuing accuracy over brevity (while not being unnecessarily verbose) has been hard.  Like getting back onto a bicycle after years of driving.  I haven't forgotten what I need to do, I know it is good for me and for others, but it is just not as comfortable.

So, as well as worrying me, Matt Might's post has spurred me to get back to my blog.  As it says:

That's why I recommend that new students start a blog. Even if no one else reads it, start one. You don't even have to write about your research. Practicing the act of writing is all that matters.

I hope to see you again tomorrow.

Blogging Technology

I have spent much of the last 48 hours feeling ill. Nothing serious just a sore through and ticklish cough, but it has kept me awake at night and so I am very tired. It allowed me to catch up on about eight hours of TV programmes recorded on my PVR but at the cost of really feeling at a really low ebb now. I can hardly be bothered to write this blog. I only got yesterday's done because I had prepared it in advance. Though I did change it on a read through yesterday, but I have not had the courage to check my changes since. I was so tired I probably wrote complete rubbish.

I should have taken advantage of technology through the night. Rather than spend all that time just watching shows I was not that keen on watching, I should have used my technology to write my blog. I couldn't be bothered to switch on the PC, also that would be too noisy. However, I have downloaded an iPhone app that allows me to update Blogger. I really want to have a go on it. I could have used the time to get familiar with that. Once I get into it I think it will allow me to use train journeys to keep my writing practice going. Anyway I'm too tired to write more. Let's hope normal service is resumed tomorrow.
 

Keeping a Record

Another important behaviour to develop to become a productive writer is to measure progress against short term realistic goals. I really believe this works, in my pre-academic life I worked in performance measurement. My whole life was put towards developing measures, agreeing goals to be achieved and trying to mitigate a much as possible the unintended consequences of the targets. I was always amazed at how motivating goal setting and measurement was. It motivated people so much that they would achieve goals - unfortunately often poorly designed - at the expense of good customer service, at the expense of their own personal happiness, at the expense of the long term viability of their jobs.

I think most of this problem comes from making measures and goals simple. They have to be simple to be motivating, so that people can easily see how their behaviour affects their reward. The trouble is that business, just like society at large, is a complex non-linear system and just looking at a few variables gives a very narrow insight into what is happening. Putting targets and therefore basing reward on a small number of variables then inevitably skews the importance of those numbers and what was a finely tuned system becomes unstable. Especially as measures often ended up being quantity rather than quality based.

Fortunately, I don't think this applies much to my writing. I am not writing great literature. As long as what I write is clear and understandable then I think I have passed the quality threshold. Perhaps I will advance to better style over time. What I really need to measure is a count of words written and documents finished. I did attempt to set up a measurement regime on Daytum in an attempt to motivate myself a month or so back. But I overcomplicated  my monitoring - I fell back into my work habits - I thought I would want to break down my writing into detailed charts and figures. I won't. I just need to know I am moving forward. I will keeping simpler records from now on.

Storing up posts

After "losing" and then finding a post I have wondered about building a store of unpublished posts so that I have something to hand when I find myself short of time to write my daily post. Indeed, this post is one such. I am actually writing it immediately after posting the "lost" post. But it occurs to me that I am falling into one, or maybe two, of the bad behaviours listed by Silvia. I am allowing myself to envisage lacking time for writing - I should schedule time and stick to it. Also I may be pretending that I write better when I'm inspired. I certainly feel that I am on a roll at the moment and could write a hundred posts. But that is binge writing and in the long run will not be productive.

I guess what I will do is set aside a given time for my blogging everyday. I must use that time for writing posts. If I manage to write more than one post then that is a bonus. And I think I will save up the spare posts - I do aim to take a few holidays and will, perhaps, not blog seriously during that period. Having a stock of unpublished ready written posts to use will be useful then.The actual publication is not what is important to me, it is just a great side-effect of getting my writing organised. But I must write one post every day. Indeed I worry that writing more than one is another way to avoid my main focus - writing some papers.

Scheduling

Well, I only made two postings before missing one. I hope this post starts a longer run of daily posts. I was busy yesterday getting ready to give a tutorial at our regular group meeting. However, that is no excuse - or as it is termed in my current read - it is a specious barrier. The book is, "How to Write a Lot" by Paul J. Silvia and is subtitled, "A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing". Silvia has no sympathy for those that find themselves short of time for writing. The productive writer schedules time and jealously protects that schedule. I have now put aside some time each week and I have every intention in sticking to it.

Silvia also is lacking in sympathy for those do not stick to their schedules. He says people are good at scheduling other activity such as watching favourite TV shows and should be able to schedule their writing. I agree that scheduling my writing will be a key step forward, but I have spent much of the last decade removing schedules from my life. I rarely watch live TV, I routinely records all the programmes I plan to watch on my PVR and watch them as time allows. I am now considering breaking the link to live radio and listen to just podcasts and other on-demand audio. Sticking to the writing will, I am sure be tough, we'll see how I get on.

Lost Post

Okay, so I was a bit tired yesterday morning when I wrote a post bemoaning the fact that I had already broken my run of daily posts but that I was going do better with the next run. I thought I would then do something else before proof reading and hitting "publish". Looks like I never did hit publish. But it must be saved as a draft somewhere, Blogger is still new to me so I'm not sure where. I hope I'll be able to find it again soon. So maybe today will have two posts for the price of one.

I am a terrible typist, though I used to be better. As a child I taught myself to touch type on an old stiff manual typewriter. My bad habits started there as I didn't have the strength in my little fingers to press the keys so I used other fingers but I was still pretty fast and accurate, especially when I got a modern typewriter and then a computer (a TRS-80). However, when I went to university I didn't take my new computer (a BBC B) and my typing skills fell away - yes I am so old that laptops didn't exist let alone form part of the average student's study equipment. So I taught myself to type again after university but I was lazy and I now use just two fingers of each hand plus my right thumb - pretty poor.

So, this has got me thinking about proof reading. It is something that has to be done. But how long should I leave between draft and proofing. There has to be some gap otherwise I miss my errors because I read what I wanted to write not what was actually written. But if I leave it too long I forget about it and, maybe, lose it. I think it is probably just another work avoidance behaviour, proofing is boring. From now, I will just leave it long enough to make a cup of tea and then check through. Let's see how this works for this post.

Exoplanet App

I downloaded a nice free app for my iPhone today - the Exoplanet App by Hanno Rein. I became aware of it from @exoplanetology's twitter feed. The app is a more visual and iPhone friendly version of the Extrasolar Planets Catalog. It shows an image for each planet based on Jupiter, Neptune or the Earth indicating what type of planet it is thought to be. The colour of the image shows an estimate of the temperature of the planet - I assume that is the equilibrium temperature - the redder the planet the hotter it is. Basic data for the planet and star is given plus links to Simbad, ADS, exoplanet.eu and arXiv. The links to Simbad and ADS perform searches on those databases relevant to selected planet, the other two just link to the sites.

The app description says a pro version will be available soon, I assume that will not be free. It promises more features including daily updates of new data. I would like to see database sorting options added; currently the data is presented only alphabetically. I would also like to see the temperature given explicitly, even if it is just a rough estimate, rather than having to be inferred from the colour of an image. However, this app is a major step forward in helping me carry around the key information I require for my research and I look forward to supporting Hanno by purchasing the pro version.