Working around distractions

I've been trying a method for enhancing my productivity during the day. Why am I doing this? Well, I want to maintain a healthy work-life balance; if I get more done at work, I have more time to spend with my fiancee, workout, cook, read, etc. This is incredibly difficult in academia, where there is no limit to the work that can be done. However, I value my personal life as well as my professional one, so a balance must be found.

My approach is simple and is inspired by the No Meat Athlete and Zen Habits blogs. I first make a list of things that need to be done. It can be large or small; it doesn't matter. I then work on one thing on the list and only open programs and browser tabs that directly relate to this task. That's the most important part. Multitasking, I've decided, is the bane of productivity.

If I see an interesting paper, I use Instapaper to save it for later. If I have too many e-mails or unread items, I go through and delete the ones that were once relevant but no longer are. The goal is to reduce the noise and possibilities to be distracted while working. This also includes choosing not to listen to music if I am writing anything or doing something that requires more than passive attention.

Of course, I also account for when I can not avoid being distracted. I allow time to be interrupted (and I will be numerous times) during the day by my colleagues and adviser. I also set time limits that are proportional to the magnitude of the task. If I have lab work, I give myself an hour minimum and two hour maximum; conversely, computer work is usually delegated 15 minutes to an hour. By setting upper time limits, I allow myself to be satisfied with unfinished work, knowing that when I pick it up again I will have a fresher mind. And by setting lower time limits, I ensure that I have enough time to accomplish something meaningful. Once an item on the list is done, I remove it. If it's not done, it stays.

This may be a bit too much micromanaging for some, but with the amount of things that are required of one in academia, I think it's necessary.

I believe that Henri Poincaré had habits similar to these. His goal, in part, was to maximize his creativity. I think this was so because he believed that a creative mind must be allowed to wander around different tasks. In this way, he recruited his subconscious to work on problems while he consciously worked on others.

Philosophy isn't useful for science? Don't be crass.

Richard Feynman once quipped, "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." Dr. Feynman is one of my scientific heroes, but this quote often tempers my admiration for the man. I respect him because he appreciated what was good in many different things, from the simple aesthetics of a flower to the intricate mathematics underlying quantum mechanics. He was not one to dismiss ideas simply because they were "artsy" or not of pure science. This is why I often puzzle over how he could have made such a statement concerning philosophy.

Without philosophy, I would not be the same scientist that I am, and I would venture that I would not be as good of one, either. Philosophy is the art of critical analysis; the philosophy of science examines the methods and logic that form the foundation of our field. The result of this investigation exposes the mental machinery that powers our work. But this knowledge has also produced a number of practical applications throughout history. The following are two examples.

E. T. Jaynes and R. T. Cox, among others, re-examined the long-held rules of inference. A simple redefinition of probability led to an explosion of techniques for drawing conclusions where information was limited, from signal processing to economics. This is the well known Bayesian revolution. As another example, Henri Poincaré established a daily routine that complemented his work as a scientist. He postulated that the subconscious was at the focal point of discovery, and so he took steps to nurse its well-being. A modern day analog to this is the development of programming philosophies that are intended to increase a software engineer's productivity by tailoring work methods to the structure of the mind.

My justification of philosophy to science was to make a point, but I don't think it was necessary. It is unfortunate that we must always find utility in our work. As I've stated before, science is ultimately a creative process that is powered by our primal nature and instincts. To remove its basis from the romantic mindset and place it solely in the context of practicality is a fallacy. I do science and philosophy because I like to, and no better justification is required than that.

A diverse basis for science

The sum of our experiences, environment, and genetic predispositions form the basis for how we view and interpret the world. This is a principle of many philosophies and helps to explain the broad diversity in human behavior.

The practical view of science is of a rigid structure built upon basic assumptions and prior knowledge. After the proper application of "the scientific method," this foundation leads us to new discoveries. Roughly speaking, the method goes as such: we start from our current state of knowledge, make a hypothesis followed by observations, formulate a proper model that accommodates the data, then draw our conclusions while taking into account the prior information. This outline must follow the rules of logic and not contradict what we already know to be true (and if it does, we place this contradiction under extreme scrutiny until the contradiction is resolved).

This generalization of the scientific method is confounded by the inherent variability in the assumptions from which it starts. In reality, every one possesses a different set of beliefs regarding scientific inquiry. This is exactly analogous to the variety of metaphysical beliefs held by people across the globe. And, just as this variety gives rise to the diversity of people, it leads scientists to different interpretations of theirs and others' work.

Rather than enforce a common basis for the pursuit of science, scientists ought to respect the basic diversity within their own field. Science is more than rote application of a formula; it engages the scientist to the point that discovery becomes an act of self-expression. A study is flavored with the thoughts and feelings of the people involved and can not be separated from them. Once this is understood, we can see that science is a very human endeavor and not the cold, calculated formula known as the scientific method.

The great physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar gave a famous lecture at the International Symposium in Honor of Robert R. Wilson in April, 1979 entitled "Beauty and the Quest for Beauty in Science." In the second paragraph of the lecture, he quotes Poincaré:

The Scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living.... I mean the intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts and which a pure intelligence can grasp....

It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in following the giant courses of the stars, now in scrutinizing with a microscope that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness, and, now in seeking in geological ages the traces of the past that attracts us because of its remoteness.

Good science is not forced and does not evolve from long hours in the lab and a work-centric lifestyle alone, though I admit that these are necessary to maintain a healthy scientific career. Rather, science is intimately related to one of the most basic of human traits: the impassioned drive to create order out of chaos.

And this is why, despite my affection for Poincaré, I disagree with part of the above quote. Beauty does not exist within Nature because its parts are inherently balanced and "harmonious." Beauty exists as a result of the mind imparting its own structure to random titillations of the senses. Men and women do not render Nature meaningful through physical exertion alone. The reduction of Nature to coherent understanding is the realm of Science.

Creativity in academia

I recently read this very interesting article that is a followup to the author's original book "Hackers," a look into the subculture of the computer geeks who laid the foundation for today's computer-based society. Two of the common qualities of these influential tech giants is their obsessive drive for quality and their playful creativity. Indeed, many modern companies, such as Google, go to great lengths to foster creativity in their employees by giving them freedom and resources to work on side projects and time to think about new products. The idea, I think, is to keep employees' minds fresh and slightly unfocused so that inspiration strikes more often to the company's benefit.

A similar and equally interesting article came out recently on Talking Philosophy's blog in which the author, Benjamin S. Nelson, discusses the creative process itself in relation to a man, John Kanzius, who invented a radio frequency generator to both attack cancer cells and split water molecules (awesome!). Philosophers, starting with Poincare, have broken the creative process into four successive steps: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. I will take these steps to be self-evident in their meaning, but I only wish to note that I believe that creative environments strive to improve the preparation and incubation steps so that illumination happens more often and with better results.

This being said, I wonder now why such environments are not fostered in academia. Graduate students are frequently overburdened with many menial tasks such as grading papers and acting as teaching assistants, attending class, writing portions of grant reports, attending frequent group meetings, and staying up-to-date on the relevant literature. Add to this exercise, chores, and hope for a meaningful social life and one can quickly see that this lifestyle does not support creative solutions to research problems. In no way are these other tasks without benefits, but if the resources of the mind are constantly employed for a menagerie of many simple duties, then what room is there to allow ideas to incubate in their minds?


I think academia could really benefit from adopting some of the creative strategies that many companies now use to better the quality of their products. What do you think?

Note: In college there was a video that was often shown in our engineering business classes from some evening tabloid (Dateline or something similar) which followed a company's process for developing a new and improved shopping cart. I can't remember the name of the show or the company, but it is highly relevant here. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

 Update: Found part of the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M66ZU2PCIcM. The company's name is IDEO and focus on innovative designs. Their take on the creative process is very characteristic of the stance that some new companies are taking.