Tag Archives: productivity

The infinite bits problem; skills I’d like to build upon

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The other day I made this list of things I’d like to learn more about (within the next year). I’m convinced that not focusing on one area has really hurt my impressiveness, so I need to cull this down and ruthlessly prioritize. The first priority at this moment is landing a kickass job, so that’ll take precedence. I started by deleting RSS feeds not related to these areas. If you don’t at least have a list of skills you’d like to improve upon you’re probably spinning your wheels. I welcome comments.

Desired skills/areas of knowledge
Increasing Productivity
Better speaking
Reading faster
Management skills
Making people happy
Linear programming
Accounting
Interview – Conducting and Responding
Programming (general)
Finance (options, bonds)
Reading faces
Game
Prospect theory
“Finding alpha”-related theory (hurdle rate)
Depression
Asperger’s Syndrome
Ways to increase or lower someone’s status
Coaching/Leading people (basketball)
Consulting (knowledge)
Web Design
Design/Usability
Photoshop

summer activities:
working at atlassian
explore green startup
speech coach
coaching AAU
consulting blog
reading 1 book a week
practicing game
thesis
Filming myself
omnifocus plugin/iphone app
toastmasters (?)
10 informational interviews
Weekly podcasts

next fall activities:
start-up business
Advice for a quarter stand
thesis
apply for jobs
the cmc forum (?)
complete classes
Robert Day coaching
practice interview club
good eating club
Create online course guide for CMC students

planned courses:
programming (practice for the ACM)
thesis
accounting
accounting
linear programming

next semester:
philosophy
neuroscience (fulfill bio GE)
accounting/economics
computer science

How to get tons of reading done

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I’m about to finish my fifth book in 5 weeks (What Works in Development? edited by Bill Easterly and Jessica Cohen), in addition to reading a higher number of academic papers and the same number of RSS feeds that I usually read. There are a few good reasons for this:
1) Amazon Kindle app for iPhone: I read on the largest possible font, so there are only two or three sentences on the page at a time. The relevant unit of accomplishment is flipping this (small) page, so I can read a little or a lot and still feel like I’m getting reading done. Furthermore, with this small screen I don’t skip text and backtrack nearly as much as I do when I’m reading paper. Reading on a digital screen makes me less sleepy. There also aren’t any distractions, like my phone is when I’m reading a paper book.
Another nice thing about the Kindle is links within the book. I read more footnotes because you can skip easily to the footnotes and back to the main text by touching the screen. This is something that’s even easier to do on the iPhone than on the Kindle.
On a side note, I’ve purchased books for the first time in almost two years; it’s impossible to get paper copies of the books I’d like to read while I’m here.
2) No Internet at home: I’ve had tons of experience dealing with this one; queue up a whole bunch of tabs, print out PDFs of each page and save them to a flash drive. In addition to saving time surfing (no actual reading time,just deciding whether or not to read things later), I finish a higher percentage of my reading and I’m not as distracted because there’s no information coming in, like new RSS feeds or email/text messages. Any links I open from stories I’ve just read get saved with a “Unable to load page” page in Chrome; the next time I get on a wireless connection these open automatically. Same goes with emails, which I compose and then sit in my outbox for days at a time.
3) More free time. Everyone says that liberal arts schools ‘teach you how to think’ but also stress the irrelevance of the course material. Classes are a distraction; most of the reading is stuff that isn’t too helpful.
In short, I’m enjoying higher productivity now but all three of these are going to disappear once I get home; I won’t read on my phone when I can get free books from the library, I struggle to shut off the Internet voluntarily and next semester I’ll have thesis and job applications in addition to coursework. I’m not optimistic about maintaining this high level of productivity.