Our department has up to four PhD studentships available and anyone interested in potentially joining my research group should get in touch as soon as possible! The details can be found here.
I am interested supporting students broadly in the areas of vertebrate evolution and palaeontology, morphological evolution, and phylogenetics. The deadline is 9 January 2023 (not a lot of time, considering the holidays are approaching!) Please note, this opportunity is open to UK residents only (and potentially EU students with appropriate immigration status).
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There's a nice editorial in Nature this week: In praise of research in fundamental biology. It even includes a nice shout-out to Palaeozoic fish.
It is good to see this message taking centre stage in a widely visible place. I'd only add that this isn't just about funder policies. Many funders give their panels and referees wide scope to determine what is important and worthwhile and many run "discovery science" programs within their remit, as NERC does here in the UK. This is key, as it helps maintain intellectual independence, ensuring that panels and referees can make decisions based on the soundness of the science without interferences like political or institutional fashions. It is not just the institutions therefore that need to see these messages, but working academics who are the gate-keepers of funding decisions. A lot of fundamental science is not hypothesis-driven and thus appears to have ill-defined outcomes. I strongly suspect this fact is what undermines a lot of fundamental science proposals. This happens at the review stage where peer reviewers and expert panels make the decisions, not the institutions. This isn't to say that fundamental science does not concern hypotheses. However, a lot of fundamental research does not follow an experimentalist model, and therefore is not best explained in experimentalist terms. Historical sciences, like palaeontology highlighted briefly in the editorial, are not uniformly modelled in an experimentalist framework. Historical sciences are more investigative, and tend to involve searching through details and constructing hypothesis and narrative in light of new observations. This can give the impression that the work is dealing in ill-defined objectives and may be too risky to warrant support. Nevertheless, the expectation that historical sciences work in a pre-defined hypothetico-deductive pattern infects even palaeontologists, especially when they get in the panel room or review proposals. I believe this is more a product of subconscious "physics envy" more than any sense that the investigative, discovery-driven approach is any less worthwhile. Scientists evaluating proposals---whatever their background---need to become more aware of the diversity of research approaches before relying too quickly on standard heuristics for assessing research quality. This substack by author Anne Helen Peterson rings pretty true. A few choice quotes here, but go read the whole thing. Some job descriptions expanded alongside the ongoing assumption that new technologies (photocopiers, word processors, computers, faxes, email, Slack, Teams, Zoom, online calendars, project managers, or automating shortcuts) dramatically reduce workload, thereby justifying the number of tasks that have been pushed onto the plate of a single worker. In reality, those technologies dosimplify an existing task — but they also add a new, complex layer of additionalwork. As I discussed with Sarah Marshall on this week’s You’re Wrong About, email did not kill the memo; it created a different, wilder, more slippery sort of memo. One of the caveats of Focus Day is that it doesn't absolve us from our duties, and we may still need to step in and handle emergencies if that's our charge. Ultimately, you'll need to check your email at some point and possibly need action. That's just life. The question isn't really about whether you should do email. It is really about how you will deal with email to reduce its drag on your focus, productivity, and creativity.
1. Set a specific time to check email. Choose one or more blocks in the day where you'll deal with email. You probably do this daily anyway, but make these shorter than you usually do. Perhaps no more than 20-30 minutes. Avoid doing email first thing in your day if your role lets you. If you really are worried email will nag at you in the background while you're trying to work on something, then perhaps do it first thing. I prefer to leave it until after I've done my first Focus Day time block. This alone can be liberating. 2. It's time to check your email. Gird thyself. You need to mentally prepare yourself for incoming stuff that will make you want to react to it and potentially do it right away. Worse still, you don't do it, so it could create an open loop that drags on later in the day. Get yourself ready for this possibility to prepare yourself for the next step because it will take a bit of willpower to ignore—and ultimately forget—things that aren't urgent. 3. Read only new email subject lines Filter your inbox to show only new messages; read over the subject lines for stuff that seems specific and urgent. If it's not something that appears to need doing right now, then leave it unread for your next visit to your inbox. At this point, that should be all. However, you may find it hard to ignore things, you might not keep your "unread" flags up to date etc. so you'll be nagged by the feeling that you'll miss or forget something. If that's a problem, proceed to step 4. 4. Process your emails, but don't action everything (or even anything) The concept of processing email is explained best in David Allen's GTD method: capture, clarify, and then set some reminders to deal with any actions for the right place and time. Use the two-minute rule: if it takes two minutes or less to reply to or action an email, do it now. Otherwise: file anything that isn't actionable and organize anything requiring action. That means jotting down a reminder in a list or diary so that you do it in the right time and context. I keep three folders in my email client: Actions, Review, and Reply. The names are pretty self-explanatory: The Actions folder is for emails requiring that I do something, usually soon and has the steps needed to deal with it; Review is for stuff I should look at but don't have time to digest in detail right now. Often, these are journal tables of contents or newsletters. Reply is possibly redundant with Actions, but it does help me sort out messages that might require me to have a bit of time to think and compose a proper reply. A simple folder system like this can help you keep a clear head and not worry that you'll forget about something you saw. The key to any of this working is that you need a system that you trust. If your brain doesn't trust you to check in regularly with your diary or lists, you will continue to hold that information in memory, and you'll continue to worry about it. This generates stress and drags on your focus. The key to a trusted system is that it's something you're doing or dealing with pretty much every day or very regularly. This means that dealing with email in this way needs to be a daily or routine exercise and not something you do just on Focus Days. At an institutional and operational level, improving the focus, well-being, and experience, therefore, comes down to respecting the fact that none of us is at our best with an inbox that's constantly open in the background. Today was my department’s second scheduled “Focus Day”, but for me it is the first because I was teaching last week. My department is trialling Focus Days for a six-week period. Staff have expressed a desire for more time to have unbroken concentration on important but non-urgent tasks. For academics like myself, this will generally mean things like work in support of papers and grant proposals. So, it’s a license to switch off emails and turn down meetings so that you can buckle down and have some serious time to think deeply and work with focus.
Personally, this day was a success from the get-go. By 9:00 this morning, I was brimming with creative energy. It was almost impossible to pick something to actually focus on! Luckily, I had decided earlier in the week what I would be doing and I stuck to it. I chose two very different types of task to work on to minimize the drainage caused by ‘task switching’. One task was a concentration-intensive one; the other was just stuff that needed doing but needed me to be occasionally present. I also kept the list short to ensure success and that I feel positive about the outcome of the day by the end of it. The first task was simply to get some specimens I am working on into a bath of acid in the lab. This is digesting the carbonate rock off the fossils to extract the bones. These can sit in the acid for an hour or so before I need to go back to the lab. So, it was easy to schedule doing this stuff as part of a break from the other thing. That other thing was working on some long overdue co-author input into a manuscript I’m collaborating on about modern shark functional evolution. This is a project I’m super excited about. It was something I started years ago, but the vicissitudes of academic life had put it on hold. As it happened, another group was independently working on it and we’ve now joined forces. Thanks to their efforts, there’s a manuscript that should soon be getting submitted (once I get off my butt and do my part!). Again, I chose some very specific, finite and achievable tasks: a quick read-through of the MS and generate some action items in terms of re-writes or further research. I managed to very quickly identify those and set to work on them. The result was a major breakthrough in the progress of this manuscript and what I think will make it a more exciting paper. How did I prepare for the day? It is important to prepare for the day because without a bit of task management, old habits can creep in and, before you know it, you’re filling out an expense claim or writing a letter of recommendation. Here’s how I got started today: - Before starting work, I cleared out a couple of urgent tasks before starting my day. This isn’t something I’d recommend as normal practice for Focus Day. However, as Focus Day is a new thing I’m working into an existing work pattern, it was a helpful way to start this first one. A couple of household chores and a recommendation letter got done before I went to the office. - I decided to do my focus day in the office, because that would be most free from distractions. For some people, it will be the other way. - Ensured a good supply of coffee and snacks. Major key to success: I treated two 1.5-hour blocks of time the way I would lecture time. That meant that I: - Finite work hours. As noted, the main focus time was actually concentrated into two 1..5 hour blocks. So the time 'scarcity principle' was still at work. It meant I didn't dawdle around websurfing, but spent time moving the needle on important stuff. - Switched my phone’s notifications off (do-not-disturb mode) for the 1.5 hour periods. - Email and any instant messengers were closed/off. I always do this when working on anything anyway, but this will be the case for much more of today. Overall, this focus day was quite productive for me. I feel like I got more done than I would have had I tried to do this work on one of my regular morning ‘deep work’ sessions. The freedom to not have to deal with ad hoc communication kept my mind free of distracting ‘open loops’. What I noticed was the fact that I was having a lot more creative thinking—getting new ideas and piecing together disparate ones in new ways. Daylight savings time (DST) has ended in Europe and will end this weekend in much of North America. As it's early in the new term here in the UK and this blog may get occasional check-ins from students, I felt it worthwhile to remind us all of the fact that the start and end of DST is basically a great international experiment on the health effects of sleep. Each year at the start of daylight savings, when we go into summer time and lose an hour of sleep, participating countries witness a small, but significant increase in heart attacks in the following days, as well as a slight increase in the number of road accidents. Conversely, these same metrics show a slight but significant decrease when daylight savings time ends. The start of DST basically nudges the population into a kind of short-journey jet lag, moving us suddenly into the next time zone and denying us an hour of sleep. Perhaps most interesting is the peak response to this one-hour shift is about two to three days after put our clocks forward. Just that one hour of adjustment is having an effect days later in our week. This is one of the reasons why I continually stress to students (but also friends and colleagues) to take their sleep seriously! Students in their 20s are probably unconcerned with heart attacks, but there is evidence that the students with the consistent sleep habits tend to perform best overall in their studies. There is a lot more to investigate about this relationship (there are certainly confounding factors that can be at play), but there's a healthy amount of common sense experience to back this up. We all know we are less functional the next day after a poor night's slumber, but erratic shifts in our day-to-day sleeping habits can be taking a longer-term toll. You'll make more silly mistakes in the lab, be less effective in retaining information, but it can take days or weeks to correct things. Data like the plot shown above remind us how important sleep really is.
Cal Newport is perhaps my favourite author on the topic of work productivity. I first encountered his work a couple of years ago with an article "Is Email Making Professors Stupid?". It opened my eyes to a wide world of how our day-to-day tasks and workflows—particularly those generated and managed by email—were a serious drain on my cognitive resources. Don't get me wrong: I felt this every day, but one mostly tried to hack their way through it. There is a serious amount capital (what Newport calls "attention capital") that organizations are losing out on and which is also making workers miserable. And indeed I was miserable; in no small part thanks to email-based workflows. The deluge of unfiltered, undifferentiated stuff pouring into my inbox each day was unbearable.
A World Without Email is Newport's manifesto on the toxic relationship between knowledge work and constant communication and what we can do about. Newport is a great resource for young academics and other knowledge workers. He writes from the perspective of a busy academic with a family life and interests outside of academia, all while maintaining a stellar publishing career and a normal work-life balance. Up to now, a lot of his writing has been about how we as individuals can successfully do battle with the onslaught of responsibilities and commits in their work life (a thing he calls the 'productivity hydra'. In A World Without Email, Newport simultaneously takes aim at this individual-level focus on ' productivity hacks' and on the responsibilities of organizations and managers to improve communication and workflows so that knowledge workers get more stuff done, lead happier lives, and are more creative. The book's two-part structure is similar to his 2016 book Deep Work: a first part that gives us background and research on why what he's about to tell us is important. The central villain in Newport's World is something he calls The Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow (hereafter we'll just call it the HHM). The HHM is a noisy morass of back-and-forth communication with knowledge workers in a near-constant state of 'on-call' from email, to Teams, Slack or other instant messaging. The HHM is not something workplaces or managers consciously devised and implemented, it evolved on its own—kind of like a virus—and it now infects workplaces around the world. The HHM has now become endemic and many knowledge workplaces have grown numb or indifferent to its pernicious effects. Email (and text communication generally) is a socially unnatural form of communication. Attitudes, tone, and intentions frequently don't transmit, which can leave people feeling irked, frustrated, or like they are on the receiving end of hostility—much of which may have been unintentional. Email can be cognitively draining to compose and can be emotionally distressing to deal with. Part 1 is filled with fascinating anecdotes and studies to back up Newport's thesis that the HHM is a self-installed virus, that email makes us miserable, and that there must be much better ways we can work. One of my particular favourites was the installation of one of the first email servers in a large company in the 1980s. Specced out to simply accommodate existing workflows and on-paper messaging needs, the multi-million-dollar mainframe crashed within the first day, overwhelmed by the unanticipated multiplication of near-instant, effortless communication. It is here that Newport introduces us to a key idea in the book: friction. Emails are relatively easy to send and compose if you're not really faced with the social consequences of face-to-face interaction. It's easy to ask somebody to "do something" for you, but without providing them any resources to get the job started. Your simple request could lead to a world of pain for the person on the other side. At best, such a simple request leads to a painful game of email ping-pong, distraction, and delay. At the other end of the spectrum, Newport introduces us to organizations that have recognized the costly and painful toll of email and the HHM. Some companies even instituting radical email policies for the benefit of their workers. Perhaps my favourite here is the holiday autoresponder policy that automatically informs the sender that the recipient is on holiday, their email has been deleted, and that they should try again upon the recipients return. This isn't simply for the sake of churlishness, but recognizes the fact that even while people may be allowed to ignore their email on holiday, studies show we remain aware of the messages accumulating in our absence, leading to persistent low-level anxiety. Part 2 is the practical end. Armed with the knowledge of the HHM and the toll it takes, we can begin to take steps to improve how we work so that we are less reliant on instant back-and-forth messaging. I'm not going to go into all the details here. This is not meant to be a summary A World Without Email. What I want to highlight here are some really generalizable principles that emerge from reading Part 2. But you really need to read this section in full to get a complete view of how you can improve your own work life and your organisation. Part 2 contains a lot of focus on tools like task boards and scheduling software, all of which are useful but may see different degrees of utility in different kinds of knowledge work. Simply dipping into Part 2 as though it's simply a list of tips will miss the bigger picture. 1. A focus on Workflow. Newport invites us to look at knowledge work from the perspective of workflows. The HHM is a workflow and a poor one because it is chaotic, unscheduled, leaves room for poor accountability ("I sent an email so my job is done!"), and requires cognitively draining task-switching. You can't focus on really important, meaningful brain work if you're constantly switching to your inbox. Workflows need to be designed (often without that much effort) so that the delivery side of the work spares team members the need to be on a constant on-call status. That's why it's important to identify clearly what the tasks are at the outset, identifying the persons responsible, and the target deadlines. Often that person is simply your own self, but it needs to be clear and organized. Once clear workflows are identified, you can... 2. Get communication in context. One of the key strengths of task boards is that they centre any communication directly into the spot where tasks are staged, their relevant data is held, and their status is noted. If you're working with task boards as Newport recommends, then you never need to go into your inbox—which contains an undifferentiated mass of stuff you need to filter—but right where you need to be to start a focussed session of work. If you're using a taskboard and you're just starting your work for the day, you would log in, check the project status, find your action items, and alongside those action items find the relevant threads or communications, ideally without anything else clogging up the pipes. Putting communication in context in turn lets you... 3. Create systems that avoid trips to the inbox. In properly designed workflows, whether using task boards or not, it is imperative that team members can avoid a trip to the inbox to get that one document they need, or check on a date for something. Shared drives, for instance, can provide the necessary remedy here. Increasingly, it is possible to send attachments that aren't attachments but simply linked to data in a shared drive. Putting mission-critical data into shared drives prevents needless trips to the inbox. Another example is how scheduling apps like Calendly work directly with your calendar to help set up and manage appointments. I use Calendly now to set up appointments with students and colleagues. If a conflict emerges after that meeting is set up, it is very easy to reschedule from within your calendar app without needing to open email. If this is a meeting with somebody in your organisation, you can usually see the details of their calendar alongside yours (in Outlook and Teams, this is the Scheduling Assistant). You can drag/drop the meeting to a mutually free time, for instance, without having to compose any emails. Although this process can itself trigger a bit of back-and-forth, it cuts out a key cognitively draining exercise: getting into your inbox and task-switching from inbox, composing, to calendar. Let the tech help you. 4. Keep meetings short. Keep them short and focussed. Newport expands on this pointing to popular systems in software development like agile and scrum. I won't say more, apart from the fact that meetings not focussed on defining and delegating clear actions and accountability are probably wasting time and probably only contain information that could be posted on a company intranet. My only real complaints about this book are perhaps idiosyncratic, or driven by my own experiences with email. In my organization, I wouldn't say we suffer tremendously from the Hyperactive Hive Mind, mostly because I am relatively insulated from it. I don't find task boards to be that useful in my current state, but that may change as my research group grows. To me, what is more problematic is simply the management of workflows and information storage/retrieval through inboxes. University websites are notoriously difficult to find useful information on and I frequently have to search and filter email to find simple information (or indeed, bother somebody else with my request). My organization has a terrible habit of managing important workflows (like grading) through email communications and email attachments. If a workflow is updated, a new email is sent. Email is what I would call a noisy channel and I think Newport would agree. It can often be difficult to find the most up-to-date information on a workflow. Senders could use subtly different subject lines or the info is buried deep in a thread after several irrelevant replies. So I would add rules about attachments to Newport's guidance, and the use of systems that centralise data management so that multiple copies of information are not floating about. In short, Cal Newport's A World Without Email is a timely read and will be of interest to anyone who works in or manages a knowledge workplace. As we become more dependent on technology, particularly as the post-pandemic world approaches (hopefully, anyway), we need to be wary of the self-amplifying footprint this technology can take in our lives. It can drive us away from more meaningful, personally fulfilling pursuits. I'm halfway through Cal Newport's latest book A World Without Email. In recent years, I have grown acutely aware of the cognitive drain that derives from email. I thought I would share some thoughts on email in the knowledge work place.
Two of my major problems with email are that it's a) a noisy channel; b) prone to information duplication. In spite of this, many workplaces (especially universities), treat email as an infinitely flexible system for information management. As Newport is fond of pointing out, your inbox is full of undifferentiated information coming at you and it can be hard to keep focus on a project of any scale (even a mindless administrative task) when you need to rely on your inbox for information storage and retrieval. Trying to single-task on something that then requires you to reference an email can be surprisingly detrimental: just venturing into your inbox and seeing a few new messages awaiting your attention is enough to trigger unmanaged open loops that will create a drag on your attention. Not to mention the willpower resources you might need to use just to keep yourself from reading those messages. "Just a check" can be an alluring but ultimately self-destructive thing. Add to that the fact that email services and clients vary in the quality of their search tools and displaying threaded messages; threads can bury mission-critical data quite quickly and you can find yourself wading through a mess of stuff before you find the info you need, especially if you don't keep up with some kind of sensible foldering system (I suspect most don't). That brings me to the second problem: workflows that rely on email and documents embedded therein are prone data duplication. As anyone in computer science knows, this is often a terrible way to design software. Mission-critical data should live as a single copy with highly structured read/write privileges. You don't update it by creating new copies of it (unless those back versions are themselves important). It should be accessed via a link (pointer) or interface. Popular software version control systems like Git are designed around keeping a working copy at the front of the queue (back-versions that might be worth referring to later live deep inside the history and can be called upon only when needed). So, better workflows designed around keeping up to date with a workflow that itself could be changing would be better off moving their data into a web page accessed via a link. Perhaps if the workflow is changed, users could receive an email with a change log or similar update, but regardless of where we are in the process, the same link should access the same data. This way, you never have to sift through a pile of emails, encounter a distracting "urgent email" (that believes it must be done right now) while you're trying to focus on the core mission such as grading undergraduate research projects. As I try to keep my digital and work life organized and balanced, I have yet to come up with a satisfactory solution for organizing interesting articles that I might like to come back to at some point. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, suggests a "tickler file". This is a file system for things you might like to come back to at some point that cycles month by month. If you want to see something again in the future, you might shove it into a folder for July. When July rolls around, you empty your July folder into a series of folders for the various days of the month. Every day, you check your tickler file. I haven't managed to connect with a tickler file system. It requires too much upkeep and is a bit of a lottery choosing when I might have time to deal with and think about something like this again.
Take for instance, this article that has been sitting in an open tab on my phone for two years. The concept of digital media making traditional paper formats obsolete has been interesting to me for some time. Most of us have experienced printing out a PDF because reading one on screen is just cumbersome: we don't read on-screen the same way we do hard copy. So why are we using 21st Century technology to emulate the printing press? There has to be something better. One day, I might write more about this topic but I haven't decided what yet. One possibility is I store this as research material in a "Someday Maybe" project. But it might also be a good trigger in the future for starting that project. Furthermore, maybe I'm not yet ready to decide what that project will look like. How do you log interesting reads and find reliable ways to come back to them at appropriate times? |
Martin d brazeauPalaeontologist, fieldworker, sometimes phylogenetic programmer. Transplanted Canadian in UK. All views are my own. How to pronounce my name? Rhymes with "bureau" or "chateau". He/him/his. Archives
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