Uncommon Ground

Uncommon Ground

Author Archive: kent

On my way to Brisbane

UConn is a member of Universitas 21, an international group of universities dedicated to excellence in research and education. Every year Deans and Directors of Graduate Studies (DDoGS) of U21 universities gather at one of the member universities to exchange ideas about improving graduate education. This year the discussions will include sessions on providing support for career planning, advising and mentoring graduate students and postdocs, and entrepreneurship. The meetings begin Sunday morning and continue through Tuesday – three very full days of vigorous discussion.

This year, the University of Queensland is hosting the meeting, hence my travel to Brisbane. I’m sitting in the departure lounge at Bradley as I type this, and I expect to land in Brisbane about 36 hours from now. If time permits, I’ll send an update or two from the DDoGS meeting. If not, expect a short report after I return.

April 19, 2018 Graduate education 0 Read more >

Causal inference in ecology – Counterfactuals

Causal inference in ecology – links to the series

Let’s start with a few preliminaries.1

  • A causal factor (“cause” for short) is something that is predictably related to a particular outcome. For example, fertilizing crops generally increases their yield, so fertilizer is a causal factor related to yield. The way I think about it, a causal factor need not always lead to the outcome. It’s enough if it merely increases the probability of the outcome. For example, smoking doesn’t always lead to lung cancer among those who smoke, but it does increase the probability that you will suffer from lung cancer if you smoke.
  • Causes precede effects.2 That’s one reason why teleology is problematic. A teleological explanation explains the current state of things as a result of, i.e., as caused by, something in the future, namely a purpose.3
  • Effects may have multiple causes. The world, or at least the world of biology, is a complicated place. Regardless of what phenomenon you’re studying, there are likely to be several (or many) causal factors that influence.

The last point is one of the most important ones for purposes of this series. When we are investigating a phenomenon,4 we’re trying to discern which of several plausible causal factors plays a role and, possibly, the relative “importance” of those causal factors.5

To make this concrete, let’s suppose that we’re trying to determine whether application of nitrogen fertilizer increases the yield of corn. That means we have to determine whether adding nitrogen and adding nitrogen alone increases corn yield. Why the emphasis on “adding nitrogen alone”? Suppose that we added nitrogen to a corn field by adding manure. Then increases in the amount of applied nitrogen are associated with increases in the amount of a host of other substances. If yields increased, we’d know that adding manure increases yield, but not whether it’s because of the nitrogen in manure or something else. Why does this matter?

From very early on in our education we’re taught that “correlation is not the same as causation.” We want to distinguish cases where A causes B from cases where A is merely correlated with B. Yet, as David Hume pointed out long ago, experience6 alone can only show us that A and B actually occur together, not that they must occur together (link). One way of distinguishing cause from correlation is that causes support counterfactual statements. They provide us with a reason to believe statements like “If we had applied nitrogen to the field, the corn yield would have increased” even if we never applied nitrogen to the field at all. The only reason I can see that we could believe such a statement is if we had already determined that adding nitrogen and adding nitrogen alone increases corn yield.7

How do we determine that? Randomized controlled experiments are the most widely known approach, and they are typically regarded as the gold standard against which all other means of inference are compared. That’s where we’ll pick up in the next installment.

  1. As I warned in the introduction to the series, I am not an expert in causal inference. The terminology I use is likely both to be imprecise and to be somewhat different from the terminology experts use. ↩
  2. Philosophers have argued about whether backward causation is possible, but I’m going to ignore that possibility. ↩
  3. Biologists sometimes use teleological language to explain adaptation, e.g., land animals evolved legs to provide mobility. It is, however, relatively easy (if a bit long-winded) to eliminate the teleological language, because natural selection shows how adaptations arise from differential reproduction and survival (link). ↩
  4. Or at least this is how it is when I’m investigating a phenomenon. ↩
  5. I’ll come back to the idea of identifying the relative importance of causal factors in a future post. ↩
  6. Or experiment. ↩
  7. If there are any philosophers reading this, you’ll recognize that this account is horribly sketchy and amounts to little more than proof by vigorous assertion. If you’re so inclined, I invite you to flesh out more complete explanations for readers who are interested. ↩

April 16, 2018 Statistics 0 Read more >

Causal inference in ecology – Introduction to the series

If you’ve been following posts here since the first of the year, you know that I’ve been writing about how I keep myself organized. Today I’m starting a completely different series in which I begin to collect my thoughts on how we can make judgments about the cause (or causes) of ecological phenomena1 and the circumstances under which judgments are possible. Before I start, I need to offer a few disclaimers.

  • Any evolutionary biologist or ecologist who knows me and my work knows that it’s not uncommon for my ideas to represent a minority opinion. (Think pollen discounting for those of you who know my work on the evolution of plant mating systems.) I make no claim that anything I write here is broadly representative of what my fellow evolutionary biologists and ecologists think, only that it’s what I think. Please challenge me on anything you think I’ve got wrong, because I’m sure there will be things I get wrong, and the easiest way for me to discover those errors is for someone else to point them out.
  • I had a minor in Philosophy as an undergraduate and there is an enormous literature on causality in the philosophy of science. I’ll be using a very crude understanding of “cause.” I don’t think it is wildly misleading, but I’m certain it wouldn’t stand up to serious scrutiny.2
  • I’ll be thinking about causal inference in the specific context of trying to infer causes from observational data using statistics rather than from inferring causes controlled experiments.3 I’ll be using an approach developed in the 1970s by Donald Rubin, the Rubin Causal Model.4
  • There is a very large literature on causal inference in the social sciences. I’ll be drawing heavily on Imbens and Rubin, Causal Inference for Statistics, Social and Biomedical Sciences: An Introduction,5 but there’s an enormous amount of material there that I won’t attempt to cover. I am also pretty new to the concepts associated with the Rubin causal model, so it’s entirely possible that I’ll misrepresent or misinterpret a point that the real experts got right. In other words, if something I say doesn’t make any sense, it’s more likely I got it wrong than that Imbens and Rubin got it wrong.

Although I will be thinking about causal inference in the context of observational data and statistics, I don’t plan to write much (if at all) about the problems with P-values, Bayes factors, credible/confidence intervals overlapping 0 (or not), and the like. If you’d like to know the concerns I have about them, here are links to old posts on those issues.

  1. I’m calling the post “Causal inference in ecology” only because “Causal inference in ecology, evolutionary biology, and population genetics” would be too long. ↩
  2. There’s a good chance that a moderately competent undergraduate Philosophy major would find it woefully inadequate. ↩
  3. To be more precise, we don’t infer causes from controlled experiments. Rather, we have pre-existing hypotheses about possible causes, and we use controlled experiments to test those hypotheses. ↩
  4. In my relatively limited reading on the subject, I’ve most often seen it referred to as the Rubin causal model, but it is sometimes referred to as the Neyman causal model. ↩
  5. Reminder: If you click on that link, it will take you to Amazon.com. I use that link simply because it’s convenient. You can buy the book, if you’re so inclined, from many other outlets. I am not an Amazon affiliate, and I will not receive any compensation if you decide to buy the book regardless of whether you buy it at Amazon or elsewhere. By the way, Chapter 23 in Gelman and Hill’s book, Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models has an excellent overview of the Rubin causal model. ↩

April 9, 2018 Statistics 0 Read more >

Getting organized in 2018 – Putting it all together

Getting organized in 2018 – links to the series

When I started this series I didn’t think it would take me three months to finish, but it did. If you’ve been following along, you’ve read about how I keep myself organized. In this last post, I’ll put it altogether by running through the process with links to the individual steps. If you’re familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done, this will look pretty familiar, although I discovered most of these practices on my own well before I read his book.1

It all starts on Sunday morning. I brew myself a nice cup of coffee – black, no sugar -, sit down at my laptop, and boot up OmniFocus. I move tasks that may have accumulated in my OmniFocus Inbox to the appropriate Project folder or subfolder.2Then I use the Review perspective to review all of my tasks. I’ve set different projects for different review frequencies. Some I review every week, some I review once a month, and some I review only once every 3-6 months. But everything gets reviewed at a frequency experience has taught me is appropriate. Every week the review will review tasks that need to be rescheduled (sometimes earlier, sometimes later) or dropped. And every week the review gives me ideas for new tasks or projects that get entered into the appropriate place (sometimes it’s Someday/Maybe for things that I just need to think about, sometimes it’s a new project or a new task in an existing project). With that review done, I’m confident that I’ve planned for anything I can plan for in the following week and that my complete list of projects and tasks is in good order so that I’ll be prompted about other important things when the right time arrives.

I review my calendar for the week ahead at the same time. Before I became a dean, I made appointments with myself for blocks of time that I could use for focused work. I treated those time blocks as real appointments and did my best not to let other commitments break them up. As a Dean, I can’t be that inflexible. Too many things arise that need prompt, if not immediate, attention. I’ve cut back on scheduling blocks of time for focused work. Only when I have a really important project that has a looming deadline, a grant proposal for example, will I put a “Do not disturb” block of time on my calendar with instructions to my administrative assistant to check with me before scheduling anything short of a meeting request from the President or the Provost in that time block. That’s as close as I can get to planning deep work time ahead of time. Mostly, I have to take advantage of time blocks when they appear, and they are rarely more than a couple of hours.

On any given day, my calendar and OmniFocus keep me on track. Some of my OmniFocus tasks have specific times of day associated with them, meeting preparation for example. Many have only the end of the day, 5:00pm. I review today’s task list every morning. As a result, I can often pick something to do without checking OmniFocus first, but I do check it frequently throughout the day, often because I’m entering something new that just came up.

At meetings I rarely take paper. I’ve either saved the electronic versions of documents that were sent or scanned paper versions to PDF. Either way, any documents I have before the meeting are in Dropbox, Evernote, or both. Any notes I’ve made before the meeting were probably made with Emacs using Markdown, and published to Evernote with Byword. At the meetings I use pen and paper, my everything notebook. At the end of the day, I’ll scan notes to PDF and save them to Dropbox or I’ll scan them directly to Evernote. As I wrote earlier, I don’t have a clear plan for what goes to Dropbox and what goes to Evernote, but either way I can get it from any electronic device I have handy. If there are action items I need to follow up on, I will have marked them with an arrow (==>) in my notebook, and I transfer them to OmniFocus. I also check over my everything notebook during my weekly review to make sure I haven’t missed any action items that need to be recorded.

Writing it all out like this may make it sound pretty time consuming and complicated, but it’s not. The daily task management is a natural part of the activity and it doesn’t add any time. It just uses the time differently. The weekly review takes a bit longer, but spending 15 minutes or half an hour with a nice cup of coffee looking over the week to come is a nice way to spend a quiet Sunday morning.

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April 2, 2018 Productivity 0 Read more >

Getting organized in 2018 – The limits of deep work

Getting organized in 2018 – links to the series

Last week I introduced the idea of deep work,

Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.

The key words there are distraction free. I picked up some useful tips from reading Deep Work, but there’s also at least one limit to be aware of.1

In Deep Work Cal Newport describes the working style of two people who have been exceptionally productive and who exemplify what he calls the monastic philosophy of deep work scheduling, Adam Grant and Don Knuth. I don’t think I’d heard of Adam Grant before,2 but anyone who’s done more than a little programming has heard of Don Knuth. Not only is he the author of the monumental The Art of Computer Programming, he grew frustrated with the typesetting for TAoCP and wrote TeX and Metafont to compensate. He is also famously inaccessible by e-mail. He stopped answering e-mail in 1990. If you want to contact him, you’ll need to send him a letter to his postal mailing address. His administrative assistant will sort through them and pass along any that seem relevant. Grant isn’t quite as extreme as Knuth, but he batches his availability. He stacks all of his teaching into the fall semester, turning his attention fully to research for the rest of the year. He’ll answer e-mail, but if you happen to e-mail him during one of the 3-4 day periods when he’s focused on a research task, you’ll get an auto-response telling you that you’ll have to wait to hear back from him.

There’s no question that a monastic approach to deep work allows those who can adopt it to accomplish an enormous amount. But there’s also no question that society can continue to function only so long as there are only a few people who adopt that approach. A functioning society depends on functioning institutions, and functioning institutions depend on people to keep them functioning. If you work with a very small group of people, you might be able to agree among yourselves that interruptions are allowed only between 11:00am and 1:00pm or only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but if you work with more than four or five people you’re unlikely to be able to set aside consistent “do not interrupt” hours except relatively early in the morning or relatively late in the day.3

And it’s not just the people you work with face to face. If you’re an academic, the functioning of your scholarly community depends on your willingness to review papers and grant proposals and to serve as a leader in your scholarly society. I know a few people4 who have made many important scientific contributions, in the sense that they’ve published important papers and discovered important things, who have also made few or no contributions at all to supporting the scholarly community on which they depend. If you decide to adopt a monastic approach, you better be sure that you can make contributions large and important enough that they compensate for your lack of community spirit.

For most of us, we won’t even be able to adopt the bimodal philosophy that Jung employed – periods of intense deep work in seclusion interspersed with periods of involvement in day-to-day life and work.5 It’s most likely that we’ll have to adopt the journalistic philosophy – developing the discipline to do concentrated deep work whenever the opportunity presents itself. That’s why setting up your workspace in a way that you can avoid distraction is important. Any time you find yourself with more than 15-20 minutes of uninterrupted time ask yourself,

  • How much time can I set aside right now for work that needs concentrated attention?
  • What is the most important work I can do right now that needs concentrated attention?

Then do that work, and don’t allow yourself to be interrupted. Close the door. Don’t answer the phone. Ignore e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook.6 Turn off notifications on your cellphone. Do the work. Then take a break and reward yourself.

Your position in life will determine both how often you find yourself with those uninterrupted blocks of time and how long they are. If you ever find yourself in a position like mine, whether department head or dean or any other administrative position, you’ll soon learn something a friend of mine told me a long time ago.

It’s not that Provosts or Presidents spend that much more time working than the average faculty member. It’s that Provosts and Presidents have little control over their own time.7

That’s more true for me now as a Vice Provost and Dean than it was when I served as Interim Department Head, and it was more true for me as a faculty member than it was as a graduate student or postdoc.

One last piece of advice, if you’re a graduate student or postdoc reading this, take advantage of your relative freedom to develop good deep work habits now. The more you practice, the better you get at it, and the older you get, the more you’re going to need those good habits – no matter what career path you follow.

  1. To be fair, Cal Newport acknowledges the limit I’m about to describe, but I don’t think his discussion of depth philosophies fully captures it. ↩
  2. It turns out he’s was the youngest person ever promoted to full professor at Wharton, and he’s the author of a New York Times bestseller (link). ↩
  3. I say “relatively” because the meaning of early and late depend on where you work. Many businesses operate on an 8:00am-5:00pm schedule, so early might be before 8:00am and late might be after 5:00pm. I’m a morning person. I’m usually in the office before 6:30am. Since I rarely have scheduled meetings before 9:00am (except for meetings with my students), I typically have 2 1/2 hours to myself every morning. ↩
  4. Who shall remain nameless. ↩
  5. If you’re not familiar with Jung’s work habits, buy Deep Work or do a little web surfing. Same thing for Walter Isaacson who follows. ↩
  6. Use new, clean workspace if you’re on your computer. Use a utility that block Internet access if you doubt your willpower. ↩
  7. The friend who told me this is a former Provost at a major research university (not UConn). ↩

March 25, 2018 Productivity 0 Read more >

Joyce DiDonato @UConn – an extraordinary night

Last night I had the privilege of attending a recital by Joyce DiDonato at the Jorgensen Auditorium. It was an extraordinary night. I won’t try to describe it, except to say that the third encore – yes, third encore – was breathtaking. Her Kansas roots were showing as she sang “Somewhere over the rainbow.” I don’t recall ever hearing such an extraordinary vocal performance, not even when I heard Renee Fleming perform at the Bushnell Performing Arts Center several years ago. The YouTube video below will give you some idea, but nothing can substitute for the privilege of seeing Joyce DiDonato sing “Somewhere over the rainbow” live.

March 21, 2018 Personal 0 Read more >

Getting organized in 2018 – Deep work

Getting organized in 2018 – links to the series

Cal Newport published Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World in 2016.1 He defines deep work as:

Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.2

He goes on to formulate something he calls the “deep work hypothesis”:

The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

I’m not going to discuss the deep work hypothesis. If you want to see the evidence Newport has for it, you’ll have to read the book. I didn’t learn anything from reading the book a couple of months ago, but I did find his four rules to be a useful framework for understanding what I already do (or try to do).

Rule #1: Work deeply: The fundamental (but not particularly new) insight is that to accomplish any significant work that requires understanding complex ideas or creating novel ideas requires large blocks of uninterrupted time. I have adopted two new insights from Newport’s book: Scheduling my blocks of uninterrupted time to ensure that more immediate, and often important, distractions don’t crowd deep time out of my work week.3 Ritualizing my deep time. When I am in deep time, I’m usually working on my MacBook or my iMac. I have both of them set up with two desktops. When I’m in deep time, I switch to a desktop that has only the applications and documents I need open. It takes some discipline, but by opening a different desktop it’s easier not to check e-mail or respond to other notifications that appear on my screen.

Rule #2: Embrace boredom: This was a new one for me, but I think the way Newport states it is misleading. The fundamental idea is that concentration is a skill. With practice and exercise, you can improve your ability to focus, and since deep work requires concentration, the more you exercise your concentration, the better you’ll get at deep work. Here the strategy is what I alluded to in the last sentence of the last paragraph: Take breaks from focused work. Allow yourself to be distracted by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever only when you’re not engaged in deep work. Schedule your deep time, or at least commit to spending a specific amount of time in deep work before you begin, and don’t allow yourself to be distracted. Even if you’re not making progress on the project, force yourself to stay away from distractions until you’ve reached the end of your deep work block. You may be bored, but you’ll be training yourself to resist distraction. This is related to the pomodoro technique.4

Rule #3: Quit social media: That’s overstated, but it’s good advice. Take a careful look at how much time you spend on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and other social media platforms. Ask yourself: “How much of the time I spend on platform X advances the work I want to do?” As for me, I use Facebook only once or twice a month. I post to Twitter pretty regularly, and I look at recent posts 2-3 times a day, but I don’t have Twitter open in my browser. I think I have an Instagram account, but I haven’t used it more than once or twice, and that was 4-5 years ago. I use Twitter with some regularity (a) because I want to draw the attention of my small audience to items I’ve found interesting and (b) not infrequently the scientists I follow will post a link to an article with an interesting idea I need to follow up on. There’s a good chance, especially if you’re younger than I am, that you find Facebook a good way to stay in touch with friends and family. If so, I see no reason for you to quit using it. I do suggest, however, that you think carefully about when you use it and that you keep Facebook closed (and silence Facebook messenger) when you’ve blocked out time for deep work.

Rule #4: Drain the shallows Newport suggests scheduling every minute of your day. That might work for you, but it doesn’t work for me. What reading Deep Work did remind me to do, however, was to focus on the small number of things that are really important. Before agreeing to do anything, ask yourself “What would happen if I said ‘No’?” If the answer is “little or nothing”, say “No.” Only do things where (a) there is no one else who can make the contribution you could make, (b) making your contribution could mean the difference between success or failure (or between an excellent and a mediocre outcome), and (c) success or failure is important (in whatever way you judge importance in this context). This is clearly an ideal, and there are certain to be circumstances in which you have little choice but to do something that doesn’t fit these criteria.5 Nonetheless, you’ll thank yourself in the long run (if not before) if you depart from the ideal as little as your circumstances allow.

  1. The link takes you to the Deep Work page on Amazon.com. The book is available from many different sources. I just happen to find Amazon convenient. The link is not a sponsored link. I won’t receive any money if you click on the link, nor will I receive any if you happen to buy the book. ↩
  2. I can’t provide a page number for the quotation, because I’m reading this on my Kindle. I rarely buy or read hard copy books. ↩
  3. This insight isn’t entirely new, but Newport inspired me to make it more formal. ↩
  4. Rule #1 and Rule #2 are almost redundant, but they emphasize different things. Rule #1 emphasizes what you should do – focus, concentrate. Rule #2 emphasizes what you shouldn’t do – let yourself be distracted. ↩
  5. More about that next week. ↩

March 19, 2018 Productivity 0 Read more >

Getting organized in 2018 – Mindmanager

Getting organized in 2018 – links to the series

If you’ve been following this series you know that the tools I use most frequently are: pen and paper,1 OmniFocus,2 Evernote,3, Dropbox, and Ulysses. Those are the tools I’d be lost without. Last week I introduced a tool that I could live without, but that I find very handy, Scrivener. This week I’ll briefly describe another tool I find handy. It’s one that I could live without more easily than Scrivener, but it still comes in handy. It’s a mind-mapping tool called MindManager.

Like Scrivener, MindManager is available for both Mac and Windoze. Unlike Scrivener, the features available in the Windoze version seem to be much more advanced and flexible.4Although the Mindjet site5 promises that you’ll find MindManager useful for brainstorming, visualizing data, flowcharts, and project management, I’ve only used it for brainstorming. For that it is very useful.

I am lousy at visual thinking, but I’m trying to get better, and mapping out concepts in a concept map is an easy way for someone like me who thinks very verbally to start making my ideas more visual. I’ve discovered that making my thoughts visual – admittedly just a pretty outline – makes it easier for other people to understand them. But it is more than just a pretty outline. It’s easy to move pieces of a map around. It’s easy to promote or demote them in a hierarchy, and I often find that after I’ve played with a map for a while, new ideas are occurring to me that wouldn’t have popped into my brain if I’d been trying the same thing in a Word outline or outline mode in Emacs.6

If you’re not familiar with mind mapping, visit mindmapping.com and look around. If you want to see an example of how I’ve used it, take a look at this mind map derived from a 2013 meeting of the Dimensions of Biodiversity team working on Protea and Pelargonium in South Africa. It’s written in HTML 5 and directly exported from MindManager.

Click on the little bubbles with numbers, and you’ll see details pop out. Click on the little circles with “-“, and you’ll see the details collapse. The version you’re looking at is read-only, so you can’t change the text or the structure. You can either imagine what it’s like to drag any piece of this map anywhere else, add anything you like at any lever, or delete anything you don’t want, or you can get a trial version of MindManager and try it out yourself.

If you’re interested in mind mapping, you owe it to yourself to spend a little time investigating the links you’ll find from a Google search. There are free mind mapping tools available, and there’s a good chance they’ll be plenty to satisfy your needs. I use MindManager (a) because I started with it years ago and (b) I like the export options (PDF and HTML 5), but your mileage may vary.

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March 12, 2018 Productivity 0 Read more >

Getting organized in 2018 – non-Word software for writing projects (Scrivener)

Getting organized in 2018 – links to the series

Last week I described Ulysses, which provides a simple interface for ASCII text files combined with Markdown for publishing in a variety of formats, including WordPress blogs. This week I’m going to describe a different kind of tool. It’s one I use much less frequently than Ulysses, and it’s one I could do without, but it’s one I also find handy for certain types of writing projects –Scrivener.

Scrivener is more like a traditional word processor than Ulysses. You select fonts and font sizes, insert tables and bulleted lists, use italic and bold in a way that’s more familiar than the underscore and asterisk approach Markup uses.1 It allows you to set margins, and most of the other things you’re used to doing in a traditional word processor. Unlike Ulysses (or Emacs + LaTeX) and like Word, Scrivener doesn’t separate markup from presentation.

What Scrivener does that a traditional word processor doesn’t do is to provide a single environment in which (nearly) everything you need for a writing project can live. Take a look at the screenshot above to see an example of a project that’s in a very early stage. The National Science Foundation released a “Dear Colleague” letter describing an opportunity for “International Research Coordination Networks comprised of U.S. and South African Researchers.” I’ve been in contact with several U.S. and South African colleagues about putting a proposal together, and I’m using Scrivener to keep all of the information I collect accessible. That’s the items under the “Research” tab on the left.

The “Draft” tab above that is where I’ll start writing notes when we start serious work on the joint proposal. I’ll have different documents corresponding to notes about the research plan, the management plan, the evaluation plan, and other sections of the proposal. We’ll probably use Google Docs to write the initial draft of the proposal so that each of us can work on it when it’s convenient while ensuring that all of us also have the latest version of the proposal in front of us. So how does Scrivener help?

Take a look at the second snapshot of the interface above. The split screen interface is very handy. I don’t have to boot up Firefox or open another application to look at any of the documents or resources I’ve collected. I can look at them while I’m writing, and since I don’t leave Scrivener, I’m less likely to be distracted by something that pops up when I open Firefox or to see that e-mail that just came in that’s begging for attention. Using Scrivener helps me keep my focus where it should be when I’m using it – on writing.

And if I really just need to write and I don’t need to look at any of the resources I’ve gathered, I can put myself into composition mode (illustrated above) and work with even fewer distractions.

In the IRCN project illustrated here, I will probably copy blocks of text from the “Draft” section into a shared Google Doc. When I’m working on a project by myself, I’m liable to start it in Scrivener, get the whole document into good shape, export the result to DOCX, and clean up the formatting in Word.

I don’t really need Scrivener, but it makes avoiding distraction easier. If I’m working on a project by myself, I tend to use Scrivener – unless it’s a project that involves a lot of math when I’ll use Emacs and LaTeX. Scrivener supports a Markdown -> LaTeX export, but I haven’t explored that yet because I find it easier to work directly in LaTeX. I use Scrivener when I anticipate a final export to Word for formatting clean up or when I expect to share a draft with others for comments and suggestions.

Like Ulysses Scrivener is available on Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Unlike Ulysses, there is also a version for Windoze. When I last tried the Windoze version 3-4 years ago, it was much more primitive than the Mac version. I don’t know if that’s changed, and I don’t recall if there’s a version for Android, but it is at least a little less tied to the Mac ecosystem than Ulysses.

  1. Of course, Ulysses lets me use Command-I to start and end italic and Command-B to start and end bold, so the difference isn’t that great. ↩

March 5, 2018 Productivity 0 Read more >

My thoughts on Moleskine’s new smart pen

Moleskine recently released its Pen+ Ellipse. I’ve long been intrigued by the smart pen idea, where I would simply write, doodle, or sketch and have the result automagically transferred to an electronic form for me. But I won’t be buying an Ellipse any time soon. Why?

  1. I love my fountain pens. I don’t want to give them up.
  2. I want to write on any paper I happen to have handy, whether that happens to be in my Moleskine everything notebook, a Rhodia notepad, a 3″x5″ index card, a sheet of 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper, or anything else. I don’t want to have to write only on one kind of paper or in only one kind of notebook.
  3. By combining pen and paper with the camera in my iPhone (whether the camera itself or the Evernote-linked app Scannable), I can easily get anything I’ve written down anywhere into Evernote or scan it to PDF and store it in Dropbox. There is a “cool” factor missing from my approach, but it works very well for me, and it seems a lot more flexible.

February 28, 2018 Productivity 0 Read more >