Head Space

Calm productivity for academics

Category: Information management

  • Use constraints to boost creativity

    Limited time, resources, and information can sometimes represent opportunities to use constraints to boost creativity

  • Writing regularly changes what you pay attention to

    I often find my attention being hijacked by whatever happens to show up in my feed. And in the moment, that content may very well be interesting. The problem is that so much information can be interesting while still having relatively little value. When I’ve set aside 1-2 hours of writing time every day, my attention…

  • Design your academic workflow to do less

    Improving your academic workflow isn’t about squeezing more things into less time. It’s about spending more time on fewer things.

  • Use a weekly review to close open loops

    As academics, we carry countless mental threads throughout our week — unfinished tasks, half-formed ideas, looming deadlines, and scattered notes. Left unattended, these “open loops” consume valuable mental bandwidth, even during times when we should be resting and recharging. Every Friday afternoon, I dedicate time to what might be my most valuable productivity ritual: the…

  • Share what you learn

    Never hesitate to share your knowledge; you’ll never know who might find it valuable. Overcome the intimidation of content creation with these tips: maintain a topic list, batch content creation, stick to a regular publishing schedule, and view unsuccessful efforts as experiments. Teach freely, as others’ shared wisdom has taught you.

  • Reading as conversation, not consumption

    Transform your academic reading from passive consumption into active dialogue. Engaging with scholarly texts through questioning, challenging assumptions, and making connections can lead to deeper understanding and new insights.

  • Managing information in my personal learning environment

    In this video I demonstrate how I manage information in my personal learning environment. I talk about the flow of information, from deciding what to pay attention to, then how to filter, capture, and process it, and finally how I share it.

  • Academic workflow for writing: From first note to publication

    In this video, Dave Nicholls and I talk about the tools and services we use in our writing process, as well as our intentions that guide our choices. Ultimately, we decide that ‘academic workflow for writing’ is about creating space to spend more time on the work that matters, rather than simply doing more.