Inbox zero

One of the hints that I and many other writers share is to keep your email inbox empty. The point is to file away any information you may need for later and add items to a central to do list, and enjoy the empty inbox. The empty inbox allows you to clear your mind for your actual work on your to do list, and can reduce the email overload that we all face since you aren't tempted to fire off responses to emails in your box.

How do you get to empty? Check out this post from Good Experience to see simple, workable instructions that will get you working.

Back up your data!

Late last week my hard drive died on me and all the contents were completely unrecoverable. In my 15 or so years as a student and employee this has never happened to me. I'm one of the few. Those of you who have already gone through the pain will echo my strong suggestion this week to back up your data. Take the time NOW because you may not have the time later!

When I went to a Mac about three years ago one of the advantages was that the computer came with built in backup software. All I needed was an external hard drive. My employer wasn't willing to provide one so I meant to buy one on my own. They are very affordable so I didn't really begrudge the purchase but it was out of my normal activities. This idea languished for a while and now I am kicking myself for not making the time.

Action items for readers this week:

• Figure out a way to back up your most important data--documents for me are the thing I miss the most. All my annual review paperwork dating back six years, and the paperwork for my employees, will now have to be recreated for the next cycle rather than just updated. Luckily I have hard copies. There are lots of guides online and your systems department can also assist. They would rather restore a hard drive from a backup than listen to us complain about losing data, I can guarantee from my experience.
• Once you figure out how you will do it, ACTUALLY GO THROUGH WITH IT. I had just gotten as a gift a thumb drive with 4 GB of storage two weeks ago, which would have easily held all my documents that I'm currently missing. But I never set it up to back up my data. You can bet it was the first thing I did when I got the refurbished machine back.
• If you are in the position to facilitate backing up your employees' machines, do so. It would have been great if, when I first brought the issue up, my employer sprang for the hard drive. I will now research doing so for my employees and make sure they are backing up their data. I'll try to get some sort of seminar for our faculty here on what we should be doing to preserve our data. I'm certain I'm not the only one not backing up...just the only one who had the worst happen.

The power of (short) meetings

One theme that ran through my book was how much I dislike meetings. In general they are not bad--as long as you are meeting for the right reasons. In my opinion meetings should be action oriented. Meetings just to share information are a waste of time.

I really appreciated reading about the 22 minute meeting this past week, from Scott Berkun's Blog. The illustration from Nicole Steinbok should be framed and put in every meeting room.

National Procrastination Week

National Procrastination Week was last week, and I thought it'd be fitting to wait until this week to post about it!

Lifehacker had an excellent roundup of procrastination tips in honor of the occasion. I recommend also checking out the comments on that post to learn more tips.

Do you have any tips or tricks for dealing with procrastination?

Productivity in academia

Barbara Fister's recent Library Journal column examining productivity in academia brings up questions that I find very interesting. Why is so much of academic productivity measured in publications? She suggests a new way of applying for tenure, via a portfolio of a faculty person's top three artifacts of scholarly work in their field. An interesting idea that could change a pressure-cooker environment focused only on producing the most you can as fast as you can into a more introspective and quality-filled pursuit. Something to think about for those of us in academia!