Note about this article: This week’s post was going to be about how my hybrid analog/digital GTD platform, hinted at in earlier posts, was going. I’m going to eventually write about this, but honestly, the system is still evolving so much that I don’t think it’s fully ready to describe yet. So I’m saving that for another day, and instead signal-boosting a post that first appeared here in 2023.

Most higher education institutions have 4-6 weeks left in the semester, and it’s not too soon to start thinking about summer. Faculty spend summers differently. Some are knee-deep in research; some are teaching summer classes; some are taking extended breaks; some are a linear combination of the above, and some are none of the above. Whatever you’re into in summer, it’s good for your whole person-ness to approach it with a plan and with some structure, so as not to feel the crushing regret about wasted time, which so many of us experience right around July 15th.

That’s what this article was originally about back in 2023. Today I’m presenting it again with some updates along with some new stuff at the end.

Summertime in academia. It’s what we look forward to all year long, but when it gets here we don’t seem to know what to do with it.

On the one hand, it’s summertime and our natural instinct it so use the time for rest, travel, reading for pleasure, and lots of other fun things. On the other, we still have work to do. Some of that work is also fun, for example exploring a new class we’re teaching in the fall or digging into research on a question that matters to us. Other kinds of summertime work are not as fun, but we deferred it into the summer because of a perception that we “have the time” during the summer to do it but didn’t “have the time” during the school year. (Which might be more about work avoidance than it is about not “having time”.)

Around July 1, We reach a point of no return in whatever it is we’re doing in the summer. You can see August on the calendar. If you haven’t enjoyed your summer by this time, you’re not going to. Instead, you’ll regret that you neither rested as much as you needed, nor got as much done as you’d hoped. It’s a sorry state to be in. How can we avoid it, and approach summer so that we’re happy with the work we are doing and the stuff we aren’t doing?

Decisions and commitments

In the summer, and in the rest of the year, we’re balancing two commitments that seem opposed to each other:

• A commitment to doing good work in our jobs, so we produce value for our institutions and serve students. And,

• A commitment not to do work, so that we take care of ourselves and those we love.

These commitments are opposed to each other in the same way that your thumb is “opposed” to your forefinger. They are meant to act together and allow a range of useful motions in life. The only way to make these two commitments work with each other, is to make decisions about your time.

Making a decision is a tiny murder. In his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman writes that “the original Latin word for ‘decide,’ decidere, means ‘to cut off,’ as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a close cousin of words like ‘homicide’ and ‘suicide.’” Those are words associated with death. When you make a decision to do something, you are also making hundreds of decisions not to do other things at the same time— you are, in a sense, putting those other options to death. Or at least, you’re killing off the notion that you have an immediate commitment to those things.

Real decision-making in this sense is hard for academics. We are used to Doing All The Things. Confronted with a decision to make among three options, the typical academic will try to do all three, at one-third the level of investment. We take Yogi Berra’s advice: When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

The key to having a summer that you can feel truly good about, is not being like the typical academic. It’s about making decisions — in advance — about what you intend to do with the time you have, which are simultaneously decisions about what you are not going to do, and then commit to your intentions and don’t worry, and try not even to think, about the things you are not doing.

How to make decisions about summer stuff

Decision-making isn’t always easy. What makes it easier is having a direct path from your personal values, to your big-picture goals, and then to an allocation of time on the small scale. In other words, decisions about how to use time involve creating a direct line of sight from your core values, to your long range plans, to your short range plans, all the way down to your projects and moment-by-moment tasks. Even in the summer.

You may think I’m about to follow this up with a detailed list of how I program every moment of every day during the summer. You would be wrong about that. I have tried that approach before and it never works either on a practical level or on a personal satisfaction level. Instead, in the summer, I follow four basic rules:

1. Make strategic decisions in advance (at Quarterly and monthly reviews) about what I want to accomplish, both work and not-work, on a big-picture level.

2. Schedule my time, on a loose and negotiable level, during each week and for each day to move incrementally toward the things I wanted to accomplish.

3. Give myself permission to modify, or completely throw out, that schedule if it fails to make sense in the moment.

4. For summer specifically: Schedule no more than 4 hours of “work” per day, and preferably do that work in the mornings.

With the exception of Rule 4 this is exactly the same approach to work that I have every other time of the year: Use yearly, quarterly, and monthly reviews to develop large scale goals, then narrow them down at each weekly review to goals and daily actions so that every day, every week I am moving little by little toward my large-scale goals.

Long range planning is important. Rule 3 is important in an equal and opposite way: It realizes that while schedules are useful, living by a rigid schedule is a drag, and sometimes things come up that are more urgent, or more interesting, than the things you planned. Tactics change and life happens, and I trust myself to be smart about making on-the-fly adjustments if needed.

Rule 4 is summer-only (although I applied it on sabbatical last fall too). Back in 2023 I had so much work to do in the summer — David Clark and I were finishing the Grading For Growth book — that I never really had a chance to slow down and just enjoy life. I enjoyed working on the book, but that was basically all I was doing. So in 2024 I decided to stop taking on any new projects after April 1, so that I could clear the decks for summer and focus only on what sustains me outside of my career — music, physical activity, and reading. “Bass, beaches, and books” was how I formulated it. I managed mostly to stick to that mantra and that summer was transformative in ways I am still realizing. In particular, I did much better work at my job the next year because I was actually rested.

That summer I used a routine, which I have since kept during the summer, even though now I do have limited numbers of work projects that show up during that time. It is basically a list of pre-made decisions for how to use my time, for each weekday:

• 6:00: Wake up and make coffee.

• 6:30: Read for half an hour (often 15 minutes each in two different books).

• 7:00: Write for half an hour. Doesn’t matter what. Just write. Aim for 1000 words unedited.

• 7:30: Work on the most important thing (MIT) for the day.

• 8:00: Stop and shower.

• 8:30-10:30: Time to work, using 30-60 minute time boxes on tasks or projects that need attention.

• 11-12: Exercise followed by lunch.

• 1:00-2:30: Practice bass guitar. (And I have a schedule for that as well.)

• Then from 2:30 onward I just play it by ear, which is OK because all the stuff I “need” to do has been done. If I want to binge 3 hours of a TV show, for example, or go out to the beach with a book, I can do that without feeling guilty about what I “should” be doing instead.

• Before bed (which is 10pm for me): Spend 15 minutes planning out blocks of time for the next day, designating a few tasks as priorities to complete tomorrow, and tagging one of those as the MIT.

This routine doesn’t work for everyone. It didn’t even work for me on a lot of days. And in any event, that should be taken as suggestions for how to spend time, not hard and fast rules. And this routine does not carry over into regular semesters. But it’s an intentional use of time that puts both work and not-work into each day^. It is the key to not having the summer blow past you without really every enjoying it. And, it’s never too late to start — as long as it’s not August.

April 2026 updates to this

I made a few edits and changes to the original article, but I also wanted to add some new thoughts that have cropped up about this over the last three years for me.

• One of those edits is the injunction that routines and plans are just suggestions for how you would like things to go. Sometimes life happens and the universe throws black swan events at you that defy all attempts at planning and all routines. This is to be expected if you are actually living. It also doesn’t negate the value of having a routine or a plan. I view routines and plans like this now as conversations with God about how I would like my day to go if He permits, and the kind person I would like to be as long as He agrees.

• So we shouldn’t take the actual routines or plans too seriously, but we should take making of them very seriously.

• But at the same time, it’s very important to give ourselves grace and room to breathe when those routines and plans and the goals we set don’t happen. This is a corollary to the Law of the Whole Person. You are the inextricable sum of your parts and more than that. So when a goal isn’t met or a routine isn’t followed on one particular day, or ever, it’s not a failure of you. It may be a sign of great success in your quest to be a whole person because you’re experiencing the unpredictability of life and not just sitting around the house watching TV. (See below for reference.) It may also be a warning light on your life that says there are blockers or issues that you haven’t noticed yet until the light just came on that need your attention. But there’s nothing wrong with you.

Etc.

Just one item in this section this time, and that is the musical source for the reference I’ve made above. This is a song that in some ways is the theme song for this blog and has been a lot to me over the years, especially as I get into the second half of my 50s.

Have you ever noticed that some people have a near-religious devotion to brand names? In the bass guitar world where I often live, some players are hard-core Fender disciples, while others think Fender sucks and Spectors are where it’s at, or Stingrays, or something else. Or maybe it’s Ford vs. Chevrolet; or DeWalt power tools vs. Milwaukee; and on and on. This always seemed weird to me because these tools are just instruments — they are not the music itself. And as a person grows and changes as a player, or a driver or a craftsperson, what worked for them once may not any more1.

I think “productivity tools” are the same way. Productivity, which I think of as intentional engagement with systems that connect all our horizons together, can’t be reduced to this tool or that tool, to a collection of apps and lifehacks. But you might not be able to tell this if you look at productivity influencers on social media, whose job seems to be hawking products. You should never confuse productivity with tools, and in that spirit, here are some tools that I used to use, sometimes religiously, but just don’t any more.

But first a word about this

Most of the tools I am listing here, I stopped using because I just didn’t want to use them any more. This means I am going to point out some negatives that put me off using them, for good. If you’re a user of those tools now — for example you’re a devoted Evernote person — you might get offended. I would ask you to hear me out, and sit for a second with that perceived offense. Why are you getting upset that somebody else didn’t care for your favorite app? It’s that feeling of partisanship, the felt need to defend the honor of an app, that deserves some attention.

Also, this was a hard article to write because, well, I don’t use these tools for some years and so I had sort of forgotten about them. It’s entirely possible that some of the final-straw moments with these have been improved upon by now. That’s fair; point those out in the comments.

Prezi

What is it: Prezi is2 a presentation tool that had at the time a unique selling point: It doesn’t use slides, but rather an infinite canvas. You add content into it, and then rather than going slide to slide sequentially, you zoom in and out and pan across the canvas to highlight the content. Here’s an example (click the “play” icon to start the action).

Why I used it: When I started branching out into giving workshops and keynote presentations I was looking for an alternative to PowerPoint and (God help me) Beamer3. I was looking for something with a distinct visual style and which was web-based. Google Slides, released 2006, was still in a very raw form. Prezi was all the rage back in those days so I signed on happily. It was just what I was hoping for: A digital storytelling medium that captured audience interest and set my presentations apart (except for all the others using Prezi).

Why I stopped: It captured too much audience interest. I started noting that the questions I was getting following my talks that used Prezi were increasingly along the lines of, “What’s that presentation tool you’re using? It’s really cool!” and increasingly less about the actual content of my talk. Also — I swear I am not making this up — someone in my audience one time had to literally run from my talk straight to the bathroom, because the constant zooming and panning gave them motion sickness, and divest themselves of their breakfast.

Lesson learned: When the tool starts competing with your content for attention, it’s time for a different tool. Also, presentation tools should not cause vomiting4.

OmniFocus

What is it: OmniFocus is, arguably, the progenitor of all task management apps. Originally designed for tight integration with the GTD approach, it has a powerful and deep feature set and a beautiful user interface.

Why I used it: OmniFocus 1.0 appeared on the scene in January 2008, about a year after I had read David Allen’s Getting Things Done book and started seriously practicing GTD. Before its official release, OmniFocus was a collection of AppleScripts that interacted with OmniOutliner, collectively known as “Kinkless GTD” and I had been using that system, because I had a lot of stuff to wrangle and a digital approach made sense for me. And I was a Mac and iPhone user (important; see below). I was an alpha (!) tester of OmniFocus in its pre-1.0 form, when those janky AppleScripts were being tidied up into a real app, and I was very excited — and was not disappointed when the OG version was released to the public.

Why I stopped: It’s Mac/iOS only, and always has been. This is not a problem if you are dedicated to Apple products, but around 2010 I ditched my iPhone for an Android device, and I was increasingly finding myself hopping from Mac to Windows to Linux on a regular basis. To me the whole point of a digital-first approach to GTD is to have your information available anywhere on multiple devices — otherwise why not just put it in a paper notebook? — and I didn’t want to commit to an operating system.

I am aware that OmniFocus now has a web app. I’ve tried it. It lacks many key features from the main app, requires a separate subscription on top of the already-somewhat-steep cost of a license for the app (around $80), and in my experience was clunky. So, no thanks.

Lesson learned: Don’t use a tool if it requires you to commit to not only that tool, but also any other tool (e.g. operating systems) that are needed for the first tool.

Todo.txt

What is it: Todo.txt is not exactly a “tool” but an open-source plaintext-based approach to digital task management that involves a particular syntax for notating priorities, contexts, etc. along with tasks, that is managed from a simple text file. There are some tools available — or at least there were, see below — for implementing this approach.

Why I used it: I wrote a blog post back in the day (2017) about adopting todo.txt. Briefly: I was getting tired of task management apps getting increasingly bloated and wanted to get back to a minimalist approach, but I still wanted to keep it digital. Todo.txt was the closest thing to a paper notebook I could find that was not a paper notebook — a plain text file, that I kept on Dropbox and accessed with apps, or with no app but just a plain text editor if I wanted, that did all the important things without any of the stuff I didn’t need or want.

Why I stopped: I wrote a blog post about that too. Two main reasons: First, although supposedly one could keep the main todo.txt file on Dropbox and edit it from anywhere and have Dropbox take care of the syncing of data, in practice this could fail, and one time it did and I lost a ton of data, and all trust in the system as a workflow. Second, although I was trying to get away from apps, the shallow and dormant app ecosystem for todo.txt was keeping me stuck using half-developed apps to manage my data. Even the most popular VSCode extension for todo.txt handling hasn’t been updated since 2018. Basically it seems to have been a hot idea at the time that got people excited, but then everyone stopped caring.

Lesson learned: Sometimes you get what you pay for.

Slack

What is it: I think most people know what Slack does — it’s a workplace-focused communications tool that combines elements of email with text messaging, so people in an organization can collaborate and share information in a multiplicity of ways within the same platform.

Why I used it: Slack was released to the public in 2014, and there was a stretch in the late 2010’s where Slack seemed to me like a perfect solution to the problem of community-building in a distributed network. For example I was leading a task force in the Mathematical Association of America to build the MAA’s social network presence; the task force was spread all over the USA and I set up a Slack workspace to coordinate our communications. When COVID hit, and I was chair of the Math Department, I set up a Slack for our faculty that we used for communication and connection. It was important for us to get out of our email (such a source of stress and uncertainty) for this, as was the need for connection in real time when we couldn’t be present with each other. And to this day I still help administer a Slack workspace for alternative grading.

Why I stopped: Aside from the alt-grading Slack, I don’t use it anymore. In fact I refuse to, and actively avoid doing so, because it promotes what Cal Newport calls the hyperactive hive mind. You can mute Slack notifications, but you cannot triage them using the Clarify process like you can emails. Nor is it simple to connect Slack to other systems you might use for managing information. It is its own thing, one more damned inbox to have to check, and refuses to play nice with a more calm approach to handling messages. That constant pinging still haunts me in dreams.

Lesson learned: The purpose of a tool is to make work easier. If it makes work harder, more plentiful, or both — drop it and run the other way.

Evernote

What is it: Evernote is, or at least was, the granddaddy of all productivity tools, the original “second brain”. It is a system, really an ecosystem, where you put any kind of digital object you want — text, web clippings, audio, video, files — and these entries can be tagged and organized, synced across devices, and then pulled up later with a fast and robust search engine. Sounds great! But, the fact that you might not have heard of Evernote is why it’s perhaps the greatest example of the downfall of a tool.

Why I used it: I can’t remember exactly when I discovered Evernote, but it must have coincided with my first GTD explorations. It was immediately the solution to one of my life’s biggest problems: Having crap (some of it important) all over the place, on multiple computers and desk drawers and unprocessed inboxes with no single source where I could find it. I remember over the course of a few weeks relocating all this crap into Evernote, and it was instantly at my fingertips anywhere I had an internet connection. It was truly magical and legitimately is still, in my view, the absolute best of the golden age of productivity software releases from the mid-00’s5.

Why I stopped: For several years Evernote was untouchable. But then came the bloat. Not content with simply being a killer organization app, Evernote’s developers started adding features and add-ons that added questionable value while eating into resources required for core functionality like syncing, and taking away from the minimalist beauty of the tool. There was an add-on for recipes, for example, and an add-on for managing business cards — each potentially useful but not without a cost, not only in terms of a bloated experience but also in dollars, as the price of a subscription started to go up and up to pay for expanded server needs. At one point there were socks for sale rather than fixes to critical issues. Our pleas for attention to the core features ignored, we users stopped caring and eventually left for greener pastures. (For me it was Google Keep and now Obsidian.) In 2023, the company was acquired by Italian developers Bending Spoons and there have been some promising moves back to the app’s roots. But all I know is that I have to go on to the Evernote web app every so often to hunt down a very old note, and the experience is miserable. Which is a bad situation because I have a lot of stuff in Evernote that I have never migrated out.

Evernote’s rise and fall has become something of a case study in the tech world, and this article goes into some more depth.

Lesson learned: Two things here. First, simple tools are the best and when an app starts to lose this realization, start looking for the exits. Second, don’t start putting information into an app or an ecosystem without an exit strategy for exporting it to a portable form you can use somewhere else.

Honorable mention: Tools I no longer use but wish I could

These five tools are all ones that I used for a while but then chose to stop using. But there are three that are worth mentioning, which I used to use but don’t any more, not by choice but because they were shut down.

Wunderlist: Wunderlist was a fantastic task management app. Cleanly designed, not too complicated but feature-filled enough to be useful, web-based, GTD-friendly but also GTD-agnostic. I was just about to commit to using Wunderlist for GTD in 2015, when Microsoft bought it and promptly killed it. Nominally, Microsoft turned it into Microsoft ToDo, which had the look of Wunderlist but almost none of its functionality, rendering it basically nothing more than a fancy Word file where you keep tasks. MS ToDo has gotten a lot better since then, but it’s taken 10 years to do so and it’s still not as good as Wunderlist was.

Google Jamboard: Jamboard was a collaborative online digital whiteboard tool, like a Google Doc except it was a whiteboard. For us educators, and especially during COVID, Jamboard was a God-send: A free web-based tool that could be used either individually or collaboratively, in the classroom or online, using handwriting or typed text, and dead simple to use without a lot of fussing with accounts and permissions. It didn’t have a lot of features but the simplicity was actually a strength. For a time it looked like Google was committing to the product by integrating it into Google Meet and offering expensive hardware digital whiteboards that ran Jamboard. But alas, they shuttered it at the end of 2024.

Google Reader. Ah, Google Reader. If you were into blogs in the mid-00’s like I was, Google Reader was more than an app. It was your personal operating system — a simple, minimalist RSS/Atom feed aggregator that was your central point of contact to the blogosphere. The shutting down of Reader in 2013, seemingly timed to herd users over to the brand-new social network Google+, is still a rallying cry for internet OG’s. We haven’t gotten over it yet.

The takeaway

Tools for productivity and intentionality are important, just like physical tools in your garage are important. Between a snow shovel and my monster 24” snowblower, I know which tool I’d rather use to clear my driveway in a Michigan winter. They make life easier. But there’s a real danger in getting too attached to them, and confusing the tool for the work that the tool does. If you look back on the graveyard of tools you once used but now have discarded, you can begin to find patterns in use that can inform you today.

What are some of the tools in your graveyard, and how did they get there?

Readers – that’s you – are what make working on this newsletter so rewarding week in and week out. I’ve been thinking about productivity and purpose in higher education for a long time, and it would be easy enough just to keep all these ideas to myself and benefit from them. But it’s better to share these ideas, so that we can all learn and grow together.

To get you readers more front and center in what I’m writing, I’m starting a new series today that I’m calling the Reader Mailbag.

A few weeks ago, I solicited questions on social media, related to anything you wanted to know about the topics we deal with here: productivity, purpose, GTD, the Law of the Whole Person, email management, time management – anything that’s on your mind. I received 18 responses with questions that were significant and often deeply personal. Today I’m going to focus on three of the questions that I received, that are all centered on the theme of career trajectories.

Choosing your own adventure

Here’s the first question:

I am a mid-career tenured math faculty member at a community college. What questions should I answer to decide my next career move? I could continue the path ahead, refining my teaching practices for the next ten or twenty years. I could add on small side projects of helping others teach with active learning, some coding projects, and other higher education related side hustles, as I continue to teach. Alternatively I could shift into administration, doing more with assessment and accreditation work at my institution.

All three of the questions I’m answering today have a similar answer: To make this decision, it’s crucial to have absolute clarity on your higher horizons: Horizon 5 (your Life Plan – your overall purpose and direction), Horizon 4 (your 3-5 year goals) and Horizon 3 (your 1-2 year goals). Here specifically, the key elements are Horizons 5 and 4.

In Horizon 5, you’re thinking about the roles that you play in your entire life and the fundamental forces ithat drive who you are and who you want to be. These include your career trajectory, but are not constrained to it. It’s your constitution, written using the Law of the Whole Person. Here you’re not necessarily thinking about career moves you might make — you’re thinking about what moves you.

Your life plan has its own separate existence apart from your career trajectories, so you can use it as a North Star to help you make career or personal choices on a grand scale. If you haven’t written out your Life Plan, that would be a great place to start. If you have, this is a good time to give it a checkup and make modifications, given your own personal evolution.

Once you do that, focus on Horizon 4, your 3-5 year goals that are instantiations of the stuff in your Life Plan. For example, one of your Life Plan items might say that you view being a skilled researcher as one of your primary roles. A Horizon 4 item aligned to that, might be a goal to publish five papers in your discipline by the end of 2031. The main thing here is to get clear on what professional directions you want to pursue that move you closer to the kind of person you want to be as outlined in your life plan. Notice we’re not talking about specific projects here, just goals that are far enough away to be aspirational, but also close enough in time to be concrete.

With a Horizon 5 that’s clear and a Horizon 4 that is in alignment with Horizon 5, you are essentially playing out different scenarios and seeing what resonates with you. Or what doesn’t! You might put something into your Life Plan that sounds great at the time, but then when you start instantiating it into 3-5 year goals, you might lose interest. Or vice versa, some roles that you might play in life might sound a little mundane, but when you think about how they might concretely show up in your life, it might spark a lot of interest that you didn’t realize that you had.

From here, you can begin to get a glimpse of what’s further down the road on each of those branches. You’ll likely also find that there are variables that aren’t strictly professional that also have an impact on these decisions. For example, if you have children, and you have “parent” as one of your primary roles, then you might realize that some of the branch options will make it harder for you to be fully present with your kids as they get older over the next few years, and that can inform your choice. Don’t forget the Law of the Whole Person: every part of you that matters when thinking about these choices.

Different people have different lives and therefore different Life Plans. My decision in your situation is probably going to be different than your decision. But what should guide us is the overarching clarity that we have about who we are, who we want to be, and why we were put on this planet and what that might look like concretely over the near term.

Competing norms

Another question:

I am an assistant professor (R1) and my salary heavily relies on external funding. While a current funding environment is a threat, I don’t think that is the only reason I am constantly feeling anxious about my future. What parameters should I use, beside what is asked in the annual evaluation (number of publications, submission of grant, etc). They are all/mostly productivity related. I feel constantly behind the “productivity” norms.

This is a really good question, primarily because it’s a conundrum: Each of us has our own expectations and hopes for ourselves in terms of who we are and who we become. But the metrics that are used by our employers to do annual evaluations are typically divorced from these things. I cannot think of a single institution where I’ve been employed that has ever asked me if my annual productivity is aligning with my higher horizons. So we have one set of “metrics” that we use for ourselves, and the places that employ us have another, and they don’t always agree.

So let me start with the personal criteria. A lot like my answer to the previous question, this is really a matter of your higher horizons: Horizons 5 and 4, and in this case I would also include Horizon 3, which consists of your 1-2 year goals. (Actual projects and areas of responsibility live in Horizon 2, and I don’t think those necessarily show up here.) If you have, as I described above, gotten clear on your Life Plan, Horizon 4, and Horizon 3, then I think an appropriate set of criteria for determining your own professional success is the degree to which you are accomplishing those goals and moving towards the kind of life you have in your Life Plan.

A good venue for determining this, is the review processes that are baked into the GTD system. However you don’t have to be a GTD person to have those reviews. Once a year (I like to do this on New Years Eve day), you can sit down with your higher horizons and honestly evaluate whether you are moving toward your short-term and longer-term goals and the description of yourself that you have in your Life Plan. If you’re like me, you’re going to have some wins and you’re going to have some misses. For the wins, where you are accomplishing your goals and moving toward your Life Plan, you can think about what’s working and what you need to double down on, moving forward. For the misses, you can ask yourself what’s blocking you and then make plans accordingly. Honestly, this ought to be what our professional annual evaluations look like. But since that almost never happens, we can at least do it for ourselves.

And remember the Law of the Whole Person states that you are not just a professional. You are a whole human being with a family, friends, hobbies, physical health, and more. Those are as much of a contributor to your professional success as any amount of papers or grants you get or teaching evaluations. So those should factor into your annual personal checkup as well.

Insofar as the metrics for your actual job go, I’m afraid there may not be much you can do about that — the tenure/promotion/salary adjustment metrics are what they are. But perhaps you can make some strategic decisions using the process that I described in this post about frameworks for saying no to things. I’ll be honest here, if you find yourself in a job situation where keeping up with the productivity norms of your institution is incompatible with your purpose as a human being, you might have some difficult career decisions to make in the near future because working in a job that constantly pulls you from your humanity is not sustainable.

But it’s also possible that you can find ways to meet the criteria that are on paper for your institution, in ways that are in alignment with your higher horizons. I don’t know your particular situation, but for instance: If you find teaching to be of primary importance in your life and your institution is open to counting scholarship of teaching and learning as research along with your disciplinary research, then perhaps you can branch out and start writing papers about teaching, which would be in alignment with your higher horizons and count toward your publications that you need. You might still be on the hook for writing 5 papers a year, but at least a couple of those would be about something fresh that energizes you1.

Doing all the things

The final question is:

I love my job as a professor of History (recently promoted to Full Professor), and I am very productive. Yet I consistently put too much on my plate. I say yes to every exciting publication request that comes my way. I constantly reinvent my courses. I dedicate many hours each week to office hours because of the active pedagogies I use. I attend multiple conferences per year. As a result, I live in a constant state of feeling behind, which prevents me from fully feeling happy or satisfied. [At the moment, I am working on several books, edited collections, and articles, all at different stages of completion—projects for which I often need to request extensions. I have an ever-growing inbox, partly due to administrative roles that I genuinely enjoy and would not want to give up. I often end the day with the feeling that, even if I worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, what remains undone far outweighs what I accomplished—even when I accomplished a great deal. How do you hit reset in this situation? Should I learn to prioritize more strictly and say no—even to wonderful opportunities like fabulous book proposals? Should I revise my expectations of myself? Should I change my attitude toward being behind or late on deadlines?

First of all, you’re right about the amount of time in the day. If we woke up one morning and the day magically had 36 hours in it, we would all probably put 48 hours worth of work into it and start saying “If only the day had 48 hours in it!” This is known as Parkinson’s Law and it’s really annoying because it’s true.

You are bumping up against the absolute limit on time and energy that every human being has to put into commitments. If you try to push past those limits, you may think that you enjoy what you’re doing, but on the wide scale, the enjoyment is dwarfed by exhaustion and regret. So we have to make choices, in your case among things that all provide some value to you.

I’m going to answer this similarly to what I said above: When faced with these choices, I think the right place to go is Horizons 5, 4, and 3 — starting with Horizon 5. Forget for a moment about all the things that you have the opportunity to do or are doing, and zoom way out and ask some big questions: Who are you as a person? Why do you think you were put on this planet? What are the most important roles that you play in your life? What are the driving forces that make you who you are? If it all ended today, what would you like people to say about you as a person, in the future?

I think you understand that if you said yes to all of these things, you would be basically saying yes to none of them, because you would be so thinly spread, you would have zero presence in any single one of them. Whatever value a single one of these things might provide for you or other people will be wasted. You’d end up in a situation where you’ve made commitments to other people, but you’re breaking your commitments, which makes you feel terrible.

For a situation like this, there are two sets of “things” you have to deal with: The things you have already said yes to, and the things that are in your inbox that you haven’t said yes to, yet.

The second set is easier to work with because you can just say no to those things. My recent post about frameworks for saying no basically says that we should never just say yes mindlessly, even if (especially if) the thing you’re deciding about has some positive value, but instead determine the degree to which the thing aligns with your higher horizons and your capacity to actually get it done. So first of all, like I said, make sure you’re clear on these higher horizons — and your capacity.

Since you currently have a buffer that is overflowing, it’s a good idea to apply that framework very stringently to anything that you haven’t committed to yet. It wouldn’t be completely wrong to simply tell yourself and your colleagues: I’m going to say no to everything until I get my current list of commitments under control. You’re a Full Professor now, so as long as you do this with professionalism you are incurring minimal risk. You are in fact at a much greater professional risk by missing deadlines and otherwise not fulfilling commitments to colleagues or yourself. There seem to be a lot of good opportunities coming your way, so I wouldn’t worry about missing out on any of them by saying no.

If you don’t feel like saying no to everything, then apply the framework to screen out roughly 90% of what you’re getting opportunities to do, and only focus on the one or two items a semester that might provide the greatest value — or which makes your existing slate of work easier or obsolete2. You have an overflowing buffer, and the first thing to do is shut the spigot off so that more stuff is not flowing in.

For items that you have already said yes to, you can do a couple of things.

The first thing that I would do is make a list of the commitments that I’ve already made: projects, one-off tasks, and so on. Then go through that list and see if it’s possible to renegotiate the “yes” that was given. Is it really necessary for me to complete this right now, or can I park it on my Someday/Maybe list and get to it later? Am I actually the right person to do this, or do I have the option to delegate it? Is there a way for me to politely and professionally back out of this commitment without harming myself professionally? In other words, it’s a good idea to at least look into the possibility of de-committing from at least some of the commitments that are eating up your time. I don’t like this option, but it doesn’t hurt to explore it. You certainly wouldn’t want to de-commit too often because it is a bad professional look. On the other hand, it’s also a bad professional look to consistently fail to complete commitments.

For the commitments that you have made and must complete, I recommend a process similar to what Dave Ramsey calls the “snowball method” for paying off financial debt. Go through your list of commitments and triage them, putting them in order based on priority and “cost” in terms of the amount of overhead they are requiring. A project that is high priority and which requires a large amount of time or headspace would be very high on this list. For example, writing a chapter in a scholarly textbook would probably be higher on this list than an op-ed piece for a magazine, because the former is more “expensive” in terms of time, research, concentration, and so on.

Having triaged your list, start blocking off dedicated time to knock out those projects, one by one in decreasing order of priority, meaning the highest one goes first. Don’t work on any other projects until that one is done3.

This likely will look like time blocking, where you set aside, for example, three dedicated hours once a week where nothing in your universe exists within that time block except that project. Life is not allowed to get in the way. You stick to that time block as an inviolable part of your life, like a class that you’re teaching, no matter what. You work on that one project every week until it’s done. Then you move on to the next one, reinvesting the time and headspace from the previous project to double down on the new one. Then move on to the next one, and so on. Like a snowball effect, every “expensive” project you complete makes it easier to complete each next one.

This is not how I would recommend handling your projects on a regular basis if your workload is normal. But if you have so many commitments that you are failing to get traction on any of them, and all of them are starting to slip away from you, then it’s time for extreme measures.

If you happen to have a large chunk of time where your day-to-day commitments are more flexible — for example, summer break or sabbatical — then I would be eyeing every minute of that time to devote to these heads-down time blocks where you knock off one project at a time greedily in order of priority. This may be the reset that you’re looking for — along with the commitment you make to yourself to say no to things unless they align with your higher horizons and your personal capacity.

Conclusion

There were 15 other questions in my list that I received from you that were every bit as substantive as the three that I just answered. I have this feature planned to show up every two months, and so I will get to these questions in time. In the meanwhile, if you’d like to submit your own question for a future reader mailbag, you can just use the form that’s linked here (https://forms.gle/3REYnbHJftgLvF6i8).

I will check it at intervals, I will do my best to give honest answers and start honest conversations about what’s on your mind. Thank you again for being so awesome.

Sometimes people ask how I manage to get so much done in so many different areas of life. I have two answers. First, I explain, I don’t really put a lot of effort into my day job. That’s kind of a joke answer, although there is a grain of truth in it because the second answer is that I say “no” to almost everything that comes across my plate — personal, professional, you name it. What you might see as “getting a lot done” is really just a fraction of the things that I could say yes to, and I am focusing maximum effort on a minimum number of things.

I’m a big fan of the 80-20 rule, which states that 80% of our outcomes are determined by 20% of our inputs in most cases. I think that most people should be saying no to roughly 80% of decisions, so they can focus their energies on the remaining 20% that really matters the most. Maybe that’s why it’s been said that saying no is the only true productivity method.

My predilection for saying no didn’t happen overnight or without stress. It feels easy to me now, but it’s because I’ve sanded down the rough edges of saying no over the course of years. Today, I wanted to share my personal framework for knowing when and how to say No, as well as saying Yes, so that like everything you can take small steps within coherent systems to be more intentional.

TL;DR here is a flowchart

Because I think in terms of flowcharts and systems, here is a flowchart that summarizes this entire post.

You can stop reading right here if you want to, or keep going to get a breakdown of each piece of this process.

First things first

You cannot reliably say yes or no to anything and expect good results if you’re not clear on who you are and what your purpose and goals are. That’s why this entire framework starts with four very high level points of view:

• The Law of the Whole Person, which states that every person is made up of uncountable components that cannot be separated into discrete parts. By extension, anything or anybody that suggests that you should do so, is asking you to be less human. If you don’t accept that premise, any yes/no decision you make about something is likely to just be a reaction to someone else’s (misplaced) sense of urgency.

• Horizon 5, a.k.a. your Life Plan. Having accepted the Law of the Whole Person, Horizon 5 is where you map out your values, your roles, and the domains of your life. As noted in the blog post at the link, I believe that you should write these things out in a document that you keep archived and refer to often.

• Horizon 4. Once you have written out your life plan, then you can write out your five-year goals, which are concrete instantiations of your life plan. The five-year timeframe is good because it’s close enough to be concrete and recognizable, and yet far enough away to be aspirational.

• Horizon 3, which consists of goals on the 1-2 year scale. These are less aspirational, more concrete, like projects but with a longer view.

The next step down from Horizon 3 would be Horizon 2, i.e. projects and areas of focus that make up your day-to-day. These are important, but many academics make the mistake of saying yes/no to opportunities or requests only at the Horizon 2 level without considering the higher horizons. This is like trying to drive through an unfamiliar, busy, confusing city downtown only by looking at the street signs without a GPS giving you the big picture — you can do it, but you will be at the mercy of whatever is in front of you.

But if you have all of these higher-altitude concepts worked out and in alignment with each other, at any point you can look backwards along this direct line of sight and have a frame of reference for knowing whether something is going to help you move toward the life you want, or prevent you from doing so.

Block or support?

That’s what the next level of the flowchart is about. When you are presented with some opportunity, request, or action, don’t just reflexively say “yes” or “no” to it. Instead, you hold it up to the light (The Law of the Whole Person plus Horizons 3–5): On balance, does this thing support or block the movement I want to have in my life?

I say “on balance” because in real life most things are not obvious supporters or blockers. Suppose, for example, your department chair asks you to host a student event from 8am to noon on a Saturday morning. This is a simple thing, and it may seem to you that the default expectation is for you to say yes to it. But when you start scratching the surface, it gets complicated.

On the one hand, you might have a mid- to long-term (Horizon 3 or 4) goal of becoming more involved in the life of your department. If that’s what you want, then this request supports that direction. But on the other hand, you might also have a mid- to long-term goal of getting more sleep on the weekends; or if you have kids, you might wish to be more involved in running them around to activities on Saturday mornings. This request blocks that direction. What makes it complicated is that both goals are worthwhile, and you might want both.

Only you can make the decision about saying yes or no to this, and there is no right or wrong answer. But there is a wrong way to make the decision, and that’s simply to say yes because it was a request from work and we should be Doing All The Things at work out of professional fear. At that point you are just crossing stuff off your department chair’s to-do list, without intention.

Do you have capacity?

If you decide that the thing in front of you is a net supporter of where you want your life to go, the answer is not immediately to say yes to it. First, take a good look at yourself and ask: Do I have the capacity to do the thing I would like to say yes to?

There’s an additive fallacy, rampant in higher ed, that says if something is good, then I should add it to my life because it increases the amount of good things I have or do. This sounds reasonable until you see academics who have added so much “good” to their lives that they can’t enjoy the goodness of the things they’ve added.

Everything comes at a cost, and you may not have the resources to pay that cost, even if the thing itself is objectively good. You may, for example, decide that it would be a good thing to host that student event on Saturday mornings, and on balance it supports your values and goals. But you’re also exhausted and you really need to catch up on your rest. Although hosting that event could be a net gain for you, you just don’t have the physical wherewithal to pull it off.

Going $100 into debt so you can buy something worth $10 is not a good financial move, but academics somehow do this all the time with their time, energy, and commitments. That’s why you have to take the question about capacity seriously. And don’t get overconfident. If your first instinct is to say, yes, I do have the capacity, ask yourself, Really? Or is that just wishful thinking? If after an honest assessment of yourself you believe you have the capacity to carry out the commitment you’re about to say yes to, then say yes enthusiastically.

But if you decide that the thing in front of me supports the direction that I want to head, but at this time I don’t have what it takes to successfully do it, it’s important to sit with that for a moment. It takes a lot of courage to admit it. And it should make you a little mad if it happens. It should drive you to the next question in the flowchart: Can you increase or build your capacity to the point where you will have enough? For example, is there something you’re currently doing that you can stop doing in order to free up the time and energy to do the new thing?1 Or habit changes that you can start doing now, that provide an immediate capacity boost? If you don’t currently have capacity, but you can quickly acquire it, I think you should go ahead and say yes, because life is very short and it does no good to pass up good opportunities if you can afford them.

But maybe you just don’t see a way forward at this moment. This also takes a lot of courage to admit. In this case, the wise thing is to say no — but also strategize. Make a concrete plan for increasing and building your capacity so that the next time something like this comes up, you don’t have to say no. Or make a plan for working on your capacity and revisiting the thing in the future. Either way, make sure to put the thing on your Someday/Maybe list so you won’t forget about it.

What if it’s a blocker?

If the thing you are deciding about ends up being a net blocker of your direction, then there are some thorny questions to ask.

First among these is whether you must say yes to it regardless2. For example, if you are asked to host that student event at 8am on a Saturday morning, you might want to say no, but there could be some implicit or explicity signals that you don’t have the freedom to say no without getting into trouble.

First of all, if you do not receive these signals — you’ve been asked to do something, it’s a net blocker for your goals, and there’s no real reason to say yes — then say no and walk away. You are under no obligation to accept such requests and saying yes to such things only lessens your ability to be fully present and competent in the important moments of your life.3

But, based on my experiences, there are a lot of faculty – including tenured full professors who have full protection for saying no to things – who feel powerless to resist requests, because they are receiving those signals and are afraid that by saying no they’re going to get into trouble or even get fired. Without minimizing those feelings, what is extremely important if you find yourself in this situation is to get absolute clarity about whether this is just a feeling or whether you will actually suffer consequences if you say no.

For example, if the department chair asks you to go host a student event at 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning and you want to say no, but you feel like you are supposed to say yes, here are some possible courses of action:

• You can go through the faculty handbook to see if there is any mention of requirements to work on the weekends in your core job duties. If there are such requirements, then we’ll get to that in a minute. But if not, then you have some basis for saying no because in most jobs you are not required to do work beyond your core job duties.4

• You can talk to a trusted colleague and ask them about whether it’s safe to say no to the request.

• In my view, the best thing to do is to go to your department chair, i.e. the person making the request, lay out your reasons for being ambivalent about the request, and ask for their advice. You could even straight-up ask them, will I get into employment trouble if I say no about this?

But the thing you don’t want to do is act out of fear. You want to act intentionally based on information other than a feeling.

If you seek this clarity and you get it, and it becomes clear that you don’t actually have to say yes to the thing, then you should say no. But not just a no: also explain why. For example: Thanks for thinking of me for hosting this event. Unfortunately, I have obligations with my kids on Saturday mornings and I can’t do it.5 It’s also good to offer, or ask for, alternatives. I’d like to help – is there some other way that I can support the event without being physically there on Saturdays at 8am?

To be clear, this explanation of why is just a courtesy for the other person. You don’t have to explain yourself. The word “no” is a complete sentence.

On the other hand, if you seek that clarity and it does become clear that unfortunately you do have to say yes to this request that is a net blocker, then two things.

First of all, double check yourself. Have you really determined that you must say yes, or is it still just a feeling? You might change your mind upon a second look.

But if you take that second look and the answer is you really do have to say yes to this, then you should say yes. But also act strategically. Set your boundaries with the department chair (e.g. I can be there from 8-12 but I’m unavailable outside that range), have an exit strategy (e.g. I have a hard stop at 12), and make plans for getting yourself to the point where you don’t have to say yes to something like this again.

If it’s not totally clear whether you must say yes to this request, then you need more information. And in my view, the thing to do is, as above, go to the person making the request and talk to them about your situation in plain, honest terms. You could ask a very important question: What would you like for me to stop doing in order that I have the time and energy to do what you’re asking me to do? Many times people in power ask others to do things without even thinking about the details of that other person’s schedule, and once presented with those details, they will back off and find somebody else — especially if the other things you are doing are high value and will result in a net loss for the request-maker if you stop.

Whatever you do, do it intentionally

I don’t claim that this framework that I presented here is perfect or complete in any way, but it’s worked for me and it’s helped me isolate the things that I do say yes to down to that top 20%, where I can make the greatest amount of impact without wearing myself out. I’m not going to sit here and write that you should just say yes to the top 20% of opportunities that spark the most joy in you, because we live in the real world, and sometimes we have to say no to certain things we want to do and say yes to things that we don’t want to do.

The main thing is to have a system for doing so that is in accordance with who you are as a human being and where you want to go instead of just doing somebody else’s work for them.

Etc.

• Tools: I’ve mentioned here before, somewhat cryptically, that I am experimenting with a hybrid paper/digital setup for my GTD practice. I’m still living with this practice and working out the details, but I have a big post about this planned in a month or so. However, I do want to mention my favorite tool for this system are Sharpie fine point felt tip pens. They produce very clear (black, although all kinds of colors are available) ink, they don’t smear terribly, and they’re inexpensive. And they have a very nice 0.4 millimeter fine point, which is important because my handwriting is super small. I like using the orange and pink ones for grading too.

• I’ve been using the Sharpie retractable gel pens too and they’re… just OK. But more convenient because there’s no cap to lose.

• Music: My band Better Desire is starting to include country music in our playlist (this is west Michigan after all) and this song is a lot of fun to do, and well written. Has that clever, ironic play-on-words that separates great country songs from the rest.

There’s this new technology around and maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called artificial intelligence, and it’s abbreviated “AI” and there’s a chance it might become kind of a big deal.

Seriously though, everyone has experienced AI. In fact, in some quarters, it is the only thing that some academics can think about, and the subject of AI can provoke strong reactions. For the last several months, I’ve made a commitment to working with AI tools for at least 30 minutes every working day, either in my everyday work or just to experiment. Because I can’t make informed decisions about something I don’t understand, and I can’t understand a technology that I don’t use.

In that spirit, and as a second installment in my running series about tools that can make our lives easier in higher education, I want to focus on 10 ways I’ve used generative AI tools to help me be a more productive and present professor.

Where I stand and what I use

Here’s where I’m currently at, with regards to AI use.

Without exaggeration, artificial intelligence is an epoch-defining technology on the order of the wheel and electricity. It has the potential to do both great good and great harm. Or rather, we human beings have the potential to use it in either, or perhaps both of those ways. The worst move that a person can make with AI today is to go to an extreme: to lay down a reactionary blanket refusal to engage with it on any level or to adopt an uncritical acceptance of it at every level. The proper role of a scholar and an intellectual regarding AI is to engage with it, experience it for yourself, and think about it critically and circumspectly. Then and only then you can start making real decisions about it. Which could mean refusing to use it; or could mean using it mindfully and in accordance with the Law of the Whole Person.

I am aware that there are concerns about the detriments of AI related to student learning and its environmental impact, among other things. For me, the jury is out on those concerns. For the time being, I’m going to engage with AI because I believe there is the potential for great good in it. I remain open, unlike some who go to extremes, to being wrong and changing my mind in the future.

If you want to know more, leave a comment. For the rest of the post, I want to talk specifics.

My main tool right now is Gemini Pro. This is because I have a Google Workspace account that I use for my writing and speaking and it comes with Gemini Pro, so I’m already paying for it. But I will also say that I find it to be generally superior to all the other tools, even if some of them are better at certain niche tasks. I also like how Gemini is integrated with Google Docs and Sheets, which I use a lot.

I have also used Grok and I like it quite a bit, especially because I’m a Tesla owner and Grok is available inside the car. I can have a chat with Grok while I’m driving and it syncs with my other devices so I can pick up the chat later. This has come in extremely handy in a few cases. But I haven’t yet bumped up against the limitations of the free version, seemingly, so right now I’m not paying for it1.

All the other major players like ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and so on I have tried, I still do use these on occasion, but I haven’t found them to be better than Gemini Pro or Grok. I will say I have decided never to use Perplexity again after the company released the Comet browser and then marketed it specifically to students as a means of cheating.

These tools are here, despite appearances, to serve humanity and that starts with you and me. Here are ten ways I’ve found AI tools to be useful in this regard.

Use #1: Writing quizzes for my LMS

I work on a Blackboard campus and I give weekly 15-question multiple choice quizzes on Blackboard to my students as practice. They are useful but tedious to make. Fortunately, I recently discovered a workflow that makes Gemini create these quizzes. I first give Gemini the following prompt with the blanks filled in.

Please generate a 15-question multiple-choice quiz with [NUMBER] options per item over [SPECIFIC TOPICS] that I can upload to Blackboard for use in one of my classes. The output must be tab-separated text using the official Blackboard format. For multiple-choice questions, ensure each option is immediately followed by the word ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ to indicate the status of the answer, and include no header row. Also use only character encodings that will render properly in Blackboard in a browser, such as Unicode -- do not use LaTeX to format math.

If all goes well2, Blackboard generates something that looks like this:

Notice, Gemini created all of the content in this quiz. All I gave it were the topics to be used.

Then save this file with a .txt extension; go to Blackboard where the quiz should go and create a “Test”; then click the “plus” button and select “Upload questions from file”; then upload the text file. Voila, you have a deployable quiz.

I do not simply give this quiz out to students the moment I upload the questions. Many times there are questions that are poorly written, some have incorrect formatting, some just need to be deleted. But editing the quiz takes about two minutes, whereas making the quiz from scratch would take about 30.

Use #2: Illustrating your syllabus

As I was preparing my current classes back in November, Google released Nano Banana, its AI image generation engine. I decided to have a bit of fun: I took the syllabus, uploaded it to Gemini Pro, and gave NanoBanana the following simple prompt: Based on the attached course syllabus, create a graphic that describes the course in the style of a pirate treasure map.

To my great surprise, it came up in less than a minute with the following visual, which I think did a better job of explaining the course than the syllabus itself did:

This was awesome, fun, and useful and I gave it out to students on the first day of classes.

Use #3: Cracking tough grading cases

I do not use AI to grade my students’ work, and you shouldn’t either, for a lot of good reasons. However, I have definitely used AI as a second set of eyes on a piece of grading that I just couldn’t figure out on my own.

I can’t give any specifics here because that would be divulging student identities. But an example that I commonly run into is a proof of a mathematical conjecture that I am certain has some sort of problem in it, but I can’t figure out exactly what. It’s a little like looking at computer code that has a glitch, but you can’t find it. And just like computer programmers might use AI to help find those glitches, I can type up a paraphrase of a student’s work and their general solution method, feed it to Gemini and have it help me identify where the issues are. Gemini Pro has been able to identify these cases about two out of every three times. Then I am in a position to give my human feedback to the student on their work.

Use #4: Simplifying syllabus content

You also shouldn’t use AI to write your syllabus, in my view, unless you’re just curious. But it is absolutely the case that AI tools can be used to rephrase parts of your syllabus to simplify the language. For example, here’s a section of my current syllabus with some serious policy language:

This is okay, but after giving it to Gemini and asking it to make the language simpler and friendlier for college students, I got this:

This seems much more appealing to the eye and also a little friendlier on the brain when you read as a college student.

Use #5: Coming up with good writing prompts and problems to solve

Coming up with good activities or assignments that actively engage students in interesting concepts, but aren’t way outside of their skill set or use content that isn’t covered in the class, is hard. I’ve found AI tools to be very helpful in giving good suggestions here.

For example, in my Discrete Structures for Computer Science class I needed some interesting problems about modular arithmetic. This is a topic with a lot of good applications that are way beyond current student abilities, and a lot of simple exercises that are too easy to be considered “problems”. I needed something in between. I asked Gemini for ideas, and it came back with this:

I had to clean this problem up a little to make it truly fit where my students are in the course. But once cleaned up, it’s a very good fit for what I needed.

Use #6: Getting suggestions for overall course or lesson design

As I was coming off of my sabbatical and getting ready to re-enter the classroom, I felt like my Discrete Structures for Computer Science course needed a bit of a refresh. I’ve never been happy with the first four weeks of this course, which covers some extremely basic ideas about division and integer representation. Both my lectures and my active learning activities were super boring. So I turned to Gemini to ask for better ideas.

It gave me not only a week-by-week suggestion on content coverage that was better than what I had planned, it gave me a great activity to use during the first week that introduces modular arithmetic in a completely self-contained and fully active way — a game where students move paper clips into cups according to the outcome of three dice rolls3. It was a really well thought out, physical, active learning exercise that made a huge impression on my students. The following week, we looked at division in binary, and more than one student was asking me how we might adapt that game to a base 2 version.

Use #7: Modeling deliberate practice

Over at the Grading for Growth blog, I’ve been writing a lot about deliberate practice and its role in learning, and grading. The gist of those articles has been that a course’s grading system is only as good as its ability to elicit deliberate practice from students. And the quality of deliberate practice depends on your ability to self-generate feedback. I have found that AI tools are exceptionally good when used as practice devices.

Here’s one example. In my discrete structures course I’ve described, we are currently looking at logical propositions. For example, given a conditional statement, I want students to be able to tell me the hypothesis, conclusion, converse, contrapositive, and negation of that conditional statement. We practice this in class, but that practice can be extended indefinitely outside of class using an AI tool. Simply go to your favorite tool and give it the following prompt:

Please create a practice quiz involving 30 conditional statements in English, but in various sentence formats, where I need to identify the hypothesis, conclusion, converse, contrapositive, and negation of those statements.

In Gemini at least4, Almost instantaneously you will get an interactive quiz that does all of these things. And if you’re a student in my class, you can just keep doing this over and over again until there are no mistakes. It replaces the “back of the book” in a textbook and frankly is probably better than a textbook in helping master this concept.

Use #8: Finding research papers to read

I’ve written here before about the digital tools I use while on sabbatical, and I have to give a renewed shout out to scite.ai. Part of what I was doing was overhauling the research summary on flipped learning. I was doing the usual academic database searches, but I felt like I was missing a lot and wasn’t giving the “right” queries to the databases to get what I needed.

Using scite.ai helped me get past this. Briefly, it is an AI-powered web tool specifically for finding research papers, extracting their results, and comparing them against each other. All I had to do was give the tool a general question or request that I had, and it did the rest, bringing back a variety of published research papers with an overall summary and detailed citations for each so I could go fact check.

Another tool that was extremely useful was NotebookLM. Whenever I would find a new paper to read, I would put it not only into Zotero for human reading and annotating but also into a topical NotebookLM. For example, I have an entire NotebookLM on flipped learning and the COVID-19 pandemic. NotebookLM is well known for being able to generate interesting media out of the items dumped into it, such as fake but hyper-realistic podcast interviews. But for me, the best use was just chatting with the notebook. I read every paper that I put into my NotebookLMs, but sometimes struggled to find the big picture. I was able to go to the NotebookLM and ask it something like: What were the overall impacts of flipped learning during COVID on things like student engagement, motivation, and satisfaction? And it would look through the papers — and only those papers that I gave it — and give me a detailed breakdown of an answer with links to specific locations in specific papers that I could then go and double check the notebook’s answer. It was a lot like having a smart graduate assistant who could help me with my research.

Use #9: De-escalating emails

I don’t outsource my emotional intelligence to AI, but I also don’t trust my emotional intelligence 100%. Just as I can use AI tools to simplify and make my syllabus language friendlier, I can also use them to clean up and tone down emails that I might inadvisedly be about to send. Here is a mock-up of one such email, which I would theoretically send to a colleague after they texted me at 8:00pm on a weeknight about action on a particular matter that could easily have waited until the next day5:

Dear [Name], I received your text about the matter for tomorrow. Please do not ever text me after 6 p.m. on a weeknight unless it is an actual emergency. I reserve this time for my family and for my rest, and I do not wish to be bothered with text messages that pertain to matters that can wait until the morning. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

So yeah, it would be a bad idea to send this. Fortunately, I have just enough awareness to realize that I have just composed an email that makes me look like the most toxic coworker ever. But, the message — that I do not want to get work communications in the evenings, unless they are true emergencies — is important and worth sending.

I gave this to Gemini and asked: Here is an email I was about to send to my colleague. Could you please suggest an alternative wording that gets the main message across, but softens the language and makes it friendlier and more professional?

The result:

“Dear [Name], I received your text regarding tomorrow’s agenda—thanks for reaching out. I’m currently making an effort to disconnect from my devices after 6 p.m. to focus on family time. If something comes up in the evenings that isn’t an immediate emergency, would you mind sending it via email instead? That way, I can give it my full attention as soon as I’m back at my desk in the morning. Best regards, Robert”

This was actually one of three rewrites that Gemini suggested, including one that was “soft and collaborative” and another that was “short and direct”. This one was labeled as “balanced and professional” and I think it succeeded at both. I would feel very good about sending that result as an email.

Use #10: Making sense of university policies

Finally, in my view, one of the best uses of AI is to help navigate complicated documentation of any sort, whether in a computing language or especially in your university’s thicket of policies.

For example: I am looking into starting one-on-one faculty coaching. (More on that some other day.) This would be a very different financial situation than doing a paid keynote talk or workshop – I would be setting up and running my own small business, rather than being paid as a contractor. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed to be careful to avoid violating any policy in my faculty job that would preclude all this.

I started searching through university policies for items about “outside employment”, “conflict of interest”, and other related ideas. It got confusing really fast and it was difficult to know exactly which policy or policies applied to me, and whether there were other legal terms that I ought to be searching for but wasn’t thinking about. All of these policies are either written or finalized by lawyers, and being not a lawyer, even if I could find something that seemed to apply to me, it was not making sense.

This is where Gemini came in very handy. In my case, I wrote up a prompt that explained exactly what I was trying to do and then gave it the entire faculty handbook and asked it to find relevant policies and explain how those might or might not apply. Importantly, I also asked Gemini the following question: What questions am I not asking about my situation that I should be asking? This surfaced a few very important ideas and especially specific terminology that I needed to look for in our faculty handbook policies.

In the end, I took Gemini’s output and went to our HR department, and thanks to the AI research was able to frame a better question about what I was needing to know. They were able to connect me with two other people on campus who I ended up talking to, and now I have a solid plan for moving forward and doing this by the book.

The situation illustrates a common theme about good use of AI: You don’t use it to replace a human being necessarily. You use it to augment yourself and to create something, whether it’s an explanation or a piece of artwork or something else, that you can then take to a real human being who can give you the final product.

Conclusion

Once again, I’m aware that artificial intelligence evokes a wide range of very strongly held beliefs. It’s actually quite hard to talk about generative AI these days without getting into an argument. I’m not suggesting that people should use artificial intelligence tools. I’m only pointing out here that there are real uses of these tools that support the human experience and can make individual faculty members more intentional and more grounded in their work. And I think those are worth exploring.

The main message that I preach around here —and to be fair, I do this with everybody—is that the most important thing for personal progress is to take small steps consistently, inside of coherent systems, that gradually accumulate to real progress over time. Half of that equation is the system itself. What you want, in an intentional approach to life and work, is a system that you can trust and inside of which you feel like it’s totally natural to take those small steps consistently.

You might get the idea that the systems I use daily are fully optimized and at this point mainly run themselves, and that the purpose of the Substack is to teach you about the system and show you how to use it. The second part of that sentence is correct. The first part is absolute hogwash. I am here to tell you today in concrete terms that there is no such thing as a fully optimized system, and even if there were, it would not run itself – or run at all – if put to extreme amounts of stress.

Why systems sometimes crash

Every system is by definition highly connected, has a lot of parts, and makes assumptions about inputs. The inputs affect the parts and how they interact; sometimes those inputs shut the system down because the parts can’t keep up.

Take the various systems in your body, like the nervous or respiratory system. These are generally quite efficient, but they can crash when the inputs go outside of parameters. Your nervous system is optimized to work well under certain standard conditions, but we’ve all experienced times when our nervous systems are overloaded and we lock up – or literally seize up.

Every productivity system, GTD or otherwise, makes assumptions about inputs and will fail when those aren’t met. We know the five stages of GTD: capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage. I even have a nice little flowchart for the Clarify process that I refer back to a lot. But there is an underlying assumption that the pace at which you are working and the backlog of stuff that you have to work with, are manageable under your present abilities. And I think anybody in higher education will tell you that this pace and quantity can overload one’s circuits on a regular basis, every semester, sometimes every week, rendering the entire GTD process a nice idea, but impractical in reality.

I’ll be honest: Sometimes GTD is impractical in reality. In fact, what I’m going to tell you about now are some situations I’ve experienced where the typical implementation of GTD is just not going to work, and I have had to pivot to something else.

Grading overload

I’ve written before about how GTD helps me handle my grading workload and I’ve done a better job lately of streamlining my assessments so there is not so much grading in the first place to do. But still, every semester, more than once, I will get to a point where the grading piles up, I’ve got way too much of it to do in the time that I have, and my entire well-laid plans for intentionality crash because the whole system has been spammed by grading like a denial of service attack from my students1.

The last time this happened to me was about this time last year. For whatever reason, I had not been as productive getting grading done and returned to my students, causing a snowball effect where there was more grading coming in, but the grading was not coming out fast enough… I don’t need to explain this to an audience of academics, right? But it looks and feels a little like this:

It felt as though I was making a water balloon and had filled the balloon with way more water than it had intended to contain – and the spigot was still turned on. My entire productivity system, so finely honed and optimized, was becoming distended with the amount of inputs that it had. One morning I woke up and had this incredible sense of dread at the amount of stuff that wasn’t going to get done, both grading and otherwise.

Here is how I handled that situation and every other time this overload happens. It is a variation on the idea of simplify, breathe, and listen that I wrote about a while back.

• First of all, just put the entire task management apparatus away. Don’t look at the Next Actions list, don’t look at the flowcharts, don’t look at the calendar, or any other part of it. Take GTD, or whatever your system is, completely offline and put it out of sight. Because if GTD were capable of handling this level of overload, it would have done it by now.

• Pull out a standard stack of Post-it notes and a pen.

• From memory, write down everything you think you need to do regarding grading. Write in your standard size handwriting and then stop when the post-it note is full. Importantly, when you fill up the post-it note, there could still be stuff that you need to get done, but leave it out.

• That post-it note is your entire universe until further notice, until the stuff on it is complete.

• Then clear your calendar for the rest of the day and perhaps even the day after that and get the stuff done on the post-it note. Cancel meetings. I have even canceled classes before to do this. Remember that for the time being there is no other task in your world except what’s on that 2x2 inch piece of paper.

• Once this is done, do a weekly review to factory-reset your main system. This may be in the middle of the week and you might be doing another in a couple of days, but pretend this is your standard review time.

The main reason I think this approach works so well for me is that there is great power in constraint. My productivity system crashes under grading overload because the inputs have broken free of their constraints. So I am creating an emergency backup system that imposes helpful artificial constraints. By doing a brain dump from memory, rather than transcribing it off of my next actions list, I’m letting my brain subconsciously pick the small number of most-critical tasks that I really need to get done before I can think clearly again. By doing it on a Post-it note, I’m only allowing that list to be about five to six items long. And something about doing it with my hands, with a pen, slows me down, calms my mind, and allows me to think a little more clearly than I was able to a moment ago.

Children doing children things

I never truly understood the concept of a random variable until I had kids. Mine are all basically grown up at this point and more or less self-maintaining. But when they were little, things were very different. On any given day, the inputs into the family system could be perfectly normal and unremarkable. Or they could go completely off the rails.

When I first started at my current institution, my son was a year and a half old. We are fortunate to have an on-campus daycare center, which made it easy for me to drop him off in the morning and then pick him up on the way home and not be too far away in case something was needed. It turned out during my first year, “something was needed” on a regular basis. I would get a call from the center telling me that I needed to drop everything, come pick him up, and take him home2. And since I was the person nearest to the center and because my wife works full time, it was my responsibility to do this and spend the rest of the day with him at home.

Now, I certainly don’t mind spending the day with my son. However, during my first year at this institution, I was having to leave in the middle of the day to do this, almost once every other week. I have no resentment about that, but it’s a fact that it was very disruptive to my work, and I was falling behind and getting overloaded, a lot, during the first year at a new institution where I was trying to prove myself. People were beginning to ask why I was “never around” and why I was canceling meetings, office hours, even classes at times.

I want to say a bit about not only what I did during this time to stay intentional and focused, but also what I didn’t do.

What I didn’t do is give up on my system or on weekly planning. Former US president Dwight Eisenhower famously said that “plans are useless but planning is essential”. Despite knowing that on any given day my plans could be completely blown to smithereens, I still felt, and still do feel, that weekly planning is essential for at least a first approximation at being intentional. The idea of ditchability comes in here: It’s not good to go into life or work with no plans and it’s okay to renegotiate those plans in the moment if life goes sideways. In fact, you should plan on having to renegotiate your plans. And the systems that we create for intentionality need to be easy to reprioritize in the moment, based on inputs you didn’t plan for.

What I would do in these situations with my son is, first of all, be a dad. All that work that I’m not doing at school will still be there when my son has gotten home, had a snack and a nap and possibly medicine, and we’ve read a book together. No matter how supposedly urgent my co-workers believe their emails and meetings are, they are not more important than being present for my kids.

Secondly, it’s important to focus only on the things that can possibly get done. This is where contexts in your GTD system come in. For example, there is no point expending one calorie of energy looking at my @campus context if I am stuck at home. Instead, I need to be looking only at things that are campus-agnostic, like checking my email, or which can only be done at home. If you use energy levels as a context, then that can be an important filter as well because there is no point attempting high-energy or high-concentration tasks when the vast majority of your attention belongs to your kid.

Eventually these situations calm down. The child becomes well and is ready to go back to school and so are you. At that point, you can get back into your regular system and look at the full scope of what needs to be done and renegotiate all the things. Give yourself the grace and permission to do that. But in the moment, focus on the most important thing, which is your child, then doing what you can with what you have once they’re taken care of.

Speaking of bodily systems

Even if you don’t have kids, or somehow manage consistently to keep on top of your grading load, your physical health will at some point get compromised. This adds its own brand of complexity and overload to your system. For me, the most common compromise until recently3 has been sleep issues: Insomnia, sleep apnea, and the resulting follow-on physical issues that come with it.

I usually do my weekly reviews on Sunday afternoons, making time blocks and weekly goals and so forth. Then, for whatever reason4, I would often have a horrible night of sleep: Two or three hours of sleep at most, never very deep and often coming in 30-minute bursts with 60-minute awake times in between. Then my alarm would go off at 5:45am, and by 7:00am — having not even left the house yet — I was already totally exhausted, with a full day of classes and meetings ahead.

Having to do an entire day’s work while totally sleep deprived is a bit of a combination of being overloaded and having to take care of a sick child, except this time the sick child is you.

In these situations, first thing in the morning I will rearrange time blocks. For example, if I’m sleep deprived on a Monday, I’ll often look ahead to Tuesday. If I had planned a time block on Tuesday that doesn’t require heavy concentration (like filling out paperwork), I might swap it with a time block on Monday I had set aside for a higher-energy task (like grading)5. If I’m sleep deprived on a Monday, then there’s a fairly good chance I will sleep well on Monday night and be a little more peak-human on Tuesday, so it makes sense to just double up on the high-energy stuff when I’m a bit more recovered.

Secondly, as with the sick child situation, I’ll get clear with what is truly important to me, and operate in contexts that make sense for the moment, for example those involving low energy. I actually have a context called @brainless that I use to tag tasks that can be done in a zombie-like state. Sometimes I’ll take the factory-reset approach using a post-it note and a pen to write down just a small number of very simple tasks that don’t require much more than a lizard brain. When you’re sleep deprived, or if you’re sick with the flu and so forth, what your brain is craving is simplicity and rest.

It’s also okay in these situations to just do absolutely nothing. Go ahead and call off the whole day, go back to bed, and drink a lot of water. Just like with a sick kid, all the stuff that you need to do will still be there when you are better rested and in a better position to be fully present. And despite what other people say, their stuff is not more important than your physical health.

This is real life

Notice that none of the instances I described above are one-time singular events. They are recurring situations that any person who is living a real life in the world will experience, over and over again every year. You will get sick. You will lose sleep over something. You will get overloaded in your work. You will have surprise outside commitments that require serious and immediate renegotiations.

The Law of the Whole Person says that, since these imperfections are an inherent part of being alive, they cannot be separated from everything else, but instead your efforts at intentionality should allow for them. I think the common theme among the three situations I’ve described here is that you have to be aware of what’s important to you, not just what other people think is urgent for them, and be prepared to plan and act accordingly. Any system that doesn’t allow you to change the rules on the fly is not sustainable, because all these things are facts not only of academic life but just life in general.

Etc.

• Tools: I’ve had to teach remotely this week because of winter weather, and the MVP of the situation experience was a modest, open-source command line tool called SCRCPY (”screen copy”). It lets you stream a live copy of the screen of an Android device into a window on the macOS desktop. With it, I could use my Android tablet as a whiteboard, appearing as a window on my laptop screen, then shared out to students with Zoom. It even works the other direction, I can control the Android device from my laptop via the live window. Very simple, no bloat or spyware, has a targeted single purpose and does that one thing well, and it’s free. That’s that kind of ed tech I can get behind!

• Music: I have a goal this year of making 100 short recordings where I make up a bass line along with a drum track, or a backing track with instruments. I am trying to get better not only at playing music written by other people but also writing riffs and grooves. Here is the second of these records (out of 3 total so far, the fourth one is almost ready). It’s heavily inspired by the classic track “The Chicken”, hence the name.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, said Leonardo da Vinci1, and this is a belief that can guide our life and work as we venture into the new year. I wrote about my goals for 2026 last time, but the more I think about them, the more I think I have just one goal: Simplify.

That includes the tools we use, and this year I’m running a series of articles about simple, often free-to-use tools that are useful for people in higher education and often hide in plain sight, and some ways they can make our life and work easier and more centered on the right things. Today is the first of these, and I’m focusing on a tool I have come to appreciate and rely upon, but which surprisingly few academics seem to know about: Google Keep.

What is Google Keep and what’s so great about it?

Google Keep, obviously made by Google, is a very lightweight note-taking tool. The notes that you take with Google Keep come in the form of little cards, and those cards can contain plain text, checklists, images, links, audio recordings, or just about anything else you can imagine that you would want to, well, keep.

You can access Google Keep at keep.google.com as well as through apps on your devices. You do need a Google account to use it. Like just about all Google products, it is free to use and there are no constraints on the free version.

There are a lot of note-taking apps out there, some of which have more capability than others. (I’ve already written a lot about my love for Obsidian for example.) So why consider Keep?

• It’s free to use and cross-platform. There are some notes tools out there, like Apple Notes or Samsung Notes, that are excellent but which lock you into an ecosystem. Some apps are great and cross-platform but require a subscription to get past a very limited free version. For me, true cross-platform capability is a deal breaker for any tool, I have found Google Keep to work extremely well on every mainstream device, especially in a browser. And free is nice2.

• It doesn’t have a lot of features. This sounds like a negative, but it’s actually a big plus. Google Keep does not (yet!) try to do everything that a user could possibly want it to do. You cannot, for example, embed a PDF and handwrite on top of it3. You can do both of those things in apps like Microsoft OneNote or Evernote — and you pay for it, either in terms of a subscription or in terms of feature bloat that complicates synchronization, or both4. The fact that Keep keeps things very simple means that it’s fast, it’s reliable, and you’re not paying for servers5.

• It integrates well with the Google ecosystem. For example, you can take any Google Keep note and convert it into a Google Doc with a single click. This may or may not be useful to you, but as someone who has a lot of investment in the Google ecosystem, it matters to me.

The minimalist, protean nature of Google Keep makes it useful for a surprising number of applications. Here are 10 uses, many of which I use in my daily workflow, that you might find helpful.

Use #1: Ubiquitous capture

The foundation of most functioning productivity systems is ubiquitous capture. That means that no matter where you are or what situation you are in, you have a way of getting things out of your head and into a trusted system that you can review later. There are as many ways of doing capture as there are people, but Google Keep is a great platform to consider for this.

Google Keep can be present just about anywhere you are: at your computer, on your phone, or even on your smartwatch if you have one. I’m trying to do much more analog life this year, but I usually still have my phone nearby even when I am trying to be “off grid”, and if needed I can use it to capture stuff.

Use #2: Extracting text from photos

If you take a photo of something with your phone (or add a photo from elsewhere to a Keep note by dragging and dropping it), once the photo is added you will get a menu option to extract the text from the photo:

This is very useful for times when you see text that you want to capture, but it’s impractical to write it all down. Just take a photo of it and let Google Keep do the work for you.

Use #3: Voice recording with auto transcription

When creating a new note on Google Keep on a mobile device6, one of the options you are given is to create an audio recording. Choosing this option not only saves the original audio recording that you can play back, but also a transcription.

This is another useful capture situation where writing down a thought is impractical but talking it out is easy. Google has always been ahead of the game in terms of speech-to-text quality, and it’s baked into this tool.

Use #4: Throwaway checklists

I make a lot of one-and-done checklists — for example, things that I want to do over the weekend, or a list of places I need to go while running errands on a single afternoon. I don’t need to hang on to these checklists for later, so they don’t properly belong in my GTD system or my bullet journal. Fortunately checklists are one of the primary templates for Keep notes, so I can make these up on whatever device I have available, they sync up with my other devices automatically, and I can dispose of them later.

Post-it notes are also good for this, but sometimes paper is impractical whereas I am nearly 100% certain to have my phone on me in these cases.

Use #5: Non-Throwaway Checklists

I also have a lot of checklists that I do not want to be one and done, but which I use and reuse on a regular basis. Keep is my primary tool for this use because of the ability to reset and reuse checklists once they are checked off.

For example, I have a “Gig prep checklist” on Keep that I use when loading my music gear before a show. It is a detailed “pre-flight” checklist of the specific gear I need to pack and the containers I need to put it all into.

I have this list pulled up on the computer in my home studio space as I pack. As each item goes into its appropriate bag or case, I check off the item. Then when a bag or case is loaded into the car, I check that off as well. This way, as long as I pay attention when I am checking off items, I always leave the house confident that I have not left anything important behind.

I could do this on paper, but with a Keep note, there is an option to “Uncheck all items” on a checklist which resets it for later use. So for example when loading back up after the gig to come home, I can run through my list and make sure nothing gets left behind; then uncheck and reuse for the next gig, etc. This same idea can be applied to any recurring situation where you need to make sure certain things happen, and higher ed life is full of those.

Use #6: On-the-go hands-free brainstorming

I mentioned above that Keep notes can be used to capture and transcribe audio. But if you also have access to good speech-to-text tools, which are increasingly built into many devices, then you can use Google Keep to create text notes using your voice hands-free: Just open a regular text note and then use your tool and start talking and let the device capture the text into the note.

This has become my go-to method to outline and draft blog posts. When it’s time for me to do this, I will often grab my phone, put my walking shoes on, and go take a three-mile walk around my neighborhood with an empty Google Keep checklist open on my phone. Then as I walk and I think about what I want to write about, if an idea comes up, I’ll add it to the checklist using voice input, then hit enter to start a new checklist item and repeat until I’m done with my walk. This creates basically a bullet list of ideas, and as I incorporate them into the outline or draft (or decide not to), I just check them off.

Here for example is the outline I created for this article, while making dinner:

Use #7: Basic read-later service

If you encounter something online that you want to read but not write this second, you can save it to Google Keep and review it later. This is just capturing, but it’s a particular kind of capture that Keep is quite useful for doing, thanks to browser extensions and built-in sharing tools that make it easy. For the latter, on Android devices at least (I think this works on iOS too), if you have something on your device that you want to share, Google Keep is one of the destinations to which you can share it.

So it’s very easy to clip items to Google Keep on a device. In fact, it might be a little too easy, so you have to be aware of over-clipping and creating more read-later items than you can really consume. A computer tool will not substitute for your judgment.

Use #8: Foundation of a minimalist GTD implementation

I have never personally known anybody to do this in real life, but some folks have written or made videos about using Google Keep as the platform for GTD. Details vary but it might go like this:

• You have one note for each of the main lists needed in GTD: Someday/Maybe, Next Actions, Waiting For, Projects, and Agendas. Those can be pinned so that they always appear at the top of your notes.

• Also, one note for each project.

• And possibly one separate note for each context that you use.

• As well as individual notes for reference materials that you might save (or notes that contain links to where those materials are stored; if the reference materials are for a particular project then you can just dump the link into the card for the project).

• And finally, one primary note called INBOX which is also pinned to the top for brain-dumping individual items.

The process of using a system like this would be basically the same as using any implementation of GTD. In fact, this feels very close to what David Allen originally did when he invented GTD and was using stacks of index cards — an Inbox card, one card per project, and one card per context for next actions.

One thing that Keep has in its favor, if you wanted to try this out, is that it has an extremely good search function — no surprise there since it’s a Google product. A search in Google Keep will go through not only the titles and text that’s in a note, it will also even search text that’s in images. Notes can also be tagged and the tags can be searched. Notes can also be color coded and the colors can be searched — for example, you can do a search for all the red cards. So when it comes to slicing and dicing your stuff in your system, the search feature makes this very flexible and easy to do.

Use #9: Foundation of an uber-minimalist non-GTD system

I recently learned that Steph Ango, the CEO of Obsidian, manages his to-dos by creating a single weekly note with a brief checklist in it:

Every week I create a weekly note, and write my to-dos for the week. I may add more items to it during the week.

If any items didn’t get done I roll them over to the next weekly note or drop them.

That’s it.

I usually write my to-dos from scratch without looking at the previous week’s list. This helps me decide which items I should drop. If I can’t remember a to-do it probably wasn’t that important.

This is not GTD: There are no contexts, projects, higher horizons, etc. — Although in a Twitter exchange with Steph, I expressed skepticism that this was truly all he was doing7.

Still, in the spirit of extreme simplicity, his single to-do list approach really fascinated me and I’ve been trying something like this out in my analog/digital hybrid system (that I will write much more about in a future post).

If you wanted to try what Steph is doing, then Google Keep would be a great place to do it because of the checklist functionality I mentioned above. Simply, at your weekly review, do what Steph does, just do it in a Keep note.

Use #10: Multimedia reference system

Even if you don’t use Keep for an entire GTD system, it could be useful as your reference system for a larger implementation especially when dealing with multimedia items. If you save a link, it will try to give you a preview of the link. Same if you save a video. If you save a picture and it happens to have text in it, you can search the text that’s in the picture. And as I mentioned above, the search feature in Google Keep, while not as fully featured as it could be (for example, you cannot do a Boolean search in Google Keep), does work pretty well with text that’s inside a picture, or labels, or colors, or types of notes, and so on.

I personally think something like Google Drive is a better way to have a reference system set up. But if you wanted to keep everything in Google Keep, you could certainly try it.

In conclusion…

In my view, Google Keep is one of the best things that Google has ever done. And we all know what Google sometimes does to products that people love, like Google Reader, which I’m still bitter about. It’s my great hope that Google Keep stays viable for a very long time. I see no information in the tech news that would suggest it wouldn’t. And that’s a good thing because it’s at the foundation of everything that I do — not quite a second brain, but pretty close to it.

Etc.

• New easier way to get to this blog: You can now access this Substack using the better, shorter URL intentionalacademia.com. This is of course the same URL as before, except you don’t have to add “.substack.”. Nothing personal against Substack. It’s just a mouthful, and it makes it easier to remember and share without it. The old URL still works too.

• Music: Unless you’re a bass nerd, you’ve probably never heard of Spanish bassist Vincen García. I’m a huge fan of his style — fast and funky, but mostly “fingerstyle” without all the slap bass technique8 that has taken over the instrument. Check out this tune from his new album and see what I mean.

I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions. They are frequently not kept: Typically 25% of people who make a New Year’s resolution will break it by the second Friday of January, affectionately known as “Quitter’s Day”; about 80% will have dropped out by the end of February; and by the end of the year, only 9% of people making resolutions will have kept them1.

But the impulse to look back on the concluding year and ahead to the new one is good, even if resolutions aren’t. So instead of resolutions, here is an activity that you can try, called a start/stop/continue exercise2. It’s simple: Just list some things you don’t currently do but plan to start doing, some things you will stop doing that you currently do, and some things you are currently doing that you will continue to do. Or to make this really focused, which I encourage you to do, list just one thing in each category.

This past weekend I was the passenger on a long car ride to visit family, and I had a chance to do this for 2026. I’m sharing that with you today, along with some special new year’s wishes at the end.

Start: Going analog

In my last post, I wrote a throwaway line in the “Etc”. section that seemed to generate more interest than the post itself:

Lately I’ve been feeling like I spend more time in the digital world than I do in the physical one, and I don’t like it. In 2026 I’d like to have a more embodied existence — thinking and acting with my senses in the physical world. This involves a shift to analog things, like vinyl records and shopping in person, and especially using paper.

During my sabbatical this fall, I was heads-down for 4-5 hours a day doing research, writing, and communicating with faculty doing case studies for my book. I enjoyed it, but by the end of the morning I felt exhausted, not so much from the amount or difficulty of the work, but because all of it was digital, at a screen. The rest of the day, by contrast, usually involved purely physical activities like going for a walk, lifting weights, cleaning the house, and practicing my bass. While it’s hard to compare those two categories, I thought it was interesting that I was more ready for a break after 4 hours of computer activity than I was after 6+ hours of physical activity.

I read two books that I read this fall that clarified what I was experiencing. One was The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, which lays out in terrifying clarity the connection between the malaise experienced by today’s younger generation (which includes my three kids) and the advent of ubiquitous digital experiences purpose-built to suck them in3. The other was The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen, recommended to me by an Intentional Academia reader in the comments on my post. This book addresses the implications of having a disembodied existence via the digital world when in fact, we are humans in physical bodies who need physical experiences to survive and thrive.

Both of these books, together with my unease at digital overload, made me reflect on two things that have great meaning in my life: playing live music with my bands, and being a practicing Catholic. Both of these, while sometimes veering into the digital realm, are fundamentally physical. Playing with a band makes me use my fingers, my ears, my back, my voice. The Catholic Mass involves hearing the songs and bells, watching the priest, smelling the incense. All these are active, full-spectrum sensory experiences that feed my experience of life, not drain it.

Heading into 2026, and the second half of my 50s, I’m wanting more than ever to live with intention and richness. I’m convinced this involves maximizing those sensory, physical experiences. And as I think of practical ways to do that, I keep coming back to the idea of returning to analog, and using digital affordances well but minimally4.

I’ve decided that this includes my systems for productivity. For the last month, I’ve been experimenting with a hybrid analog/digital GTD setup and will be using it in 2026 for as long as it works. It involves:

• Using Workflowy, an outlining app, as a back-end database of all my tasks and projects5;

• At each weekly review, hand-copying a short list of important tasks to be done during that week into a paper bullet journal notebook; and

• Operating day-to-day and moment-to-moment out of the bullet journal, rather than out of a task management app.

I’ve attempted analog systems before, but they broke under the sheer volume of tasks and projects that I face during a semester6. What’s different this time is that I am not planning on using the bullet journal for everything. In particular I am not using it to store and track all tasks and projects. Digital stuff is better for this7. Instead, the weekly review is where I scoop out the subset of tasks that I intend for the week from my database, put them in the notebook, and then leave the database alone until the next weekly review and spend most of my time during a given week outside the weekly review in an analog, paper-and-pen environment.

That’s about all I have to say about this for now, but I plan on giving a lot more details in 2026 once this has a chance to establish itself.

Stop: Extra-long weekly reviews

About those weekly reviews: they’re too long.

I typically do my weekly review on Sunday afternoons. A few weeks ago, I was doing one, and I realized that I was missing a football game on TV that I wanted to see. I looked at the clock and realized I had been at it for an hour already, and was not anywhere near halfway done. The question came up: Why is this weekly review — why is every weekly review — taking so darned long to complete?

I used to allot 60-90 minutes for weekly review, and that was enough. Over the years, the time spent on weekly reviews has crept up to the point where they were taking at least 2 hours and sometimes longer. Now, I am all about being thorough in these reviews, but this is too much. So I audited my process and found I’d broken my cardinal rule of Simplify as much as possible. I found numerous parts of my process I’d read about them somewhere (e.g. articles with titles like “10 Questions You Should Be Asking Yourself Every Week”) and thought they were cool, so I added to the review process without subtracting — ever. My review process was no longer my own review, but an accretion of other people’s ideas about how I should review.

Those add-ons might have added value to the review, but each one came at a time cost that had added up to more than I felt like paying. So I’ve redesigned my weekly reviews around the minimum process that David Allen suggests:

• Get clear: Clean up my workspace, get inboxes to zero, clear my head of uncaptured stuff.

• Get current: Review next actions lists, the calendar, the Waiting For list, projects, and any other lists I have and get them updated.

• Get creative: Review the Someday/Maybe list and note any big creative risks or ideas I might be thinking about.

• And for my hybrid system formulation, I also set up the bullet journal for the week: Make a spread with commitments and goals for the week, and loop through my next actions and projects to skim off a subset of tasks that I want to get done this week, hand-copying those into the notebook.

The goal is to complete my weekly review in under an hour8. I did the above process for the first time this Sunday and it took around 75 minutes, which is definitely trending in the right direction. It leaves out a lot of the reflection that I used to do, which did have value. But I figured, this is something better suited for a longer-scope review, like on a per month or per quarter (or trimester) basis. I didn’t feel like I was missing anything by not doing all that high-level review at the end/start of a week; after all, the day-to-day log is right there in my notebook. And I was able to plant myself on the couch and watch football, which perhaps other than going to Mass is my ultimate Sunday goal.

Continue: Actually this is two things

I couldn’t decide on one thing to continue doing because fortunately a lot of what I did in 2025 was successful beyond my expectations, so I’ll share the top two.

First, continue making physical health my top priority for the year. The biggest success I enjoyed in 2025, was losing almost 40 pounds on the Ideal You weight loss program9 during the fall, and going from an lifetime high weight of 212 pounds over the summer to my current weight of around 170. For the first time in a very long time, weight loss is not one of my goals heading into the new year.

Instead, I want to invest effort into building my health through engagement with cardio, weights, and flexibility. I’ve been exercising fairly regularly for a while. But now, many activities will be a lot easier now that I have shed so much excess weight. Physical health is one of those Pareto principle concepts — one of the 20% of things that we do that makes the other 80% easier and better. I’d encourage every higher ed person reading this to consider joining me.

Second, I want to continue in some way to keep the schedule I had during sabbatical. I would trundle out of bed around 6:00am, get coffee, play Wordle, and read The Economist. Then by 7:30 I was at the computer writing or researching, heads down with no interruptions until 11:30 or noon. Then I would just…stop working. The rest of the day was for whatever I felt like doing or needed doing — usually a combo of bass practice, exercise, writing, or low-priority “work” tasks. But I abided by the scientific fact that most people can do no more than 4 hours of deep work per day. We academics may think we’re exceptions to the rule, but it’s only because those 4 hours of useful attention are split up into 100 small shards of attention spread over 8 or more hours. You can combine all those together into a single 4-hour sprint and get the same amount and quality of stuff done, if not more, if the schedule permits.

That last part — permission of schedule — is the rub. A typical academic workday doesn’t allow it. But I’m going to experiment with making it happen somehow anyway next semester when I’m back. At the very least, I only teach on Monday/Wednesday/Friday next term and I have no standing commitments on Tuesday or Thursday, so Tuesday/Thursdays are going to be “sabbatical schedule” days — which means I need to get ready to say “no” to meeting requests and the like on those days, at least in the mornings.

Conclusion for the year

First of all, I’d love to hear your start/stop/continue plans in the comments. You might spark inspiration in one of your colleagues – or get the inspiration you need!

Second, I want to express how grateful I am for each person who reads this blog. Here, I post ideas that are in my mind about life and how to live it well in academia — ideas I’ve always had, but not had an audience until this blog. Attention is scarce and it means a lot to me that you are spending some of it here.

One of my goals for 2025 was to increase readership (measured by the number of subscribers) by 50% over 2024. I am really pleased to say that as of this writing, we’ve gone from 602 subscribers to 903 — almost exactly 50% growth. We did it!

In 2026, you’ll continue to get my best thoughts about productivity and purpose in academia, every other week. Some of the posts I have planned include:

• A new series on “10 Ways to Use ____ in Academia” where I focus on simple, usually free tools that can help us do our work, or live life, better – that often get overlooked.

• An update or postmortem, depending on how it turns out, of the analog/digital hybrid GTD system I mentioned.

• Articles on how to navigate tricky ethical issues that come up here — for example saying “no” when you’re in a vulnerable job position, or why it’s actually OK to not be available to others.

• How to build and teach a minimalist course.

• Quarterly Q&A posts from readers.

• And more!

This Substack is, and I plan on it remaining, free of charge — because I want the message and ideas contained here to spread as far and wide as possible. However, I will point out that there is a paid “patron” subscription available.

For $5 a month or $50 per year, you can help support my writing and make it easier to get these ideas out. You can also give gift subscriptions. There are a few patron subscribers, and the funds from those subscriptions goes to pay for operating expenses10. So paid subscriptions are very much appreciated. But please know I think you are an amazing person regardless whether you pay for all this or not. .

Thanks again and I’ll see you in 2026!

The last time I made a major shift in my systems was two years ago. As I wrote in a three-part series (part 1, part 2, part 3), I was unsatisfied, not only with my work itself but also the way I was approaching my systems with GTD and all the rest. I felt a bit like a hamster running frantically on a wheel, all activity and no progress. Can you relate?

I made some changes back then that included a concept I never explicitly wrote about, until today, that’s less about the systems and more about how I relate to them in real life. I made the following rule and still abide by it: The systems I use must allow for “ditchability”.

What is ditchability?

Ditchability1 is the property of “stuff” (tasks, projects, calendar events, etc.) that makes them easier or harder to reprioritize in the moment, based on inputs you didn’t plan for. I think of this in terms of lowering the priority of something, possibly to the point of removing it from your system entirely — “ditching” it, in other words — when something else happens that disrupts the system. Easier to reprioritize means higher ditchability, harder means lower ditchability.

Let’s take an example from real life, namely me, back in the day when my three kids were little. My plans for a typical working day would include teaching a couple of classes, attending a couple of meetings, and working on various teaching and research projects in between, as well as personal plans for the evenings. I usually set up all those daily plans at my weekly review so that on any given day, and any time of the day, I have a sense of what I should be doing as well as what I should not be doing2. Which is all well and good — until I get that phone call from my son’s elementary school telling me that he got sick in class and somebody (me) needs to come pick him up.

Suddenly, I have to think about what I can ditch and what I can’t. My scheduled classes for the day have somewhat low ditchability. They are normally top-priority and that priority is difficult to lower, meaning that I’ll attempt to teach them if at all possible (for example by shifting them to online for the day, or finding a colleague who can cover). Blocks of time for grading papers, on the other hand, have higher ditchability. I need to get those done (relatively high priority) but if something comes up (like taking care of a sick kid), it’s fairly easy to shuffle the time block to elsewhere in the week or later. And most of the time the personal plans in the evenings are 100% ditchable (ask any parent); you try to stick to them but if life happens, they are typically the easiest to move.

What my rule then says, is that if I have a system for productivity or intentionality or whatever you want to call it, that doesn’t factor in ditchability, it’s sub-optimal because it’s “brittle” — any disruption to the system breaks it. My systems must be supple enough to allow renegotiations of priorities, in the moment, based on new information, and still work.

Many approaches to productivity don’t work because of how brittle they are. Plain to-do lists, for example, tend to fall apart when life doesn’t go the way you planned. You might have 5-10 things on such a list to get done today, but that assumes a particular vision of “today” that doesn’t involve your kid throwing up in class. And for academics, if it’s not a sick kid, it’s going to be something else: a meeting that goes overtime and eats your next time block, or an unplanned hallway conversation. Or all of these! This approach basically assumes nothing is ditchable and all things are of equal priority. And then, your to-do list (which was already probably too long) becomes impossible to complete, and the system, such as it is, breaks — and because it is blind to ditchability, it makes you feel miserable and guilty.

On the other hand, a ditchable-friendly system has built-in grace to give you permission, and rules of engagement, to renegotiate priorities if the moment calls for it.

How do you build a system like that? I think there are three key “pillars” to it.

The First Pillar of Ditchability: Alignment

I’m going go back to something I stressed in my last post: If you are in a situation (as each of us is, every day) that is in constant flux, then you must know what your values, roles, and primary life goals are — the things that change no more than once or twice in your life — to navigate unsteady waters, and your system must be based on aligning those with your lower-altitude projects and plans. Without such knowledge, and without aligning it with day-to-day plans, ditchability is an impossibility.

Standard GTD methodology doesn’t talk much about this explicitly, but it does say a lot about alignment of the various horizons of focus. When your Horizon 0 (tasks), Horizon 1 (projects), and so on up through Horizon 4 (3-5 year vision) and Horizon 5 (purpose and principles) are coordinated, then you have a direct chain of command from the smallest action all the way up to your life plans. You need that perspective to estimate the ditchability of a task, or even a project or a higher goal. Being clear on this alignment will help you cut through the brain fog that descends the moment that well-laid plans go out of kilter and make decisions with integrity.

The Second Pillar of Ditchability: Big Rocks

There’s this famous illustration about how to pack a bunch of rocks into a small container. The short version is that if you try to put in the small stuff first, the big rocks will never fit. But if you put the big rocks in first and then pour the smaller stuff into the container, all of it fits.

The application should be clear: All of us have a lot of stuff to cram into a given day or week, and if we want to succeed, we have to determine what the “Big Rocks” are and put those in first, then let the smaller stuff fall where it will.

This is getting much more into the tactical weekly planning aspect of a system. I think the week is a good unit of time to use for planning, since it aligns with the idea of a weekly review, and because often “ditching” something on a given day means rescheduling it, and it’s easier to do that on a week-to-week basis (i.e. something you planned to do on Tuesday gets bumped to Thursday).

Here’s how I do this on a weekly basis. At my weekly review, I look ahead and think about what my highest priority tasks are for the week. I keep this limited to between three and six items, and those are my Big Rocks. If you have more than six things that are “highest priority”, then it’s likely that none of them are high priority. Then I look ahead at my calendar for the week and I schedule enough time blocks for those Big Rocks to get done — assuming no disruptions. And then I treat those time blocks as appointments, on the same level as scheduled classes or meetings — and with the same, low level of ditchability.

Many academics approach high-priority weekly tasks with this approach, but introduce failure points. They might have too many big rocks, for instance; remember, six (about one per day) is probably the upper limit. Or they underestimate the time involved. Or perhaps most likely, they treat those time blocks with too high of a level of ditchability, canceling them or moving them to some point into the far future based on the slightest disruptions in the day.

A ditchability-friendly system translates your understanding of your higher horizons down to something concrete that you can put onto the schedule on a weekly basis, in the form of the Big Rocks. This seems counterintuitive because we’re introducing things into the system that are less ditchable. But by having those fixed points, you will have an enhanced ability to make changes to your plans in the moment.

The Third Pillar of Ditchability: MIT’s

If Big Rocks are the weekly incarnations of Horizons 3–5, then the daily incarnations are what I call the Most Important Things – MITs — for the day. On a daily basis, you simply decide what are the 1-3 Most Important Things to get done that day. You should not identify more than three of these; it’s best if you can narrow it down to just one.

MITs have even lower ditchability than the Big Rocks. You might conceivably shift a Big Rock to later in the week because that is the time scale on which Big Rocks are identified; but an MIT is attached to that day. These are the ditchable items of last resort.

The best approach to handling MITs is to identify them before the day starts, or at the very beginning, and then knock at least one of them out before anything else happens in the day. This will give you a sense of accomplishment and freedom, and it makes it less likely that it will get caught up in the backdraft of an unforeseen event that throws the day into chaos. But if the latter happens, and the MIT still isn’t done at the time, you will have a clear sense of the distinguished priority of that one thing, and it signals that you should strive to complete it before the day is done, if humanly possible.

A ditchability-friendly system makes this distinction, between mere “stuff” that you can get done on a given day and the highest-priority items that you should or even must get done that day3.

Conclusion: Trusted systems

Many folks, especially academics in my experience, dismiss systematic approaches to life and work because they believe those systems will simply fall apart under pressure. What’s the point of doing GTD when life comes at you so often and unpredictably?

That’s not a bad question, if it’s not rhetorical. The answer, I think, is to understand that in a trustworthy system, plans are just “plans”, and we don’t expect life to be 100% compliant with them. Instead, you work within a coherent system that recognizes that some of these plans are more ditchable than others. In fact, that’s part of what being a “trusted system” means: I can trust this system to be of use in the ever-changing world of being a whole person.

Etc.

• Tools: Lately I’ve been feeling like I spend more time in the digital world than I do in the physical one, and I don’t like it. In 2026 I’d like to have a more embodied existence — thinking and acting with my senses in the physical world. This involves a shift to analog things, like vinyl records and shopping in person, and especially using paper. I’ve started using paper notebooks and pens for a large part of my approach to GTD, and I’ll be writing about that soon. Based on that, I highly recommend Leuchhterm1917 dotted notebooks and Pilot G2 0.5mm gel pens as well as my old standby, stacks of cheap Post-It notes.

• Music: Two of my favorite musicians, playing together back in the day — bassist Pino Palladino and drummer Manu Katche (who played with Peter Gabriel). This is what “groove” sounds like, and I was amazed to see Pino playing a 5-string fretless.

Last week, I spoke (online) at a Lunch and Learn session for faculty at the University of Maine at Presque Isle. The talk was called “The Coherent Professor: Finding Productivity and Purpose in a Whole Faculty Life” and synthesized many of the themes you will read about here. I presented three principles for a coherent life within academia and applied it to a couple of real life examples, including email management. Here are the slides and here is a resource page that goes with them.

As usual, the Q&A session at the end was more interesting than the talk itself. I was given some questions to address before the talk began, by some folks who weren’t able to attend. I thought they were so compelling that I wanted to turn them into today’s post. So here they are, with my responses (that go into more detail than I had time for last week).

Advice for the young at heart (academically speaking)

The first question was: If you could go back and give your younger academic self one piece of advice about finding coherence and purpose, what would it be?

The youngest age where I think I even had an academic self, is 22, when I was a first-year Ph.D. student. I was a fish out of water: a rare Nashville-area native1 going to Vanderbilt, coming from an excellent but thoroughly non-elite state school (Tennessee Tech). My cohort represented some of the top graduates from universities not only from around the United States but also Europe and China. To this day, I’m certain my acceptance into the program was a clerical error.

I began the marathon of graduate school from about two miles behind the start line. That first year was back-breakingly hard. But it wasn’t complicated. For all the difficulty of graduate school, it is a simple life. I only had two jobs: study and get up to speed on research, and learn how to teach. Those two jobs are not trivial, but they are the only two I had. I wasn’t married, didn’t have kids, and had no expectation of having a life outside of school (I knew what I signed up for).

The advice that I would go back and give to myself is: This will not always be the case. As hard as it may seem now, you are playing life on “easy mode” if you only have two main things to worry about. So take advantage of the relative simplicity of your life, now, to build coherent systems that will scale up to what’s coming when you start your career.

There will be a day (I would tell myself) when you finish your PhD and start your career. The work at that point may or may not be as “hard”, but there will be an exponential jump in how much there is of it, and in the diversity of it. You’ll still be doing research and teaching, but you’re going to be teaching twice as much; serving on committees; doing service to your broader professional community; doing service to your campus and the community; meeting with more students; meeting with students who are not your students; dealing with internal politics; and more.

And by the way (I would continue to tell myself), you’re going to be moving to a new city where you don’t know anybody, so you’ll have to rebuild your personal life from scratch. You’ll have to manage your finances better because you will have a comma in your paycheck. You’ll have to start taking better care of your health because you’ll be getting older. And so on.

Right now (I would add to myself), while the work is hard, deciding what to work on is not hard. It’s either teaching or research. But later, you’re going to have so many things competing for your attention that it will be almost impossible to know what the right thing to do is, without a system. Everything will appear extremely urgent, so putting out fires isn’t a sustainable plan. So start now to decide what’s important to you and who you want to be, and build systems and workflows around it, so that when the floodgates open, you will have a systematic way of picking the things that are in your best interest, consistently and wisely. By the way, have you ever heard of this weird corporate concept called Getting Things Done?2

That’s what I would have told myself back in 1992. Whether I would have listened to myself is another question. I do remember going into my first job out of graduate school and having the exact experience mentioned above, and I wish I had had this advice back then.

In true academic form, the second question I got was actually three questions. I’m going to split these up into two parts.

Hitting a moving target

That second question, which was actually three questions, had two questions that went together well: How do we regularly show up for our most important work when that is defined and redefined multiple times over? How does this advice change for tenured, pre-tenured tenure-track, and non-tenure-track faculty?

This question got me thinking about a trip that my family and I took to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan over the summer. We were in the Keweenaw Peninsula area and we visited Copper Harbor, the northernmost town in Michigan. The town sits on the peninsula far out into the middle of Lake Superior. True to its name, there is a harbor there where freighters used to dock to receive copper ore that would ship out onto the Great Lakes and to points east.

Lake Superior is a treacherous body of water for ships. Getting into the harbor safely is difficult when the weather is rough. So Copper Harbor has not one but two lighthouses: One on the shoreline, the other further inland and up an incline. (A photo of these is above.) By lining up these two lighthouses so that one of them appears to be vertically atop the other, a pilot can get a direct path of approach to get into the harbor safely.

The lesson I take away from this, is that to navigate volatile situations where everything is in constant flux, you need fixed points. Once you establish fixed points that do not change, you’re in a much better position to navigate the things that do because you can triangulate your position.

In order to consistently show up for your most important work, you first have to decide what actually is important at all. What are your core values in life? What are the primary roles that you play, and how do you want those to play out? In GTD language, we call this Horizon 5. If you’ve never actually taken a notebook or a Google Doc and written out the answers to those questions in a Life Plan, start there.

Without having a clear sense of these things, you’re going to find it difficult to show up for your most important work. Instead, just like my 22-year-old self, you will be simply doing the work that is the most urgent, not necessarily what is most important, and you will have no basis for making decisions about what to work on. You’ll be spending all your energy checking off boxes on somebody else’s to-do list. You may be physically present for your work, but there is no sense in which you have intellectually or emotionally “shown up”.

But if you know what your fixed points are, what your “lighthouses” are that you can line up to to chart a course for yourself, you may be surprised just how easy it is to navigate change.

Take generative artificial intelligence. This technology has thrown the entirety of higher education into a state of constant flux, and many people are, to put it mildly, really struggling with it. Following the Fall 2024 semester, where I had my first large-scale encounter with AI mediated academic dishonesty, I was definitely one of them. What’s helped me navigate the state of constant change is being crystal clear on what my fixed points are.

My core values are growth, humanity, temperance, and transcendence. And my primary roles in life include being an excellent teacher, among other things. This informs me about how to approach AI and how it’s changing higher education. For example, while I do want to mitigate the risks of cheating with AI, I also want to think about how I can harness it in my classes to enhance my students’ learning experiences, because that’s what being a teacher is all about. Therefore I don’t want to simply deny AI or “#resist” it as some are doing. And, because curiosity and growth matter to me, rather than avoid or mindlessly reject AI, I want to learn as much about AI as I possibly can. I’d be a sorry excuse for a learner if I didn’t.

Your core values and primary roles in life are probably different from mine and I’m not saying my way of thinking about AI or anything else is right. But I am definitely saying it’s in alignment with who I am as a person. And this how you show up to do your most important work every day.

I don’t think this is any different depending on your professional rank or employment status. Tenure or no, we all have an obligation to figure out who we are and then act in alignment with the answers. To do otherwise is to lose our humanity.

When all else fails…

The final question was perhaps the most provocative: What happens when or if we discover what is most important has nothing to do with our jobs in academia?

First of all, I think this happens more often than we think, especially as we get older. I think it’s very common, the more we engage with our lives, that we realize that what matters most to us isn’t found in our job description: Raising a family, attending to health, exploring faith, serving community, you name it. So it’s not an existential crisis. But it does mean we have decisions to make about how we respond.

In extreme situations, you might find that you have to pick one: either your Most Important Thing or your job. One or the other, but not both. For example, I had a pastor once who worked an ordinary 9-5 job, but then realized that becoming a priest was the most important thing he wanted to do, and since you cannot both be a Catholic priest and work in an accounting firm, he had to make a choice. If I were in that kind of situation, an all-or-nothing choice, the first thing I would do is sleep on it for a week. Because it’s very easy to become so enamored with a new idea that you feel like it’s worth quitting your job over. But if you put a little distance between you and that idea, you realize that it isn’t.

If you go through a period of discernment, including checking in with the people around you, then you would have to make a similar choice to the one my pastor did. Only you can make that choice. But I would say I have no judgment against people who leave academia to pursue things that they legitimately believe are more important for them, as long as they have a clear idea of what’s important to them and have gone through that period of discernment. In fact, I wish them the best and might be slightly jealous of them at times.

But most of the time, it’s not that extreme. You might spend quite a bit of time in academia and build a career, then realize that it’s no longer the most important thing to you. Something else is: raising a family, pursuing a side gig, starting a business, taking care of your health (or someone else’s). That “something else” may not require that you quit your job, but it does require that you reallocate your energy and time to fit the level of importance that you assign to it.

If that’s the case for you, then I have a few pieces of advice:

• First of all, again, if you have not written out a Life Plan for yourself, where you’re very clear about your Horizon 5, do that. This is your map for the decisions you’re going to have to make next.

• Second, honor the place of importance that your “something else” takes and just realize that it’s okay for your academic career to shift position so it’s no longer in first place. We should all really resist the temptation to be defined as human beings by the job that we hold.

• Third, start making decisions in your job based on what you now realize about your “something else” as codified in your Life Plan. If your job is no longer the most important thing in your life, stop acting as if it were.

That third point is crucial. You cannot just decide that something is more important than your work: You have to alter your life and how you live it, so that you act in accordance with that decision.

For example, if you have kids and you come to believe that raising them and being present for them is more important than your academic job, then if your job asks you to work on nights and weekends – say no. And don’t just “say no” to requests, but build your life in such a way that your system, aligned with your life plan, automatically says no to choices that detract from the importance of raising your kids. For example, you can manage your email better so that you’re not answering messages all day. You can manage your course design and grading better and not grade on the weekends.

This point is really hard to hear because a lot of people will believe that their academic job is no longer the most important thing, but will be unwilling to die on that hill, discipline themselves to act, and accept the consequences which could potentially include unemployment. I fully understand that what I’m saying here is riskier for some people than it is for me. But I insist that if you truly believe that you have found something more important than your academic job, you will commit to that realization, no excuses and no apologies, and accept the risk.

So maybe this question goes with the other two after all. How do you handle the realization that the most important thing in your life is outside your job in academia? It usually requires that you allocate resources appropriately. And how do you know how to allocate your resources appropriately? You have to be crystal clear on your core values and your primary roles. You have to know what your fixed points are — the non-negotiables in your life that don’t change no matter what you discover.

Etc.

• Podcast: I’m not really a podcast guy, but I found one that not only consistently delivers really excellent information about music, but also applies to life and to the classroom. It’s called The Bulletproof Musician, and it is published every Sunday. Most episodes are 7-9 minutes long (the sweet spot for podcast length in my view). The podcast is mainly about how to make musical practice better, but the applications are wide ranging to any sort of skill and they target exactly the sort of intentionality that I’m writing about here. As both a musician and as a teacher, I’m fascinated by this idea of deliberate practice, and I have really gleaned a lot from these episodes, so I highly recommend it.

• Music: Speaking of AI, one of my favorite applications of this technology is taking songs and reinterpreting them in different genres. This is fast becoming a genre unto itself, and one of my favorite sources is the Fake Music YouTube channel. I have no idea what kind of technology stack this channel is using, but it’s incredible, and I will just let the results speak for themselves:

This semester I’ve been on sabbatical to work on the second edition of my book, Flipped Learning, A Guide for Higher Education Faculty. I’m doing two main things in this project: completely rewriting a survey of the research literature about flipped learning in higher education, and conducting faculty case studies. These will add at least four new chapters to the book.

I’m currently halfway through the semester, but thankfully, more than halfway through the project. When I was working on the first edition ten years ago, it was my first book and I had nothing like a plan for getting it done. I ended up working 10-hour days the summer before the deadline because I had frittered away the preceding year with ineffective or nonexistent work on that book. This time, I was determined not to do that, and I’ve taken a much more intentional approach.

That approach has worked out well so far, and today I wanted to share some of the major parts of what’s made it so effective. It’s really just an application of the fundamental principles of “intentional academia” to a specific (large) case.

Start with scheduling

In my last post, I said that in the real world, being intentional often just looks like scheduling: Creating a coherent framework for what you are going to do, and not do, at given times of the day, days of the week, and weeks in the month. Time boxes can be part of that, but there is no single way to do it – only a single imperative that you really have to have a framework for time, if you want your mind to be at its freest.

For this project, the framework originated at a very high level, very early on.

While I was writing a proposal for the sabbatical in 2024, I had to create a timeline for the project. I did something uncharacteristically smart for me: I asked another person for their advice and listened to what they had to say. That person was David Clark, my colleague and co-author on the Grading for Growth book and blog. The case study part of my sabbatical project, is basically a direct copy of what David did on his sabbatical a few years ago when we were writing the Grading for Growth book. He took a semester to interview faculty on their use of alternative grading, and the resulting 17 case studies ended up being, in my view and many others’, the best part of the book.

Toward the end of 2024, I asked David for details on how he made his sabbatical so successful. The first thing he said was that I needed to start, immediately, to line up faculty interviewees. As he explained, it will take more time than you think, at every step, to get faculty involvement: soliciting interest, getting people to commit to interviews, drafting and finalizing their interviews, and more. Especially when all of this involves email, which if you read this blog are aware that this is not many professors’ strong suit.

David is a very smart guy and is usually right about things, so just after New Year’s Day, I made out a Google Form for prospective interviewees and started pushing it out on email and social media. I decided I wanted between 15–20 case studies for the book and would be satisfied with 10–12 good ones. To get that many case studies, I estimated conservatively that I would need at least double that number of actual interview responses, so I would have some room for picking and choosing. And to get around 40 interview responses, I estimated – again, conservatively – that I would need at least 80 responses to my interest form, possibly more (given many faculty’s propensity to say “yes” to things and then decommit or forget).

By the end of April, I only had 30 total responses to the interest form. And to my dismay, when I looked over those responses, almost all of them were from STEM disciplines – a serious problem because the publisher had conducted a focus group of readers who unanimously agreed that the first edition had too much STEM focus. So I redoubled my marketing efforts over the summer to specifically target humanities, social science, arts, and business faculty, as well as centers for teaching, in the hope that I could un-skew the responses.

Long story short, it all worked out. By the middle of August, when I had planned to really begin the sabbatical project, I had just over 50 responses – still not as much as I wanted, but a reasonably large sample – and around 30 actual interviews. From those, I’ve been able to select 23 faculty members to assemble into 19 case studies, which are shaping up to be really cool and useful.

Had I waited until the start of the sabbatical itself (August) to start the interview solicitation process, there is no chance that I would complete this project on time. My takeaway: In GTD language, a project is defined as an outcome that requires more than one step and which you want to complete in one year. When you have a project that’s of this scope, you have to take that “one year” part literally. On all projects, especially ones this big, start early, count the costs, and have a framework for how you’re going to complete it, or you and the project will be toast.

Having a time framework on a large scale allows you to be intentional about what you’re not going to do, as well. Starting nine months in advance allowed me to commit to doing absolutely no work on the sabbatical over the summer, except for ongoing communications. I was scheduled to teach a class during May, and I really just wanted to chill on the beach and practice my bass the rest of the summer, rather than work like a dog as I did with the first edition 10 years ago. Since I knew what was coming well ahead of time and had made a little progress by the start of the summer, I was able to set a firm start date of August 15 for all sabbatical work1, and say no without guilt to everything related to before then.

The Master Plan

I have one plan for completing my project in the sabbatical proposal that was reviewed by my department and the Provost, and another slightly different Master Plan that I am actually following, that looks a little like this:

• Last half of August: Set up the infrastructure that I need to complete this project: folders, directory structures, accounts, and so on, as well as figuring tools and workflows, like I described earlier in my post on using Obsidian and Zotero to take research notes.

• September: Conduct all background research. For the case studies, that meant getting all initial interview responses collected. For the research review, it meant reading all the papers I intend to read and curating my notes.

• October: Get everything in position for drafting the manuscript. For the case studies, that meant turning all the interview responses into rough drafts of the actual case studies that I could send out to authors for their comments. For the research review, it meant constructing detailed outlines of all parts of the review.

• November (present day): Draft all the things. Then put them into cold storage until Q1 of 2026 when the entire book manuscript is being assembled and edited.

• December: Absolutely nothing.

You read that right: In December, I want to do absolutely no work whatsoever. Not on the sabbatical, not on planning my Winter 2026 courses… nothing. I want to enjoy the holidays with my family, sit in my comfortable chair in the family room and read books and watch movies, and play my bass, for one month without interruption2. Because this is a SABBATICAL, and on some level, this has to mean rest. Otherwise, we really need to work on the branding.

So in the spirit of the Law of the Whole Person, I designed my whole plan around doing no work during December and then working backwards from there to make things fit.

There is a larger plan in place that also is predicated on the idea of large chunks of doing no work whatsoever. When the publisher asked me when I would like to set the deadline for the manuscript, I told them August 1, 2026. I was fully aware when I said this, that I could easily complete the entire manuscript by the end of May, and I still plan on doing this. But I think you can guess by now that I am committed to not working in the summer, so I started with that as a priority and worked backwards.

The day to day

Plans are all well and good, but execution is where things really happen. On a day-to-day basis this fall, I’ve kept in mind a primary principle that’s intuitively obvious to most of us, but that’s also backed up by science: human beings on average are only really capable of about four to six hours of effortful work every day. After that, most of us are too spent to be useful.

Those four to six hours are most of the time carved up into 50- to 75-minute segments throughout the day in the form of classes and meetings and research with a bunch of dead space in between. But when you’re on sabbatical, you can cluster all of that time into one place. And that’s my goal, and my daily plan: Do four to five hour sprints of heads-down work every morning and then stop. My schedule looks like this:

• Wake at 5:45am.

• Coffee, Wordle, reading, and day planning for an hour (until around 7:00).

• Be at the keyboard, ready to work by 7:30.

• Work without distractions on sabbatical tasks from 7:30 to 12:30 with one 20-minute break.

• At 12:00-12:30: STOP WORKING and put sabbatical stuff away until tomorrow3.

• Have lunch and take a 3-mile walk.

• Afternoon: Do whatever else is in the next actions list. A lot of times that’s blog maintenance (posts like this one, guest article management over at gradingforgrowth.com, etc.) or personal learning time or bass practice.

• By 5:00pm, shut it all down and enjoy the evening.

Do I always follow this schedule? No. Sometimes life intervenes, sometimes things go longer than expected, sometimes I have a dentist appointment, etc. But it’s a framework I can live with and live by.

Is this schedule sustainable in the long term? Also no. When I get back to my job in January, I will be teaching three classes on Monday/Wednesday/Friday and this schedule won’t work. But it can work on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I plan on keeping it on those days, because there’s an entire rest of the book that needs to be updated. But for now, I am taking full advantage of the unique scheduling opportunities afforded by a sabbatical.

How it’s going

As I mentioned earlier, I am well ahead of schedule on completing the project, possibly (OK, probably) because I’m so highly motivated by doing nothing in December. (My own inherent laziness is a clear common denominator behind everything I write about here, if you know what to look for.)

For the case studies, I’ve been collecting interview responses since the summer and drafting the case studies since August, updating these as faculty members review drafts and give comments. By doing it this way, it turns out I’ve already written most of the case studies, in pieces, and all that remains is assembly. Earlier this week, I sat down to write an initial draft of the first of the three chapters that I had planned, and was able to complete it in roughly 15 minutes because all I had to do was copy and paste the drafts I’d had in progress into a single document. The only bottleneck is getting interviewees to contribute their comments and suggestions on the drafts.

These will eventually need to be edited for consistency and flow, but that is something for next semester as the entire manuscript comes together. This is an example of where knowing your scope of work comes in very handy. I decided early, in the sabbatical proposal, what I planned to do and what I did not plan to do with the time. I did plan to complete a complete first draft of the case studies, but I did not commit to completing, nor do I intend to complete, the final draft.

It also is an example of taking small steps consistently within coherent systems. Rather than waiting to draft three monolithic chapters of case studies, I’ve been incrementally drafting the individual case studies bit by bit every day for a couple of hours. And now putting them all together is just a matter of keyboard shortcuts.

I’ve not been doing the same sort of thing with the research review. Instead, I’ve been focusing on surfacing relevant papers to read, selecting what seem to be the best of the bunch, reading those carefully and taking good notes that are curated within a coherent system (Obsidian, for me) where I can get to the results easily for making and summarizing the overall themes, and building detailed outlines of what to write. Since it’s November, according to my Master Plan I am drafting the research review. The outlines make it simpler, though not effortless, to write up these drafts. I don’t have to think about what citations or main ideas I’m going to present, or when. This has already been worked out. And having all the results of each individual paper pre-summarized in the Obsidian canvas that I wrote about here makes it very easy to simply scan visually and know what I want to write.

What I’ve learned

First: Like I said earlier, with any project but especially big ones, it’s important to do a thorough and careful accounting on the front end of all the steps you think you’re going to need to go through completion of a project, and start further in advance than you might think. Build in slack time for not only things that take longer than you expected, but also simply to rest. If email communication is involved, it’s not a bad idea to multiply all time expectations by 1.5.

Second: The Law of the Whole Person is real. Start with the human considerations on these large projects and build in time for you to be a whole person. That can mean, like it does for me, quitting by 12:30 in the afternoon so that I can focus on other things such as exercise. It could also mean setting a hard start date in addition to a hard stop deadline so that you’re giving yourself permission not to work on the project up until a certain day. Whatever it looks like for you, don’t just say yes to a project and then let scope creep take over until you have no life left.

Third: Don’t be afraid to put systems and schedules around things, even if there’s a nagging voice in the back of your head saying that something is going to come up to break those schedules. Of course something will come up and break those schedules from time to time. But as they say, failing to plan is planning to fail. Having the schedules set up as frameworks lessens your workload, because all you have to do is show up and do the boring stuff every day for a few hours and let the wins accumulate.

Etc.

• Any discussion of my sabbatical project would be incomplete without mentioning how clutch various AI tools have been. I know people have varying opinions on how AI should be used in academia. But without a doubt, these tools have been absolutely crucial to my progress on this project. For example, I set up a NotebookLM for each of the five research questions that structured the research review, and when I found a paper that I wanted to include, I’d dump it into both Zotero and the relevant notebook. Then in addition to actually reading the papers, I could chat with the notebook to surface different insights and double-check my own reasoning. And I already mentioned in an earlier post how scite.ai was helping me cut through the mass of research to find the 20% of papers that influence 80% of the field. You may have legitimate issues with AI, but if you are a researcher and you’re not tapping into it, you are trying to build a skyscraper with hand tools.

• Music: Lately I’ve been working on expanding my listening beyond my usual Spotify playlists. I asked Gemini to create a list of albums that, based on my listening habits, I would enjoy but might have missed. It gave me a list of 20 of these and I’ve been sitting down with 1-2 of them a week. This week was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and all I can say is, I think I’ve been sleeping on a lot of great music.

Getting the most out of your life and work takes time. But time is scarce, so how do you find more of it, to engage with the stuff you want to engage with? The answer is: You don’t. There is no such thing as “finding time”; there is not even really such a thing as “making time”. Each of us has exactly 168 hours in a week, and no matter what we may do or wish, we’re not going to ever be able to find or make any more of it. Instead, the responsibility of each and every one of us is to allocate the time that we have, in a way that lines up with our goals and our values.

So in the real world, being intentional often looks simply like scheduling. It’s a very un-sexy idea, but I’m beginning to think that scheduling is key for being both productive and happy with what we’re doing here. I don’t mean setting up a super-strict, moment-by-moment regimen of what you’re going to do with every minute of the day, but simply creating a framework that gives your brain and body some markers for what should be happening and when so that your time is used well.

Time boxing is one way to do this. Another small way to set up those signals is a shutdown/reset ritual. I think I first heard about this idea years ago, like so many other things that are written about here, from Cal Newport, and I’ve been engaging in a shutdown/reset ritual almost every working day ever since. In today’s article, I’m going to describe why I think such rituals are important, what I do, and some suggestions for how you can get started.

What is a shutdown/reset and why somebody might do one

The shutdown/reset ritual is simply a brief time at the end of each working day, where you clean up your physical and virtual spaces, then reflect on and summarize the workday that is coming to an end. It is like a weekly review in miniature. It is a way of drawing the day to a close and prepping yourself both for the next working day and for the evening coming up.

There are at least three very good reasons to engage in these shutdown/reset rituals every working day:

1. It gives you a chance to clear the decks. I don’t know if it’s just me, but at the end of most working days, my physical workspace is a mess. And I find it hard to think straight if there is clutter, half empty coffee cups, scraps of paper, etc. lying all over the place. A similar thing can be said about my digital spaces — Lots of emails in my inboxes, downloaded research papers all over my computer desktop, and so forth. Before I can be expected to work productively the next time I engage with these spaces, I really need to declutter all of them. The shutdown/reset gives me a little window of time to do this. And if you spend a little bit of time on this every day, it’s never that much work on any single day.

2. It sends you a psychological signal that you are transitioning to a different schedule. It’s critically important for every person (faculty or otherwise) to realize that they were not made to work 24 hours a day. Bringing grading home to work on in the evenings or writing reports on the weekends, and so forth, is neither healthy nor sustainable. You need rest, and you need non-work activities to engage in, in order for you to do your best work and to obey the Law of the Whole Person. A daily shutdown/reset ritual can act as a sort of factory whistle that blows when your shift is over. It sends a clear signal to your body and to your brain that the working day is over and your non-working portion of your life can now begin without guilt. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need an outside stimulus for this, but in this day and age it’s critical. It’s especially needed by those who work at home, like I am right now while on sabbatical. The physical boundaries between work and home are nonexistent — my “commute” is a 30-second walk up the stairs from my office to the kitchen. So I need that shutdown/reset to flip the switch in my brain that the work day is over.

3. It gives you a heads up about any priority items that need to be handled tomorrow. In cleaning up your physical and digital spaces and reflecting back on the day you just spent, often you will surface new things to capture. Quite often, a handful of those new captures will be somewhat urgent or time-sensitive. It’s likely that you won’t need to handle those right that second. So the shutdown/reset gives you a chance to structure your next day around those things. It’s far better to learn about those things at the end of a day than at the beginning of a day. And very often items that appear to be EXTREMELY URGENT in the moment turn out to be not urgent at all, sometimes not even actionable, once you sleep on them.

How I do a shutdown/reset

Like I said, the shutdown/reset is a ritual — the same set of actions you perform at a regular cadence. Different people do this differently, and my own practice has evolved over the years. But as of today, this is how I do a shutdown/reset:

1. Get all inboxes to zero. I typically process my email, once in the morning and then once in the afternoon when I do my shutdown/reset. When I say process, I mean get to inbox zero. Since I also do this in the mornings every day and do a big sweep at the weekly review, my inboxes are never extremely full by the time I get to the shutdown/reset. So it’s no big deal to run through the Clarify process and get everything where it belongs before I shut things down for the day.

2. Tidy up my physical and digital workspaces. This means recycling unneeded papers, putting the pens back in the cup, taking dishes to the sink, wiping down my desk, and so forth — and doing similar things with my computer. This is purely my own preference because I’m just a much happier camper when I don’t have clutter and crap all over the place.

3. Make a list of three wins that I experienced during the day. These are accomplishments big and small that I can take credit for that add evidence to the notion that I had a good day: “I made it to the gym even though I didn’t want to go”; “My classes were fun and engaging”; “I got through the Faculty Senate meeting without murdering someone”; etc.

4. Make a list of three challenges that I experienced during the day. These aren’t necessarily failures to go along with the wins, but just challenges that I experienced, whether I overcame them or not: “Getting out of bed to go to the gym was hard even though I did it”; “I spent too much time on social media in the afternoon and ended up not getting my grading done”; “Had a difficult conversation with a student who is failing the class”; etc.

5. List three things that I learned that day. These can be items that I learned intellectually, or things that I learned about myself, realizations about my work, and so on: “I used generative AI to make a meme”; “I learned that I really need to get all of my course prep done before 10:00 AM or it won’t get done”; “I went to the Applied Math Seminar and learned about topological data analysis”; etc.

6. List one thing that I’m grateful for. The benefits of gratitude journaling have been well documented. I try to keep in my personal journal any instance where I feel gratitude for something, but I make a point to list at least one such thing every single day.

7. Write down my plans for the evening. I started doing this as part of my shutdown/reset a couple of years ago after realizing that after doing the first six items on this list and driving home, I would often eat dinner and then collapse into a chair to watch TV for the entire evening, mindlessly and without intention. There’s certainly nothing wrong with eating dinner and not much wrong with watching TV, as long as you are doing those things on purpose. I wasn’t, and entire areas of my life that I could only work on in the evenings or on weekends — for example, practicing my bass so I can be a better musician — were being ignored. So while I don’t over-plan my evenings (usually my plans consist of: eat dinner, read, then practice), and while I don’t always stick to my plan, before I quit work for the day I want to have some idea of what I plan on doing with that precious time in the evening before I have to go to bed.

8. Say, out loud: “SHUTDOWN COMPLETE”. This I definitely got from Cal Newport. It sounds dopey, but if you say “SHUTDOWN COMPLETE”, out loud so that you and everyone else around you can hear, it’s an undeniable and concrete signal that the workday is over — as if you flipped the power switch to the off position and there is literally no more energy going into that part of you until tomorrow. Yes, I have done this in public places before, like coffee shops, and yes, people looked at me funny.

This looks like a lot, but it isn’t. I estimate it takes me about 15-20 minutes on average, including the zeroing out of inboxes. I seriously don’t want to overthink it.

I do all this in Obsidian. I use the Periodic Notes plugin to create a daily note each day using this template. You’re free to use or modify this template as much as you want1. In the mornings, I complete the first part of the daily note, which asks for certain things that I plan to do or experience during the day. I add information to the daily note in the middle throughout the day as sort of “captain’s log”. And you will see the framework for the shutdown/reset ritual toward the bottom of that note.

When I do my weekly reviews, I go through each of the week’s daily notes and look for broad, overarching patterns on things that are working for me that I need to double down on, experiences that I’m having that I need to learn from, and things that are not working for me that I need to work on changing or quitting. Very often the shutdown/reset part of the daily note has the highest quality information in it, and I learn a lot from the aggregation of all those days’ reflections.

What you might also do

What I just described is my own process and it’s not necessarily optimized for everyone. Some things you might do in your shutdown/reset ritual, In addition to or instead of some of the things I’ve listed, include:

• Set up a calendar or agenda for the next day. In my shutdown/resets. I actually don’t look ahead into the next day — I’m merely recapping the day that’s coming to a close. But you don’t have to do that. You can look ahead at your next day, check through the calendar, look at your schedule, and then make a little agenda for what you want to do and when you want to do it. This is, for me, taken care of at the beginning of the week in the weekly review when I set up time blocks. But it’s conceivable that you could set up time blocks on a day-by-day basis rather than once for the entire week.

• Decide what your MIT will be for the next day. MIT stands for Most Important Thing: the one thing that you insist that you get done in the following day. This involves going through your next actions list and deciding on one and only one thing that you will try to get done that day. And as iNSERT NAME HERE says, you should convince yourself that until you get that MIT done, everything else is just a distraction.

• Capture stray items, but don’t process them. It’s almost inevitable that when doing a cleanup of your digital and physical workspaces, you will find stuff that grabs your attention and needs to be processed at some point. At the end of the day, you may not have the time or energy to do that. So simply capture them, put them into your physical inbox or a digital inbox folder on your computer or however you might manage it, and then save the processing for later when you get a chance to do a mini review2.

Now you do it

Setting up a shutdown/reset ritual is dead simple and provides outsized benefits to you. So here’s some homework for you.

• Decide how you prefer to shut your working day down. That could be through doing the stuff that I’ve listed above or a small subset of those things or something completely different. But be intentional about it and write down the steps on a note, either physical or digital, that you can refer back to. But keep it simple! Maybe something you can do in 10 minutes so it’s a can’t-miss proposition.

• Then do one of these shutdown/resets either today or tomorrow. Don’t overthink it. Set a timer for maybe 10 minutes, and when the timer goes off, just stop where you are and put everything away, say SHUTDOWN COMPLETE, and then stop working and don’t start again until the following workday. This last part can be extremely hard for a lot of people in academia because we are so institutionalized into thinking we have to work all the time. But this step is here, and this entire shutdown/reset ritual concept is here, to break that brainwashing. So practice it. Over the course of several days, you will begin to associate a certain time of the day ,with a certain practice, and then with a cessation of work. And this is a path towards being a whole person again.

• If you haven’t done so already, spend time getting all your inboxes down to zero. Use the weekly review if you must. If you haven’t set up a weekly review yet, start doing that this week. By getting all your inboxes down to zero once, it’s going to make it easier to maintain them near zero on a day-by-day basis.

Etc.

• Health: Since September, I have been using the Ideal You system to try to lose weight. I’ve been 20 or more pounds overweight for most of my adult life, and earlier this year I hit an all-time high (or low?) of 212 pounds which by some estimations is almost 50 pounds overweight. I knew drastic measures were needed — I’d tried other approaches with no success. Ideal You is a 10-week program, 6 weeks of which involve significant restrictions on what, when, and how much one eats, along with a regimen of supplements and weekly coaching. It works: I am on week 5 and have so far lost around 25 pounds, and am today just 8 pounds from my goal weight. Furthermore my entire operating system around food has been rewired — I find I have no interest in crushing a pizza or a Taco Bell order like I used to but prefer cleaner fresh food instead. Physical health is a precondition from the sort of complete life that I write about here, and if you’re in a similar situation I highly, highly recommend Ideal You. It may not be available in your area but give it a look.

• Music: We recently lost the great neo-soul pioneer D’Angelo who shockingly passed away from cancer. I’ve been in awe of the Voodoo album for some time, (especially since it has Pino Palladino on bass, one of my inspirations and who I’ve featured in this section before). Just listen to this. Gone too soon.

In my last article, I talked about how I’m using digital tools to complete my sabbatical project this semester, where I’m, among other things, doing an extensive research review for the second edition of my book on flipped learning. My go-to tool that’s emerged for discovering papers to read is Scite.ai, an AI-powered research assistant. I’m using Zotero to organize, read, and annotate my papers and keep them organized. Finally I use Todoist to keep track of what I’ve done and help me understand what to do next.

But the main work of this part of the project is taking my notes in Zotero and getting them into one place, where I can keep them organized and try to find connections between them, so that I can begin to look for large-scale patterns, which I’ll then write about for my readers. Eventually, when I sit down to actually write the manuscript for this research review, it would be ideal to have my notes from the reading in the same place as the partial drafts for the research review so that the manuscript will just simply be stitching together things that I’ve already done.

The tool for this is my old favorite, Obsidian. And in this article, I’m going to explain how I am using this note-taking tool to accomplish these tasks.

Obsidian redux, and plugins

I’ve already gushed about Obsidian in this article and explained what it is and how I’m using it. But for those who are new: Obsidian is a note-taking app. The notes in Obsidian are just plain text Markdown files, and the app itself is simply a wrapper of code around a folder, or “vault”, of those plain text notes. The app simply provides functionality for organizing and manipulating your notes.

The functionality that Obsidian provides is incredibly extensive. It includes things like text formatting, native LaTeX support, and especially backlinking, where you can create links from one note to any other very simply. Backlinking allows you to take a vault of notes and turn it into essentially a mini Wikipedia.

Some of this functionality is native to Obsidian and always-on. Obsidian also possesses an ecosystem of plugins, which provide additional features that can be switched on or off. Some of these are called core plugins and are available to all users by default. The core plugins include things like daily note templates, tools for showing a table of contents in a note, a command palette, and more.

The core plugins are all fairly standard features and not terribly exciting. Things get much more interesting when you expand to include community plugins. These are developed by individuals and other third parties and cover a very wide variety of potential uses. A full list of these is here and there is so much variety in that it’s impossible to summarize them. Just go to the link and start scrolling to see.

Two of these community plugins are going to be especially useful here:

• Dataview allows you to put SQL-like code into a note that will run a query in your vault, like a database, and bring back relevant information formatted in different kinds of ways that is dynamically updated as you change and add notes. For example, here is some Dataview code that I use in my daily journal notes that creates a list of all other journal notes from the same day in previous years:

dataview
   LIST FROM “Journal”
   WHERE file.cday.month = date(now).month AND file.cday.day =     date(now).day
   SORT file.cday ASC

Dataview is an incredibly powerful, and fairly complicated, plugin that is well worth the learning curve because it lets your vault become a true “second brain” that you can “pick”.

• Zotero Integration is another community plugin that, as the name suggests, connects Obsidian to Zotero and gives you functionality for inserting and importing citations, bibliographies, notes, and PDF annotations1.

Let’s begin by looking at Zotero Integration.

Setting up Zotero Integration

Zotero Integration is how I pull notes and annotations and other info from papers that I’ve read in Zotero, into Obsidian notes. It is not easy to get this to work, I must admit. Let me explain how I have Zotero integration set up. To give a full explanation, I have to get into some serious weeds though, so bear with me.

First, there’s another plugin that has to be downloaded and installed in Zotero (not in Obsidian!), called Better BibTeX Integration. It’s worth explaining exactly what this Zotero plugin does. When referring to a paper in Zotero, the program uses what’s called a citekey. This is an identifier unique to every item in your Zotero library. Having a citekey for every paper prevents “collisions” from happening. For example, if you had two different authors whose last name was Smith and they both authored papers in 2020, in everyday language and probably in your citation in a paper, you’d refer to each one as “Smith 2020”, but this could be two different things. But in Zotero, each paper has a different citekey.

That citekey has to be rather long and complicated in order to avoid the collisions. Better BiBTeX makes it somewhat more readable, but it’s still a little on the long side. For example, this week I read the paper “The Impact of Flipped Classroom on College Students’ Academic Performance: A Meta-Analysis Based on 20 Experimental Studies” by Qing Zhang, Elizabeth S. T. Cheung, Christian S. T. Cheung this morning. The citekey from Zotero, using Better BiBTeX, is zhangImpactFlippedClassroom2021. In my manuscript, I would likely refer to it as “Zhang et al. 2021”. The difference between the citekey that I’m given, and what I want to call it, is going to become important a little later.

Now let’s go back to the Zotero Integration plugin in Obsidian. I’m going to walk you through the steps of going through the settings in this plugin in case you want to try this yourself.

Open up the settings for the Zotero Integration plugin by going to Obsidian’s settings, scrolling down to Community Plugins, and clicking on Zotero Integration. You’ll get this window of settings:

In the top part of the settings, leave everything the same as the defaults, except switch on “Open the created or updated note(s) after import” (which just automatically opens the note that you create when you run the plugin) and “Enable annotation concatenation” (more on that in a minute).

In the middle portion of the settings is where things get interesting.

I don’t do anything with “Citation Formats”, but “Import Formats” is how you define what the note looks like when you import annotations from Zotero — so that’s a big one. This allows you to define different styles of notes for different kinds of imports; for example I might make notes contain one collection of information for my book, and define a different style for personal research.

If you click on the “Add Import Format” button, you are presented with fields for information about what resulting notes should look like and where they should go in the vault.

• Under “Name”, give your import style a name. I’m only using one style, and I call it “Import annotations”.

• “Output Path” tells Obsidian where to put imported notes in your vault. All or mine are dumped into a single folder in my vault called “Research”. Note the {{citekey}}. Anything that appears in double curly braces is a field that the plugin will populate using metadata from Zotero when the plugin operates. Every Zotero paper is given a large collection of metadata about the paper, including the citekey, and the Zotero Integration plugin taps into that metadata. So when I create a note from a Zotero paper using this plugin, it’s going to create a file whose name is whatever the citekey is (the .md extension just indicates it’s a Markdown file), and it sticks it in the Research folder. All this is done for me automatically by the plugin.

• If there’s an image associated with the file, for example if I’ve highlighted a table or a graph in the original paper, the “Image Output Path” field allows you to tell the Zotero integration plugin where to put it in Obsidian. The next field, “Image Base Name”, I just leave alone.

The next field, “Template File”, is all-important. To use the Zotero Integration plugin, you have to provide a generic template to Obsidian to tell it how to format the note that you’re creating. This is a separate Markdown file that lives in your vault, that Obsidian makes a copy of when the plugin is activated, and then populates it with the data being pulled in by the plugin.

Unfortunately, creating a template file from scratch takes a considerable amount of work and coding know-how. The typical practice is to find somebody else’s template file, and just use that, with some light modifications. I have done so, and I am going to pay that forward by giving you my template file, which you can find here.

I’ll just let you look through this template file and not attempt to break down every single part of it. But I do want to note a few things about it.

• The top portion lists Properties. Every Obsidian note has Properties, metadata about the note itself, and these properties can be tapped into by the Dataview plugin, which I mentioned earlier. In my template, I’ve added a few tags, for example, that are specific to the second edition of the book that I’m writing, which will be added to every note that I create using this template. And note especially the one that says “aliases”. We’ll come back to that later.

• If you scroll through the rest of the note, you’ll see different sections and some code that tells Obsidian what to do with the data that the Zotero plugin is pulling into it. Like I mentioned earlier, anything that’s encased within double curly braces is metadata from Zotero that will be auto-populated in the note. Anything that’s encased within single curly braces with a percent sign next ({% %}) is additional code that performs actions. For example, it takes the colors of annotations from Zotero and turns those into section headings.

I should mention that I did not write this template myself. I stole this from another person and unfortunately I cannot remember exactly where I got it from. Otherwise I would give that person a lot of credit for creating a pretty cool template that does neat things as you’ll see.

Using the Zotero Integration plugin

With that initial setup done, we’re now ready to actually use the plugin, and fortunately, this isn’t very difficult to do. But: There are two additional steps over in Zotero to complete before this plugin really does all that it’s capable of.

Over in Zotero, if you open up a paper, there is a pane on the right that shows you all the metadata that’s associated with it. Two fields are of particular importance. One is the “Extra” field, and the other, which requires an additional click, are tags that you place on the document. The first thing I’m going to do is go to the Extra field and put the handle that I would normally use to refer to this paper: for example “Zhang et al 2021” instead of the citekey zhangImpactFlippedClassroom2021.

The second thing is to add tags to the document with any tag I would like to see in Obsidian.

My import template will take whatever tags I have on the document in Zotero and turn them into Obsidian tags. An important thing to note about tags in Obsidian is that they can’t contain spaces. So when I add a tag that’s multiple words, like “flipped classroom”, I have a convention where I use all lowercase and a dash to separate words. So I want to have a consistent naming scheme for tags on both tools, that will work on both tools.

Still with me? Now we can actually use the plugin.

• First, go into Obsidian and hit Control-P to open up the command palette, and then type in the name of your import format. That was the field we entered into earlier, and I called mine “Import annotations”. This will send you to the command to employ the Zotero Integration plugin. As you can see here, I’ve assigned a hotkey to this (Command-Shift-Z) because obviously I’m using it quite a lot.

• You’ll be presented with a little menu that shows the most recently accessed papers from Zotero. The one at the top of this list will be the one that you accessed most recently. If you don’t see it in the menu, you can just search for it. So find the one whose notes you want to import, select it, and hit enter.

• After a little bit of thinking, you will be presented with a note that has all your annotations in it. This note now exists and is in the folder that you told the plugin to put it in.

I want to point out one specific element of this note, and that’s the “aliases” field at the top. In Obsidian, an alias to a note is just another way that you can refer to that note instead of its title. This is very important for things like backlinking, which I do a lot of in this research review. My template sets the title of an imported note by default to be the citekey of the paper in Zotero. That string can be, as I’ve mentioned, quite counterintuitive. What I want is to have an alias that is set equal to how I would normally refer to it.

Remember from earlier that we manually added that preferred handle for paper into the “Extra” field in Zotero. The import template used by the plugin pulls whatever is in the “Extra” field in Zotero and sticks it into the “aliases” field in Obsidian. So as long as I manually set the extra field equal to the paper’s preferred designation, the plugin will do the rest and make that the alias, which I can then use in Obsidian to refer to it the way that I want to.

The reason I do it this way is that if I add the alias after the import into Obsidian, then any future updates to the note will overwrite the alias. Remember in the setup phase we switched on a feature to “Enable annotation concatenation”, which lets future updates to Zotero notes to simply be tacked on to the end of existing Obsidian notes. However, after a full day of trial and error, I learned that it does not preserve the properties of the note. Those are overwritten every time the plugin is run, and the alias is reset back to being blank. So the only way to get the alias into the Obsidian note so that it sticks, is to put it into the Zotero metadata, in the Extra field and then pull from that field.

Isn’t this fun?

What to do with the notes

So this plugin allows me to reach into Zotero, grab information from a paper, and summarize it into a note in Obsidian that is plain text, perhaps with embedded images, that I can now use. But how exactly should I “use” them?

One powerful way to use these Obsidian notes is to link them together using backlinks. I am doing a lot of this in writing the research review. When I’m creating an outline or writing a draft of one section of the research review, I can simply backlink to notes about research papers, with my annotations from the research paper right there. So when I’m writing the draft, the detailed notes on each paper are no more than one click away.

Another very useful way to employ Obsidian is to create hubs or homepages for different overarching ideas or sections of the book that I’m writing. For example, the hub that I’ve created for flipped learning and the COVID-19 pandemic includes the Scite.ai summary that was generated when I first did the research on this, as I described in my last post; links to references; and the outline of the section and possible additional notes that I might want to think about when I’m writing this section up later. And on each hub, I have also included some data view code that will pull in links to every note related to papers that pertain to that topic:

The code I am using here is:

dataview
   TABLE aliases
   FROM #scholarship/fl2e/papers AND #covid
   where aliases
   SORT file.cday DESC

So by careful use of tagging when I create these notes, which is done automatically for me by the import template that I showed you earlier, I have a hub that contains an outline, a summary, and links to all the detailed notes for every paper that I intend to include. Eventually, there will also be a link to the actual draft for this section, which I’ll create in a separate note, but then backlink it into this hub.

A third and final way that I’ve been using Obsidian to organize the notes is a big picture overview using what’s called a canvas. A canvas in Obsidian is a two-dimensional, free-form landscape that you can use to organize anything you wish — notes, links, images, and so on.

Here in my canvas, I’ve created separate areas for the different aspects of the research review that I’m doing. And then within each colored area for different sections, I am putting little mini versions of the paper notes that I pulled in from Zotero. These have links to the full notes on each paper, along with a very brief summary that gives me an overview, so I will know how all these papers fit together and I can click into any specific paper easily. The canvas has been very helpful for me in creating the basic shape of the outline for each section. It allows me to visually connect not only notes to other notes, but large areas of interest to other large areas of interest.

What this is all for

If you’ve made it this far without skipping anything, then you have more patience than I do.

Doing this kind of research review is hard because the field that you’re studying is quite big, and what you want is not merely to glean information and insights from a single paper but from possibly hundreds of them and join them together to surface big insights that cut across the entire field. You still have to get into the weeds of one paper at a time, which is hard enough. But you also have to think about the connections between each paper, and there are so many connections that simply remembering them all is a physical impossibility. And, you have to discover overarching narratives that are emergent properties of the papers and the connections between them.

On the micro level of studying one paper, Zotero does a good job of letting me add my thoughts and highlight important things about it in a way that is accessible later on. On the macro level of connecting all these thoughts and ideas into a networked system where I can see the connections and also zoom out to see the big picture, Obsidian really shines.

And eventually, of course, I have to actually write the manuscript (early next year). My hope is that I will write the draft of the manuscript also in Obsidian. But when I say “write”, I don’t mean come up with every single piece of content from scratch. As I’m doing the reviews, I’ll also be writing snippets of what I intend to put in the manuscript. So that when it comes time to write stuff for the publisher, all I will need to do is go through and stitch together the things that I have already written in pieces and smooth it out. This is often how I write blog posts: I’ll capture passing thoughts and dump them into Obsidian notes and tag them. And then when it comes time to write the blog post, it’s really just a matter of pulling things together that I’ve already written down, and then editing into a (hopefully) coherent whole.

A short conclusion

This blog post is ridiculously long as it is. So let me just end by saying: Coming into this project, I knew what I needed to do and what assistance I was going to need from the tools that I have at my disposal. I spent a solid week at the beginning of my sabbatical just getting the infrastructure and the tools set up and working properly. Having done so, it has probably saved me more than a week in terms of actually doing the work. In fact, at this point, I would estimate that I am about three weeks ahead of schedule on the whole project. My hope with this pair of posts is to give anybody who is in a similar situation, and could benefit as I have from digital tools, some blueprints they can use and perhaps tweak to their own special cases. I certainly don’t believe I have an optimally functioning system, so if you have suggestions or any further tricks or changes, please leave those in the comments.

This semester I am on sabbatical leave to work on the second edition of my book, Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty. My sabbatical project focuses on two major additions: a collection of faculty case studies, and a completely revamped review of published research on the topic of flipped instruction. When I first planned the project, I figured the case studies would be seriously time-consuming because they involve summarizing several rounds of interview questions given to 20 different faculty, and I thought the research review would be something easy that I could do in the background. But it turns out that the opposite has been the case.

When I wrote the first edition in 2016, the sum total of all research on flipped learning was contained in about 250 papers, a number small enough that a comprehensive review of that research could be done simply by reading all of it. Today, however, that number is an order of magnitude greater. Not only has the quantity of research grown, the tools for reviewing it have greatly evolved as well. So I learned very quickly when I started last month that I needed to figure out a whole new workflow for doing a research review.

This article is part 1 of a two-part series on how I am approaching this research review and the tools and workflows that I’m using to do it. I want to remind everyone that intentionality in academic life and work is not about tools, apps, and gadgets but rather about taking small steps within coherent systems. But since I recently posted about tools such as Obsidian and Todoist, I thought this would be a good opportunity to show how those can be put to use. And I’m not at all sure I have this completely optimized, so I’m putting this out there for you to give me ideas on how to improve my workflow.

What I am doing, and what I am not doing

The first thing to understand is that my book is not what I would consider a “scholarly volume” — a thick tome intended for experts on the subject. Instead, it is a practical book about teaching, written for faculty in the classroom, focusing more on blueprints rather than theory or deep analysis. So when I say “research review”, this is not the kind of review that you would find in something like a comprehensive scoping review or meta-analysis. I am not attempting to be fully comprehensive and I am not following the usual practices for comprehensive reviews. I’m simply taking the point of view of what an average reader would want: To look around at what the research says about flipped learning, and interpret what it means on a practical level — something I could use in a class tomorrow.

When you look at it from that point of view, there are at least four distinct actions that I need to perform in this review:

• Finding research papers that have something interesting and useful to say about flipped learning;

• Reading those papers and taking notes that distill the main ideas and takeaways for my readers;

• Curating those notes and discovering connections between them to uncover patterns in the research; and

• Keeping track of what I’ve read. what I need to read eventually, and what I need to read next.

Early on in the project (meaning, four weeks ago), I discovered that friction on any one of these points grinds the entire review process almost to a halt. When I did the research review for the first edition, I did not have a reliable system for managing what I was doing, nor did I really need one. But I soon found out when I began work this time that I needed to have a coherent system within which I could make small daily steps. Otherwise I would end up wasting time, a scarce resource as I need to complete this project by the end of 2025.

Discovery: Scite.ai to the rescue

The general question I am addressing is: What does published research say about flipped learning? This question is ridiculously broad. To get my arms around it, I broke it up into five more targeted questions:

1. What is the impact of flipped instruction on student academic outcomes?

2. What is the impact of flipped instruction on the overall student experience apart from academic outcomes (engagement, belonging, metacognitive growth, etc.)?

3. How do instructors experience flipped learning, and what best practices have emerged?

4. What is the impact of emerging technologies (artificial intelligence, virtual reality, etc.) on flipped instruction?

5. What impact did the Covid-19 pandemic have on flipped instruction?

Implicit in these questions is “What does the research say about all this?” So, the first step is to find “the research”.

The typical way to do this is to go to an academic database like JSTOR, SCOPUS, or the ERIC database and put in some rather complicated queries for what you’re looking for. And what typically happens is that you get hundreds, if not thousands of papers to sift through, usually given in no particular order:

This is how I started the research review process last time, 10 years ago, and it’s how I began this time too. But when I started seeing the sheer number of papers to sift through, I decided that I had neither the time nor the inclination to read through it all, nor to craft complicated custom queries to get what I wanted (which may or may not actually get me what I wanted).

What I really wanted, was a smart graduate student, to go out and find this stuff for me in an intelligent way, and bring back a small number of the best results for me to review. Well, I don’t have graduate assistants. But I did discover Scite.ai which has turned out to be perhaps the next best thing.

Scite.ai is an artificial intelligence tool that is like many others where you can ask it questions and it gives you answers. But instead of LLM-generated text, it gives you detailed reviews and citations of published research articles. The user interface can be switched between Assistant mode, Search mode, and Table mode. Search mode is like a typical academic database search:

But the special sauce in Scite.ai is in Assistant or Table modes. Here, you just ask a question, and it finds the research for you. Here it is in Assistant mode, where I am asking How have higher education faculty used augmented reality in implementing flipped instruction? And as you can see, it generates a search of the literature, summarizes the results, and puts links to the original sources in the sidebar along with stats about those sources.

The same question asked in Table mode produces a list of papers, with references, and summarizes them next to the reference. You can add columns for research methods, population, and more.

The way I’m using Scite.ai is to ask targeted sub-questions related to my five main research questions, to discover papers that seem to be central or seminal. For example: What are the most frequently cited peer-reviewed articles focusing on the effects of flipped instruction on student self-regulated learning? The results in Assistant mode look like this:

As with all AI tools, you have to exercise some caution in the results. I have yet to encounter a hallucination with Scite.ai (you can click into the results to verify the papers are real) but clearly, in this case, it is playing loose with my “most frequently cited” criterion — the top result is only cited once! However, the next one is cited 258 times, which in this field would be considered a lot of citations. It’s therefore probably an actually-influential paper, and therefore a good starting point for my own review of this sub-question1.

I have a whole collection of these targeted sub-questions that I keep in my project notes in Obsidian (more on those in the next post). Each one gets a Scite.ai search like this. I copy the summary text and paste it into the note for that sub-question for reference; then pick through the sources that seem to be most central/influential/seminal, and go look them up. (It’s possible to look them up directly within Scite.ai, but there are often paywall issues, see below.) Those papers go into a queue for reading, and as I read those papers I add any others from the reference section that also seem important.

In other words, Scite.ai points me to appropriate starting points for finding papers that have something important or useful to say, and I take it from there. I find this to be a much smarter strategy than the typical database-surfing, and it’s AI used the way it ought to be used — as a kind of powered exoskeleton around my brain.

Interlude: Academic publishing sucks

No offense to my wonderful partners at Routledge who publish my books, but academic publishing on the research side of things is a royal pain.

Some of the papers that I discover and then go look up — so far I’d estimate about half of them — are freely available as PDFs. The other half are hidden behind a rat’s nest of paywalls. There are usually ways around these if you are employed at a university. For example, the paywalls sometimes disappear when I log in to my campus network using a VPN. Sometimes they don’t; but then I can usually go to my university’s library page and log into our institutional JSTOR account and get access. Except for the times when this doesn’t work. I could use Interlibrary Loan, but that takes time (which remember is scarce). Sometimes, when the usual methods fail, I can somehow get a janky-and-possibly-illegal copy of the PDF online, and often it’s something like a manuscript rather than the final product, so it’s hard to trust. And sometimes, none of this works, and the website and Scite.ai are just sitting there placidly telling me that I can purchase a copy of that paper for the low, low price of $29.95.

Look, I understand that the primary function of a publishing company is the same as any company: To make money. These are not charitable organizations, or patrons of the sciences. Most of their money is made via subscriptions to journals. So I get it: When making a paper freely available causes you not to sell more subscriptions, then you don’t make them freely available. Or, you ask for an “Article Publishing Charge” — a one-time fee paid by the authors (or their institutions or granting agencies) to make the article open-access, at a high enough amount to recoup the potential loss of subscription revenue. This charge is typically in the thousands of dollars.

I have no problem with capitalism in general. But this practice of paywalling research articles, some of which are 10 years old or more and many of which result from research that was funded with my taxes, has gone too far and it’s been the primary headache of this project. I would simply propose that any research paper that is older than 5 years should be made freely available as an accessible PDF on the publisher website.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blog post.

Doing the reading: Filtering, ToDoist, and Zotero

So Scite.ai is my primary means of bootstrapping the research reading process, and the discovery process continues by recursively going through the bibliographies of the papers I find — being picky the entire time because I am looking for a moderately small body of highly influential research to review, rather than trying to consume it all.

When I encounter such a paper, I (attempt to) access it, then read the abstract and the discussion section to see if it’s relevant. Sometimes the title catches my attention but it turns out to be a dud2. If it’s a non-dud, though, I do three things.

First, I add a task to read the paper into ToDoist, which if you are new around here, is basically my life’s operating system. I have ToDoist projects set up for each of the five primary research questions (e.g. “Conduct research review on emerging technologies”) and each paper is a task3. This allows me to put individual papers on the radar screen for the day’s work, or to complete within the week, and so on.

Second, I have a Google Spreadsheet set up that I use to keep track of these papers:

The reason I keep the spreadsheet in addition to the ToDoist projects is sort of embarrassing: I was forgetting which papers I had read. I’d check off the ToDoist task for a paper, let’s say Hung Yeh 2023, after I read it. Then, time would pass, and I would encounter Hung Yeh 2023 as a reference in some other paper and think, Wow this sounds like a useful paper, I should download it and read it. Then I’d go through this process I am now describing only to find out I’d already read it. This was starting to happen a lot, sadly, so I built the spreadsheet as a sort of database to help me track what I’d completed (since completed tasks in ToDoist are not visible by default).

Third, and most importantly, once I decide to read a paper, I download it and import it into my research paper management tool of choice: Zotero.

I’ve been using Zotero for many years4 and I really like how it “just works”. When you find a PDF of an article, you simply drag and drop it into the software and it magically ingests it into a library — that is synced to the cloud so you can access it across devices — along with a ton of metadata about the article. For the research review, I have five “collections” (like sub-libraries) set up for each of five main focus questions. As I move through the project, I am tackling one major sub-question at a time and the subcollections keep me focused.

The reading of the papers takes place within Zotero. In the PDF, it’s easy to highlight and add notes to a paper:

I have a color-coding system that keeps the annotations categorized, which comes in very handy in the next stage when I import these notes into Obsidian. Here, yellow means “interesting point” and purple means “main findings”.

Those annotations live in Zotero with the paper as just another set of metadata. The original PDF is there too and accessible if I want to share a clean copy with someone.

For next time

In summary so far:

• Scite.ai is my go-to tool for discovering papers to read, because it allows me to just ask a good question and get pointed to important, relevant research — rather than having to outwit a database using search queries. Once I discover a few central papers, I can use those papers’ references to keep iterating.

• Zotero is where the papers actually get read, along with notes and annotations.

• ToDoist and Google Sheets help me organize these paper-reading tasks into coherent next actions so that I will be aware of what I have already read, what I need to read eventually, and what I need to read next.

But this is only the front end of the process. The real work is in taking those notes, annotations, and insights from reading the research and getting them into a system where it will be easy to see the connections between them as well as the overall picture, and eventually turn those into a manuscript I send to the publisher in a few months. This is where Obsidian really shines, and there’s so much to this that I’ll need another post in a couple of weeks to do it justice.

In my last article, I presented a Grand Unified Theory of Academic Email. I had a particular agenda in mind then, because I want to discuss a topic today that a lot of academics feel is either objectionable or impossible or both, and that is the idea of Inbox Zero.

You see, there's no reason to have a highly detailed Clarify process that connects GTD methodology to your higher horizons and principles and to the Law of the Whole Person and everything else, if you just end up thinking about your unread emails all the time anyway. The concept of Inbox Zero addresses the real goal of all these processes, and today I wanted to explain what I think the idea means, why it’s both possible and desirable for academics, and of course how to actually go about getting there.

What is Inbox Zero?

You might have heard of Inbox Zero before, and I've blogged about it here before. It is a misunderstood concept. There are at least three different ways to conceptualize it.

Perhaps the most common is that Inbox Zero is the state where there are literally no emails sitting in your inbox. I mean, the term does say “Inbox Zero”, so it’s understandable why people would think this. And maybe in the early days when this term was first coined, that was the intent. But I don’t think this is the right way to think about it, for reasons I’ll explain later.

Another conception of Inbox Zero is that it is a productivity system or method, whose aim is to achieve the literally-empty-inbox state above. You will see a lot of people talk about “using the Inbox Zero method” for example. Productivity guru Merlin Mann first coined the notion of Inbox Zero in a Google Tech Talk back in 2007:

In this talk, Mann defines Inbox Zero as a system, where email is treated as a medium or “tube” for getting things from one place to another, and The “Inbox Zero method” is a framework of rules for processing all emails every time you check your email — that is, looking at every email, deciding what it means to you, and either taking action immediately or putting the appropriate next action on a list. This may sound familiar. And, in this method, the desired end state is a literally empty inbox.

I don’t think that the literally-empty-inbox interpretation of the term Inbox Zero works is the right one to use in today’s world because it neither reflects the complexity of our current digital world, nor is it very realistic. Merlin Mann was thinking of a world in which everybody had one inbox: Their email, and only one account to tend to. Today, however, most professionals have multiple email accounts, as well as multiple places where stuff is captured and accumulated1. And when you think about the number of inboxes we have, and the frequency with which stuff comes into those inboxes, getting them to literally zero on a regular basis becomes a never-ending stress factory. We often end up not actually getting anything done because we're constantly processing inboxes to zero.

And this is why I think the third conception of inbox zero is the one that we should focus on: It is the state in which you are giving no attention to your inboxes unless you want to. In other words, the “zero” in Inbox Zero refers to an amount of time and attention, not a number on an unread message count.

So in a state of Inbox Zero, your emails and other items from different inboxes fall into one of two categories: First, there are the ones you have processed, determined what they mean and how they should be handled, and then removed from your inbox to put them in the right place — and therefore there’s zero attention you need to spend on them. And second, there are the ones that you haven’t processed yet but you know you will do so soon — and therefore there’s zero attention you need to spend on them.

As I sit here writing this article, I keep my email completely shut off so I can focus. So I have no idea right now how many emails are sitting in my inbox. But I also know that I process my email thoroughly three times a day, at fixed times of the day, so whatever may be sitting in my inbox right now, I know I will get to it within a few hours — and so I don't need to think about any of it right now. I’ll get to them when I get to them, which is not long from now.

What really makes the difference here is review. There can be times during your day — for me it's once in the morning, once at lunchtime, and once in the afternoon as I'm shutting down — where I am going to give laser-like attention to the items in my inboxes. And during those sprints, I am going to try to process every item in every inbox until I know what it means and I put it in the right place. But outside those review periods, I am not going to think at all about the items in my inbox because, I know I'm going to give them my full attention later on pretty soon.

In other words, I am definitely going to give attention to my inboxes, but it’s intentional attention – attention at a time and place of my choosing — and not unintentional attention which takes the form of intrusive thoughts about what may or may not be in an email or some other inbox item, occurring during a time when I need my full attention on something else like a student or a phone call or a blog post. Viewed this way, you could summarize “Inbox Zero” as zero unintentional attention.

This is a powerful idea for academics. How often are we engaged in some kind of important task or interaction, only to have our presence broken up by a random thought about an unread message or unfulfilled obligation? Wouldn’t it be great to be free from that?

How to get to Inbox Zero and stay there

I’m going to skip to the part about how to actually make this happen. A lot of the process I'm about to describe is just stuff that I've already posted about here. Once I pull all of it together, then I’ll discuss some of the issues with it.

First, there is a bit of infrastructure you’ll need to set up first:

• You will need five lists in physical or digital files: Someday/Maybe, Next Actions, Waiting For, Projects, and Agendas.

• You will need folders to store reference materials. You can make these up as you go and arrange them however you like, but I like the PARA framework where every email and storage uses the same four top-level folders: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive.

• You will need a calendar.

With those set up, do the following:

1. Make a list of all the inboxes you have. Again, this includes individual email inboxes and any other place where “stuff” has been captured.

2. In each inbox, start at the very top of the inbox and pick off the item that is at the top. Don't skip around and look for things that look easy to process. Start at the top.

3. Take that item and apply the Clarify flowchart for academics that you will find in this post to determine what it means to you and where it belongs. As a reminder, the flowchart leads you through a series of questions about whether the item is actionable, whether it will take less than two minutes, and so forth. In the end, every item ends up in a particular place that matches its meaning: the trash, possibly, or an email folder, or the Someday/Maybe list, and so on. Or it could be an item that is simply done on the spot because it’s actionable and takes less than 2 minutes to complete.

4. Once the item has been clarified, remove it from the inbox — either delete it, or move it to an appropriate folder, but get it out of the inbox. Otherwise, the Zeigarnik Effect kicks in, which I’ll describe in a minute.

5. Continue on to the next item that was second from the top.

6. Continue this process until you reach the bottom, and then there are no more emails in the inbox. If there were emails that came into your inbox during this process, loop back around to the top and start over. And continue this until there is literally nothing there.

7. Move to the next inbox and repeat steps two through six.

I know this may sound like an insane amount of work. If you have a massively untended inbox with thousands of unprocessed emails, it is a lot of work. You may need to clear your calendar for a weekend, or an entire Fall Break, to get through everything2. But note three things. First, the more you build this process as a habit, the faster you get with it. Second, it’s much easier to keep your inbox at or near zero than it is to get there in the first place, so the first time will always be the hardest. Third, I think this kind of work, while hard, is necessary if you want to be truly intentional about life and work in academia. You simply can't have unprocessed emails hanging around and expect to have your full attention placed where it needs to be, when it needs to be.

Staying at Inbox Zero, like I mentioned above, requires the discipline of regular review. You should be doing at least a weekly review that includes processing all — literally all — items in each inbox. This is made much easier if you also do a daily review to zero out inboxes at the start or end of each day. The end-of-day shutdown has become a welcome ritual for me, and sure, I don’t have an empty inbox when I start the next day, but I have done what I can do to keep things from piling up. If you consistently take small steps on a regular basis, I promise you it's not so bad.

Some people disagree with that last statement, so let’s look at objections.

Is Inbox Zero possible?

Some academics (and others) believe that Inbox Zero is impossible. For example, Chris Baile believes that Inbox Zero is dumb (because it’s impossible). Jocelyn Glei, author of Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done believes it is a “myth”. WIRED’s Natasha Bernal wrote that “it is impossible to keep on top of even the simplest of email inboxes without driving yourself completely insane”.

If you believe that Inbox Zero means having a near-constant state of nothing in your inboxes, I tend to agree with the doubters. The influx of messages and “stuff” is just too great, particularly today and especially in academia, to justify the work needed to pull this off.

But if you use the conception of “zero unintentional attention” as your basis, then Inbox Zero becomes not only possible, but well within the grasp of anybody reading this.

I don’t think it takes superhuman information processing skills or monastic levels of self-discipline to run inbox items through the Clarify process on a regular basis. I have neither, and yet I manage this all the time, and I am not alone. What it does take, is consistency and commitment — taking small steps within coherent systems — to build the habits needed to get to this state and stay there. It also requires a fair amount of giving yourself some slack if you mess up or fall off the wagon as you build those habits. Don’t discount this last point. It takes time and a willingness to learn from failure to make any improvements in life. Give yourself a little grace if you’re going to move in this direction.

Is Inbox Zero a good idea?

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Should already-overworked academics commit to devoting time and energy to get on top of their emails? My answer is yes — up to a point.

Maybe the main reason that this is a good idea comes from a concept in psychology called the Zeigarnik Effect. This refers to the phenomenon that we remember uncompleted tasks and goals better than we remember completed ones. In practical terms, it means that unfinished work carries cognitive load apart from our conscious attention to it. I believe we all feel this effect quite often in our everyday lives as academics: Intrusive thoughts stemming from incomplete tasks, unfulfilled goals, and — yes — unprocessed emails.

A single unprocessed email may or may not carry a large cognitive load. But multiplied over every unprocessed email that is sitting in our inboxes, it can become an almost unbearable burden. Soon, the very existence of unprocessed emails in your inbox can make it impossible to be fully present in the moment with the people and work that need your full attention. Our goal here is to have none of this.

I said that Inbox Zero is a good idea up to a point. Inbox Zero is not a good idea if you begin to obsess over it and make it some sort of purity test, like “I am more productive than my colleagues because I am at Inbox Zero”. It's also not a good idea if you make the metric a target. The goal of Inbox Zero is not simply to have nothing in your inbox — it's to allocate your time and attention properly. When the metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.

I believe that Inbox Zero is something we should strive for, but if it comes down to a choice between having your sanity and having Inbox Zero, always choose your sanity.

Finally, don't underestimate the quality of life improvements that you will experience when you are giving no unintentional attention to your emails. The ability to focus fully on your work and the people in your life and the things that you really value in your life, rather than being a servant to your email inbox and having your emails living rent-free in your head all day long, is like giving yourself 50 extra IQ points and losing 50 pounds all at once. It's hard work in the short term. It's incredibly freeing in the near and long term.

Etc.

• Tools: I'm on sabbatical this semester working on a second edition of my 2017 book. That means I'm doing a lot of typing — so much in fact, that I was giving myself tendonitis in my wrists. I tried the built-in speech-to-text tool on my Mac, but wasn't impressed with its accuracy. Looking around for other speech-to-text software, I foundan app called VoiceInk. I used it this week to not only write the new material for my book, but also to write this article. It uses an AI engine to interpret speech and convert it to text, and it is highly accurate. According to the app, it has saved me almost three hours of typing, not to mention strain on my hands, in the last three days since I downloaded it. One thing I really like is that it's not a subscription service! It is a single one-time payment of $29 to own the app forever ($39 if you want two licenses). I deeply hope that other app makers will follow this lead.

• Music: Drumeo, a YouTube channel dedicated to drummers,, runs a series in which they bring in a professional drummer, give them a song that they have never heard before with the drum track removed, and then the drummer works out their own drum part live in the studio and records it over the original track. Recently they published maybe my favorite one of these, with Will Hunt (from the hard rock band Evanescence) puts together a great version of Earth Wind & Fire’s 1979 classic “In The Stone”. A great example of pro-level musicianship, and how experts learn things in the moment!

After my last post about the Law of the Whole Person, I realized that I have not been telling you the whole truth about email and how to handle it. Now that the new academic year is underway, and probably you are already getting buried by emails, I wanted to offer what I think is a crucial update.

Previously, my recommended workflow for academic email is standard GTD stuff: Go to your inbox, start at the top, and process each item through the Clarify loop to determine what it means to you and what, if anything, you should do about it. This is still the process. But there is an important part that wasn’t explicitly mentioned, and it boils down to: Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should. Taking this into account connects GTD practice with the Law of the Whole Person, to create what I like to think of as a grand unified theory of academic email.

What’s missing from the Clarify process

Let’s start with the basic Clarify process. This involves taking items that we have Captured over a small period of time and asking questions designed to find out what, if anything, each item means to us. Here is a slightly modified version of the standard GTD process that I made, specifically with academics in mind:

Keep an eye on that first yellow diamond, Is it actionable?

A large number of items that we capture (e.g. emails) have no actionable items in them. For me, the proportion of non-actionable items in my inboxes is usually over 80%1. They’re just information, or spam, or something I might get to someday — but not something that constitutes a here-and-now task. Of the remaining 20%, the Clarify process involves determining exactly what the action is (or, whether it’s not just one action but a project’s worth of them), whether it can be done right away, whether I am the proper person to do it (and if not, how to hand it off to the right person), and whether it has a deadline. Eventually every item, actionable or otherwise, ends up out of my inbox and in some part of my trusted system of lists, folders, and calendar.

But like I said, there’s something important missing, and it goes back to that first diamond.

Suppose something lands in your inbox that has a bona fide actionable item in it — for instance, a journal is asking you to review a paper. Running this item through the Clarify process leads you to determine what to do with it. But: What’s missing from this process is determining, for yourself, is whether or not you should be acting on this actionable item in the first place.

One of the key “aha” moments for me recently has been realizing that every Next Action in my system constitutes a commitment to completing that action in a reasonable time frame. When this light bulb switched on for me, I realized that over half of the items in my Next Actions list actually belonged on the Someday/Maybe list because I had no real commitment to completing them within 12 months and I was able to cut my Next Actions list down to size.

But framing Next Actions as commitments goes further than that. When we start viewing next actions as commitments, as I think we should, the question comes up — Why am I committing to these actions at all? And should I?

Back to that request to review the journal article: I’m on sabbatical right now and focusing solely on finishing my sabbatical project by the end of 2025. If I got that request from the journal, I would look at the email and see the actionable item there. But then I would not proceed through any part of the Clarify loop, because that action/project does not align with my Horizon 3 — my 1-2 year goals, chief among which are finishing my sabbatical project. I know with complete clarity that, although the item is actionable, my response is going to be a “no thanks”. And so there’s no point in wasting time figuring out what to do with this actionable item.

This clarity does not come from the Clarify process. Indeed it short-circuits the Clarify process and ends it before it really starts. The clarity instead comes from my higher horizons — which means it comes from the Law of the Whole Person. But, that Law does not make an explicit appearance in the Clarify process. But it should, and that’s what’s missing.

Fixing the flowchart

So, something needs to go right here in the flowchart:

There needs to be some kind of stop sign, or a filter, between the point where you decide whether an item is actionable, and the point where you start putting that action in the right place. Because based on your higher horizons, the right move on an actionable item might be not to act.

Here is what I think needs to go there.

Once you determine that an item is actionable, there are three questions you must ask yourself, in this order, and be honest about the answers:

• Does the item align with my Horizon 5 — principles and purpose?

• If so, then does the item align with my Horizon 4 — my 3-5 year vision?

• If so, then does the item align with my Horizon 3 — my 1-2 year goals?

If the answer to all three of these is “yes”, then you can move on to the rest of the flowchart, because not only is the item something that you can do (unless you decide later that you’re not the right person), it’s something that you should be doing because it lines up with your entire vertically-integrated existence — i.e. it supports the Law of the Whole Person.

But what if one of the answers is “no”? I have thought a lot about that question, and I think there are no clear flowchart-friendly directions on what to do. Instead, you have four options.

1. You can say “no”. The Law of the Whole Person implies that you have the right and responsibility to act as a whole person, with all your higher horizons integrated with your ground-level actions and projects, and nobody has the right to force you to do otherwise. In other words you have the right, as a human being, to say no to things that dis-integrate you. It’s not always easy or risk-free, and there are good and bad ways to do it. But you always have the right to do it, and often it’s the best course of action.

2. You can negotiate with the sender. That is, contact the person or group giving you the actionable item and explain your situation and see if there is some middle ground that can be reached. For example, if my department chair called up and asked me to sit in on a committee meeting, while I am on sabbatical, I would probably not just say no, but get back with her to explain that I am focused 100% on my sabbatical project right now which precludes committee meetings, but is there something I can do instead that could accomplish the same purpose as attending, which wouldn’t take time away from my project? Maybe there is. Or maybe there is no reason at all for me to attend, she was just asking anyway — in which case I would just say no.

3. You can try to have somebody else do it. In other words, delegate if if you have the authority, otherwise have a conversation with the “right” person if you don’t. This is pretty standard practice in academia; if someone asks me to give a talk, for example, but I can’t because of a schedule conflict, they’ll usually ask me for names of others to contact, and I’m happy to oblige. In the case of the committee meeting, once I figure out why my chair wants me there in the first place, I might check in with a colleague who isn’t on sabbatical and could do it instead, and gently ask them if they could. (Understanding that they, too, obey the Law of the Whole Person and have the right to say no.)

4. You can just do it anyway. You can look at the request and maybe see that it’s out of alignment with your higher horizons and still choose to take it on, for whatever reason. Maybe you feel it’s professionally dangerous to say no, negotiate, or delegate. Or maybe you just think you would enjoy it, despite it not serving your higher horizons. For example, I am currently writing a letter of recommendation for a colleague who is up for tenure, even though I supposedly laser-focused on my sabbatical project, because this colleague is a good friend and has helped me out in the past, and it’s not a huge lift to write them a letter. However: I don’t recommend “just doing it anyway” because it’s very easy to get into the habit of saying “yes” to things that aren’t aligned with your purpose and goals. Eventually you will lose the muscle memory of how to say “no”.

As I said, there isn’t really a flowchart-friendly binary decision process for knowing what to do with actionable items that don’t align with your higher horizons. You just have to use your judgment and some self-discipline on a case-by-case basis and accept that sometimes you’ll get that decision right and sometimes not.

The Grand Unified Theory

So, in the red box above, in between Is it actionable? and What is the next action?, put this:

EDIT: Yeah, I know that third diamond on the left is supposed to say “Horizon 3”. I’ll get around to fixing that… someday/maybe. 😅

I had hoped in this article to not just give you a new part to plug in to the original flowchart, but an entire updated flowchart that includes everything. But, I am cheap, and the free tier of the diagramming software I use puts a limit on the number of symbols I can use in a flowchart — and I maxed out that limit trying to make the complete picture.

Which brings up a couple of points I realized about email and its impact on our lives in academia:

• If this Clarifying process, with its flowcharts and decision making logic, appears incredibly complex — it’s because it is incredibly complex. Properly deciding what to do with each open loop in each email we get, is a cognitively demanding task. With practice, the time requirement drops dramatically because this process becomes almost subconscious. But it’s never going to be effortless or easy. Remember, being intentional about life and work is about behavior change, which requires consistent effort over time.

• Hopefully this will cause us all to step back and realize how much extra work we pile on each other when we send emails. Unpacking the decision making process here has really made me realize the importance of sending emails only when necessary, and when I do it the emails need to be short and sweet so this decision making process doesn’t consume the person I’m sending it to.

Etc.

• Tools: The diagramming software I am using here is Lucidchart. I’ve used this tool for several years for drawing diagrams. (I have a possibly-weird fixation with flowcharts.) The free tier is probably enough for everyday use, although this article went beyond that. There is an educational discount for the full version and it integrates with Microsoft Office 365 if your campus does Microsoft things. It pairs pretty well with Lucidspark, an interactive whiteboard tool developed by the same company.

• What I’m reading: Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2016, so not so “new” anymore) by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. If you’ve been reading my stuff at Grading For Growth you know I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of deliberate practice, and how it applies to alternative grading practices. But I’m also fascinated with the idea in my music pursuits, and everywhere else. At age 55 and trying to establish myself in the music scene, as well as trying to learn new things generally, I find a very hopeful message in this book, which is that simply engaging in deliberate practice consistently can create capacities for growth that you didn’t have before and it doesn’t matter so much how old you are or how much “talent” you were “given”.

• Music: I’m a big fan of Rick Beato’s YouTube channel and learn something new every time I click on one of his videos. The one he posted yesterday was an all-time bait-and-switch situation — click on it for the inflammatory headline, stay for the master class on classical music and the achingly beautiful piece by Bach at the end.

Everything that you read at this blog is based on three core principles: controlling the controllables, taking small steps within coherent systems, and taking responsibility for your own career. But lately, I’ve realized that there’s something deeper that needs to be addressed, and it’s the question: What gives you the right to pursue purpose in your work and life in the first place?

Everything here is predicated on the idea that you have agency and the right to exercise it, when it comes to how you manage your life. I think most people would agree that we do have both of these. But if you work in higher education any length of time, you will run into policies and people who seem aimed at the opposite. Do we actually have the right to pursue meaning and purpose in this business?

The Law of the Whole Person

As a mathematician, I think a lot about underlying axioms — statements that we accept as true without proof — and what can be deduced from them. Most axioms in mathematical systems, like Euclid’s Postulates, are grounded in human experience and nothing else. For example: A straight line segment can be drawn between any two distinct points. This is Euclid’s First Postulate and it offers no definition of “straight”, “line”, “drawn”, or “point” nor does it attempt to explain why this statement might be true. Everything just is, and the meanings of the terms and the truth of the postulate are supposed to be intuitively clear1.

I firmly believe, as you probably do as well, that each of us does have the right to pursue meaning and purpose in our lives and work, and so “intentional academia” is not just an academic exercise. And the fundamental axiom that underlies that right is something I have come to call the Law of the Whole Person. It states:

Each person is made up of uncountable components that cannot be separated into discrete parts.

This sounds like geometry. It’s actually inspired by topology, my research area from back in the day. I think we all understand the idea of a “person”. Let me unpack the rest of the wording here:

• Components: I do not say “parts” here, because the whole point of this axiom is that we don’t have “parts”. The meaning is closer to what David Allen and GTD call Areas of Focus. They are categories of thought and action that require regular review and maintenance — like projects, but unlike projects these are not “outcomes” that we desire. For example, your health is an area of focus. So is your scholarship; your teaching; your particular hobbies, etc.

• Uncountable: In math, a countable set is one that can be put into one-to-one2 correspondence with the positive integers. What that means, is that you can label the elements of the set as the “first” one, the “second” one, and so on. An uncountable set is a set that cannot be so labelled. For example, the set of whole numbers 1 through 100 is countable. But the set of all numbers between 1 and 100, including the decimals and the irrational numbers like the square root of 2, are “uncountable”. There are not just infinitely many of them — the infinitude is so great that they cannot even be sequentially labelled.

• Discrete: Not to be confused with the word “discreet”, discrete means “individually separate and distinct”. The opposite of discrete is “continuous” which implies a seamless flowing of one thing into another. Compare a color swatch of paint you might get from the hardware store, to a spectrum of colors you see in a rainbow. The former is discrete, the latter continuous.

So to say that each person is made up of “uncountable components that cannot be separated into discrete parts” means that our lives consist of areas of interest and focus, that are infinite in number and impossible to label or to separate fully. Each of us is a unified, whole person in a way that defies separating us out into parts.

The formulation of this idea is the third or fourth draft of it since I started pondering the idea several months ago. I understand this may sound like hippie buzzword-speak, so let me explain why I think the Law of the Whole Person, as stated here, is so profound, by looking at what it implies.

Implication #1: Higher horizons are real

In GTD practice there are six horizons of focus, which you can think of as “altitudes” from which you view your life and work. Horizon 0 is the “street level” and consists of your calendar entries and next actions. Horizon 1 is like the “second floor” and is made up of your projects. Likewise Horizon 2 is your areas of focus, Horizon 3 your one- to two-year objectives, Horizon 4 your three- to five-year vision, and finally Horizon 5 is your purpose and principles (encoded in a Life Plan).

Many higher education people operate as if there were no Horizons above 2. They are stuck in calendar events, to-do lists, and projects and never manage to see things at a higher level. Maybe if they are a department head or otherwise have a broad area of responsibility that is not a project, they spend time in Horizon 2 thinking. But otherwise, to have longer-term objectives and career goals often feels like a pipe dream. When I’ve discussed this with faculty, many of them express that they believe their job conditions constrain them from thinking at this level — like they need, but do not have, permission to do so.

The Law of the Whole Person says that everything that makes you, “you”, is part of a seamless system, no single part of which can be extricated from the others. It’s not like, say, a car — which, while a highly complex system, has parts that can be isolated, removed, and replaced without fundamentally altering the rest of the vehicle. Human complexity is categorically different: Everything is connected, and we cannot alter one part without fundamentally altering the others.

And what this means for higher horizons is that they, too, are connected in a vertical integration. If you touch one of the calendar entries or next actions on your list, it should reverberate in your 3-5 year goals and your Life Plan, if we are acting as whole people. And conversely, any serious consideration of our purpose and principles will deposit something in our 3-5 year vision, which then trickles down to 1-2 year goals, then to projects, and finally to the street-level next actions. It is all integrated — whole, in the same way we are.

So the Law of the Whole Person says that, yes, you do have the right (and the responsibility) to have a clearly defined purpose in life and to design your life in a way that preserves the unity stretching from that purpose all the way to your calendar. Because that’s just how humanity works.

Implication #2: There is no such thing as work-life balance

The notion of “work-life balance” presumes that there is a part of us that can be labelled “work” and another part that can be labelled “life”, and that these are separate and must be kept in “balance”. This is a well-intentioned and reasonable approximation to the truth. But it fails in real life because it is predicated on the idea of humans having “parts” that are discrete and separable, which the Law of the Whole Person denies.

Think about the act of walking. This takes a tremendous amount of actual balance. If you’ve raised kids and taught them to walk, or if you try to walk when you’re dizzy or “off balance”, you know what I mean. So how does an adult, physically capable human manage to just get up and walk? It’s not because we are consciously trying to keep our balance — carefully watching our feet, monitoring the force applied by one leg, and implementing the same amount of force with the other, while moving our arms in just the right amounts to counter-balance everything. Nobody would ever manage to walk successfully if it required that much computation3. Instead, when we were toddlers, the essential unity between our brains, inner ears, eyes, arms, and legs finally clicked and we just started walking. Today we don’t think about it, but simply do it, and trust in that whole-system unity to keep us upright.

Life ought to be like walking. We have overlapping components that focus variously on our teaching, scholarship, service, hobbies, friendships, family, and more and we don’t expect to create a pie chart of these where each one is a slice and the slices are in some kind of pleasing proportion to each other. There are no “slices”. We instead trust in our essential whole-system unity, which the Law of the Whole Person postulates, and just live.

My friend Josh Brake, who writes at The Absent Minded Professor Substack, wrote a lovely article a few years ago where he advocated for the term “coherence” rather than “balance”. I like that a lot. Josh is an engineer and used the concept of coherence from optics to motivate the idea, where light beams can be coherent while also interfering with each other — as these components of our lives often do — and asks whether our components are interfering constructively or destructively. Go read the whole thing.

Implication #3: Disunity is dehumanizing

If the Law of the Whole Person says that individuals are unified systems, then it follows that anything attempting to dis-unify a person is dehumanizing. Unfortunately, the world is full of people, systems, and policies that want to do exactly this, and higher education has more than its fair share of them. Perhaps the people or systems trying to dis-unify you don’t even realize that they’re doing it. But it doesn’t matter: It’s still dehumanizing, and it’s correct to call it out.

Sadly, there are almost as many examples of this form of dehumanization as there are people in higher education, but here is one that I’ve heard repeatedly: Requests (which are really more like commands) to do something for your department or school at times or places where you intend to have family or personal activities. (An extreme example of this was a colleague who was once asked by his department to hold office hours between 7:00pm and 10:00pm once a week.) If you’ve carefully considered a request like this, and it aligns with your higher horizons, and it doesn’t harm or inconvenience others, and you would like to do it, then it’s OK to go for it. But if it’s not something you care to do, and you are not contractually obligated to it, then the Law of the Whole Person says you have a right to say “no”.

You have that right because in this situation, the person giving the request — whether they realize it or not — is saying: I want you to separate out the “work” part of you, from the “personal life” part of you, and give your attention to the “work” part. But as I’ve argued, there are no “parts” according to the Law of the Whole Person. Asking you to think in terms of “parts” is dehumanizing.

Finally…

There is a corollary to all this which states something that makes a lot of people mad: We have not only the right to exist as whole people, we have the responsibility to advocate for ourselves to this effect. It’s a special form of being responsible for your own career4.

This means there is a lot of “saying no” that has to be done if we want to act as whole people. In the example above, you might be compelled to say “I can’t do what you are asking me to do because that’s time I spend with my kids. But I would love to discuss other ways to help.” That sounds reasonable, and it is, but it still might make the person giving the request angry because people who want something generally don’t like being told no, and some people are so immature that they can’t regulate that disappointment except to channel it into anger.

And yet, if you say “yes” to dehumanizing requests (again, even if the other person doesn’t intend to dehumanize you) just to avoid the negative emotions of others then two things happen. First, you earn a reputation as a person who will say “yes” even to the most dehumanizing requests, and people will start to take advantage. And second, you backslide on your humanity. For some, saying no to these kinds of requests seems to pose an unacceptable risk. But let me ask it this way: Would you rather have a job that’s “safe”, but in which you are less and less human every day — or would you rather be in a risky job situation where you are acting with integrity?

Nobody should be made to feel like they have to give away their humanity this way to keep their jobs, but this is real life, and nobody is coming to rescue us or do this work for us.

Etc.

• I wrote this article using a workflow that I stumbled upon this summer that I now use regularly. I like to walk 3-4 miles each morning outside, for exercise and to get my brain going. I always have my phone with me in case of emergencies with the kids. When I walk, my mind tends to clear and I get good ideas. When this happens, I open up Google Keep on my phone where I have a pinned note called “Capture”, consisting of an empty checklist with one checkbox. Using the voice-to-text feature on the phone5, I’ll dictate that thought and have it turned into text in the note. Hit Enter, and it creates another checkbox; then just repeat this process until I’m out of ideas. Then, when home, I pull up the note on my computer, hide the checkboxes so it’s just text, then copy/paste into an Obsidian note where I can work on it later if needed. On one walk last week, I did detailed outlines of three different blog posts in a single 3-mile walk. My neighbors probably think I’m crazy, walking around and talking animatedly into my phone like I do, but it’s become the most productive “writing” time I’ve ever had.

• Music: I played with a band last week that did a three-song mini-set of Ozzy Osbourne tunes, to commemorate his recent passing. One of those was “Crazy Train” and it reminded me of maybe my favorite YouTube video of all time, where two worlds collide.

This week I’m concluding a two-part series on the software tools I use to implement a lot of the ideas you read about on this blog. Last time, I wrote about Obsidian and how I use it to curate information and discover connections between ideas. This week, I’m focusing on the one app that does the most for me: ToDoist.

Before we get started, let me remind everyone: Being intentional about your life and work is not, and must not be, about apps and gadgets. It’s about behavior modification and building good habits. Note that this is only a two-part series because Obsidian and ToDoist are the only two specific tools I rely on. Everything else (calendar apps, text editors, etc.) are replaceable and interchangeable and this is on purpose. Even Obsidian and ToDoist can be replaced if needed1. What I do and what I use won’t work for everyone, but I do recommend not getting married to particular apps.

What is ToDoist?

At the most general level, ToDoist is software that manages lists. You could use it, for example, to keep track of your grocery list or a list of books you want to read. This is pretty useful in itself. But, as its name suggests, ToDoist is designed to manage specific kinds of lists, namely task lists.

I could have said “to do lists”, which is a more familiar term and rhymes with the name of the app. But the concept of the “to-do list” has some fundamental flaws. I may have more to say about that later. Suffice to say that the best way to understand why ToDoist is so useful is to think of it as task management software and not just something for holding to-do lists.

ToDoist is available as an app on all major desktop and mobile operating systems and through a web browser interface. The screenshots I’ll include here are from the macOS app2. Tasks entered into the app automatically sync across all devices (and does so very quickly). The full version of ToDoist costs $48 per year and that basically pays for syncing3.

When you open the app, you have nice clean interface that looks like this:

The top cluster of shortcuts on the left has a button to add tasks, another to do a search, an inbox for incoming tasks that you have captured but not yet clarified, and icons to show tasks due today and due soon, and an icon that is a shortcut to “Filters and Labels” which I’ll explain in a moment.

Below that is a list of projects. It will become very important later to understand that, from ToDoist’s point of view, a project is just a folder that holds groups of tasks. This need not correspond to how we think of “Projects” in the Getting Things Done framework, where they are desired outcomes that require more than one action step and that you intend to complete within 12 months.

Then there is an area for tasks and projects that are shared. This is useful if you’re part of a team collaborating on stuff, but I don’t use that functionality myself.

In the main interface you see the tasks themselves. Each one is just a short actionable statement, with some extra info added: a date or time, for example. You can also add comments and file attachments to each task. And if you look to the far right, you’ll see that each task has an indicator (using the hashtag symbol) of which project it belongs to. Some tasks also have labels (for example the one that says “Plan user research sessions”) that are tags that just add metadata. Some, like the one about yoga, have a little arrow circle indicating that it is a recurring task.

The circle next to a task is a checkbox, and when you complete the task, you click in the circle and it makes a satisfying little “pop” sound. Some of those circles have colors, that indicate priority levels. Plain white ones are “priority 4”, blue ones are “priority 3”, there is a red one at the bottom that is “priority 1”, and not shown is an orange circle indicating “priority 2”. There is no inherent definition of what those priority levels mean; that’s left for the user to define.

Entering information into ToDoist is simple and can be done in multiple ways. You can go to the inbox and just start entering things. Or, you can use a keyboard shortcut (on macOS or Windows) to quick-enter tasks from anywhere. Or, if you are in your email and you have a message that constitutes an actionable item, the ToDoist inbox has its own email address and you can forward the email directly into it, and it gets turned into a task with the text of the email added as an attachment. A recent addition to the app invokes AI to scan your email and create a task description that sums up exactly what the actionable item is4. When entering tasks into the system, there are keyboard shortcuts that will let you add labels, priorities, and dates/times to the task.

Filters and searches

Most academics, if they were to fully brain-dump their projects and tasks into this app, will end up with hundreds of entries5. With that much in the system, it’s hard to remember what you put into it and to find the right task or subset of tasks to do in any given moment where you have time and headspace to work. That’s where searching and filtering comes in.

ToDoist has a powerful and flexible search engine that allows for considerable nuance. Let’s say for example that I am looking for all tasks that have to do with writing. If I click on the search button — or use the keyboard shortcut, / – and enter writing, I get a list:

If I realize later that some of these writing items use “write” instead of “writing”, I can do a Boolean search where one or the other keyword is used, using the syntax (search: write) | (search: writing).

Full documentation on search syntax is here (and yes, I have to refer back to that page often for the details).

You can also do search queries using labels, project names, dates, and more. Basically any metadata you choose to add to a task can be leveraged into a search query. Indeed that’s the main reason you would add that data in the first place.

Since doing these searches is really useful in everyday practice (see below), you can save them, as what are called filters. I have a filter set up, for instance, that brings up all my next actions that are not related to course prep or grading and which belong to active projects, for those times when I need to get work done but want to ignore (for the moment!) all the teaching-related stuff6. Filters can be “favorited” and they’ll then show up in the left sidebar for easy access.

How I use ToDoist

Now that you know what ToDoist is, what it looks like, and a bit of how it functions, let’s talk about how I make it work for my own daily practice. Different people use the app differently and you should never take my own practice as normative, or even fully functional. This is the result of 10+ years of daily use and evolution and there are a lot of idiosynracies.

In the GTD process, ToDoist fits into these parts of the flowchart:

In other words I use ToDoist for anything that I capture that either is actionable now, best done by me, cannot be done in 2 minutes or less, and does not have a hard deadline; or things that are not actionable now but might be of interest later. This is a very large number of things.

Let’s begin with “next actions”. Unfortunately this gets a little complicated.

In GTD there are really two kinds of next actions: Those that come from projects and those that don’t. Every GTD project must have a “next action” defined for it — the next physical step that you can take that will move the project forward to completion. But not every “next action” belongs to a project. For example, “Pick up prescription from the drug store” is a next action, but it does not belong to some larger outcome — it’s just a one-off thing I need to do. “Write draft of Todoist post” on the other hand, is a next action but it belongs to the GTD project “Publish article about Todoist”.

Why this matters here is that ToDoist does not natively have a way of distinguishing between these two kinds of actions: In ToDoist, if a task is not in the inbox, then it has to belong to a project. This is a significant Organization problem, because when processing items captured into the ToDoist inbox, they have to go somewhere other than the inbox, and if they don’t belong to a project then where do you put them?

To solve this problem, remember that what ToDoist calls a “project” is really just a folder. These “projects” do not have to be real projects in the GTD sense. And, since “projects” in ToDoist are just folders, you can also have “subprojects” which are just subfolders inside a larger “project”. Ordinarily creating subprojects off of a main project would not be good GTD practice7 but here they going to be quite useful.

So my approach to managing next actions is:

• At the top level of “My Projects” in the sidebar, I created a “project” (= folder) called NEXT ACTIONS. This is where all one-off, non-project-related next actions go.

• Below that, is a “project” ( = folder) titled PROJECTS. Inside this “project” (= folder) is a “subproject” (= subfolder) for each of my actual projects.

• And inside each “subproject” (= subfolder) are the tasks related to that actual GTD project.

It makes a lot more sense visually:

Inside each of the actual GTD projects here, are the tasks related to the project. At my weekly review I make sure each actual project has a “next action”, and the way I distinguish these is by adding the label next to the project’s next action:

This means that every “next action” in my system is one of two things: An item in the NEXT ACTIONS “project” if it’s a one-off task, or an item with the next label if it belongs to a project.

When it’s time to work, I want to have a list of all the next actions — both the one-offs and the project tasks — in a single place in front of me, so I can choose what to do. To create that list, I go back to the concept of a filter: namely the filter that searches (p:NEXT ACTIONS) | @next. Read this as, “All items that are in the NEXT ACTIONS “project” or which have the next label”.

This is not the only way to dial up tasks to work on. In GTD practice we use contexts that correspond to specific tools, locations, or other constraints that define what you can possibly do in the moment. For example, my campus context corresponds to any task that must be done while I am on my university’s physical campus; phone corresponds to tasks that can only be done by making voice calls; and so on. The idea is that these contexts are supposed to partition your life, so they are mutually exclusive and the union of them all covers all possible life situations8. So at any moment, you look at the context you are in, and only focus on the tasks in that context because it would be a waste of energy to do otherwise.

Contexts are easy to implement in ToDoist via labels. I have a label set up for all my major contexts: email, home, errand, phone, campus, and few more. I also have contexts set up for “zones” of work, for example music for music-related tasks or quick for tasks that don’t take a lot of time. (I used to have a brainless context when I was a sleep-deprived new dad, for tasks I could do if I were running on fumes.) When I’m in a particular context, I can just do a search on the label, which can be done the usual way or just by clicking on the label in the app. Labels can also be combined with other searches, for example (@next | p:NEXT ACTIONS) & @errands brings up all the tasks that are next actions and require that I am out and about running errands.

Some other elements of my setup worth mentioning:

• I mentioned four priority levels you can add to each task. I use “priority 1” (red) for my MIT, “most important thing”, for each day which I set up in the morning. “Priority 2” (orange) is for tasks that I would like to get done that day (but there is not necessarily a deadline). “Priority 3” (blue) is for things I would like to get done that week. “Priority 4” is everything else. (You can search on priority levels too, so if I wanted to see all the writing tasks I wanted to finish this week, I’d search (p1 | p2 | p3) & @writing.

• My Someday/Maybe list is set up as another “project” (folder) that lives at the top level of projects. I find it’s better to keep this list in ToDoist than in Obsidian, since Someday/Maybe and your next actions lists are constantly flowing into and out of each other. Each week there are Someday/Maybe items that get “promoted” to next actions and some next actions that get “relegated” to Someday/Maybe. This is easier to implement if both lists are in the same app.

• There is currently no native way in ToDoist to create a task that has a start date in the future, as would be handled by a tickler file. So I have yet another “project” (folder) called FUTURE that holds these. A new-ish feature of ToDoist is the ability to add “sections” to projects, which are not subprojects but just containers for related tasks within a project; I have sections for each month and move future tasks into the FUTURE project and then into the month I intend to start them. Then review this area each week especially the first weekend of each month.

• I have another “project” (folder) called PARKED that holds all actual projects (subfolders) that are on hold. Each week at the weekly review, I examine this folder and re-activate any project that’s back in business and move any newly-inactive project down into that folder. Most of my filters have search queries that exclude anything from the PARKED folder so that I’m not looking at tasks from inactive projects.

Who this tool is for and why you might use it

If all you want is to capture your “to-do list” items, store them in a trusted system, and have the ability to look at them when you want, then you do not need ToDoist or any other app. You could very easily do this with a paper notebook, or Google Docs, or just a stack of index cards and skip all the complicated stuff I just discussed.

The problem with that approach, is that at some point you have to engage with the tasks that you have put into your list. In a simpler life, a basic to-do list in a paper notebook would be perfectly adequate for daily work. But for modern academics, the list of things that we could do, and which we have committed to doing, is so long and diverse that just having these in a list is instantly overwhelming. In fact I think a lot of what we call “burnout” stems from the paralysis we naturally experience when confronted with a list of commitments we’ve made that is so large we cannot possibly do it in any reasonable time frame.

So the value proposition of ToDoist, and the reason a person might want to use it, is that it is more than just a handy way to capture and organize tasks: It provides the ability to easily slice and dice your massive master task list into much smaller context-appropriate task lists, which we can then actually think about without our brains freezing up. Rather than just doing the most urgent, latest-and-loudest item on a to-do list — or the easiest one — ToDoist makes it easy to dial up a manageable menu of tasks we’ve committed to doing, that represents the right things to work on in the moment. We can then pick one of those things off the menu and engage with it, without the lingering FOMO/guilt feeling that there is something else that you ought to be working on instead. I cannot overstate how important this point is, for our own sanity and usefulness to others.

There are other apps out there that do what ToDoist does: OmniFocus, TickTick, Things, and a million others9. What makes ToDoist stand out for me, and why I keep coming back to it if I try out another tool, is:

• ToDoist is cross-platform and has a web interface, and syncs across all devices quickly and error-free in my experience. Some competitors (like OmniFocus) work only on one OS and do not have an OS-agnostic web interface10.

• The search and filter features which I have described at length. Other apps have these but ToDoist’s seems the simplest and most natural.

• The price, which as I mentioned is $48 per year. There is no educational pricing but honestly, you probably don’t need it when the price is already this low. It is by far the best price-to-use ratio I have encountered in any software ever other than free stuff.

This post is ridiculously long, so I will end by saying that while ToDoist is a good choice for many people using GTD, it is only as good as your commitment to the habits of GTD, especially weekly reviews. No app or gadget is going to work for you if you don’t stay consistent with using it, and you must review your system, consistently and regularly to get the most out of it and keep it from becoming a hindrance. The app will not do the real work for you!

A big mistake many people make when trying to be more intentional about work and life is to fixate on tools — apps, gadgets, websites, you name it. Just look at all the articles whose title is something like “I switched from [insert name of app here] to [insert name of another app here] and I’m never going back”. Or sometimes it ends “...and I’m really disappointed”. Being intentional isn’t about tools: It’s about shaping your behavior.

But at the same time, tools are important: “The tool shapes the hand”, and the tools you use (analog or digital) can make behavior change either easier or harder. This month at Intentional Academia, I’m going to focus on two apps that are part of my everyday toolbox and which I’ve mentioned here many times before: Obsidian and ToDoist1. These are digital tools that don’t do everything for me, and never will, but make it a lot easier for me to do the boring work of taking small steps taken within coherent systems.

What is Obsidian?

Obsidian is an app for taking notes, in the same vein as many other notes apps like Apple Notes, Google Keep, Evernote, or Bear. What makes it different from the others (all of which I have used before, and which are very good) is that Obsidian is just a wrapper around a folder of Markdown files.

There’s a lot to unpack in that statement and why it matters. Let’s start with Markdown.

Markdown is a “language” for formatting plain text files. Here is what some of the basic syntax looks like in plain text on the left, and on the right it shows what it looks like when rendered using a previewer. Notice how the plain-text formatting on the left actually looks like the finished-product format on the right2:

Markdown is not an app — it’s a language, a cousin to HTML and other “markup” languages. Files written in Markdown are just plain text files with a .md extension. There is not just one “Markdown app”. In fact there’s a dizzying number of apps that use Markdown, and it’s built into some other applications too, like the comment systems on Reddit and GitHub. Google Docs now offers Markdown syntax highlighting and seamless copy/paste integration with Markdown, and text editors like VSCode have tons of Markdown plugins and functionality.

Markdown was invented in 2004, and I discovered it around 2015 (way before Obsidian existed) and quickly became a convert. It’s simple, free, lightweight, flexible, and future-proof. (Word processing and fancy note-taking apps come and go, but plain text files are forever.) Soon after learning Markdown, I began to create all my course materials using Markdown whenever possible. I even wrote my first book using Markdown. I still take a Markdown-first approach to everything, from writing blog posts to creating syllabi and everything in between.

Back to Obsidian: Every note in Obsidian is a Markdown file — a plain text file — stored in a folder on your computer. That folder is called a vault. Obsidian lives in that folder as code that accesses the notes, displays them, lets you edit them, and provides a bunch of useful functionality. For example, there is a nice search feature for your notes, formatting options for math notation and code, and fun stuff like the ability to turn a note into a slide deck.

Most of the features aside from search and formatting use plugins which are optional add-ons to the core system. There are “core plugins” that come with Obsidian but also a huge and growing library of plugins contributed by the user community that run the gamut from improved search engines to AI chat tools to integrations with other tools like ToDoist or Zotero,. There are also hundreds of user-created themes that change the visual aesthetics.

The most significant feature of Obsidian is backlinking. You can link one note to another by entering the title of the target note inside double-brackets [[ ]]. In the source note, the title becomes a clickable link that jumps directly to the target. Backlinking turns a vault of notes into a wiki. Obsidian allows you also to search for backlinks that could exist but don’t, and insert links where appropriate. So, for example, if I have a note titled “Intentional Academia” in my vault, I can check the entire vault for any note containing the text “Intentional Academia” and in one click turn all those other references into hyperlinks that jump to the “Intentional Academia” note.

Backlinking is incredibly powerful. It turns a vault into something more than just a folder with a bunch of files in it: It becomes a network of interconnected ideas. This is why Obsidian is sometimes referred to as a “second brain”. You can even visualize your network using a graph view. For example here is the graph of all the notes in my vault that are tagged #writing. Each dot in the network is a note/file, and each edge is a link between the files. Clicking on a vertex opens the note.

Despite all this fancy functionality, the thing I like the most about Obsidian is that the notes are not part of the app3. They are just Markdown files, with a separate existence from the app that works with them. If Obsidian ceased to exist, or had a bug that made it unusable, all my notes are still there in a folder on my computer. I can open, edit, copy, paste, delete, etc. them just like I can with any other file, using a text editor and my computer’s built-in file management. This is in stark contrast to proprietary note taking systems like OneNote or Evernote, where the notes are made inside the app and are only usable via the app, and if you wanted to move your data to another system you would have to deal with complex and buggy export/import tools.

Obsidian itself is free. But you can sync your information across different devices, the best way being to pay an annual subscription for their native sync service which is $48 per year — worth it as is, but there is also a 40% educational discount available which makes it even more of a no-brainer4.

How I use Obsidian

I’m obviously a big fan of Obsidian. But I do not use it for everything. I don’t use Obsidian for:

• Quick capture of passing thoughts. Google Keep, or a little notebook, in my opinion is a better tool for this.

• Task management. Although task management plugins for Obsidian exist, I find ToDoist to be superior to all of them, and if I really need to work with tasks in Obsidian I use this ToDoist integration plugin.

• Calendar. Again there are calendar integrations for Obsidian but I prefer to just use Google Calendar because it’s simpler.

• File storage. It’s possible to embed some files, particularly PDFs, in Obsidian notes and even highlight and annotate those embedded files within the Obsidian note. But I prefer not to use Obsidian for the actual storage of files, because it gets complicated (I’m storing a file inside another stored file…?) and anyway this is what Google Drive and OneDrive are for.

This may make it sound like I don’t use Obsidian for much, but that’s far from the case. Obsidian is my preferred tool for these parts of the GTD Clarify flowchart:

• Reference material: If I have “stuff” that is not actionable but is something that I might want to refer to later (that is not a file unto itself, or an email) I will usually create an Obsidian note, dump that info into the note, and tag it with the name of the project it belongs to (if there is one), then backlink to any related notes.

• Projects: In GTD language a “project” is any desired outcome that requires more than one action step and that I intend to complete within 12 months. Most of us have between 10 and 50 active projects underway at any given time. For many of these, I create a single note that serves as the “home page” for the project, listing things like the project parameters (who is involved, what are the outcomes, what are the key dates, etc.) and other pertinent information. The project home page is a combination of project charter, statement of work, and other project management basic documentation. Other stuff related the project might live in different notes. For example, if I’m giving a keynote address, there will be a home page for the event in one note and the draft of the script in another note. Then I link the secondary notes back to the homepage with a backlink. So all information related to the project is no more than a couple of clicks away.

• My Waiting For list is an Obsidian note. I do not use Obsidian for Next Actions or Someday/Maybe because unlike Waiting For, those lists consist of tasks, and ToDoist is where my tasks live.

I also use Obsidian for:

• Longer-form passing thoughts that are too big for Google Keep. These often turn into blog posts, so I tag them with the name of the blog I might publish them at, and search for them later when I need to write something.

• All my GTD higher horizons documents — Life Plan, Horizon 4, and Horizon 3 — as well as records from my Quarterly Reviews and Weekly Reviews.

• Notes from my Kindle and web content reading. Obsidian integrates with the read-later service Readwise and this has been a game-changer for me. If I am reading an article on the web or a book on my Kindle and make a highlight, the highlight is synced with Readwise’s online service and then the Readwise plugin will pull all the information about the article along with my highlights, into my vault, with links back to the original. All I have to do is highlight the original with my finger or mouse.

• My daily journal. I used to use a paper notebook for journaling, then a smattering of apps like DayOne, but finally settled on using Obsidian along with the Periodic Notes plugin.

Other more creative uses of Obsidian are definitely possible. Recently I made a new vault entirely focused on my music pursuits, with notes for practice logs, links to articles, information on people and venues, setlists, information on my gear, and more, all linked together. And a couple of years ago I created a vault for my discrete math courses that serves as a course wiki, which has been put online using the Obsidian Publish service which Obsidian offers for an annual fee. (fn: There is a 40% educational discount for Obsidian Publish, and I highly recommend it.)

My Obsidian setup

Obsidian is flexible with how you organize it. Remember it is just a folder of Markdown files that live on your computer. You could choose to have no organization at all, just dumping the files into one big container and then linking them. Some users add tags to their files and organize around a coherent tagging structure. I’m a little old school, and I like organizing files by subfolders. I have five main folders labeled:

• 0 - Inbox

• 1 - Projects

• 2 - Areas

• 3 - Resources

• 4 - Archive

Subfolders 1–4 follow the PARA system that I have mentioned once before. There are secondary folders that live outside these five. One is Journal which contains all my journaling entries. Assets is where I put attachments like images or audio files5. Notes from Readwise are put by default into a Readwise folder. And so on; and all this can be changed and tweaked in Obsidian’s settings.

What is supposed to happen in my system, is that each week at the Weekly Review, I go through the Inbox folder and Clarify each note and put it in the folder where it belongs. This is what’s supposed to happen. But in reality, I have not really used folders that much but instead rely on tags, backlinks, and search to get to the files I want, and I have not actually processed the Inbox folder in some time because I haven’t really needed to. Unlike email, where each inbox item is equally likely to be a massive project or a nothing-burger, and therefore I need to Clarify each thing to know what it means, notes are in Obsidian in the first place because they’ve already been Clarified and this is where they belong. I just need to be able to find them if needed, and folders are helpful for this but in my view not necessary.

Who this tool is for and why you might use it

The life of the mind is all about having ideas and playing them off of each other. Having a way to capture and process your thoughts and, especially, discovering the synergy between thoughts you didn’t necessarily realize were related, is where a lot of our best work comes from. This is why you might choose to use a notes app in the first place. They make it easier for many people to capture passing thoughts for later consideration, search them up when needed, and discover the connections that lead to more ideas. Paper notebooks can serve in this capacity but if you’re like me, I have my phone almost constantly with me but it can be annoying or impractical to carry around a notebook.

Obsidian might be a good choice for you, compared to other notes apps, if, like me, you:

• Have at least a passing familiarity with Markdown or are willing to learn

• Want notes that are simple plain text and are willing to sacrifice some bells and whistles

• Don’t want to become too depending on any particular notes app, but instead have full control over how to work with your notes

• Want not only to store and search notes, but link them and discover connections

• Don’t want to pay for your notes, but don’t mind paying for syncing or publishing

If you’re going to use digital tools at all, it’s crucial to keep them simple, lightweight, and trustworthy. Obsidian ticks those boxes for me and maybe for you as well.

Etc.

• Since we’re talking Obsidian, I should mention my must-have community plugins: Dataview, Emoji Shortcodes, Git, Kanban, Natural Language Dates, Paste URL Into Selection, Periodic Notes, Readwise, ToDoist Sync, QuickAdd, and Templater. That’s basically a complete list of plugins I use because I want to keep the system minimal and not get too far away from the “just a wrapper around Markdown files” philosophy.

• For Obsidian themes, I’m a big fan of the Minimal theme but Flexoki is what I’m using currently.

• Music: Pino Palladino, who is on my Mt. Rushmore of bassists, is back with another collaboration with guitarist Blake Mills and drummer Chris Dave. This one gives some early Peter Gabriel vibes.

Life is full of items that have your attention but are out of your control: The email reply you are expecting, the reimbursement request you put in weeks ago, the feedback on the journal article you submitted. How do you keep these kinds of things on your radar screen and not slipping through the cracks, without consuming unnecessary time and brain cells? You might be on the ball with your tasks, projects, and information. But what if the ball is in someone else’s court?

Enter the Waiting For list. I mentioned this concept in my post on 20 small steps to an intentional summer, right alongside the Someday/Maybe list and stated that this pair of lists was central to Getting Things Done practice. The Someday/Maybe list has its own deep dive on this blog, so let’s give the Waiting For list the same treatment. In this post, I’ll explain what the Waiting For list is, why you should have one (even if you are not going all-in with GTD), and how to make and use one using tools you already have on hand.

What is the Waiting For list?

The Waiting For list contains anything that needs your attention, but the next action belongs to someone else. This might include:

• Replies to emails, calls, or texts

• Items or reimbursements that you have requested

• Information or approvals needed from another person

• Shipments of physical items

• Tasks that you’ve delegated to others

Every area of life has these kinds of items, but academic work seems to have more than others. Education takes place in a dense web of relationships, and among our close peers, we tend to collaborate and share responsibility for each others’ work. So it’s important to track our commitments to others as well as others’ commitments to us. The Next Actions and Projects lists do the former; the Waiting For list does the latter.

Each of us has a list of Waiting For items that is perhaps longer than we realize. Right now, a few of the items on my own Waiting For list include:

• An order of strings for one of my bass guitars

• Reimbursement for travel to a speaking engagement earlier this year

• A reply to an email I sent to a host institution regarding a speaking engagement later this year

• My US passport that I sent off for renewal a couple of weeks ago

• A set list for a musical performance I am doing in July

All of these items represent tasks, where the ball is in someone else’s court. I can’t do these tasks for these folks, but I need to make sure they get done. So I put them somewhere that is not in my conscious mind but in a trusted place where I can remind myself later about them and take further action if needed. That’s the Waiting For list.

Why use a Waiting For list?

The short answer to this question is that humans are terrible at remembering things.

This classic study famously found that normal humans can only hold between 5 and 9 things in short term memory1. More recent studies suggest this “5 ± 2” figure is optimistic and the true number could be lower. As David Allen said: Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.

We also tend to exhibit foresight bias, where we believe — often erroneously — that we will remember something easily in the future because it is easy to think about in the present. Imagine a student who, when reading through their class notes, says This is all familiar and I will definitely remember it for the exam without testing recall. But we know how that situation often turns out. We are not exempt: When something gets our attention, we think we will remember it because it’s so cool in the moment, it seems impossible to forget. But in reality it’s just one of the 5 ± 2 items in your memory competing for space, and if we don’t Capture it, it’s likely to slip away forever.

Additionally, I know this may come as a shock, but a lot of people do not have their act together. They have all kinds of leaks in their systems for handling information, or they have no system. Although they realize that need to do something for you (reply to an email, schedule a meeting, read a manuscript, etc.) they have an unintentional approach to their work, and they drop the ball — they simply forget about it, or it gets buried among the avalanche of other items competing for headspace. The term used is “slip through the cracks”.

Let me be clear about that term, “slip through the cracks”: Professionals should not have cracks through which important commitments slip. Part of our jobs as professionals is to have crack-less systems. This is hard work and a lifelong process and will all slip up from time to time with commitments to others. But having cracks in your system (or having no system) and having other people’s commitments constantly slip through them, is not a good look — it’s unprofessional, and fairly or otherwise it signals on a deep level that you can’t be fully trusted with something important2.

So one of the biggest reasons for using a Waiting For list is that it allows you to exhibit kindness to others who may not have your skills at managing “stuff”, specifically the kindness of tracking these items for them, before they disappear into a crack.

How to make and use a Waiting For list

Making a Waiting For list is easy. Just pick a medium — paper, Google Docs, your favorite note-taking app, whatever3 — and put “Waiting For” in the title or on the page. (Mine is a plain Markdown file that lives inside Obsidian, which I use for notes.) This typically takes less than 30 seconds and costs nothing. Go do it right now, in fact, if you don’t have one already.

Next, populate that list. Take 15 minutes to brain-dump everything you are waiting for. Chances are that you won’t recall everything during that initial setup, and that’s OK. You will pick up more items for the list in the course of your daily life, and a solid weekly review will generate other things that are further back in the recesses of your brain. But as you think of items, just put them on the list. I tend to enter three pieces of information for each item:

• “What”: The thing I am waiting for;

• “Who”: The person whose court the ball is currently in; and

• “When”: The date that I initiated the request for the thing I am waiting for.

For example: Reimbursement for talk at Big State University, Alice Smith 2025-06-10. I’ll explain why these three points of information are important in a minute.

The moment that you become aware of something that needs your attention but the next action is being handled by someone else, it should go on the Waiting For list. This might happen during the course of a normal day or at a weekly review as you go through the Clarify process. But the key is to enter it into the list as soon as you are aware of it — don’t try to hold the idea in memory until later. (Remember what we said about short-term memory?) The whole idea here is to take these pending waiting-for items out of your memory and into a trusted system, that you then review on a regular basis.

Speaking of review: Periodically — ideally at the weekly review — you review what’s on the Waiting For list, reminding yourself of what pending items are still “out there”. If a past Waiting For item has been resolved, then you can cross it off. On the other hand, if an item has been sitting unresolved for longer than you like, add a new task to your next actions list: Follow up with [person] about [Waiting For item]. Give the person a nudge to remind them that you are waiting. This can be uncomfortable, so consider phrasing your followup as a question, or an offer to help. For example:

Hi Prof. Smith, I’m emailing to see if you needed anything from me to process my reimbursement for the talk I gave at Big State University. I submitted the receipts and forms on 2025-06-10 and was wondering if I needed to resend any of those. Thanks!

Notice how this uses all three of the info items in the Waiting For list: The person, the item, and especially the date. Using specific dates signals to the other person that you are keeping detailed records of this situation even if they aren’t and that you are not letting things “slip through the cracks” even if they are. Compare the message I was wondering if you had a chance to read my earlier email with the more specific I was wondering if you had a chance to read my email that I sent on Jun 10, 2025 . The date commands attention, and it’s a way to get the other person moving on the Waiting For item without being pushy. Keeping all that information in the Waiting For list lets you craft more effective follow-ups if it becomes necessary.

Story time

The Waiting For list really becomes valuable when money gets involved. I personally have probably saved thousands of dollars, often in the form of speaking and writing fees by having a functioning Waiting For list. Here is an example.

I recently gave a talk at a college which had agreed to pay a speaker fee and cover my travel expenses. At my next weekly review, I entered this into my Waiting For list. My contract says that the host will remit payment within 30 days of the event. Each subsequent week, at my weekly review, I was reminded that I hadn’t been paid yet4. Early on, this was not a concern. After three weeks, I was starting to get a little impatient. After five weeks had passed, we were beyond the 30-day period and I had to act.

So I emailed the appropriate person with a followup. Dear Betty, I hope you are well. I had a great time at Big State University giving that talk on April 10. I was wondering if you could give me a status update on the payment for the event? I submitted my forms and receipts in an email on April 14 but have not received payment yet, and I want to make sure you have everything you need.

Two days later I got a reply. Betty (not their real name) had indeed gotten my forms and receipts from my first email and uploaded them to the campus procurement website for processing — but had forgotten to click the “Submit” button! From Betty’s point of view, her role in my situation was done and the ball was in Procurement’s court. Procurement had no way of knowing they should expect some forms from me to process a reimbursement. It was just a simple mistake and suddenly nobody was looped in. Nobody except me, and if I hadn’t looped myself in with a Waiting For list, it’s possible I’d never get paid for that talk because I would have just forgotten about it5. But once I was able to nudge Betty, she just had to click the button, and I had my payment three days later.

Now you do it

Even if you are not using the full spectrum of GTD practices, a Waiting For list is a great idea to take a load off your brain and be intentional about your commitments to others. Take 30 minutes today and go through the steps that I outlined above to make and populate one; then sit down over the weekend and review it, update it, and set up action items for Waiting For stuff that feels stuck.

Etc.

• I recently jumped on a promotional deal to trade in my aging Garmin Venu 2 smartwatch for a Pixel Watch 3, and I discovered a potentially game-changing feature: Unlike the Garmin, the Pixel watch has a microphone and you can create or manipulate Google Keep notes using voice-to-text. I’ve sung the praises of Google Keep before as an underrated, simple tool for Capture and now I can do this on the fly even without a phone or computer. I just say to my watch, “Hey Google, make a note about…” and it captures what I say into a Google Keep note. At my daily review, I’ve added Google Keep as one of the “inboxes” I clear out, and I go through and Clarify all those captured notes and get them to the right place. You probably already knew this, and I’m sure Apple Watches have similar functionality, but it’s a significant reduction in the amount of friction encountered when capturing something, and I am using this feature constantly.

• If you’re checking out task manager or to-do list apps, Structured is an interesting entry into a crowded field. It organizes to-do items into time blocks on a daily calendar, in a package that has a minimalist visual appeal. It’s been said that time blocking is the only productivity hack, and I’ve written here about why it’s important for academics, so you might check it out.

• Music: Tony Franklin, a.k.a. “The Fretless Monster”, is on my Mount Rushmore of bassists for his innovative use of the fretless bass in rock music. He’s also one of the nicest and most generous people alive, always happy to interact with fans (like me) on the internet. He has just joined a new music project, Al Nesbitt & The Alchemy. It’s an interesting and groovy mix of rock, jazz, and Latin music. An EP is forthcoming; here’s a sample.

Until next time!