Category Archives: General stuff

Former Student becomes CEO!

Posted on by
Reply

***UPDATE: URL to MedScint website corrected

François Therriault-Proulx, a former PhD student of mine, decided sometimes ago that he would transformed a technology he co-developped during his graduate studies to a commercial product. Here he is in his first booth (right) at the premier medical physics conference, the American Association of Medical Physicists annual meeting in San Antonio Texas with partner, co-foudner and CMO Jonathan Turcotte (left).

20190714_124417.jpg

100% made in Quebec City. Congrats MedScint!

Dealing with E-mails in Academia II – Emails to actions to Inbox Zero

Posted on by
1

This is the second (and last) installment in dealing with e-mails. It assumes that you have read the first one, basic ethos. If you have not please take a few minutes and read it here. In this second part, we will see how to transform the “good” e-mails into action items in order to reach the famous, not so unicorn-like, inbox zero and file e-mail intelligently for future use. These blog posts will be permanently part of the E-offices series (digital office).

Continue reading →

Dealing with E-mails in Academia I – Basic Ethos

Posted on by
3

E-mail is at the same time an efficient communication tool and a big productivity disruption that can occupy up to 23% of your daily working hours. In fact, if you do a search for e-mail and productivity on Google you will get over 260 000 000 (that is right!) hits. This should tell you that for many managing e-mails is a serious modern problem. Furthermore, considering that your brain require a reset time to get back to a deep focus level needed to accomplish key tasks such as writing manuscripts, grants and so on every time you are disrupted, looking at your e-mail you essentially trigger that “reset” timer. The toll on your work could be disastrous.

Continue reading →

Some public shaming is in order

Posted on by
4

I do not know about you, but I am getting tired and even a bit frustrated by all the e-mails asking me to come to meeting X, publish my papers in journal Y, or even worse like the one below about being a member of editorial or advisor board of a journal Z. The problem is most of these are not even closely connected to your field of expertise; they are simply fishing and a very simply Google Scholar and PubMed search would reveal that in a matter of seconds. This basically means that these requests are coming from ill-intended individuals and companies that have no sense of ethics what-so-ever. Their meetings and journals should be considered predatory at best. Thus, public shaming is in order. The latest in this category is below with my comments.

Continue reading →

Start something new in 2019: schedule time with yourself!

Posted on by
2

The cemeteries are filled with people who thought the world couldn’t get along without them

— Multiple sources, original author unclear

As you start the new year, please take a moment to remind yourself that whatever you do and how good you are at it, your employer (and society as a whole) will continue to function with or without you. This means that you should never be ashamed or feel anxious about taking “off” time, and by that I mean all of the time allowed by your employer every year. Not only will you get more productive overall, your friends and family will thank you for it. I certainly expect all of my students and postdocs to take time off.

Continue reading →