Category Archives: General stuff

The Power of the Yearly Review

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GTD methodology call of frequent review of projects and associated task lists. In fact, the whole system crumbles if this critical operation is not performed regularly; you need to trust that it contains everything in order to make the right decision at the right time with regard to which task(s) to take on at any given moment and not miss anything. However to enable you to make these daily decisions that move you toward a larger goal, the latter needs to be established up front and also revised on a regular basis. Enter the yearly review! Continue reading →

Former Student becomes CEO!

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***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).

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100% made in Quebec City. Congrats MedScint!

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

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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).

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Dealing with E-mails in Academia I – Basic Ethos

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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.

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Some public shaming is in order

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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.

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