How to fight procrastination?

How to avoid procrastination? I don't really know. I've just spent around 2 days looking for a software to build a knowledge base (this search failed; the software of my dream doesn't exist, so the search was essentially vain and counterproductive). And then about 1 more full day (in total) blogging about neuroscience of homosexuality in Russian. (Why? Why? It's not even my topic!)

But introspectively I can list the following reasons (or maybe rather ways) I procrastinate:

1) The first reason is the simplest one: I try to avoid work; try to find distraction. Any kind of distraction!
2) I seek news; any kind of novelty; any kind of information that was generated recently, that is "hot from the press". As if to prove myself that the world is still moving on around me.
3) I seek interaction with other people. To prove that I'm not alone.
4) I seek praise from other people. To feel that I'm useful.
5) And sometimes I'm just too tired to keep working.

Normally I would cover all 5 points by procrastination, and mostly of Internet kind: checking the e-mail, blogs, twitter, facebook, Reddit, wikipedia watch pages etc. And it's bad. It should not be like that.

Some people (theorists and mathematicians) can afford working without a computer, with just a paper notebook. Or at least unplug form the Internet. I usually can't afford it, as I have to check Pubmed, or google for Matlab tips and tricks all the time. So I need to find another solution.

After SfN I successfully (at least so far) quit Reddit, which was by far the worst way of wasting time for me. Reddit is a great tool; I quite successfully used it for conducting science-related polls, advertising some of my work, and I learn(ed) a lot form it. But it's just way too demanding. I can not afford it. I also stopped checking Twitter and Facebook, by consciously making the feed unreadable. I unsubscribed from most of Google+ alerts. In total it should help with Reason #1, at least for a while.

Instead, I subscribed to some "new publications" kind of alerts at WebOfScience and Pubmed. Maybe it will satisfy the craving for the "hot" information (Reason #2).

Reasons #3 and #4 aren't a problem when I'm teaching, or when I am to present, or have recently presented my work outside the lab. I still don't know what to do "in between". Maybe developing this blog can be a solution.

And for the #5 - I will probably try alternating tasks. Can not program any more? Read some papers. Can not read? Reground the rig. Can not work with the rig? Read some science-related (but really science-related!) blogs about giving tenure talks (as if it were relevant) and what not. We'll see how it works.

Science-Art

We'll have some kind of a competition here in the University; something about Science and Art, and how they interact, and how one can be used to express the other, or something like that. I'm not quite sure. Anyway, I decided to participate in the competition, because why not.

This thing will be my submission (pen is given for scale). It's drawn with a sharpie pen, acrylic paints, and a bit of brown colored pencil at the very end. It's probably titled "The known circuitry of Xenopus tadpoles". The circuitry shown here is only partially real; I mean, it's mostly real, and should give a correct idea, even if not being completely 100% accurate. And real tadpoles aren't green of course (they are quite transparent), but green tadpoles just look so much better and watercolorish! But it's definitely art about science - they can't deny that.

Well, we'll see how it goes.

Aliens in science (yes, being one, I like this word)

Foreigners in science, per country where they work now, and per country of origin:

Source: http://www.nature.com/news/global-mobility-science-on-the-move-1.11602

Layers

I love the description:

Superdocs are the suddenly-graying, tired-eyed waifs who you see in the hallway sometimes but never at seminars. Research fellows are non-faculty that get their own lab space (maybe with 1 tech and 1 student). They are usually crying in their offices. (source) 

It's a bit exaggerated, but the imagery is insightful. 

Battle of personal wikis: continued

So, my current assumption is that I need a personal wiki to maintain my personal knowledge base. I really like the idea of cross-linking topics. I also really like the idea of keeping sources (papers) as separate entries, and linking my higher-level cards (ideas, objects, concepts) to them. Finally, if I need to write something, I can always create a separate wiki-tree for it, with a contents, and then some "chapters", linking to the "thoughts" created previously. And then, while writing the text, I can go through all these pages, gradually turning them into a text.

I read a wikipedia page on personal wikis, and decided to give a try to wikidpad as an alternative to One Note. Well... The good thing is that it can save to html really nicely. The bad thing is that the interface is not WYSIWYG, but rather a wiki-style coding thing, and it makes everything somewhat harder. But the worst thing is that in this particular program legal wiki entries should have a "CamelCase" format, with capital letters and everything. That's not what I need as many my terms will look like "AMPA" or "notch". Too hard. Won't work.

OneNote can work as a wiki, and you can "Create Linked Pages" from a word you selected, but it wouldn't autolink words for you, and actually even manually linking your words to existing pages is not that simple. If you have a page named mTOR, and then you type mTOR and want it to link to this page, there's no easy way of doing so. You'll have to go and manually find the page, and copy a link to it, and come back, and add it as a hyperlink. And to make things so much worse, while there's a plugin that allows you to export your notes into html, these within-text hyperlinks are not exportable.

So far the most promising personal wiki app is the one called ZIM. It's wysiwyg, exports to html, is simple to operate, and looks neat. Probably I'll give it a try.

Index cards (knowledge base) software

I'm thinking of writing something cool and long, like a review. And it would be nice to do it properly, organization-wise. But I'm not actually sure what would "properly" mean here. I guess the general question is: how to maintain your knowledge database; how to keep in order all those various thing you learn from the literature, and how to make it usable when you need to write something about it.

An ideal system would probably have the following features:

1. It should look somewhat like a bunch of index card, so that you could put ideas, statements, thoughts, quotes and sources there.
2. But it should be fully computerized, as I don't want to handle any real paper objects.
3. Ideally - you should be able to keep both your writing (notes, ideas) and your long-term stuff (quotes, sources) in the same system.
   
   Then also go some technical considerations:
    
4. I should be able to make back-ups easily (have control over the data)
5. It should work offline (as I'm sometimes too distracted when online)
6. It should be forward-compatible (it would be silly to start creating a knowledge database in an abandoned obsolete software).
7. You should be able to "publish" your final text in a readable editable form (as a long Word document or something of this kind).

So far I have the following options as potential solutions:

1. Scrivener. I kind of like what I hear about it, but I'm not sure it would be good as a knowledge database.
2. Personal wiki (following this great advice). It provides nice functionality (you can really organize everything properly!), but I'm not sure what software to use for it.
3. One Note. This Microsoft office tool turned to be really fantastic! And also it is de-facto free, as you get it together with the Microsoft Office, with Word and Excel, that you have to have anyway. It actually combines the index cards look with personal wiki functionality. So far that's the potential winner. There are some drawbacks though: you can not export the whole notebook as one long text document; it is not easy to edit texts longer than 1 paragraph; and most importantly: I'm not quite sure it's going to be supported by Microsoft in the future, as it lies in complete obscurity for several years already. It's really good, so why would not they advertise it more? It's kind of unnerving.
4. Endnote. Doesn't provide index cards functionality (interface). Also a huge drawback with this one is that I down't own a license (it's expensive, and is provided by the university), and thus I can not really invest into it.
5. Mendeley. Seems to be a nice free alternative, but the "Notes" field is too hard to access, so - no index card functionality again.
6. Access (personal database). Seems to be a bulky, but viable solution.
7. Excel. That's what I'm doing so far. It is scalable, portable, higly visual, and generally very nice. The problems are: you need to keep your notes short if you wan't them to be easily exportable; it's hard to organize a 3-layered structure of "Topic / Idea / Sources" that I envision.

So overall I'm still undecided. I would probably go with a simple text-based personal wiki if only I could be sure about forward compatibility and future support. This thing, this database, would essentially become my external brain and external memory. I don't want to lose it 2-3 years from now for some stupid technical reasons.

Xenopus Tadpole drawing

To make my SfN poster prettier I decided to draw some tadpoles by hand, and include them as some ancor visual elements into the poster design. This one will be the biggest.