I spend some time (ok, much more than I should) thinking about how to work more productively - primarily, with research and writing because I feel like I don’t get as much time to do these as I really want. As a consequence, I’m a fan of colleagues such as Raul Pacheco-Vega, Mark S. Reed and Pat Thomson who publish very sound and helpful advice on their websites, social media and in their publications.

Encouraged by my recent reading of The Productive Researcher by Mark S. Reed and, in particular, his ‘How to write a literature review in one week’ I set about trying to be much more productive in my reading today.

I’m not, incidentally, trying to write a literature review in one week.

Today, I managed to take notes on 18 articles relating to a conference paper that I am due to give at the end of June. Whether you think that number is impressive or not, it is more than I would usually manage, particularly when I also had to search various databases as well! I took a few lessons from Prof. Reed’s book:

  1. I concentrated on being focused on this one task - and not trying to do several things during the day
  2. I was as discerning as possible about what I read - only spending time on articles I was fairly confident would say something that I would then use in the final work.
  3. I did not try to read the whole article - despite knowing that many colleagues already do this, it is my usual practice to spend time on each article, reading it all, highlighting and making notes.
  4. I also did not create ‘rhetorical precis’ for each article as I would usually (previously?) do. (This is a technique, learnt from Raul Pacheco-Vega, that I find useful as a way to really think about the value and purpose of an article, but the process is slooooow).
  5. I captured notes using the system that Prof. Reed suggests - a simple spreadsheet with three columns:
    1. Quotations from the article (I preceeded them with the page number)
    2. A column for notes or comments from me, which is blank in most cases
    3. The reference for the article - just the author’s name because I stored the citations in RefWorks

The result of this is a file with notes from a pleasing range of articles, most of which is useful for the writing that I will be doing.

I may not have worked an 8 hour day today, but I’ve achieved considerably more than I expected to…