I’m not the only dedicated professional who takes his work seriously enough to stop doing it around dinner time. Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to being a productive academic, he’s also written several successful non-academic books. [1] In Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Newport introduces […]
simplify
Start With the Constraint
It’s possible that the most important moment in my teaching career came not while teaching, but while speaking to a beautiful young woman I dated at the start of my career. I was a first-year teacher, and I was introducing this woman to what my working life was like. “Some days,” I told her, “the […]
As Little Flash as Possible
If you look at a sampling of my blog posts over the years (here’s an organized list), you’ll notice that I went through a phase of believing that every blog post needed an image (here are some examples). Eventually, I gave the practice up, deciding to stop spending time — small though it was — on making title images. […]
“You Don’t Need More Time…
…you just need to decide.” — Seth Godin I’ve asked 11,683 people who subscribe to the newsletter a simple question: What’s the most frustrating thing about your job? In these responses, the word “time” appears 2,437 times. Here are some examples: Not enough time and too many expectations placed on teachers that are not in […]
Better and Saner Grading Tip: Start with the End
Grading is not fun. I do not like grading. Therefore, my goal in grading is always this: do it as efficiently as possible. For the sake of really zeroing in here, let’s be clear on the meaning of efficient — see Figure 1. I like a lot of things about this “define efficient” Google result. When […]