My notebook is the center of my day-to-day workflow. In it I track what I need to do, what I am doing, what we’ve discussed in a meeting, and countless other things. It isn’t terribly often that I actually go back more than a week or so to look at things — I tend to transfer long-term notes into digital storage after I’ve processed them — but they’re still there, and I find the very act of writing with pen helpful.

However, it isn’t just an ad-hoc thing where I write without structure. There is quite a bit of structure to how I use the notebook, and it helps immensely as I plan and execute my work.

I have tried a number of different productivity systems over the years. Some have worked better than others. I’ve tried:

• Simple paper to-do lists (‘war lists’)
• Org-Mode for Emacs, trying for Getting Things Done
• One Minute To-Do List in Wunderlist
• taskwarrior
• Taskpaper
• Wunderlist
• Hipster PDA
• Flying by the seat of my pants

One of my favorite people-and-preference papers is Kahneman, Wakker, and Sarin’s 1997 article ‘Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility’. They report on a series of experiments that examine how people experience and remember utility, pain, or pleasure, and the ways in which it affects their decision-making processes.

As professors, we get a lot of e-mails. One of these classes of e-mails is the prospective student e-mail, which comes in wildly varying quality. This takes time from faculty, enough that many have written guides to e-mailing or specific requirements for e-mailing them and receiving a reply; I have a version of this myself.

The standard advice is to be specific about your interest in the particular faculty member you are e-mailing, and demonstrate at least an awareness of what it is that they are working on.

However, there is a flip side to this: if we are going to expect cold e-mailers to be familiar with certain information about us an dour work prior to e-mailing, then we need to make that information clear and accessible. If we don’t, it’s a bit like the planning commission filing notice of intent to demolish Arthur Dent’s house in a disused filing cabinet in an inaccessible basement, though perhaps with less dire consequences.

In the course of training to be a scientist, you generally learn some statistics and probability theory. I’ve grown to be quite fond of the topic, but as I’ve learned it, there are a few things in particular that I’ve found brilliantly satisfying. Simple tricks, some of which may seem counter-intuitive, but for some reason fascinated me when I grasped them.

Here are a few of them.