Cleaning out the information stream

During my recent holidays, I realized that I am not absorbing much of all the information that the internet constantly pours over me. Usually, I have several tabs open (mailboxes, news, social media sites, blogs,..) which continuously pour out information - and usually I can only scroll through and try to catch a few grains here and there. Still, it started taking me too much time, so I decided to do some major cleaning to start the year fresh.

Here's a few information channels that got clogged up with random noise:

1. Newsletters
I seem to have a constant stream of newsletters flowing into my mailbox, from every possible store I've ever visited and every company I've ever used a service from. Usually, I just delete these message without even opening them - but it still generates a lot of mail. And it still triggers me to check my mailbox (too) often to see if there's a new shiny thing in there. I now am opening every unwanted mail, and unsubscribing or marking these messages as spam (if it's not possible to unsubscribe).

2. Blog subscriptions
After not reading my Google Reader for a week, I had almost 300 posts to weed through. I realized that some (even most) subscriptions did not match my current interest anymore. For a while, I followed a lot of fashion blogs, learning how to put together a nice outfit from cheap stores and thrift stores. I also followed frugality blogs for a while, to get my personal finance together. Then, I also followed exercise and nutrition blogs. For all of these, I reevaluated the situation. I now only kept the subscription to blogs of which I still enjoy reading almost every single post, and I am very thankful for everything I learned through blogs or categories of blogs which I am not actively following anymore.

3. Facebook
With over 800 likes and over 500 friends, my facebook had turned into a museum of myself - and not a platform for interaction. I've significantly reduced the number of friends to people I genuinely interact with, and I'm working on reducing the number of likes. Hopefully, in a few months I'll have a newsfeed without much noise in it again.

4. Twitter
Likewise, my Twitter account was turning into an archive of past interests and memories. I've made some space in my following list, so I can focus again on the information I'm really after, and make some space for new ideas.

Five pitfalls to avoid when working from home

For the past two years, I haven't had much opportunities to work from home as I have been very busy with my experiments in the lab. I do have the habit to squeeze in some hours during the weekend, but only recently I've worked a full office day from home (either on purpose, or because I had to be at home for some maintenance works/expected mail/...).

Working from home has the incredible advantage that no one can come in and disturb you, but at the same time it might feel harder to work from home.

Here are typical pitfalls for working from home, and how to avoid them.

1. Not getting into work-mode

You might feel tempted to clean up the kitchen, put another load of laundry into the washer... Quickly, before you are "really" going to get started. And then you go and browse the interwebs... And before you know, it's time for lunch already. Even though I don't have a designated work area at home (I can use my desk, my computer desk, the living room or the balcony to work from), I do need to switch my brain into work-mode and ignore all other distraction at home before I really can get started.

2. Not setting boundaries

When you're already at home, it's harder to decide when it's time to call it quits for today and go home. I find it helpful to define my task for the day, and just be satisfied if I can finish it by the time I would typically leave my office. Admittedly, I find this one quite difficult.

3. Isolation

This one is more a challenge for students working from distance and/or working part-time on their PhD. Not being in your research group and having the regular chitchat with fellow PhD students can make you feel isolated, as described here.

4. Losing focus

The downside of having a day of quiet peace, is that it might be too quiet - which makes it tempting to doze off or let your thoughts wander unlimitedly. I've tried to solve this by changing my work-space in the house (giving me some variety) and by setting regular breaks (which is hard when it's so peaceful and quiet that you can get completely absorbed in material and forget about the world around you).

5. Missing tools

It might be out of your hands to solve this pitfall. I, for example, cannot remote control my office computer from home because of an incompatibility in the operating systems. However, when I plan to work from home, I check and double-check to see if I have all necessary data, papers and documents with me to carry out the task at hand.

Which pitfalls have you come across when working from home and how did you solve them?

Literature review - The sequel

I previously wrote about my method of tackling the giant mountain of papers I want to read for my literature review.

As suggested in the comments, I changed my way of organizing the printed copies of the papers. Instead of having them organized by subject - which was becoming more and more complicated, I've followed the suggestion to organize them alphabetically on last name of the first author.

Since I had already worked my way through more than 300 documents, it took me about 2,5 hours to reorganize my binders full of material. But I don't think that was a waste of time, contrarily, it gave my very interesting insights.

As I was organizing the papers by author, I started to question myself. I had one small binder with my "most important" papers. Somehow, I discovered that most of the papers I read were actually fitting into the story I  am building up in my mind.

My research topic is somewhere in the middle of three different topics. I'm pulling material from papers on bridge engineering (slab bridges), papers on beam shear and papers on punching shear. I've noticed that not that many authors have published material on, for example, both beam shear and punching shear. Some authors before the 1960s explored the borders of these subject, but later on researchers started to focus on one topic in particular.

Now that had all this material going through my hands again, I started to see some links. I started to notice how a basic idea was employed in different topics, and too, felt like I now can see my topic from different angles, without thinking too much in rigid subjects.

Thanks again for the comments on my previous post! As you can see, it gave me some very good ideas.