Three tasks a day keeps the procrastination away

These last few months I have adopted an amazingly low-tech morning routine to start my workday consisting of selecting the three tasks I want to get done today. Sometimes our task managers can get flooded with an overload of tasks and this overload can make it hard to focus. This feeling of being overwhelmed can quickly turn into procrastination if you let it. For me it helps to pick three things that I at least want to get done that day as the first thing I do when I get to work. I am of course not the first person to think of something like this, but I just want to share this as a simple tip.

My desk setup
My desk setup with the three tasks system in the upper left (and lots of cable clutter I’m not too proud of)

New publication: Lymphatic drainage pathways from the cervix uteri

In a previous post, I mentioned I made a 3D interactive pdf for a medical publication. This paper was recently accepted at the Gynecologic Oncology journal and it is now available online: Lymphatic drainage pathways from the cervix uteri; implications for radical hysterectomy? I’ll try and do a little ‘Science in plain English’, for those interested but not all that familiar with the medical jargon.

A hysterectomy is a surgical treatment for early-stage cervical cancer where the womb is taken out. Typically also part of the lymphatic system in the region is removed to prevent the cancer from spreading. There are different types of hysterectomies that vary by how much tissue is taken out:

Pelvic 3D model (finger)painting with the Leap Motion

One of the cool things about being a PhD is that you can sometimes enjoy working with super-smart MSc students. It gets even more awesome when aforementioned super-smart MSc students do super-awesome stuff and you get to watch! This afternoon I lent out the Leap Motion to Cees-Willem Hofstede and here’s what he managed to do in a couple of hours:

That’s right, he uses WebGL and the Leap Motion to allow the user to interact with a 3D model of the human pelvis and to paint on this model using his fingers and what I imagine must be several magic incantations! This is just a first proof-of-concept, so more news as it emerges and hopefully I can record a better video for you soon too 🙂

Todoist!

By far the most popular post ever to grace this blog is the Comparison of Task Managers: Remember the Milk vs. Astrid vs. Wunderlist. Since I sneakily switched to Todoist three months ago, I now updated the blogpost to include that in the comparison. That post shallt henceforth be  known as: ‘Comparison of Task Managers: Remember the Milk vs. Astrid vs. Wunderlist vs. Todoist! To make this current post not entirely devoid of content, here’s a screenshot of my Todoist set-up:

todoist
Note the pretty project colors, my busy day, Karma stats in the top right and overall awesome design of Todoist ^^

Using Evernote to organize your PhD

Ideas, meeting minutes, lab journal notes, paper summaries, travel information, graduate school homework and project notes. During your life as a PhD you generate, process and receive so much information that organizing all of this can be a daunting task. Luckily there is great software that can help you get organized by making it easy to collect and find information across your devices. For me personally, Evernote is the best fit, so in this post I’ll show you how I use Evernote to organize my PhD.

Poster

STW Jaarcongres 2013 poster
Presented a poster at the STW Jaarcongres 2013 last week