It’s that time of the week again: weekly status update time! This edition features: productivity presentations, demo video recording, programming flowcharts, failing consistently and the awesome that is Lana del Rey.
- On Tuesday it was my turn to give a talk for our weekly group lunch meeting. The thought of presenting my current unfinished research one more time made me want to throw up. So I decided to talk about productivity, project management and procrastination instead. Usually, I can’t share the slides of my talks, because they prominently feature explicit imagery, but for just this once, I can! It’s on SlideShare, so go ahead and spot the Doge:
- Recently I had to record a new demo video of my software to go with a conference submission. I just wanted to share two cool tools (cool tools? really?) that are a great help with this. The first is CamStudio and its amazing lossless codec (that was suggested to me by cpbotha.net). It’s a perfect open source solution for screen and audio recording. (edit: Bastijn warns us that there might be a trojan virus in camstudio binary of version 2.7.2, so be careful with that!) I’m a bit embarrassed about admitting to the second tool, but for post-processing I use Windows Live Movie Maker. Yes really! I use it for cutting, splitting, adding smooth transitions between segments and captions.
- I saw this programming flow chart on Twitter. That definitely sums it up for me. Doing a PhD too probably 😉
Programming flowchart - My three tasks a day were really torturing me this week. Instead of finishing all three, I consistently got only one done per day. I should really split them up into smaller tasks for next week, because this is frustrating as f#$% (can I drop f-bombs here? I’m not sure…).
- I wasn’t going to say anything because it could cost me my metal card ;), but wow, I am completely obsessed with Lana Del Rey. Amazing sultry voice, inspirational style, beauty, gorgeous make-up, this lady has it all! My favorites so far are Once upon a Dream, Young and Beautiful, Ride, Video Games and of course Born to Die (spoiler alert: she dies at the end!):
Careful with camstudio binary 2.7.2 (latest I think), it is infected with a trojan (artemis). So no a clean and remove if you have that version.
Ah thx for the tip! I am still safely at 2.6, but I’ll update the post with a warning 🙂
How about replacing procrastination with meditation and daily tasks with a weekly research programme? In my case that works better and meanwhile lets process sudden action points too.
Yea, I am a big fan of meditation (especially the mindfulness variant), but for real procrastinators it is really difficult to avoid procrastination (also see http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html). I am still all for the daily tasks, because they help me focus for the day. But yes, I do have a bigger plan (my scrum system) that I follow too.