- learn how to touch type (it takes about 3 months or less with 3 hours per week of practice):see http://www.typingweb.com/ which has free & awesome touch typing courses
- learn keyboard shortcut keys
- remember you are not an average joe person in terms of computer using intensity and learning skills, so hunt-and-peck typing, or not using keyboard shortcuts is not good (ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE A STUDENT IN COMPUTER SCIENCE AREA OR IF YOU DO PROGRAMMING FOR LIVING).
record and quantify how much you work
- daily, weekly, yearly
- on each course, assignment, chapter,...
- on each research project, and sub projects
- for paperwork, for research proposal,
- using of a time-tracking software is advised (free ones should be enough for personal time-tracking)For example see gnotime
- one cannot work a lot on a constant basis. It is ok if you do it before submitting your research proposal etc.
- However, in general working for long hours constantly will decrease your motivation and efficiency thus it is not good for you in the long term. The point is not to work a lot but working efficiently.
- Aim to work 40 hours at least and don't go beyond 50 hours weekly.
- Make sure your efficiency (total time assigned to work/total time recorded) is in between 75% to 90%.
- Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy (google books / amazon
)
- Getting Things Done by David Allen ( google book / amazon
)
HAVE A REGULAR SLEEP ORDER as you use your brain a lot as a graduate student.
exercise REGULARLY: invest in your body as much as you invest in your head!
- 24h-8h(sleep) = 16h usable time daily
- 7 x 16 = 112h weekly usable time
- 112-40 = 72h available for anything else than work
- 3h x 2 = 6hours of exercising weekly:
- 6h/72h = %8 of non-work time => NO EXCUSE for exercising !!!
meet regularly with you supervisor
- be prepared and organized for this meeting:
- have a list of questions
- have a list of the things to discuss with your supervisor
- have the supporting documents/files with you in an organized fashion
know beforehand how-much time you can take off yearly
- discuss this with your supervisor
know your finances
- know how much money you will have EXACTLY as of September 1st every year
- know when and how-much you will get money, and you are supposed to pay tuition etc
save money
- cook your own food (not always of course)
- plan weekly your lunch (at least)
- buy cold-pack and lunch bag, and bring food to office
- every week check out grocery fliers online to see if your favorite foods are on sale. If so, buy tons of them. This can enable you save up to 50% on grocery bills.
socialize for a reasonable amount of time every week
Learn LaTeX
learn how to use citeulike for bibliography purposes
put ALL of your research/grad studies activity in a single LaTex file
- include every individual activity as a separate file*
- turn on and off files, by commenting/uncommenting \includefile command, depending on your daily needs
learn THE VERY BASICs of:
- a low level language: Fortran/C/C++
- bash scripting: grep, sed, awk
- Linux operating system
- symbolic/numeric math software:
- Wxmaxima
- Mathematica
- Maple
- Octave
- Matlab
- xmgrace
- gnuplot
- learn how to automate things by writing scripts. for example don't do the followings by hand: compile a code with specific linked libs and options; run the code for input 1, .... input 20; for each output plot a data to GUI, generate .eps files, and move them to a certain folder; put these .eps files in a latex document; compare each output with another output, ...etc.
- don't be afraid of computers/computer problem as you are a graduate student who is expected to able to solve problems and who is expected to have good learning skills. So, learn from every problem that you experience, if someone solves a problem for you, write up a howto document right away as you will not remember the solution even next day and as you don't want to bug that person again.
- Use Google and online forums (a lot) to seek for guides/howtos/solutions for computer tricks/problems.
