Kimberly Hirsh

Want to read: Water 4.0 by David Sedlak 📚

Hi there! This morning the outdoor temperature is 44F. When I pick my kid up at 3 pm it will be 80F. Welcome to central North Carolina!

Another super informal poll! If you are a scholar, regardless of your relationship ship to academia (student/university employee/working outside academia), do you use Google apps like Docs, Sheets, & Slides?

According to this blog post, some of the core concepts of Learning Experience Design include:

• human-centered design
• constructive alignment
• learning environments

🔖 Read Plan to rewrite NC teacher licensing could also raise pay, but it’s too early to say

Educators, what do you think? I’m not sure about the options for evaluation, but I like the idea of teacher leaders getting paid for their leadership work.

I’m curious: if you are currently or have ever been in a graduate program, are you familiar with the concept of “personal knowledge management”?

🔖 Read Four Ingredients for a Memorable Learning Experience (LXD.org) by Rodrigo J. Gallego

Studying up on Learning Experience Design & Research. Feeling it out for a potential career pivot in 2024.

🔖 Read Learning Experience Design vs Instructional Design (LXD.org) by Niels Floor.

🔖 Read The incredible power of paper prototyping (LXD.org) by Niels Floor.

🔖 Read Dirty hands do all the thinking in LXD (LXD.org) by Patrick van der Bogt.

Feeling this.

As you may have noticed, I’m reading up on Learning Experience Design. LXCON 2017 resulted in a beautiful magazine. I highlighted this bit:

To reach a desired learning outcome you want to focus on four different types of learning objectives: insight, knowledge, skill and behavior. These learning objectives are about who you are, what your views are, what you know and what you choose to do.

Chatting with Casey about D&D this morning and I’m thinking about constructivist pedagogy and how the DM can create a gradual release of responsibility to the player.

Super informal survey but hey library workers, what would a professional organization that worked for YOU look like?

Took the Be Bright Studios Brand Quiz & it says mine is a “Generous Knowledge” brand which, yes.

Eventually I will get so annoyed with websites that are not responsive that I’ll start cold-quoting companies offering to fix that for them.

I’ve been feeling a need for increased witch vibes, so I slipped this pink agate in my pocket and drew a card from Visions in the Liminal Space this morning. You may never know the answer, so “Live the questions now,” as the deck’s guide quotes Rainer Maria Rilke.

Gonna write a romance where one love interest has Hashimoto’s and has to bail on a date due to low spoons & the other love interest is like, “Cool, let’s hang at home” and then later they get married and whoops it turned into my life.

Bless the people who create prefilled Easter baskets because this mom who usually loves filling her kid’s basket does NOT have the bandwidth this year.

Sat on my foot and now it’s numb, really missing AIMs circa 2002 from Kelly O’Shea reminding me not to do this.

Having big feelings because my favorite witch store’s owner moved away, even though the store has been online-only for a couple of years & I hadn’t seen the owner for a year or so before that. Just felt good knowing she was in town.

I’m Kimberly and today I just don’t feel like doing it, where it = anything.

I am a productivity hobbyist and have a bad habit of chucking my whole system every once in a while to try and adopt somebody else’s from scratch. This never works, though, and I inevitably end up rebuilding my own Frankenstein’s monster of tools. I started feeling this itch again recently, and after briefly flirting with Tiago Forte’s PARA method, decided to go back to basics and look at what I already know works for me before spending a lot of time switching things up.

Personal Productivity

Here’s what I’m using right now. I based the list on what kind of things are in a productivity stack on this Pleexy blog post.

Personal Task Management

I don’t like using software for this. There’s something about the feeling of pen on paper that makes me prefer it intensely. It does mean that my tasks are not linked to relevant email messages, as Tiago Forte suggests they should be, but I can use email labels to hold things for later in a sort of David Alleny method with folders like Waiting For, Read/Review, and Reference.

So because I prefer to do task management on paper, I use the Bullet Journal method and its companion app. I do a pretty vanilla implementation of the core collections and add custom collections as appropriate.

The notebook I prefer is a large hardcover squared Moleskine/. I’m experimenting right now with the expanded edition, since I usually go through a couple notebooks a year. At first I didn’t like the added weight or feeling of it in my hand, but now I’m used to it and it doesn’t seem that different from the regular one.

The pen I prefer is the Pilot G2 07 in black.

I also use tabs with my notebook: 1” ones across the top to mark the future log, this month, this week, and today, and 2” ones down the side for collections.

Calendar

The Bullet Journal Method includes a way to calendar, and I do use it some. But I mostly use Google Calendar for this. It’s useful for collaboration - my colleagues and my husband all use Google Calendar, so it’s easy to schedule things with/for them this way. I also schedule a lot of recurring tasks and appreciate being able to search to see when something happened in the past.

Note taking

The Bullet Journal is great for note-taking, too, but I have a tendency to ignore notes once I get them on paper. For short notes that I want to be easily accessible, I use Google Keep. I use recurring reminders with these. For example, I have a list of all my meds and a recurring reminder to fill my cases with them, and a list that pops up every day of stuff M. needs to be ready to go to school.

Longer notes end up in my blog, which I host on Micro.blog, or in Google Docs. This is an area where I could grow. If I decide to really get into personal knowledge management, I’ll probably experiment with some other tools. I’ve tried Evernote and Notion in the past and neither of them is quite right for what I’d imagine doing.

Focus

I use Forest, but I use it pretty inconsistently. When I’m in flow, I don’t really need this kind of app. As I do more writing, though, I might use it more.

Time management

I could use Forest for this, too, and I might. So far I don’t do a lot of time tracking.

Habit tracker

These never work for me, so I don’t bother with one.

Automation

I don’t do this much, either. I like a bit of friction in my workflow. As I keep refining it, I may discover areas that could benefit from automation, though.

Scholarly Productivity

Scholarly productivity requires its own specialized set of tools. Here’s what I use.

Citation management and reading

I use Paperpile for both citation management and scholarly reading. It integrates seamlessly with Google Docs for writing. It has its own built-in reader interface available on web or mobile. It costs about $30/year and I love it. It has completely eliminated lots of document-syncing headaches I had in the past when I used Zotero.

Literature tracking and notes

I use the labels and folders in Paperpile, along with Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method for this. I track a given body of literature using a Notion spreadsheet I created. You can get it (pay-what-you-can starting at $0) here.

Keeping up with literature

I use a combination of Google Scholar alerts and journal alerts for this.

Mind-mapping

I use bubbl.us.

Writing pipeline

I track my writing pipeline in Notion, with a database that lets me view it as a list or as a kanban-board according to stage in the publication process. I have a pay-what-you-can (again, starting at $0) template you can download for that.

Revisions

I have a revisions database in Notion for each paper, as well. I haven’t made this available as a template yet, but I plan to soon. Sign up for my Newsletter if you want to find out when it goes live. It will be pay-what-you-can like the others.

Permissions

If you are using images from others’ work in scholarly publishing, you will need to obtain and track permission to use that work. I do that in a Notion database. You can get my template. (As always, pay-what-you-can, $0.)

Areas for growth

There are two big gaps in my productivity stack right now. One is the difficulty in serendipitously serving up notes to myself. The kinds of connections that build creativity aren’t readily available using Google Docs or Keep. I started to build a personal wiki for this purpose but I think the amount of labor required to keep it up was too high. I’ll probably play with Notion for this some more, but I might just keep putting stuff on my website and occasionally scrolling through categories there to find connections.

The other big gap is REVIEW. I don’t have a solid review process. I’ve tried timers and time blocking and so far they haven’t worked for me. But I know all of this would work much better for me if I dedicated the time to review it, so I will keep working on figuring that out.

I hope it’s been helpful for you to read about my productivity stack. What’s in yours?

I really am amazed that as an autoimmune Kimberly I used to just let people breathe all over me.

If high-risk people have to be individually responsible for mitigating their risk, employers should be expected to treat risk mitigation as a reasonable accommodation for ADA purposes.