AKA “Surviving the Open Office.” I typically don’t have earbuds in when I’m working, but when it is too quiet or too noisy or I am distracted by other thoughts, they help. In fact sometimes they help on their own – I put them in, get sidetracked before playing anything, and find I’m already working better!

However, the placebo effect does not always work, and I’ve been gathering options for what to play through those earbuds.

1. The One-Song Playlist

I’m a very lyrics-oriented person, which means music with lyrics is in general a poor choice to listen to if I’m trying to get work done. The exception is a short “focus” playlist, an idea I got (via some other forgotten blog post) from Joseph Mosby’s post The Psychology of a Small Playlist on Repeat. The idea is that as you listen to a song on repeat, it fades away from your conscious attention, while still occupying parts of your brain that might otherwise interfere with your focus. I’ve had success with a playlist of 3 favorites – by the third time through they are completely gone from my awareness.

What songs to use? Songs you already like listening to a large number of times. I would probably avoid pairing songs that are extremely different in character – a low, slow song followed by a loud, intense song might still jar you – but otherwise it’s an entirely personal choice.

2. Lyric-less Playlists

I have a few bookmarked Spotify playlists that are good for working. No lyrics, not too much dynamic range within any given song, a good steady beat – those are my criteria.

I started with Brain Food, a Spotify-curated list of “hypnotic electronic.” Some of the tracks I skip but overall it’s still a good choice. I fool around with a variety of trance playlists sometimes, such as ~ Trance Chillout ~, but every one has tracks I have to skip because they’re too jarring, or they have lyrics despite the “absolutely no lyrics” promise of the playlist description, or because there’s a sound that moves quickly from ear to ear and causes me actual pain.

Later I learned about Retrowave, music inspired by 80s movie soundtracks and video game music, and two same-name playlists became my go-tos: RetroWave / Outrun by Spotify, and the longer Retrowave / Outrun by fatmagic. They’re still my standards, with Brain Food coming in for the occasional change.

3. Non-Music Options

Sometimes even instrumental music is too distracting for me, and sometimes I just want a change. Spotify has white noise playlists, but I find the jumps from track to track very noticeable, so for those situations I have a collection of bookmarked noise-generation sites.

The first I discovered was Coffitivity, recordings of a coffee shop at different times of day. There are three long tracks available for free, and three more if you pay a small annual fee.

For nature noises I have been enjoying Noisli, which lets you layer tracks at individual volumes; it includes various nature-based tracks plus a cafe, train, and some more white-noise-ish options. I enjoy dry leaves blowing around paired with a quiet stream, or paired with a rainstorm for a physically impossible combination of sounds. Rain + train is another good combination as long as you keep the train volume down. I tried to pair cafe and fire, but I could never find the sweet spot for the fire volume between “way too prominent” and “so quiet it just sounds like static.”

The most recent additions to my rotation are the many generators from myNoise. I have barely scratched the surface of the long list, but the tonal drone and soundscape generators are what I’m drawn to: musical without having a melody, a slowly evolving soundscape. The feature that differentiates myNoise from other sound sites is that every track is split out by pitch, even its nature tracks, and each pitch’s volume is adjustable separately. That allows you to adjust the track based on your preferences, your hearing, or the background noise you are trying to drown out. I tend to like the “brown” preset, which makes the lowest pitch loudest and brings down the volume gradually as the pitch increases. The site has bandwidth limitations and other restrictions at the free tier, but even a $5 donation removes those permanently. It is hard to pick a generator to recommend specifically, but the one I found first was Osmosis, one of the soundscape generators; from there I went to Northern Lights, a tonal drone. Those will give you the idea!

Adorable doodle by ElisaRiva on Pixabay.

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Back in late September I managed to overextend one of my hip flexors (via slow, controlled motions) to the point of a multi-day painful limp. I’d fallen out of my exercise and stretching practices over the summer and been sitting nearly all day long at work. The process of getting back into shape wasn’t fun, but now that I’m well in the habit again it’s fine and the benefits are huge. I thought I’d write about the prongs of my plan.

As with anything like this your mileage may vary, and you should consult a doctor before beginning any new exercise program. This has worked for me and my particular circumstances and I present it in the hopes that it could be helpful or at least inspirational to others.

1. Work out regularly and stretch daily.

My exercise is walking the mile to and from work (total of 40 minutes, 4-5 days per week), working out 20-30 minutes before work 4 mornings a week, and at least 30 minutes of something (walking, elliptical) each weekend day. I do the morning workouts to add weight lifting and more-intense cardio to the mild cardio I get otherwise.

After work I stretch – and I can tell the difference when I don’t, even though I’m not holding the stretches for a particularly long time. The important ones are chest and hip flexors, though I also do hamstrings and calves. I do them all in a doorway, using it for resistance for the chest stretch and balance for the hip flexor stretch.

2. Stand for a while after warming up your body and watch your posture both sitting and standing.

In my anti-desk-job exercise reading, one article pointed out that if you exercise before work, your body is healing and regenerating in whatever posture you put it in at work – good or bad. My reaction to that is to try to stand for the first hour at work, since tight hip flexors are my particular area of concern. I have a sit/stand desk so it’s generally not difficult (except that at first it felt like a penance).

Of course, whether sitting or standing you can have poor posture. Mind your shoulders, abs, and the tilt of your pelvis – along with everything else I found myself standing in a sway-backed position.

3. Fold in specifically anti-desk-job exercise at least occasionally.

You can find many anti-sitting workouts online, including these four that stood out to me: Boston Workbar (most recommended of the lot), SparkPeople, The Art Of Manliness, and Bodybuilding.com.

I ended up writing my own, focusing on mobility and strength exercises and keeping the stretching fairly generic (since I also do it at the end of the day). I have two routines that I alternate between for a week out of every month or so. Both start with a 10-minute cardio video to warm up; afterward I stretch thoroughly, making sure to hit lower and upper calves, hamstrings and glutes, outer hips, quads and hip flexors, chest, shoulders, back, and triceps.

Here’s my routine – except for a few notes below I’m leaving exercise descriptions to the links above.

For a nice 30-minute workout do 15 reps of each exercise, per side if applicable, or 30 seconds holding the planks, plus the video and stretching. For a 45-minute workout, do a second set of 15.

* Sliding reverse lunge is a rear lunge where you slide your foot back instead of stepping back. If you’re on a hard floor, put a towel under your foot; if you’re on carpet, use a paper plate.
Drinking bird is my name for what Boston Workbar calls single-leg hinge to anterior tap and most people call single-leg deadlift.
Hip circles are a la Bodybuilding.com and probably the single best takeaway from that routine.

Happy New Year!

Garden statue photo by 4175959 on Pixabay.

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I started my work life as a mathematician. My ongoing work was research, the content of which was up to me. Research fit in around teaching classes, which were scheduled for me; attending seminars and meetings (up to 3 a week typically); and holding office hours, scheduled as I chose. Through most of my time as a web developer, I’ve had one significant weekly meeting and the possibility of a handful of smaller ones, but the rest of my time is mine. Furthermore, one of my duties is to learn new things to meet the needs of the designs or simply to implement them in a better way than I previously knew how. What those new things are is up to me.

This means for my entire career I’ve been in charge of the majority of my work schedule and content. The key measure of my work has been “how much did you get done?” Hours per week have been borderline irrelevant, and working outside the bounds of the 9-5 weekday schedule has been the norm. Figuring out how to shape and structure my work life has been a process.

There are two key challenges:
1. How do you get yourself to work hard when your schedule is so open?
I find that having too much time to accomplish something breeds procrastination. Conversely:
2. How do you define “enough work” when you could (should?) always be doing more?
This is a problem mathematicians are prone to, I found, because there is no definition of “enough research.” It can lead to guilt over any time that could be spent working and isn’t, but less productivity during work hours due to burnout. Since there are far too many technologies to master – or truly, even to become conversant with – in any reasonable length of time, the problem has followed me to web development.

Here are five key components to effective scheduling that I’ve identified.

1. Priorities

If the collection of work you would ideally be doing is more than the amount of time available to do that work, you have to decide what’s more important or pressing and what can be let go of for the time being. This would seem to go without saying, but the amount of work required to figure out priorities surprised me when I left mathematics. I started out with a feint at professional craft design; it and web development both require a wide variety of skills that optimally you would have but clearly can’t learn all together, all at once. There are also unlimited options for projects to work on. Where to start? What’s okay to save for later?

My point here is really just to expect that prioritizing your work will take time and thought. In addition to thinking about, say, what new skill is going to have widest applicability or which project will improve your portfolio the most, pay attention to the things you know you should do but really don’t like. For me as a crafter that was what I called “the hustle”: actively trying to sell my patterns and solicit new work opportunities. I had to prioritize that very highly or I would never have done any of it.

2. Slack

Slack is the idea of unscheduled time, leaving gaps in your timeline to accommodate unforeseen problems, tasks taking longer than they “ought,” and new ideas, such as recording a blog post outline or sketching a plan to refactor some piece of code. Slack keeps those unforeseen problems from wreaking havoc with your entire day and allows you to capture the new ideas before they flit away again. You may not have much ability to build in slack when a deadline is bearing down on you, but most of the time you can simply make sure the amount on your to do list is a little less than what you expect to be able to get done in a day.

As a sidebar, slack is relevant to your physical environment too. You need space to work in, of course, but what can be lost is open space to, say, set a box on while you get something out of it, or stash a few things gathered over the weekend for a Tuesday meeting.

I got the term “slack” from the book Scarcity, in which you can read an excerpt discussing the need for both physical and schedule slack.

3. Critical Mass

I get more done when I have sufficient conflicts to make my time more precious – but only up to a point. Too many conflicts become counter-productive again. I experienced this in my teaching schedule; each quarter I would teach 0, 1, or 2 courses. Relative to the amount of time available, the one-course terms were my most productive research terms.

The number of outside demands on your time is not necessarily something you can control, but this notion does imply that canceling obligations may not be the answer to getting more done. You may be able to make your own conflicts by deciding to do X at a given time and get Y done beforehand; this doesn’t work well for me but may for someone else.

4. Deadlines

Deadlines are a self-manager’s best friend. If it doesn’t matter when something gets done, no matter how good it would be in principle to do, it likely won’t happen. Self-imposed deadlines are nearly as good as external deadlines; setting them on those “I should learn this / improve this” projects can help that work not get lost among the work other people are waiting on.

I am most productive on big projects if I work backwards from the final deadline to set intermediate deadlines – with slack built in! I edited my textbook over the course of three months or so by counting the number of sections in the book and dividing them up among the weeks to my deadline, with occasional light weeks for catch-up time. I do the same with web development projects, listing the features I want to add and splitting them out over the time until my deadline.

5. Stopping

Taking time off is critical for avoiding burnout, and ultimately getting more done than if you tried to work 80 hours per week. This can be another way to get the critical mass of conflicts to push you into higher productivity: “I’m not working tonight, so I have to get this done now.” (This version of making your own conflicts does work for me.)

Time off is also an important step in learning and problem solving. Between consecutive mathematics classes the students have “soak time” to internalize the vocabulary and concepts – I don’t remember where I got the term, but I quite like it; it is one of the reasons compressed summer courses can be more challenging than regular semester courses. In problem solving you need to pound data into your brain, of course, but then walk away and let your brain sort and reconnect the information unconsciously for a while. This can happen while you’re working on something else, but is more likely to happen while you’re on a walk or in the shower.

Putting Them Together

So, then, how do you work hard and define “enough”?

Define your goals: determine your highest-priority tasks and break them down into pieces that you can accomplish in a smallish amount of time (up to a few days is ideal for me).

Assign deadlines: if you have external deadlines (typically for larger chunks of work) work backward to split them out into intermediate deadlines. Account for conflicts and other work needs, and build in slack. Make your own deadlines for other work, but don’t overload any given time period.

From deadlines, create to do lists.

Embrace schedule conflicts as motivators.

Stop when you’ve finished your list for the day. If you’ve made your list from your priorities and deadlines (whether self-imposed or external), checking it off is enough. Breathe deep.

Photo of Maria Spelterini crossing Niagara Falls from Wikimedia Commons.

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I’m pretty obsessed with organization and productivity systems, and regularly try to upgrade mine. Of course as my life situation changes my organizational needs do too. Currently I’m working with:

• Binder for 5.5″x8.5″ paper with monthly calendar, week-in-view pages, and a section for ongoing and long-term to do lists
• Staple-bound two-year calendar (monthly, small) for carting around if need be
• Asana for business projects and some individual items: programming and blog post ideas and relevant links, gory details of large programming projects
• Assorted notebooks and looseleaf for meeting notes and to do items to be processed

It is rather a lot, but there is a lot to keep track of. The hub is the binder, which holds all the scheduling and long-term to do lists (not necessarily with all their details, of course). Asana is the equivalent of the binder for my team; we stash everything there. Everything else is supplemental.

Here are some comments on why I use the items I do.

Asana is a system we learned about through my business partner’s husband, who uses it at work. It’s a great way to coordinate a team. We use it for to do lists, idea lists, running conversation, and sharing files. Like any system, it has its drawbacks (in particular, I wish I’d known before I got embedded into the built in “Personal Tasks” workspace that I wouldn’t have the ability to rearrange the project list there), but it makes it pretty easy to stay coordinated and get necessary information back and forth.

The to do list section is a recent addition to the binder. I realized the binder wasn’t really the centerpiece if it only had scheduled items and daily to do lists, which of course can’t be made terribly far in advance. When I was first getting myself organized post-professorial-life, I tried Getting Things Done, the system in David Allen’s book of the same name. I still haven’t read the book; that first link is a summary, and you can read GTD information on zenhabits and 43 Folders sufficient to get going.

The takeaways at this point are Inbox Zero (which is never literal for me, but I try to keep my email inbox to one screen and keep my paperwork under control) and emptying my brain. I’ve started a weekly brain dump, writing down everything I want or need to do, regardless of deadline or importance. That information is then parceled out onto lists by category. Note that this doesn’t necessarily help you prioritize or select things to focus on, or give you any benchmark for “enough” work in a day; when I was attempting to be a professional crafter, I used a version of David Seah’s Printable CEO to score points for various activities. I’m not doing that right now, but if I were to try to be a freelancer I would probably turn back to it.

The binder itself stemmed from the realization that one reason my hardbound planner wasn’t working was that when I am really busy I turn to looseleaf to organize myself. I thought with a binder I could have my cake and eat it too, with pages that could be left out but then be put back. I still use looseleaf sometimes, but far less often.

Most of the binder is Scattered Squirrel printable planner pages, in case you’re looking for such things. I also crafted some items for it, which you can see in the craft blog post that shares a name with this one.

The staple-bound calendar was intended for my purse, but I’ve downsized the purse situation past where it fits. However, if I’m going somewhere where I’ll want to know my schedule, I can take it along. Once a week I synchronize my calendars.

I love notebooks. Paper is my friend. To make sure my notebooks love me back I try to use the Bullet Journal system. Mine’s a weak approximation, but I mark to dos with a checkbox, points of information with a bullet, and things I need to look into with an eye, and number all the pages and leave space at the beginning for a table of contents, which I try to update regularly. The Bullet Journal system doesn’t work at all for my day to day random jottings, but it’s terrific for meetings. I also find the right-arrow notation for to do items that have been rewritten in a different list extremely helpful.

This notebook, others, and random bits of paper I’ve written on are taken care of during the weekly GTD brain dump.

Finally, a note on something I don’t use, but have tried out in the past: a blog editorial calendar. I would write plans in and then change 90% of them, even multiple times. It works far better for me to keep lists of ideas, then text files for the baby steps (despite my love of paper, I most often blog entirely electronically), and then draft posts once they’re reasonably close to ready. The only scheduling I do now (aside from scheduling finished posts for future publication) is via putting specific posts on my to do lists.

When I was preparing to change careers from being a math professor, I considered professional organizing, and looked at their professional development to see what I could learn. There I had a general principle articulated to me that I’ve tried to abide by ever since: suit the system to the habit, don’t try to change the habit to suit the system. For instance, if you do something at the dining table that “should” be done at a desk, you’ll be more successful in staying organized if you give the necessary materials tidy homes in the dining room than if you try to force yourself to start working at a desk. All planner systems should abide by this principle – they should work with you, not force you to change yourself to work with them. I’m sure mine isn’t fully tweaked yet, but using a planner with removable pages and not using a blog editorial calendar despite all advice to do so are both ways I’ve tried to make working with my system a downstream swim rather than against the current.

Notebook photo by jarmoluk on Pixabay.

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The career counseling didn’t actually lead me to programming and web design – after a sidetrack to consider professional organizing I decided to make a go of my crafting as a business. I learned a lot about myself in the process, though, via questions and introspection and reading my old diaries (oh dear). In particular, I realized I have two touchstones, and wrote a sort of personal manifesto.

puzzles

I like a lot of things that look different on the surface: miniatures, organization, programming, teaching, designing. The umbrella for all of them is puzzles: all of these things have a specific goal that you know when you’ve met, and require ingenuity, creativity, and perhaps a wide range of skills to accomplish.

Programming: the goal is a program that accomplishes a specific task, with sensible user interface and other behavior. In addition to working out algorithms, web applications require getting multiple programming languages to work together and creativity in making an attractive layout across a range of devices.

Teaching: the goal is getting the concepts across or the basics of the skill transmitted. It requires finding the sweet spot of enough detail to understand but not so much to overwhelm, determining the source of student difficulties, and thinking outside the box for analogies or illustrations.

Organization: the goal is to store objects in a useful and aesthetically pleasing fashion. The creativity is in thinking of different uses for limited space, and perhaps repurposing decorative objects so they are also functional.

Miniatures: the goal is to make something as true to its full-scale version as possible but at the specified size (at least for me. I don’t like miniature cabinets and drawers that don’t open). It requires some creative engineering and can benefit, again, from repurposing objects.

Crafting: my usual goal is to recreate a shape in fiber or satisfy a practical need with a crafted item. Inherently two-dimensional materials have to be put into three-dimensional form, supply limitations respected, and a suitable order of operations chosen so the piece goes together smoothly and as easily as possible.

Mathematical research is not a puzzle. Though it certainly requires creativity and breadth of skill, it is far too open-ended to be a puzzle.

None of these are puzzles with only a single correct answer, unlike most things called puzzles. They also vary in difficulty; I’ve focused on programming largely because I like my puzzles very hard (provided it is not because I must know the names of fifth century Scandinavian royalty or have insanely good fine motor skills).

my question is HOW

How do I make it fit? make it work? make do? get the message across? optimize?

more than meets the eye

I loved weirdness as a child. Myths, aliens, parallel universes, fairylands, the paranormal, animal intelligence, magic and advanced technology, things that worked by dream logic. I loved things that suggested those worlds were within reach, perhaps even hidden in unnoticed pockets of our own mundane world. I wanted there to be a hidden layer, another dimension, magical underpinnings, secret talents. I didn’t want mysteries to be explained, and although I am glad to be rational and realistic, my wonder and credulity were the saddest loss of growing up.

I started reading fantasy and science fiction in fifth grade, but even before that I liked Shel Silverstein and Daniel Pinkwater. I was fascinated by a book my mother had about gnomes, presenting them as though they were real and exploring their culture. I inhaled the von Daniken books about aliens building the pyramids and as an explanation for passages in Ezekiel. Even now, the story outline of Labyrinth, Lizard Music, Alice in Wonderland, and a lot of Gaiman’s work (Stardust, Neverwhere, Coraline, Mirrormask) is one of my favorites: ordinary person enters extraordinary world and has to survive and succeed at some task. The ordinary person has to figure out the logic of the new world, which is different from mundane logic but has its own internal consistency. (there’s a puzzle for you)

This love of magic worlds ties in with my desire to have miniature furniture work properly – otherwise it takes you out of the moment. It goes with the little bug habitats I made as a child. It quite possibly even explains my fervent love for Robyn Hitchcock.

means and ends

I wish to put my touch on the world in such a way as to add to the wonder of it. I want my daily work to be solving challenging puzzles.

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• Respect your students: Learn their names. Start and end on time to the best of your ability. Admit your mistakes and when you don’t know an answer. Answer questions without implying they are stupid ones. Set out all expectations in the syllabus and stick to them. Be prompt returning graded work.

   

• On fairness: Strike a balance in class between answering all questions and keeping lecture moving. Enforce the rules you set and do so consistently (to facilitate this, only set rules you really care about). Compassion is good, but keep the phrase “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” in mind when you are tempted to make concessions for a single student without a very good (e.g., dean’s office approved) reason – generosity to one student can be unfair to the rest of the class. Even what seems to be generosity to the entire class may not be; extending a deadline at the last minute does not benefit the students who did the right thing: buckled down and got it done by the original due date.

   

• Find your style in the classroom. There are many ways to engage with your students: tell jokes, ask them questions, ask them for their questions (noting that a sufficiently long pause will likely feel uncomfortably long at first), make a few mistakes on purpose, bring them to the board, walk among them, give them small group work. Figure out what behavior bothers you and what doesn’t. Do you care about attendance? tardiness? whispering? eating? reading the paper? sleeping? My recommendation is to ignore it unless it really bothers you, but do feel entitled to ban actions that get under your skin. I didn’t worry about any of those examples in general, but at the beginning of the semester I told the students that the standard in my classroom was whether an action was disruptive to other students. You can be late, but don’t plow through four students to sit in the middle of a row. You can eat, but make sure the packaging isn’t loud and the food doesn’t have much odor. Etc.

   

• If a student starts crying in your office, pass the tissues and carry on. Gently, of course. In my experience most crying students are embarrassed they couldn’t control themselves, and making a big deal out of it just makes things worse. The other two situations I can conceive of also bear this reaction: the student is glad to be crying because maybe it will make you feel bad, or the student is genuinely upset but is okay with you seeing that because they’re that comfortable in their own skin.

   

• Key elements to students liking you: Be clear, be accessible, care. Clarity is lecture organization, lecture content, and boardwork (don’t erase things you’ve just written, use the boards in a sensible order, erase thoroughly, don’t write across the lines in the board because that makes some people CRAZY). Accessibility is arriving at class early and staying late to answer questions, if possible, and having a variety of office hours to accommodate schedules. Caring is learning names, keeping track of how your students are doing, learning about them as individuals to whatever extent possible, and being responsive – if something really isn’t working in the classroom, change it. Students will forgive a multitude of sins if they see that you genuinely care about their success in your class.

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Out of this I’ve formed Opinions about traits one should avoid, lest one look like a crank.

The easiest is the true crackpot calling card: claiming something is true that was definitively proved false long ago, such as the ability to square the circle. Typically this comes with some argument about near-sightedness, essentially, where if you just expand your viewpoint you can use techniques of the greater universe to solve all problems. Sometimes these have explicit mystical/religious tones, or allusions to historical figures who were denied but were correct. They are my favorite to read but they are the most easily dismissed.

There are three more, however, that are potential traps for legitimate scientists. Cranks will often name-drop (leading one in a respected position to be careful about replying to their questions lest it be made to look as though you are collaborators). In a standard math paper there is no need to mention anyone who is not attached to the current or cited results, except perhaps in an acknowledgement for “helpful conversation.”

Cranks will frequently feel the need to show off possession of a huge body of knowledge, even if it’s not entirely relevant. This is especially true of results that are more abstract and/or difficult, such as the Axiom of Choice. I did, however, see a legitimate paper refer to the Axiom of Choice (with an exclamation point) before admitting that it wasn’t actually necessary for the object at hand. Including it did nothing but muddy the waters.

Finally, the trait that I see with nearly every crank is urgency in claiming credit and differentiating one’s own work from that previously existing, almost to the point of defensiveness. This is easy to find in certain legitimate mathematicians’ work as well, though, if they are trying to prove themselves or otherwise have a chip on their shoulders. I read a paper where, after giving an approach that was of a similar bent, the author was quick to point out that it was similar at a high level only, and not in actual methodology.

The mathematicians I admire the most are quick to give credit and unworried about claiming it. They put in their papers only what is necessary to understand the results at hand and their context and importance, perhaps with interesting sidebars but always labeled as such. Of course, this is easier to do when you are confident of your abilities and the quality of your work, but I think emulating this appearance will help anyone come across as confident and competent. That is, decidedly not a crank.

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First, addressing slides or boardwork:

• Don’t put too much on a slide.
• However, don’t put so little on each slide that you’ve moved on to the next before the audience has time to read it.
• Feel free to only say some things. In fact, if literally everything is written out the audience may wonder why they’re listening to you when it would be much faster to read the slides. You need the key points, the technical definitions, and anything else the audience may want to re-read, as well as diagrams or pictures. Think of your slides as the highlighted or boxed portions of a textbook.
• It is helpful to repeat important information (especially definitions) on later slides, or at least verbally.
• Turn down the contrast and brightness on your computer screen (both separately and together) to check readability if you’re using anything other than black and white; projectors often wash things out a bit.
• In a chalkboard talk, write top to bottom, left to right, and respect the seams of the board as edges of paper – it is difficult to write across them neatly. When going back for a second round, erase your previous writing thoroughly.
• Make sure the type (or your handwriting) is large enough.
• Use whitespace generously – avoid large blocks of solid text as much as possible.
• Landscape orientation allows higher magnification since it matches the usual projection screen dimensions better than portrait.
• Stand to the side of your slides or what you’ve just written. It is continually surprising to me the number of people who stand in front of their writing until they have moved far enough past it in the talk that reading it would be a distraction to the audience instead of a help.
• Proofread! You might not catch everything, but you’ll catch the most egregious errors. Putting the slides aside for a day will help your observational abilities – when you look at something repeatedly you often start seeing your memory of it rather than the actuality.

Secondly, your speaking:

• Practice! When you have given many talks you will need less practice, but when you are starting out, multiple sessions are desirable.
• I have never attended a talk that was read aloud from a prepared paper that did not bore me to tears. Use notes, but don’t read word for word.
• Speak loudly but do not shout. While whispering and mumbling are clearly not desirable, neither is yelling. Note that you can yell without raising your voice, as well. The audience will not understand more if you are strenuously emphatic; they will simply feel accosted.
• Note that while practicing your talk by yourself is good, it is inexact for timing. Err on the side of “too short” (within reason, of course – prepare more than thirty minutes of material for an hour-long talk); between extra things you say and questions from the audience the length will most likely increase, and if not, well, no one minds ending early.

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The key to giving a good talk is to remember that talks are about the audience, not you. If the audience comes away understanding your result and its significance, you win. If the audience comes away confused, annoyed, or otherwise feeling that you’ve wasted their time, you lose.

I always tell students that talks are an exercise in letting go. You must accept that you won’t be able to say everything you know. There’s a time limit and a speed limit, and both need to be respected to keep the audience’s respect. Pick a goal for your talk (understanding the statement, motivation, and significance of one specific result would be a typical one) and ruthlessly tear out anything that does not assist you in getting to that goal. Omit proofs if you can and give high-level summaries or “proof by example” if you cannot; give only special cases of definitions and results if that’s all you need (but always label them as such).¹ Less is more.

Your audience will be more forgiving of seeing several things they already know than of an unfamiliar idea being flashed before them with inadequate preparation. Take into account the audience you are going to address, of course: a seminar in which everyone is at least a graduate student in your field requires less background than a colloquium talk wherein, although everyone is a mathematician, many will have seen your topic most recently in a class they took a decade or more past. Within reason, it’s all right to be imprecise, as well. I have seen many talks where the speaker said something along the lines of, “I’m lying to you now, but it’s morally correct.”² Examples are helpful and getting bogged down in details is not; it will require more than a talk worth of information to truly understand the details of your work no matter what you do.

Give context for your work. As with background, how much you have to say will depend on your audience. The history of your work can be helpful in understanding how you came up with your proof, if it is not a standard technique (e.g., “we tried this and it didn’t work, so we looked into why…”). Clarify your contribution but don’t obsess over it; while you certainly don’t want to appear to take credit for someone else’s major idea, you don’t have to itemize who worked out each specific detail.

Think carefully about organization. The best order to explain things in a talk may be different from the best order for the full research paper. Remind your audience of your goal periodically and repeat key definitions or lemmas if they are being used any time other than immediately after their original statement. Don’t insult the intelligence of your audience, of course, but remember that most or all of them haven’t been working on this topic recently, unlike you, and can’t refer back to earlier material like they could in a paper.

The 3 Cs are to be clear, concise, and charming. I have no advice for the last one, but I hope this post has been useful for the first two.

¹ Of course in a topic-specific seminar, you may have been asked to explain a proof, in which case this rule is clearly changed.

² Any mathematician will understand this phrase, but non-mathematicians might not. “Lying” is used typically to mean “being somewhat imprecise,” and “morally correct” means “literally false, at least in some aspects, but gives good intuition.”

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Advantages: since the easy-to-grade exams have been pulled out, there is more direct comparison of mistakes and it is easier to be consistent – no going back to try to remember how you graded that one problem that was similar and you didn’t make a note to yourself about. You get a feeling of real progress when you mark three pages in a row on one exam, and I believe at least sometimes you are going faster because you have an easier time comparing and figuring out consistent amounts to take off.

Disadvantages: it is like saving your least favorite food to eat last.

Case study: linear algebra, 24 exams at 10 pages each.
This isn’t the ideal case study because it bottlenecked at the second to last page with a conceptually difficult problem, but it is the one for which I have data. That problem was harder for the students and involved more thought to grade, so all but three of the exams (over 85%) ended up in the pile for that problem. However, reading a bit of each student’s answer to determine it belonged in that pile probably helped in figuring out how to mark.

A “pass” here counts as finishing the first incomplete page and running through each of those exams to the next stuck point. You’ll note no one got stuck on the third page of the exam; it was part (c) of a problem and was straightforward to grade.

pass 1: remaining exams x pages left: 7×9, 2×7, 4×5, 6×4, 4×2, 1×1 (130 total pages left)
pass 2: 5×7, 4×5, 6×4, 8×2, 1×1 (96 pages left)
pass 3: 2×6, 5×5, 6×4, 1×3, 9×2, 1×1 (83 pages left)
pass 4: 6×5, 6×4, 2×3, 9×2, 1×1 (79 pages left)
pass 5: 9×4, 3×3, 10×2, 1×1, 1×0 (66 pages left)
pass 6: 4×3, 18×2, 1×1, 1×0 (49 pages left)
pass 7: 21×2, 1×1, 2×0 (43 pages left)
pass 8: 6×1, 18×0 (6 pages left)
pass 9: done

Except for the first problem and the second to last problem, the most exams I had to deal with at once was 9, under 40% of the total. That amount is easily sorted into piles according to the sort of error made and each pile dealt with quickly after determining the rubric for that kind of error.

I would like to give credit to the person who introduced me to this method, but I have zero recollection of who it was. Thank you, anonymous benefactor.

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