I Just Declared Email Bankruptcy - Woo Hoo!

I looked at my email (my "real" email, not my Financial Rounds one) last week and decided it had gotten out of control - over 1000 old messages. I started deleting the old ones, but thought I'd never get it done - thee were just too many.

Then, I solved the problem by accident - I inadvertently ended up declaring "email bankruptcy".

I signed up for Hotmail's premium service a few years ago, since at the time it was the only one offering the capability of emailing large file attachments. The bill for renewal came due a while ago, and I forgot to renew it. So, Hotmail bumped me down to the "standard" version. In the process, they deleted all but the 200 or so most recent messages. Of course, this includes messages I received way back in 2006, so there probably wasn't anything I needed in the older ones anyway.

I feel much better now.

What I Did During (The First Part Of) My Summer Vacation

I just realized that I haven't posted anything new on the blog for about 10 days, so I thought I'd let you know that I'm still alive and haven't stopped blogging altogether. But, I did feel a bit burned out on blogging, so I took a bit of a break. Here are a few updates on the summer so far:

I've been working on a few projects. One is editing a paper I'm doing with several other people. It's a new experience for me since a good part of the paper is theory-based, and I'm an empiricist at heart. So, I've been forced to brush up on a lot of the math I haven't used since grad school. In addition, I'm the only American among the coauthors, and they're all theorists. So, I'm in charge of "englishizing" the paper (their term). Hopefully it'll be handed back to my coauthors for their part soon.

I've been working on a second project in what's also a new area for me - it ties in options implied volatility to firms' information environments. While I'm familiar with the information asymmetry literature, the options stuff is new to me. And in addition, the data set is several times larger than any I've worked with, so I had to learn a few new SAS programming tricks. But being the nerd that I am, it's actually fun.

Logging my research (actually, my "writing") time has been a humbling experience. I 've been averaging one "zero time spent" day out of every three or four, and find that I don't spend nearly as much time writing as I thought even on the days I do write. But then, that's the point of the exercise. As my accounting friends say, "you can't manage what you don't measure".

I also got one small paper submitted, so I now have 4 under review.

On the personal side, I've been cycling pretty regularly (about 5x a week on average), and have done a few hard 15-20 milers. I'm still not in top shape, but I've been able to hold just shy of a 16 mph pace for a pretty hilly 20 miler. My goal for the summer is to get up to an 18 mph pace for the 20 miler and to ride to my mother's house, which is a very hilly 80 miles away.

Other than that, I've spent my time playing with the kids, trying to grow grass on the front part of my yard, and trying to unpack some of the boxes that have been in my basement since we moved almost a year ago.

I'll get back to posting some "real" stuff in the next couple of days.

Becoming a More Productive Writer

Like most faculty I know, I could stand to be more disciplined in my writing. There are times when I'm really productive, and stretches that I don't do anything. One tactic that has been extremely helpful (at least when I use it) has been keeping a writing log. Although I've mentioned this before, it bears repeating. Robert Boice (the acknowledged master of research on faculty productivity) did quite a few workshops on faculty productivity. He did a study where participants were put into three groups

• The first group (the "control") continued as they normally did, and continued to write occasionally in large blocks of time (what I call "binge writing"). In a year's time, they produced an average of 17 pages of output
• The second group wrote daily and kept log of their time spent writing and their approximate output. In a year's time, they produced an average of 64 pages of output.
• The third group wrote daily, kept a daily log, and showed it to someone else weekly. They produced an average of 157 pages in a year!

I'm sure that there are some other issues that would effect this experiment, like self-selection. But the differences across groups are pretty striking.

So this time, to tweak things a bit, I set up a spreadsheet on Google Spreadsheets with a current student, a former student, and a regular coauthor of mine. We've all committed to record out writing time and output daily. It should be interesting--there's already been one day that I put in a half hour at 11:00 p.m. just to avoid having to show a goose egg for the day.

Ya gotta love accountability. I'll let y'all know how it turns out.

update: In case you're interested, two books by Boice that are well worth picking up are Advice For New Faculty Members (the title is misleading - I got a lot out of it even 6 years out of grad school) and Professors as Writers.