Since getting my phone, I've been playing around with how to better integrate my research/academic life with it. While my friends call me a smartphone addict (which I cannot deny), I've been curious on how I can increase my work efficiency on the iPhone. The general trend of being more on task and responding to emails immediate aren't things that directly correlate to more productive research unlike other technology heavy fields. My curiosity has been how can I integrate my research activities into my smarthphone. Obviously there are the usual things such as maintaining a calendar or checking emails, but here are some other things on what I've found so far:
When I'm on the school network, I can access journal papers (I'm sure I can figure out a way to VPN onto the CMU network, but haven't bothered). There is no Google scholar app (or any general web journal searching app as far as I'm aware), but the usual website in Safari works just fine. While reading PDFs on a small screen isn't favorable, it is doable and can be useful for looking up quick facts in papers you might've read previously.
On the topic of scientific news, I do enjoy the following: Science and Nature. Both contain a mix of actual scientific news in terms of research, but also development of the scientific communities. I do also have the Journal of Material Science (JMS) and IOP Science (the latter I haven't used as much). The few times I have used JMS, it allows me branch out in my field, but within my understanding of material science still.
On the topic of networks, I recently learned about ServerAuditor. This enables SSH into a server to access the command console, and compiling and executing codes. This hasn't proven useful to me yet as most of my codes resides on my personal work computer in the first place. Furthermore I don't run any repeated computer simulations. Most of my codes are for analyzing raw data and therefore involve a significant amount of file I/O as well. I should mention it's even possible to VIM (but in all honestly I normally use another wrapper).
More recently, my friend provided corrections to a draft of a manuscript I'm working on in Word (horrendous right?). Microsoft Office Mobile was recently released as a free-to-download app, and while one cannot edit a document, one can still read all corrections all there. Having a Microsoft account with SkyDrive allows easy access.
Am I truly more productive? Or am I just finding an excuse to mess around on my smartphone some more again? I don't know the answer yet.
Anyways, what have you played around with?
theoretically: ability to do non work-related tasks in situations where you couldn't before (e.g. browsing social media during morning commute) -> less time spent doing non work-related tasks during work hours -> more time spent doing work-related tasks during work hours -> increased work efficiency!
ReplyDeletehowever in reality, it just seems to be another source of distraction during work hours haha
You are really really excited about this SSH...
ReplyDelete