04 August 2011

The Fisher Files

MIT Physics professor Peter Fisher (with whom I took 8.033 12 years ago) produced two seasons of podcasts back in 2007 called the Fisher Files. Unfortunately something disastrous happened to the stylesheets or something because the website is basically unusable in its present state. I had stumbled across this a few months ago but was put off by the wreckage of the site. TFazio recently mentioned it and this time I put the effort into downloading all the actual podcasts.

The podcasts revolve around the Getting Things Done philosophy of how to collect and organize the myriad daily tasks which make up our lives. Fisher nicely applies GTD ideas to many specific scenarios of academic life, making the ideas more directly applicable to me. He also goes further than just discussing ways to be productive, though, and tries to bridge the gap between accomplishing today's tasks and the almost spiritual goal of loving one's work and balancing it with other parts of life.

I'm so glad I went to the effort of grabbing them, because they're incredibly relevant to me right now. And in the hope of making them more widely available, I've collected the links below. I hope others will enjoy them as much as I have begun to!

Season 1 (largely about GTD)
  1. Introduction
  2. Buckets & Weekly Review
  3. Projects
  4. ToDo
  5. Calendar
  6. Putting things together [broken link]
  7. Email
  8. Files
  9. Feeding the Bad Wolf
  10. Gadgets
  11. Multitasking
  12. Reading
Season 2 (the academic life)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice! This looks super helpful, and I think Paul and I both will enjoy listening. Very timely...