To bring 2019 to a close Julia and Jonathan offer unsolicited advice on a wide range of topics, including health, finances, and computers. Don’t say we didn’t warn you! Julia gets an important phone call related to her career (insert suspenseful music).

Theme music courtesy of The Bobby Dazzlers

Links:

• Noise-Induced Hearing Loss | NIDCD
• Differences in Hearing Acuity among “Normal-Hearing” Young Adults Modulate the Neural Basis for Speech Comprehension | eNeuro
• Budget « Snowmint Creative Solutions LLC — Budget is based on the tried and true envelope method of budgeting. It’s a much easier way to see where your money is, where it’s needed, and where it went.
• YNAB. Personal Budgeting Software for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android
• Acorns
• Seinfeld - God bless you! - YouTube — "You're soooo good looking"
• You are so good looking - Seinfeld - YouTube
• What’s wrong with the journal impact factor in 5 graphs | Nature Index
• Introduction to the Terminal - DEV Community
• Jeopardy theme song [10 hours] - YouTube
• Vim (text editor) - Wikipedia
• Vim Cheat Sheet
• ‎The juice and the squeeze on Apple Podcasts

Jonathan and Julia talk about how we get our research published. What do we think about when picking a journal? When in the process do we pick a journal? What’s the deal with preferred/nonpreferred reviewers? The squeaky wheel gets the grease, but when’s a reasonable time to start squeaking?

Theme music courtesy of The Bobby Dazzlers

Links:

• Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier–and think you shouldn’t either – [citation needed]
• Collabra: Psychology
• Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles
• HARKing: Hypothesizing After the Results are Known - Norbert L. Kerr, 1998
• What’s wrong with the journal impact factor in 5 graphs | Nature Index

Winter is here, prompting a discussion of clothing and coziness before getting into the how and the why of organization systems (especially to-do lists and calendar-related things). Breaking things down into meaningfully-sized chunks is good (with a real-world example from manuscript writing). Good calendar hygiene is important.

Theme music courtesy of The Bobby Dazzlers

Links:

• Mince Pies | M&S
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity: David Allen, James Fallows: 0884154584063: Amazon.com: Books
• GQueues - Manage tasks & to-do lists with your Google Account
• OmniFocus for Mac - The Omni Group
• Basecamp: Project Management & Team Communication Software
• Introducing the Hipster PDA | 43 Folders
• 300 Nonpersonalized 3x5 Cards (Ruled or Grid) - Levenger
• YouCanBook.me
• Personal digital assistant - Wikipedia
• Patent ductus arteriosus - Wikipedia
• Calendly - Scheduling appointments and meetings is super easy with Calendly.

Jonathan and Julia tackle the topic of things that distract us from what we are dHEY look a squirrel!!! There’s a balance between being focused and having the freedom to explore. If there are too many things in your closet, they won’t fit neatly, and you might just have to get rid of something. Jonathan loves the IRB.

Theme music courtesy of The Bobby Dazzlers

Links:

• Warren Buffett - Wikipedia
• Warren Buffett’s 5/25 Strategy: How to Focus and Prioritize Your Time Like a Billionaire.
• Foraging - Wikipedia
• Peelle's Periodic Priority Probe

Sometimes it works to just go to a conference and wander around, but more often having a strategy is useful. Probably trying to do EVERYTHING will not be a winning strategy. Networking just means making friends with people who are interested in similar things as you and makes conferences way more fun. One of your hosts is much more likely than the other to strike up conversations with nearby strangers.

Theme music courtesy of The Bobby Dazzlers

Links:

• Society for Neuroscience - Past and Future Annual Meetings
• SIPS Meetings – Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science
• Meetings of the Psychonomic Society - Psychonomic Society
• Association for Psychological Science – APS
• Future Meetings – Society for the Neurobiology of Language
• Scientific networking is easier than you think — Jonathan Peelle

Julia’s favorite holiday is approaching and we all wish we could attend her Halloween party. Follow up to a listener email about how to handle new requests for work prompts a long discussion about how we choose what projects to work on in general. We should all be saying “no” to a lot of things but don’t.

Theme music courtesy of The Bobby Dazzlers

Links:

• Time and attention — Jonathan Peelle
• PsyArXiv Preprints | Completion norms for 3085 English sentence contexts
• 5by5 | Back to Work #17: Brick Building Full of Lies — Some thoughts on priorities

Among all of the facts, focusing on positive ones (instead of negative ones) can help keep us in a good mental place. Julia both loves and hates running and is grateful to the mysterious woman who encourages her. A double-edged challenge for next time: reframe something positively to ourselves, and reframe something positively for someone else.

Theme music courtesy of The Bobby Dazzlers

Links:

• To All the Movies I’ve Loved Before Podcast
• Framing effect - Biases & Heuristics | The Decision Lab
• Confirmation bias - Wikipedia
• Pollyanna principle - Wikipedia
• The juice and the squeeze - Contact

After a brief diversion for f/u we have a quick chat about the importance of having a website if you’re an academic. Taking time off from work (during the day, week, or year) seems VERY important for both happiness and productivity. But it's hard to do. Join the resistance and sharpen your saw (all credit to Julia's mom). We would all like to handle email the way Donald Knuth does but that's probably unrealistic.

Theme music courtesy of The Bobby Dazzlers

Links:

• Double Impact (1991) - IMDb
• Overcast (podcast player)
• The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play: Neil Fiore: 8601400338544: Amazon.com: Books
• David Berman (musician) - Wikipedia
• Peelle Lab Manual on GitHub — "Realize there are times for pulling all nighters, and times for leaving early to go to the park and enjoy the sunshine."
• Knuth versus Email — I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address.
• School’s (somewhat) out for summer: Five tips to help academics make the most of the season | Science | AAAS — Once you have rested and returned to your work, it can be helpful to sit down and make a list of current projects, their status, and what it would take to complete them.
• You Are Doing Something Important When You Aren’t Doing Anything - The New York Times — Fallow time is necessary to grow everything from actual crops to figurative ones, like books and children. To do the work, we need to rest, to read, to reconnect. It is the invisible labor that makes creative life possible.
• Ian Sohn on LinkedIn: "I never need to know you’ll be back online after dinner. I never need to know why you chose to watch season 1 of “Arrested Development” (for the 4th time) on your flight to LA instead of answering emails. I never need to know you’ll be in late because of a dentist appointment. Or that you’re leaving early for your kid’s soccer game. I never need to know why you can’t travel on a Sunday. I never need to know why you don’t want to have dinner with me when I’m in your town on a Tuesday night. I never need to know that you’re working from home today because you simply need the silence. I deeply resent how we’ve infantilized the workplace. How we feel we have to apologize for having lives. That we don’t trust adults to make the right decisions. How constant connectivity/availability (or even the perception of it) has become a valued skill. I'm equally grateful for the trust/respect my peers, bosses and teams show me every day. Years ago a very senior colleague reacted with incredulity that I couldn’t fly on 12 hours notice because I had my kids that night (and I'm a single dad. edit: divorced). I didn’t feel the least bit guilty, which I could tell really bothered said colleague. But it still felt horrible. I never want you to feel horrible for being a human being."
• Ken Jennings - Wikipedia
• IAmA 74-time Jeopardy! champion, Ken Jennings. I will not be answering in the form of a question. : IAmA

How do we know what we are bad at, and what do we do about it (if anything)? Tupperware containers, face recognition, mental math, and grantwriting make the list. One of us may or may not have been a childhood chess prodigy. Sometimes just jumping in and doing something (like writing a grant or learning a programming language) is helpful at reducing anxiety. Deciding what kind of bad we are seems worthwhile. Some things are important to just try. Of all the things we are bad at, how do we decide what (if anything) to work on improving?

Theme music courtesy of The Bobby Dazzlers

Links:

• Prosopagnosia - Wikipedia
• Orphan Black (TV Series 2013–2017) - IMDb
• Hyde and Mertz (2009) on gender differences in math ability
• Girls outperform boys in science, but not in the US — Researchers say these cultural forces are strong in the United States, Britain and Canada but far less pervasive in Russia, Asia and the Middle East, which have a much higher proportion of women in science and engineering. In Jordan, for example, girls score more than 8 percent better in science than boys do.
• OmniFocus for Mac - The Omni Group
• Nate Kornell Article
• myIDP (individual development plan) at Science Careers
• The juice and the squeeze - Contact — Please send email related to the show through this form (rather than emailing us directly)—it helps us organize our email in the same place!

In their first ever podcast Julia and Jonathan talk about how many people’s careers don’t go in a straight line, and how this is often OK (but beware of survivorship bias). In the course of talking about their own career paths Julia reveals the costume she wore while bartending and Jonathan sort of but not really promises to play the horn sometime. Jonathan decides to double down on self-serving bias when writing grants.

Theme music courtesy of The Bobby Dazzlers

Links:

• Rajini Rao on Twitter: "I get that anecdotes about failing classes in school but still ending up as successful faculty can be inspiring to some. But for immigrants, especially, POC, "failing up" is not an option. We have to ace every test and outperform our peers just to get a seat at the table. https://t.co/01aYmbx67N" / Twitter
• Survivorship bias - Wikipedia
• Jonathan Peelle on Twitter: "Psst! @juliafstrand and I are starting a podcast. One of the things we want to talk about is the different paths people took in their lives/careers—life isn’t a straight line. And it can be helpful to know that things turn out OK. Starting this thread to collect some examples." / Twitter
• Charles Kavalovski - IHS Online
• Career Paths in Psychology: Where Your Degree Can Take You
• Hindsight bias - Wikipedia