Studying for the California Bar exam? Have an extra $1000 burning a hole in your freshly-law-degreed butt-pocket? Then by all means check out BarMax: California Edition. One of the only iPhone apps to cost that much money, its creator, Mike Ghaffary, a JD/MBA ‘06 Harvard grad, says it has everything one might require to study up for the bar.

Ghaffary has an MBA and as of December 2009, is a member of the California Bar; so he’s got that whole I’m business savvy and I studied for and conquered the bar exam thing going for him.

As with all things iPhone, it’s portable and weighs a lot less than the fifty pounds of books you’d be buying and dragging around town if you were to go the dead-tree route. So handy! Also, if you contact BarMax, they’ll send you a free trial version so you can evaluate the materials before forking over a decade’s worth of ramen money.

BarMax: California Edition, available now in the iPhone’s App Store for $999.99, is a study guide for the California Bar Exam. Harvard lawyers oversaw development of the app, which weighs in at 1 GB and includes outlines, lectures, a study calendar, and real questions and essays from previous exams. The only comparable app available now is from BarBri, but you must be enrolled in the company’s $3000 to $4000 classes to use most of the features.

TechCrunch reports that Mike Ghaffary, a former law student and current director of business development at TrialPay, envisioned BarMax as an alternative to BarBri’s pricey classes and digital offerings. Ghaffary partnered with successful app developers in Los Angeles, and enlisted some fellow Harvard Law alumni to guide development. More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

There are days when one must finally succumb to reality and admit that despite the intense need and desire to beat the To Do List into submission, the day that was once full of productivity possibility is FUBAR to the fullest extent of that term and Plan B is the only viable option.

Below please find Plan B (what I do when everything goes all to hell). It’s a re-post. Not good at reading between the lines? Please see FUBAR above and apply it to my day.

Sometimes you have to just give up on getting any real work done. This was excruciatingly true yesterday and today, when Seattle had some “snow days,” (I use the term loosely). Seattle is a city with little or no annual snowfall, which means there’s not much by way of snow removal equipment. Also, Seattle is basically a collection of hills all lumped together. Not as bad as San Francisco, but it’s not like driving through snow in the flatlands of Kansas, either. All of which means that a few pathetic inches of frozen white stuff shuts the whole damn city down.

This is what happens: We get a few inches of snow, which is slush by late afternoon. Nighttime comes around 3:30 p.m. (oh how I wish I were exaggerating), the temperature drops, the slush freezes, and the whole city is one giant hilly ice rink. Most Seattleites are transplants from California, like me, and can’t drive for s**t on anything but freeways (Southern Calif., not me) or foggy country roads (Northern Calif., me). Although, I’d like to see anyone try to drive up the steep hill I live on when it’s covered with a solid inch of ice.

My husband and I like to drink our morning caffeine on snow days while standing by the front windows, watching car after car attempt to make it up our hill. They always give up and have to try to look cool (and like they know what they’re doing) while trying to back—braking—down an icy hill. It’s never pretty, and that’s why we park our cars around the corner where no inept, ice-driving chuckleheads will smack into them as they slide back down the hill.

A snow day in Seattle also tends to mean that the icy roads have hosed the school bus routes. Which means delayed or non-existent school days. And while I do love to spend the day trapped inside with my offspring, I don’t get any work done. About mid-morning yesterday I started to get that panicky, today-is-going-to-be-a-complete-waste feeling. That particular flavor of panic always makes me cranky. I dislike an unproductive day. I tried to work, but it’s hard to finish a thought (intelligent or otherwise) when tiny humans are asking you a seemingly infinite number of questions.

I was this close to snapping and turning into the fire-breathing version of myself when I remembered the post Gear Fire had up the other day about implementing a Task Kill Day. It’s the holiday season, so I have an a**load of tasks to kill. I took a deep breath, gave up on the idea of getting any real work done, and told the kids it was Getting Stuff Done Day. They are 7 and almost-3, so they didn’t really have any tasks to kill other than some artwork and bouncy-ball testing. But because I wasn’t sitting in one place and trying to have long, involved higher thoughts and was instead running around the house being super busy and kicking task ass, they mostly did their own stuff and left me alone.

I crossed several items off of my To Do List that were causing me more peripheral stress than I had thought; when I took stock of how much I’d gotten done, I saw several dark Eeyore clouds lift.

My point is this: if your day is suddenly not going in the preferred productive direction, sometimes redirecting your Unplanned Non-Work Day into a Task-List Demolishing Day can make you feel better and save you time later on. And you’ll be saving others from the cranky version of you, which people always appreciate.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Finals were about a month back. I’d be willing to bet a large pile of cash that 99% of all you college students out there were praying to gods you don’t usually summon, swearing allegiance and faith and the future performance of selfless acts if only those gods would save your underprepared asses and help you to pass your finals.

In addition to promising faithfulness to your quickly thought-up gods and to be a better person, you also promised to be a more efficient and organized student. Crap.

The holidays are over, pal, and you’re back at school, already hip-deep in the new term. Which means you’re about two weeks late with creating the new, supah sleek you.

I’m a fully functioning paper-and-pen notebook girl, myself. Should you require organizational inspiration, check out Gearfire’s post, Organisation Porn for the New You.

Further Reading:

Implementing Organizational Resolutions
Getting Organized

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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No, it doesn’t write your paper for you. Using the Achievers Writing Center apps for the iPhone or the iPod touch, college and high school students can write, edit and get assistance with the paper-writing process. Students are on those phone pod things all the time anyway, and the technology is prepared to handle way more than just playing music and making calls. People write novels on those things.

From the press release:

Niles Technology Group today announced their Achievers Writing Center apps for iPhone and iPod touch. Achievers Writing Center apps are revolutionizing how high school and college students write essays and papers. The apps make it easier to be more successful at writing, and they also significantly reduce the time and money required to produce excellent work. For a fixed, affordable price, each app comes with professional writing center services and more.

Students know that time is a precious commodity that they cannot get back and that money is finite and must be used wisely. The main goals of Achievers Writing Center are to help students be more successful writing essays and papers, while helping them spend less time and money in the effort.

“Essay writing assistance for students is the perfect example of a highly fragmented market in need of a serious technology makeover. The products and services simply have not kept up with the mobile, smart-phone centered lifestyles of students,” states Michael Niles, President and CEO of Niles Technology Group.

Mr. Niles explains, “Achievers Writing Center apps deliver the mobile technology and content to let students do things that, in the past, required spending time sitting at a computer, making appointments at a school’s writing center, and traveling multiple times to the writing center. As for reliable “writer’s block” email support, well, that is virtually non-existent at writing centers. And, most importantly, if students want help in editing and reviewing the final product, they usually spend more money than they should on another entity that did not even help them write the essay in the first place. Just talking about all the steps and time involved illustrates how difficult and inconvenient it is to receive consistent, reliable professional help.” More…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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I knew it! Multitasking is for sucks. Focusing on one project at a time and asking one’s brain to dig deep, ponder and problem-solve like the higher-thinking Homo sapiens that you are is smarter, faster, better. I hate the spinning in circles aspect of juggling one’s entire life all day every day.

I lust after graduate study carrels, those delicious-looking closet-sized rooms in libraries reserved only for thesis- and dissertation-writing grad students. Holing up in a tiny, interruption-free room for hours to focus and solve the crap out of all problems on the list that day sounds divine.

Getting off on being alone to think about one item at a time made me L-A-M-E until this vindication-saturated article showed up. Ironically, I found it while multitasking on the Internet, but whatever.

The Decade Google Made You Stupid was written by Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media studies at The New School University and producer and correspondent for the PBS Frontline Digital Nation project. In it, Rushkoff explains, with scientific evidence to back him up, that the whole Google/multitasking phase of mankind is making our grey matter work less efficiently and is wrecking our analytical processing abilities.

Cliff Nass, director of Stanford University’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab (known as CHIMe Lab), has been studying the best multitaskers on the face of the earth: college students. “How do they do it? Do their brains work differently?” He, too, was shocked by his own research. “It turns out, multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information. They’re terrible at keeping information in their heads nice and neatly organized, and they’re terrible at switching from one task to the other. This shocks us.”

Nass split his subjects into two groups—those who regularly do a lot of media multitasking, and those who don’t. When they took simple tests comparing assortments of shapes, the multitaskers were more easily distracted by random images, and incapable of determining which data was relevant to the task at hand. And just because the multitaskers couldn’t ignore irrelevant data didn’t mean they were better at storing and organizing information. They scored worse on both sorting and memorizing information.

So what does it mean if we multitaskers are actually fooling ourselves into believing we’re competent when we’re not? “If multitasking is hurting their ability to do these fundamental tasks,” Nass explained matter-of-factly, “life becomes difficult. Some of studies show they are worse at analytic reasoning. We are mostly shocked. They think they are great at it.” We’re not just stupid and vulnerable online—we simultaneously think we’re invincible. And that attitude, new brain research shows, has massive carryover into real life.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say the increased dumbing down of the human race can’t be good for anyone.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Big projects, like term papers or dissertations or what have you, really freak people out. Sometimes I try to give other people advice about getting s**t done. They never appreciate hearing my exquisitely condensed single line of wisdom, so sharp it sings out like a band of angels with knives: Sit down and get to work (dumbass).

If they’re unappreciative a**holes about it, I shrug and walk away. Their big dumb project is their big dumb problem, not mine. But if they’re all quietly sad and hopeless and ask for some expansion on my awesome advice, I will relent and add one shred more: Set a timer for an hour or thirty minutes or whatever you think you can handle without losing your s**t. Sit down and work on the project until the timer goes off. Take a short break, and repeat.

Little chunks that you can see the end of never seem insurmountable, and it’s actually fairly painless to move a mountain from here to way over there if you do it one bucket at a time.

Peg Boyle Single wrote a piece in Inside Higher Ed about how to change your procrastinating ways so’s you can write your dissertation already. It’s helpful advice (and she’s much kinder in her delivery than I am).

Further Reading:

Write or Die V2.0
Getting Past the Overwhelming Wall
Monumental Tasks
A Writing Routine

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Simplify the high-tech messaging portion of your super busy life. If you’ve got messages coming in and going out from several directions all at once, it’s likely you’ll end up scattered and cranky. Or you’ll chuck all messaging devices and end up living on the perfect island I’ve already set aside for my own future use.

Back off my island, chucklehead, and please try Sendible. Here’s what their site promises to deliver:

Schedule email, sms and social network messages ahead of time

Access all your email and social network contacts from one place

Remind yourself and others of upcoming tasks and events

Post status updates to your blogging and social network accounts

Posted by Alexa Harrington

There is no grey area in classifying me as a door-closed worker bee. I am hard-wired to focus with extreme intensity on tasks and goals and To Do lists. I can’t not be in motion. I’m one of those jackasses who looks forward with unquellable elation to a long-planned and well-deserved vacation, and by Day #3 I’m done with sitting around and reading and have begun cataloguing and alphabetizing anything that’s not nailed down. I know. I disgust even myself. And while no one has ever accused me of being a slacker, almost everyone who knows and loves me has told me (for my own good and for the sanity of those around me) that maybe it would be better if I took it down a notch, for Pete’s sake.

Too bad for me that, due to my preference for having the office door closed and for all distractions to be annihilated with my laser-beam eyes the moment they open their yaps to ask me a question or tell me something inane that has nothing whatsoever to do with my current task, I will probably not choose the problem or endeavor that will be important enough to catapult me to fame. Or so theorizes Richard Hamming in his talk, “You and Your Research.” I’m not a research scientist, but I think Hamming’s theory is applicable to all humans, regardless of their field.

This talk centered on Hamming’s observations and research on the question “Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?” From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.

Here’s what he had to say about those who work with the door open vs. those who prefer to work distraction-free:

I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame.

So, clearly I’m probably going to be missing the chance to take note of, and then solve, the big and interesting problems of our day. I know myself pretty well, and I could have told you years ago that I will always tend toward missing the important stuff as I will be too busy crossing s**t off of my list.

While I like the fact that I’m not a slacker, I am trying to re-wire myself enough so that I’ll be better able to stop the train and focus on the present day, instead of constantly looking to the horizon, which seems always to be the thing I’m trying to get to. (And for anyone who paid attention in Reality 101, please won’t you slap me and tell me again that it’s impossible to ever get to the horizon, which means I’ll never be finished, so its probably okay to just take a breather every now and then).

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(via Ben Casnocha)

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I wouldn’t necessarily classify myself as a teetotaler, but I’m fairly certain everyone who knows me wouldn’t hesitate to slap that label across my sober forehead. It’s not that I have anything against the imbibing of drugs or alcohol, I just haven’t ever tended toward any sort of relationship with chemicals. And yet, even freakishly squeaky-clean me has seriously entertained the idea of dipping into the family of oomph-producing drugs.

On two separate occasions I gave at least an hour’s worth of deep thought to obtaining and using something speedier than caffeine. (Dork that I am, I was immediately shaken out of these moments of idiocy when I realized I hadn’t the faintest idea how one goes about acquiring any substance stronger than green tea.) Both of these flirtations with chemical dependency occurred when I was in school and was so buried I felt like I was at the bottom of the cold, dark sea and I would never have the time nor the energy to finish all of my papers, labs, exams and assignments in time to swim to the surface and breathe again.

When the mental image you have of yourself at the daily grind is a fully-clothed you walking along the sea floor, dragging your responsibilities behind you, and everything is cold and dark and devoid of breathable oxygen and the weight of the water above is crushing the life out of you, it’s probably time for some reevaluation. Or, for the modern-day super student, it’s time for some ass-kicking neuroenhancing drugs. Margaret Talbot has an eye-opening article in the New Yorker that makes me feel like I have simultaneously missed out on being a more incredible version of me, and have dodged a big fat, expensive, chemical-laced bullet with crazy numbers of strings attached.

Previous Posts and Further Reading:

Joe Schmoe, B.S.*, M.S.*, M.D.*, Ph.D.*
More Students Turning Illegally To ‘Smart’ Drugs
Brain Enhancers: ‘Professor’s Little Helper’?

Posted by Alexa Harrington


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I’m a pretty organized, focused little gal. People who know me use less kind terminology, like “intense,” “bordering on obsessive,” and “freaky list-maker and notebook-keeper.” Whatever. They are just jealous of my awesome organizational skills and my ability to get things done.

Although I have a system, don’t lack focus, and I prefer my own way of doing things, I am still drawn to other people’s ideas for organizing and list-making and guides to getting things accomplished. Maybe I just need to be certain that my way still fits my needs. Or maybe it’s the vicarious thrill of reading about someone else getting their life organized, accomplishing tasks and projects, and crossing items off of their lists. Some people watch p*rn or the Food Network, I read about different organizing tactics.

Large projects tend to be the most frequent overwhelmers of humans. Overcoming clutter or the lack of a solid To Do list can be dealt with, but being faced with writing a paper, a thesis, a dissertation or a book can stop most humans in their tracks. There’s so much to do, no one ever knows where to start.

It seems ridiculous to start anywhere, because none of the places small enough to finish in a day seem consequential enough to make any sort of dent in the project. The little stuff seems as pointless as carrying the beach back to the ocean one spoonful at a time, and the big stuff seems impossible.

Humans think too much; ants just start building the anthill. Although, ants don’t have roller coasters or cotton candy. We have angst and teeth-gnashing, but we get the fun. My daughter has an ant farm, and I have seen no evidence of any fun being had on (in) the ant farm.

Pamela Slim wrote a post explaining how she dealt with “hitting a wall” while writing her book Escape From Cubicle Nation. She got to a point where she was inundated with accumulated information and work still to be done. In the article she outlines the plan she came up with that enabled her to keep going and finish the book. It’s simple and practical and would be of use to any poor bastard at the overwhelming beginning or the inundated middle of a huge project.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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