My Life as a Content Management System (2025)

Follow up from my post on May 10, 2011.

Students from time-to-time, usually after seeing a 4:30 am email about an Overleaf edit on their paper, ask “Professor Levinson, how are you so productive?”¹

Some traditional answers:

• Intelligence: Simply the ability to mentally track multiple things simultaneously is essential to productivity in a non-routine environment. I encourage my students to possess this. Fortunately, we have invented writing and can off-load many memory-intensive tasks. I encourage my students to do this as well.

• Spatial and Data Organisation: Things and data should be put away where they belong so that (1) you don’t have to see and think about them when they are not being used and (2) you can find them later when you need to use them again. These are gifts to your future self.² Putting data away is a large part of Content Management Systems though.

• Routinisation: Organise as much work as possible to be as standard as possible. “The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots.” But you yourself need to be able to execute at less than 100%, like when tired and your IQ is measurably lower.

• Precrastination: Doing things as soon as you can, and certainly before they are due, along with loose application of GTD: Getting Things Done is required for my sanity. I do not understand how so many people work up against deadline, and others can’t even start until the deadline has passed. This aligns with my goal, rarely achieved, but occasionally of Inbox Zero.

• Persistence: Not letting the man get you down. This is essential in research, where journals are just getting flooded with papers and funding agencies only fund about 10% of their proposals. It will not get better any time soon. Editors desk rejecting your paper quickly is far better than a slow rejection. A paper under review earns more interest than one sitting on your hard drive. Finished papers that are not published should be under review.

• Anti-Perfectionism: Nobody wants to be imperfect, and I am sure people have views on my quality. But the perfect is the enemy of the good, and as Steve Jobs said: “Real Artists Ship.” Will delaying the output, and the discounted loss in benefits from seeing the less perfect thing sooner outweigh the gains from spending more time perfecting the thing, so it is better when released later in time? Obviously this depends, and is going to be highly uncertain. Some students need to dial up the quality and down the quantity, others vice versa.

• Work-from-Home: Every day that I work from home, rather than commuting, I save 84 minutes of travel time. Certainly not all of that is devoted to work, but some of it is. And the quality of work using a phone while on the train is probably lower than a computer on a desk for many tasks. On the other hand, a phone is fine for triaging emails. Obviously there is also some value to being on-site, particularly when the work involves meeting with people, which is better in real life, or specialised equipment. A desktop computer is not such equipment. I suspect for many office workers, WfH 2 or 3 days per week is optimal.

• Drugs: There are a slew of productivity-enhancing drugs out there. Most people use caffeine. For those with specific diagnoses, there are even better drugs. One imagines there are side-effects to all of these, since they use up the brain in ways that we were not evolved to handle. (Don’t do drugs kids.)

• Large Language Models: ChatGPT is probably barely a greater than 1.2X multiplier for me at this point, mostly for editing, sometimes for thinking, but one hopes it or its ilk will be 2x or 10x or more in the future.

• Productivity tools: The main discussion of this post.

There is the very real risk of procrastination via productivity tools. I know many people who (metaphorically) spend far more time sharpening their knives than cutting. Don’t be that person. Sure, “measure twice, cut once”, but don’t spend all your time shopping for tools in place of doing the work. Nevertheless, the right tools can, in practice, improve productivity.

The question then becomes, productivity for whomst? It is often not for yourself that these tools exist, nor for your outputs, but for the machine that employs you or the capitalism that turns you into a content generator.

Productivity requires sacrifices: To quote Luthen Rael:

“Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion, I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything!”

We burn our souls every time we turn ourselves into human content management systems for the benefit of our oppressors. Yet, as a practical matter, we have little choice. If we don’t pay taxes, we will, with a high probability, go to prison or go into hiding. If we don’t file the proper paperwork electronically in the proper system, we will lose our employment or not get paid for our contracts. This post is not so much about serving the Organisation, using the Tools of our Enemy, but rather advancing science, society, and ourselves

We remain at a developmental stage wherein every artefact of modern civilisation that passes through us: papers, announcements, bibliographic records, course materials, slides, travel, photos, or data must be manually curated and distributed across an unruly tangle of platforms.

I talked about my tools in 2011. Fourteen years later, the interfaces have changed, the file formats are in flux, and the tools differ, but the AI is simply not ready to absolve us of our responsibilities. The core job hasn’t gone away, and every second of every day that we must pass bits from one side of a screen to another, a little bit of us dies. Below are the instruments of my death.

The Tools

Domain            | 2011                     | 2025
------------------|--------------------------|-------------------------
Non-academic Writing
Blog/Newsletter   | WordPress                | Substack
Website           | WordPress (active)       | WordPress (static)
Social Media      | Twitter                  | Mastodon, BlueSky 
Syndication       | Manual email, links, RSS | RSS, dlvr.it

Editing
Journal           | JTLU -- OJS              | Findings -- Scholastica

Academic Writing
Documents         | MacTeX, Flat Files       | Overleaf
References        | BibTeX                   | Zotero (asp.), BibTeX

Research
Mapping           | ArcGIS                   | QGIS, Python, some R
Statistics, Code  | Excel, Stata             | Python, R

Tracking
Notes             | OmniFocus                | Apple Notes
Project Mgmt      | Asana                    | None

Data Management
Backup            | SuperDuper, CrashPlan    | iCloud,DBox,Time Machine
Photos            | iPhoto, Flickr           | Photos, Flickr, Pixelfed
Personal Finance  | TurboTax                 | AUS auto, TaxAct US
Contacts          | Email address book       | Apple Contacts, platforms
Mail, Calendar    | Apple Mail, Calendar     | same
Genealogy         | GEDCOM files             | Ancestry.com 
Bookmarks         | Browser folders          | Deleted
Podcasts          | iTunes                   | Overcast
Music             | iTunes                   | Apple Music
Library           | LibraryThing             | Dormant
Passwords         | 1Password                | same

Jobby-Job
Teaching          | Custom sites, Moodle     | Canvas LMS
University Fin.   | Manual                   | Concur
etc.              | Miscellaneous custom sw. | Miscellaneous custom sw.

---

Non-Academic Writing

The Blog (what you are reading) is now functionally the same as the Newsletter. I was maintaining both separately for a while, and that was a major pain. Using Substack as a Blog as well as a Newsletter is possible if not optimal. There are three classes of things I write here, all are syndicated via RSS and available to readers of Substack Notes:

• Things I post and don’t email are basic blog posts. This includes paper announcements, and other things which I want on the permanent record, but don’t feel the need to flood subscribers email inboxes with.

• Things I post and email only to paid subscribers. These are things I write, like this post which you are reading, which are not the monthly newsletter.

• Things I post and email to all subscribers. This is the monthly newsletter. It includes links to the above.

I chose to set up a newsletter at first at TinyLetter when I planned to leave Minnesota because the death of Google Reader derailed blogging and Newsletters seemed to be the next big thing, then later migrated to Substack. Substack does its job better than TinyLetter and WordPress, which has since added a newsletter feature. Haters are going to hate, but all large platforms have issues, and you can trace much of the FUD to their competitors and the home-owners association of Mastodon.

Thus the Blog, which used to be hosted on the website, is now here. The original (well not the OG original, which goes back to the 1990s, but you know what I mean) website sees a lot less action.

Social media has seen a migration away from Twitter (and Facebook) for what should be obvious reasons. I am not happy with the alternatives, but they are necessary.

Syndication has long been a pain. RSS worked back when everyone used Google Reader, but who wants to go around cutting and pasting links into various social media platforms? I am using dlvr.it as of this year to automatically repost the RSS feeds from the Newsletter (and from Findings to the journal’s various social media accounts). Dlvr.it is my tool to move to Publish On Own Site Syndicate Everywhere (POSSE), recognising Substack isn’t my own site exactly. This sends new publications to Mastodon and BlueSky and LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn buries these though. We will see how it goes. I think auto-syndication gets less love from the commercial algorithms than original posts.

Editing

I was the editor for JTLU, which used OJS, which as far as I can tell has not been significantly updated in 20 years. I am now editor of Findings, which uses Scholastica as the journal management software. It has a different set of headaches, but is in my view superior to software like Editorial Manager, their service is good, and there are live people on the other side of the communications.

Academic Writing, Referencing, and Citation

I have long ago moved all of my and my group’s academic writing to Overleaf, with a local backup on my DropBox. (I will only use Word when someone else is driving the project). Overleaf is a really sound piece of software, allows multiple people to edit simultaneously, manages versions, and isn’t too wonky (aside from the standard LaTeX wonkiness). It is cloud-based, with all of the risks that entails, but it has yet to lose anything.

I think I’d like Zotero to be the hub of my bibliographic world. But in practice, it’s not yet. My intention is there, I have populated a large Zotero database so far, but there is much left to do, compiling the set of .bib files from all my previous projects. Making it useful is still to be proven.

Sending updates to RePEc for articles is manual. Honestly this has fallen off in the last 3 years, and I am trying to pick it up, but it’s so ad hoc, and my server keeps moving.

ORCID and Google Scholar seem to work. ORCID should just be the standard CV repository for everyone. Google Scholar should integrate with ORCID and DOI. That it doesn’t is a shame.

Research

Organizing datasets and code repositories for the research group (mostly Python, sometimes other languages, some R) should be done in a systematic way, but isn’t. Each student tends to work independently, so I don’t touch the data or code personally; and I want each student to have as much autonomy as possible, data management is a skill researchers need to learn, and they are all adults … but there isn’t an obvious great way to do this more automatically. Of course there are also issues about what data and code are public and which are confidential. Notebooks, like Jupyter, seem to make doing research easier, but tracking more difficult.

Idea Tracking

I now use Apple Notes, which is available (at no additional cost) on all my devices, as I am in the Apple Ecosystem. I store key writing snippets there. It's ubiquitous, lightweight, and frictionless. It has become a really good piece of software. I use it to write down everything I want to remember, and then sort it into folders later. I pin things which I want easy access to. I delete the note once the idea has been turned into a blog post, or added into an academic paper, or otherwise processed. Notes is not as formal as GTD software like OmniFocus, and as a consequence it has less overhead. Most of my projects are not on fixed timelines, so OmniFocus became a chore to enter things into. I’d like to be one of those people for whom DevonThink works, I have just never got into it. Scrivener also never really made it and I abandoned it mid project nearly 10 years ago.

Notes isn’t really keyed for version control, though I assume Time Machine would work. Indexing remains manual.

Data Management

• I still must back up relevant files from iCloud and institutional systems before they vanish.

• I manage photo archives of more than 60k photos that no one but me can access. Ideally many of those photos would be public and appropriately documented, but that requires time. It takes far longer to attach metadata than to take the photo in the first place. They are backed up to Flickr, but in a private collection, because I don’t have time to figure out what shouldn’t be private. I would like to in principle connect to Pixelfed, but again, time.

• I track family genealogy on Ancestry.com, knowing it could disappear with one terms-of-service change, though I have most of the data locally as well, as do lots of other people. I suspect this database will be reproduced in the post-apocalypse..

• I listen to dozens of podcasts in Overcast, but never bookmark articles

• Apple Contacts handles the people I know—students, collaborators, colleagues, family. But the rest? Social media followers —none are linked. There's no global “buddy list.” I track attention across platforms the same way I used to track links: manually.

• The Australian government does my taxes for me. How kind of them.

• I don’t save bookmarks anymore. I archived my collection, then deleted from my browser. The browser kept trying to autofill from bookmarks whenever I typed a magazine or newspaper into the browser tab, which is not what I wanted.

• LibraryThing has a database of my books up through 2017. It is not up-to-date with gains or purges, nor especially eBooks.

• I use Apple Calendar for Calendaring. Its relationship with MS Exchange (which manages my work stuff) is wonky and saddening. I will not however let Exchange own this for me, nor Google. Mail has not seen notable improvements either, and syncing still lags.

Jobby-Job

Often I am thrust into various management systems not of my own choosing. While much of the software at the University is custom, bespoke, and university-specific, two widespread ones are at the University of Sydney.³

Concur, the accounting interface I deal with to get reimbursed, is either terrible software, or implemented terribly, or both. It asks for “receipts” but it wants “invoices”. It gives me choices I am not allowed to use. It asks for praise every time I open it. I have come to believe that no one who has designed the software has ever used it. This is the most obvious “Tools of our Enemy.”

On the other hand, Canvas, the Learning Management System is pretty good (as was Moodle) for what it does. Some minor complaints about the rubric score not auto-populating the overall mark, requiring double-entry keeps tripping me up.

Still the CMS

I remain the node where all these systems intersect. I am the content management system. I tag, sync, archive, and cross-link across time and format. I migrate across platforms when they close, reformat when standards change, and reconcile duplicates when machines can’t.

I have become one with the system and the system is with me.

FIN

1. Literally, they do ask this, it is not just a lead-in to a blog post. I don’t know if they are sincere or flattering, or a mix of both. I do get up early, but I also go to bed earlier than they do. This helps the overall productivity of the group, as my sleep is during their productive hours, and vice versa. Also, literally, I am often getting up as colleagues are going to sleep, allowing exchange of information in the wee hours.

2. As my son says “What has my future self ever done for me”. The answer of course is to give you a reason for living.

3. That there is no good “University Operating System” is odd. Every university in the world has almost identical needs, and while LMS have become standardised, the other software is ad hoc that every university has to build their own stack.