Recently my workdays have fallen into a rhythm. Email and meetings in the morning, followed by any urgent tasks. In the afternoon, I work on design projects for a couple hours then complete the day by responding to email, checking my calendar and scheduling events for the week ahead.

But research suggests that 1pm might be a better time for a nap than web design. In fact, there’s an ideal time to do just about everything, according to your body’s natural timing.

Here are some interesting tips I’ve run across on how to best schedule your day:

Take a nap (1pm – 3pm)

That’s right — the siesta is legit! Researchers tell us that your body temperature dips in early afternoon, causing a natural grogginess. A quick nap can help you stay more alert for the rest of the day.

The key is to limit naps to 10 or 20 minutes. Any longer and you’ll get into the deeper sleep cycles, making it harder to fully wake up.

If your boss doesn’t approve of sleeping at your desk, you can reduce afternoon haze by eating plenty of protein at lunch (for sustained energy) or having a moderate amount of caffeine.

Do your best intellectual work (9am or 9pm)

Our minds are most alert in the morning (8-10am) and late at night (8-10pm). Immediate recall seems to be best in the morning, so this is a great time for reviewing that presentation or reading research. Longer term retention can work best late at night, before you go to bed.

So spending an hour checking email in the morning might not be the best use of your time. Instead, use that morning boost to tackle your most difficult project.

Get some exercise (4pm – 6pm)

I used to jog a few miles every day before work, but it seems cardio is best saved for late afternoon. “For increasing fitness, decreasing the chance of injury, and improving sleep, the best time to exercise is late afternoon or early evening,” says Matthew Edlund, M.D., author of The Body Clock Advantage: Finding Your Best Time of Day to Succeed In: Love, Work, Play, Exercise.

Later in the day, your body has had a chance to warm up so you’re more coordinated and less likely to suffer an injury. Of course, you don’t want to exercise too close to bed time or you’ll have trouble falling asleep.

Schedule appointments outside the office (8am)

When making a doctor’s appointment, try to grab the very first time slot of the day. Doctors almost always overbook and get behind during the day. You’ll spend less time in the waiting room if you’re the first patient in the door.

The other option is to get the first appointment after lunch, since doctors often catch up on their work over the lunch hour. This applies to other errands outside the office as well. I’ve noticed the U.S. Post Office, for example, has the shortest lines early in the morning too.

Take some vacation days (Feb – March)

After moving to Seattle, some of the first advice I got was to schedule a vacation late in February to find some sun. Not everyone lives in rainy Seattle, but almost everyone in the U.S. experiences less sunlight in the winter.

Too many gray skies can put you in a sour mood, so it’s vital to take a break somewhere sunny as the winter drags on.

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But creativity is not an immutable personality trait. It’s a skill that can be learned and nurtured over time. It just takes some experience with the creative process, a few helpful role models, an adjustment to how we think about problems and a bit of time to let our ideas simmer.

To improve my creative output, I’ve recently been watching talks by the experts. These folks have helped me reconsider my approach to creative work and given me some new strategies and methods to adopt along the way.

Many of you have already seen the creative genius talk by Elizabeth Gilbert. Gilbert dispels the notion that certain rare people are geniuses that can create great works at will. Instead, she says, all of us “have” a genius that we must pay attention to when it shows up.

For me, this the relieves the burden of self-doubt and frees us to explore ideas with fewer constraints.

A more recent talk by Kirby Ferguson takes some additional pressure off of the creative process. He argues that nothing is original and even our most celebrated creators — like Bob Dylan — borrow ideas from others.

We are not self-made. We are dependent on one another. Admitting this to ourselves isn’t an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness, it’s a liberation from our misconceptions.

When we understand the creative process involves remixing others’ ideas, we are free to accept this as part of our methodology.

Being creative takes work. And it means finding a productive process that gives you the best opportunity for success.

The next two videos focus on some practical ways to support idea creation from David Kelley (of IDEO) and John Cleese (from the Ministry of Silly Walks).

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when presented with a new problem. There’s a secret solution to this: impose constraints. In the next short clip, Jack White talks about using constraints to streamline the creative process and produce better work.

Finally, it’s important to note that things won’t always go smoothly. Things might be rough at first as you develop your creative chops. In this short blurb from Ira Glass (This American Life) we learn it might require years of perseverance before we get to our best work.

I hope you’re convinced that creativity is for everyone. Now, go create!

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During the last six years of SAGrader development, our small team has constantly battled our style sheets.

With every new feature comes questions like: Is there an existing class I should be using for this element? Is this supposed to be a H1 or an H2? What color should this border be? How do I put a sidebar here?

In practice, every new feature we built included another 100 lines of specific CSS classes. This made development more difficult for our developers (who should be concentrating on building magic functionality not redesigning our app) and left us prone to inconsistent styling (left up to the discretion of the developer).

One solution has been to use a CSS pre-processor like LESS. At the very least, LESS allows us to use variables for commonly used elements like colors and typography.

But after doing some research, we found that LESS is only a band-aid for a systemic problem. It turns out that many other groups have the same problem we do, and the solution is to re-think our approach to CSS.

When designing CSS for a large application being developed by many people, it’s important to optimize your CSS for re-usability. This means throwing away many of the CSS basics we learned in 1999.

Check out this talk from Andy Hume (with slides) along with this presentation from Nicole Sullivan. These two are talking about a new way to do CSS, sometimes called Object-Oriented CSS (OOCSS).

For me, the main takeaways have been:

• Separate different types of styling. Most importantly, separate structure from chrome. This allows for easier mix-and-matching.

• Minimize the depth of applicability. Creating six levels of descendent selectors couples CSS too closely with specific markup.

• Avoid over qualifying selectors. Keep them as general as possible so they can be reused and combined.

• Get in the habit of using multiple classes on elements rather than one huge single class.

We’re working on implementing some of these strategies over the next few months, and I’ll be interested to see what actually works.  Our goal is to give our developers a flexible CSS framework that can be quickly and easily adapted as SAGrader evolves.

In the meantime, our battle with style sheets continues.

By default, qualitative analysis often means presenting common themes and supporting them with representative quotes from participants.

This is a great starting point, but typically fails to capture the true complexity of the data. More importantly, this simplistic strategy can provide weak support for your argument.

Pat Bazeley, a qualitative and mixed methods data analysis expert in Australia, believes we can do much better.

In her paper “Analysing Qualitative Data: More Than ‘Identifying Themes’‘” Bazeley suggests using theme analysis as a starting point for more complete modeling and theory building.

To begin, says Bazeley, we should “describe, compare, and relate” our data. This means outlining the characteristics of the data, then describing how people are addressing certain themes. Who is talking about this? Who isn’t?

Next, we must compare that theme across various contexts. How are different groups expressing these ideas? Also note any instances where there is no variation.

Finally, “relate this theme to others already written about…As you relate categories you will be helped to structure your data because relating is best done to categories already discussed.”

In other words, listing a series of disparate themes is often confusing and not very persuasive to readers. It’s vital to explore and explain the relationships between key themes.

In most situations this will require more than a simple hierarchical organization of your themes. A matrix display, flow chart, or typology can help develop researcher understanding in addition to better presenting your conclusions.

These strategies can help you explore more complex relationships such as how often things happen, in what ways things vary under different circumstances, and how outliers can further your understanding.

And what about those participant quotes? According to Bazeley :

Reliance on presenting brief quoted segments of text as ‘evidence’ encourages superficial reporting of themes, whereas building an argument requires that conclusions are drawn from across the full range of available texts.

She suggests adding quotes only in the final drafts of your paper. In early drafts write without using quotes and focus on wider evidence for each of your points.

As a result of building a stronger collection of themes sensitive to context and held together by well-defined connections, your analysis should do a better job engaging readers and make journal reviewers happy as well.

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Big data is big business. But as I’ve written about before, you’re missing the full story without humanizing your data in a historical context.