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Survive the postdoc stage having ADHD
I made it to a rather high level in Academia (I'm a senior postdoc at the moment) but now I am stuck at this level (doing my 6th postdoc in 7 years). I was performing quite well when I had more or less clear goals set by my PIs but at this stage I have either individual funding or very hands-off PIs and I have to plan things myself. I think I have a pretty decent intuition and lots of interesting ideas, but the implementation stage is very tough for me. There are three problems.

First, like in most (every?) STEM fields, in mine one has to fail many times in the process of getting an approximate solution to the problem one tries to solve. Normally, (as far as I understand) one is not discouraged or uses a couple of productivity tips/tricks and goes on to try another approach, until it works. I found out that, despite trying hard, these productivity tricks do not really work for me.
Second, due to this uncertain time to solve the problem, it is also not really possible to plan the task by splitting it into small bits, like is often suggested.
Third, even when I have the research done and I have to publish (or when I am writing a grant application), it is very difficult to polish the plots and fix wording of the paper. Again none of the standard tips really help me.

So, due to all this and me living alone and working 99% remote these days (my field is computational) I wallow in procrastination way too much of the time.
I understand that this affects everyone in science to some extent, but at some point I started to feel that it is not just me being more lazy than others or being unfit for the task, but that there is something deeper. So I went to a psychiatrist and got my ADHD diagnosis. Of course, my ADHD is not super severe (otherwise I would not make it to were I am), but it is bad enough to halt my career now, and I don't want it to happen.
So my question is: is there a good way to "gamify" scientific research somehow? Or maybe there are some other ways to deal with the problems I mentioned, specifically in the ADHD setting?
I know that there are some special cognitive tricks designed for ADHD people to help them achieve their goals, but none of them (as far as I know) works for scientific research due to these three reasons I mentioned above.

How is your productivity? You don't say anything about your output.

@Buffy when I worked as a "normal" postdoc instructed by someone, I published 3 first author papers in 2 years despite radically changing field. Since I got an individual funding 2.5 years ago I have published nothing. I am doing something, it is approaching a publishable state, but the closer it gets, the slower I go, because the tasks become more "routine". My project is objectively not a simple one (I am using a non-conventional method that I had to learn from zero to study one of the central problems in the field, all of this 95% alone). However, most of my issues are not because of that.

I started a discussion on meta about whether ADHD issues are on topic here, since we can't give medical advice. You might want to comment there. https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5047/75368.

So, it might be closed. But for the third issue, which is really shared by everyone, finding someone to work with who can give you feedback on your writing is a big help.

@buffy I think a writing buddy is a great idea, but I don't understand where to look for. It would require significant time commitment from this person and they should be from my field (or at least from Academia). I know people I could ask to look at the draft once or twice but I guess what you are talking about is something more regular, if I understand well

Gamification per se is a gimmick, but feeling rewarded for completing tasks, including tedious ones, is much needed. Going through your points: how does "very difficult to polish the plots and fix wording" bit manifest itself? Because this has to do with splitting the problem in the small, concrete, measurable bits directly. I find myself returning to the drawing board all the time, but keeping those plots to produce in sights helps immensely: now you don't just endlessly improve on results, but have a somewhat specific goal of producing really good plots. This is a PI kind of perspective.

I think that there is something bigger than the ADHD issue. You do not survive postdoc as you "survived" the Bachelor/Master/PhD level.
A Postdoc is a non compulsory transient between the PhD and something more defined (professor, technical scientist, researcher, lottery winner ...).
Pick a goal, work towards the path that leads to that goal. As a Postdoc, you have almost infinite freedom (in comparison to the previous step as a PhD and with the next academic step as a whatever professor).
From what you discuss here, I feel that your goal was/is to be a succesful academic professor. Then you apply for grants, where the aim is not to get money for you (only), but for you and another person that without your help would not get a salary and science (i.e. your research) would not benefit from the skills of that person. Then you will get publications because you are supervising the work, not because you publish (disclaimer: supervising is not an easy job, these publications are not for free, but it is easier than publish on your own).
Supervising excellent researcher doing a good job, providing him all the tools and money to perform that research, while you have free time to pursue a deep understanding of the same topic is a powerful motivation, offloading some work. If it is not enough to put the efforts into polishing a proposal, then try to think as "I can focus less on that subtopic because then a minion of mine will work on that".
If it was not clear enough before, now that you reached the 6th stage of the Postdoc life, you should have realized that you are not indispendable, there are plenty of persons with your skills that can do the job you did until now.
Your added values are the supervision and the experience. Without these, there is no quality difference between a 3rd year Phd and you (you may have more quantity, i.e. more aspects of the same topic, but it is not such a winner thing, unless you have gained some interdisciplinarity that is hot&popular at the moment).

I am not quite sure how it is supposed to answer my question. Also I quite disagree with your prelast statement. The more years I spend in science, the stronger is my understanding that any scientist is very much unique and there are many problems that I can solve (provided I handle my productivity issues) and nobody else can, without repeating the same path I had. Of course the converse is also true.
I know how to write grants. The main reason I don't get them is mostly because of my modest publication record (that's what reviewers repeatedly said) which is due to ADHD as I described.

side comment: infinite freedom for a postdoc is a characteristic of only some STEM areas (like pure math) but certainly not all. In fields that involve real-life experiments, postdocs are often much more like slaves.

@demitau "the stronger is my understanding that any scientist is very much unique and there are many problems that I can solve " Sorry to tell you, but you are very wrong on this, this is not the foundation of your uniqueness, exactly because any other can do the same by repeating the same path, so it means that you can provide guidance to make that path quicker to the next other, otherwise the path was a complete loss of time.
Regaridng PostDoc being slaves: it is exactly their freedom that allows them to be a slave. For so long time!

I think that my path was radically inefficient and asking another student/postdoc to follow the same would be unethical.

@demitau  I repeat myself: "it means that you can provide guidance to make that path quicker to the next other, otherwise the path was a complete loss of time."
Please realize that as a PostDoc writing proposals and aiming at a professorship you are there "simply" to prevent the unethical occurence of another student/postdoc to follow the same path. You do not need to survive Postdoc, because you already did for 6 years. Now it's up to you to decide which path to go.


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How does management work in academia? Who do professors report to?
In commercial companies you will mostly only have a handful people per manager. For example in a law firm it might be four or five and rarely that I know of more than a dozen.   But in (university) academia, a department can have 60 academics in it and only one department head. How does line management (i.e., the chain of command) work with such a huge ratio of staff to heads of department?  Are there a lot of middle managers below the head of department that professors report to?

Glib answer: it doesn't.

Generally speaking "management" in a university takes a different role and faculty are generally expected to know what to do and to do it to a high standard. In a certain sense, every faculty member is an independent entity and they only need to coordinate on a few things. Those things, such as curriculum and grading policy, are normally handled by committees of faculty, not handed down from above.
Typically a department will have monthly faculty meetings in which things are communicated and new opportunities and directions are discussed. Solutions are normally by consensus. The meetings may be mandatory or not, but the mandate can be pretty loose.
There are few situations in which a tenured professor is told what to do by "management". And some of the layers of management, such as department heads and even deans may actually be chosen by vote of the faculty.
So, in a forty year career, I seldom "reported" to anyone in the traditional sense and no one "managed" me and my work. True, I submitted an annual report of my activities and said there how I worked toward the three traditional goals of the university: teaching, research, and service. The department head or dean would respond to that report, perhaps making suggestions, usually minor, on things I might do in the coming year.
Even it times of conflict, such as when a student complains, the complaint often is handled by faculty rather than by "management."
Faculty normally self organize into seminars and such, and normally worry about their funding. There may be some pressure about that in top universities.
In the traditional (Medieval) university, the faculty IS the university and it would hire "managers" to do those tasks that they found unsatisfying. It is still somewhat similar in many places, but less so in large R1 and State Universities.
There is a story about Rockefeller Columbia University (if I remember correctly) that when ex-president Dwight Eisenhower became the university president, he held a meeting and told the faculty all the "wonderful things the university would do for the faculty." The head of the faculty (an elected position) stood up and said something to the effect that the university couldn't do anything FOR the faculty. The university WAS the faculty.
There are, however, many support offices in a university that are managed in a traditional sense. There is often a funding support office, an enrollment office, a counseling office, etc. It can be very extensive. But they don't manage faculty. Instead, they provide support services to faculty and others, though internally they may be traditionally managed. A "student recruiter" would probably answer to a "boss".

Who deals with unsatisfactory teaching or academics not responding to student queries for example?

@anush the first point of contact would probably be the director of undergraduate studies, who chairs the UG cmte. If the DUGS is involved, the chair.

@Anush In practice, often nobody.

There are universities outside the US...

There are few situations in which a tenured professor is told what to do by "management". - I think this is rapidly changing.  I am often told what to do or how to do something.  However, I am not likely to get fired for not doing these things and I agree that there tends to be more freedom in academia than in some other careers.

At our place generally the HoD will ask for volunteers and try things by concensus first, but they will tell professors what to do if they need to.

Interestingly, many people in support roles think they manage faculties because they can use processes to 'control' them.

An answer from a Dutch perspective. Short answer: there are no traditional managers for academics.
At the top level, the university has an executive board. These are normally (ex-)academics, and each has different responsibilities. There is a rector magnificus, who is responsible for all academic and educational affairs, and a president, who is responsible for basically everything else (finances, housing, etc). Usually there are a few more people who are delegated some of the responsibilities. There is also a supervisory board, consisting of people appointed by the minister of education for a fixed term. As they are more political, this usually causes some friction with the academics.
The university is organised into faculties, headed by a dean, who is a (possibly elected) member of the faculty of one of the departments. They usually are the head of faculty meetings, and represent the faculty in meetings with the board.
Each faculty is organised into departments, lead by a department chair. They are just one of the full professors of the department who have taken on some extra tasks. Similarly, there are typically heads of education, research, program chairs (for the various educational tracks), etc, all members of the faculty. Most decisions are made by committees consisting of these people, and they are usually advised by elected groups of faculty and students representing those interests. Sometimes a member of these advisory groups also gets a vote in the decisionmaking process.
Each department is split into groups/divisions. These are typically headed by a professor, and consist of members of faculty doing research and teaching in a specific subfield. For instance, my CS deparment has divisions called Interaction, Algorithms and Intelligent Software Systems. Each division may be further split into smaller groups, usually of a few full/associate/assistant professors, post-docs and PhD candidates.
Each of these groups generally has complete freedom to do what they want, provided they have found a source of funding for their research. This source of funding may provide some specific targets the recipient needs to meet, but these are usually quite vague. Each individual member of staff does have a "work leader", with whom they have a yearly meeting to discuss their progress and plans for the future, and who is typically their first point of contact for any work-related or personal issues.
However, there are essentially no "managers" in the traditional sense. These exist only at the top level, where the executive board makes decisions about finances, housing, and long-term strategic plans to attract more researchers/students/funding, and (as mentioned by Buffy) in the supporting departments like accounting, student affairs and the research support office.
As an academic, almost nobody ever tells you what you should spend your time on, other than some generally agreed split between research and teaching. This is something almost all academics I know enjoy, but it also means that if you can't handle that level of freedom and responsibility, academia is likely not for you. One small exception is usually PhD candidates, for whom their promotor is usually quite involved in decisions about directions for research. This is of course quite natural, as the PhD candidate is still in the process of learning how to do independent research.

"As an academic, almost nobody ever tells you what you should spend your time on" - this is a great falsehood which is typically discovered in the first year of PhD

@benxyzzy in my experience it's true though. There tends to be some generally agreed upon split of time between teaching and research, but no one ever tells you "today you're going to work on this research topic". This is somewhat less true for PhD candidates, but that's more to do with not knowing what you should be doing yet. Obviously there are deadlines for e.g. conference publications, but those are self-imposed.

As Buffy mentioned, many universities do not use a line management model.  But some do.  There are several strategies used to deal with the ratio of "managers" (department chairs/heads of school/deans) to "workers" (professors/lecturers/adjuncts...)

Disfunction is a popular option.
Adjusting the scope of the work unit.  For example, a department/school might have as scope of "optical physics" or "physics" or "physical sciences" or even "arts and sciences" depending on its size.
The department chair may have managers below them.  These managers are not responsible for a subset of people, but for a subset of duties.  There might be assistant chairs for research, undergraduate education, and graduate education, for example.  These assistant managers manage all faculty in the department, but not all of their duties.
Nonacademic staff (administrators, technicians, etc.) may have their own management which could be exactly like what is done in a corporation.
The number of levels of management varies a great deal.
In some cases all professors are managers who have direct control over other staff.

Usually each university takes its own approach to management structures and it is common to change the structure.

Old ideas of academic freedom, and the academic as a self-organizing unit are getting rarer than they used to be.
In my university a faculty member's line manager is definitely the Head of Department (HoD), and conversely postdoctoral researchers, technicians, and research assistants report to the faculty member. The number of staff members a faculty manages differs, but in life-sciences an average group might be a couple of postdocs, a technician and 2 or 3 PhD students.
The HoD might manage between 30 and 100 academics depending on the size of the department. There are teaching and research directors and committees, but they are advisory bodies/working groups, and don't really hold any power. There is also a chief administrator who is line manager for professional services and other non-academic staff in the department.
Once upon a time, HoDs were elected from within their department, and served as the department's champion within the university. Now they are appointed by their superiors and are responsible for enacting the Faculty and university's goals and priorities within the department.
The KPIs for research are the number and quality of papers, and research income. As long as you make your targets here, how you go about your research is pretty much left to the academic.
However, teaching and service roles are more actively managed. While volunteers for given roles are generally welcomed, and the HoD is guided by the teaching, administration and research committees, the HoD has the final say on who does what. The HoD is responsible for balancing staff member's workload under the Workload Allocation Model.  The HoD leads the annual appraisal of each academic and is responsible for initiating performance management (and ultimately dismissal) if KPIs aren't met. Interestingly promotion isn't within the power of the HoD, but rather the promotions committee of the Faculty.
I've often heard this complex structure referred to as a pastiche of a commercial corporate structure, with many of the down sides, but not really any of the actual efficiencies.

By "30 to 100 academics" do you mean faculty? That's an enormous department. Or are you including all the graduate students that report to the faculty that report to the HOD?

My current department has 145 faculty (+ 150 postdocs,  300 grad students and 2000 undergrads/masters), although this is recognized as unusually large (second largest at the university). It was formed from the merger of three departments. The department I was in before had 25 faculty and was merged because it was felt too small to be sustainable - it had had 45 academics when I arrived 10 years earlier. Similarly the university is in the process of closing down a department of 15 faculty because it had gotten unsustainably small, and would have needed an investment to bring it back to size.

Hot dang. I'd consider 30 "large"

Self-organization on a high level
One aspect (at least in many countries) is self-organization and self-elected "managers". For example, in my research institute the leadership (both "mid-managment" of various research labs and the whole organization) differs from a research department in a commercial company in three substantial aspects:

The chairs are scientists - they are selected from the scientific staff, bringing in an outside manager is impossible/prohibited, so they are "one of us" in some way even if they specialize (and they can't permanently specialize, due to term limits etc they'll have to step down and continue scientific work).
The chairs are elected by the staff, and they answer primarily to the other scientists and not to some external stakeholders;
The administrators don't have hiring and firing power for scientific employees (they do hire/fire administrative staff, finance people, etc), the scientific staff has to approve all that by voting.

So in some aspect they're the opposite of a regular manager, my "boss" can't fire me but I (together with my colleagues) can fire him from that position. They are essentially representatives of the staff chosen to handle internal coordination and external representation. Perhaps the appropriate non-academic analogy is a workers' cooperative?
Project-based teams on low level
For the daily research work (teaching is different), however, most of the coordination happens on the project level, partly because that's how funding is assigned and managed. It doesn't matter as much where you are on the "organizational chart" in general, the thing that matters is on whose grant you're working. Once a principal investigator has obtained long-term funding for some research goal, they are personally responsible for achieving the goals and managing the researchers and students working in the project. The management of those teams is much closer to how the industry works. Those are smal (equivalent to a "two pizza" team popularized by some non-academic management approaches?), functional teams with a clear goal.
One aspect of those teams is that they are inherently not permanent - they have an end date; some people may be explicitly hired for the duration of the project (e.g. post-doc contracts) and while it's common to have much of the team continue in a future project with a similar topic, IMHO it has more staff rotation to different teams than in a business environment - also partly because both the "individual contributors" and "project managers" have a quite free choice on their work; if I don't want to work on a particular project or with a particular PI, there's literally no way how "the management" could order me to do that; as long as there are any other projects/PI's with funding willing to take me on, I can go work on them; and PI's can pretty much arbitrarily choose what research projects they will pursue (though they do need to win grants to fund them).

Regarding the last heading about grants, the employee is a profit center. They write the grant, which brings in outside money, of which the university gets about half (for "support"). They're personally in charge of how it's spent. The grant system ensures that individual PhD's are in the driver's seat.

Your boss not being able to fire you is a property only of those systems that have tenure for academic staff, and I hear that even in the US tenure is not what is used to be.

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What are your responsibilities if a student announces their intention to commit a crime?
As a faculty member, it can happen that a student tells you that they are intending to commit a crime (while also attempting to swear you to secrecy). This might be something as simple as buying illegal drugs but it may also be something more serious.
It seems you might have three sources of responsibility.  A moral one to do the right thing, a second responsibility to follow university guidance and potentially a legal responsibility to report the intention.
Assuming the university has no clear policy on this question, what is the right and legal thing to do?

This will depend wildly on the type of crime and will not depend so much on whether there is an academic relationship between you two...

@wimi One question is if there is some implied duty of care within a university that wouldn't apply in other contexts. Another is if the situation is different for students under 18.

On matters of self-harm or harm: you need to act. On matters of a victimless crime - the situation is more delicate, because as academic you are a crossing between an official or semi-official, and a confessor. Strictly spoken, however, you do not have the secrecy protection in place that a priest, a lawyer or a journalist enjoys and therefore, the person confiding in you has put you in an ethically impossible situation.

Are your students adults? If yes, is there written informationen by the institution? If no, why should it be different than if you were, say, a yoga teacher?

This question is too broad.  Mandatory reporter laws vary from place to place and crime to crime.

@user111388 At least in Italy, the answer is yes, it is different if you are a university professor or a yoga teacher, because a yoga teacher is not a civil officer (see my answer).

@FedericoPoloni: But this is not written down in the university papers?

@user111388 Which university papers? That rule is written down in Italian laws, which trump any university regulations.

@FedericoPoloni: I must say I find it strange that they don't mention the fact that profs are civil officers in university regulations. I would have hoped/assumed that universities make their employees aware of such facts.

My own institution (in the United States) has a behavioral response team to deal with just such circumstances.  Perhaps yours does, too.

@Anush  Here's their own description: "The Behavioral Response Team (BRT)  takes a planned approach to identifying and assisting individuals who are distressed and/or exhibiting abnormal, threatening, or dangerous behavior. Through early identification, the team can connect individuals of concern with the resources they need to succeed and hopefully prevent crises. The BRT is a multidisciplinary team that meets regularly to assess and manage concerns that have been brought to the attention of the team."

@user111388 Since it's by law, you're expected to know the law (even though the Italian law is not so clear about our duties and rights: I once tried to better understand what are my legal responsibilities toward the students in case of an emergency, but I couldn't find a clear answer).

@MassimoOrtolano: I do not know Italian regulations, but in my own country words like "professors" are a little bit blurry - not everyone means the same when speaking about them. Thus, I would have hoped that people who are  civil officers would be told by their institution so such that they can look up the law. Is it completely clear in Italy who is a professor/civil officer?

@user111388 Yes, in Italy that of professor is a well-defined category. I think I've been known that professors are civil officers since I was at middle school.

what is the right and legal thing to do

I think this question mixes two different concerns: The right thing to do is a matter of personal ethical judgement. The legal thing to do is, well, a matter of law.
One might argue that the ethical concern is more fundamental than the legal one, since "I will do whatever the law requires me to do" is already an ethical statement -- and, depending on the case, a highly problematic one: History is full of examples where laws were set up in a way that was clearly not right -- from our view as citizens in modern societies today, and from the view of ethically-minded individuals who initiated changes to these laws.
One's personal ethical judgement, however, will depend on the case at hand, unless one takes the shortcut of just doing whatever the law requires one to do.

"What is the legal thing to do" depends on the jurisdiction. In Italy, for instance, during your job as a professor or instructor you have the role of a civil officer (pubblico ufficiale), and obligated to report all criminal offences (reati) (relevant law: art. 361 c.p.).
On the other hand, since you make that example, buying a modest amount of drugs for personal use (below a given threshold depending on the exact substance) is not considered a reato, but just a milder offence.

Does that include reporting when people say they intend to commit a crime in the future? (Note my use of the word illegal. There must be some drugs that are illegal to buy in Italy?)

@fomin Ah, good point, I don't think so.

@fomin It might count as planning to commit a crime, which in some places for some crimes can be itself illegal. If the student tries to enlist your help in violently overthrowing the state, that certainly sounds like conspiracy to commit treason. When it's just about drugs for personal use, probably not so much though.

If you were a priest, psychologist, etc., people talking to you in that capacity have a reasonable expectation of privacy and confidentiality (though I believe that the confidentiality can be broken if it involves an intent to commit a future crime that will directly harm someone).
But if someone says something to a professional who is not acting in that capacity (e.g. a conversation at a party), there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.
In your case, it's unlikely that the plan to commit a crime is related to your relationship as a professor.  Asking you to keep it secret happens at the personal level, not professional level. So how you choose to deal with the knowledge should be no different that how you would handle it if an acquaintance at the gym had told you the same thing.
On the other hand, if the crime is related to your official relationship, failing to report it could make you complicit.  As an extreme example, suppose your student tells you he is going to abduct people to perform experiments for his thesis.
The fundamental issue is why the student told you this information.

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How do I deal with diverse interests when applying for a PhD program?
I have a master's degree in Computer Science. I have applied to PhD programs, and decisions are trickling in. I may soon have to choose between two or more PhD programs. I am outside of the US.
Unfortunately, I have diverse interests. I was advised that a successful PhD application is usually quite specific, so I made each of my applications very specific. I wrote to a professor working in decision making (AI), another working in computational learning theory, another working in computer music, another working in quantum & parallel computing, another working in logical foundations & philosophy of computation. With much enthusiasm, I informed each professor that I was interested in pursuing a PhD in his / her field. This is true. I am interested in each of these fields, and know something about each of them. When advised to apply, I did.
The problem is - being interested in each of these fields also means that I'm interested in all of them. (There are more areas of CS I'm interested in. What's worse - my interests are not even restricted to CS. For the purposes of this post, I'm restricting myself to only the mentioned areas.) So when I choose between PhD programs, I'm choosing between completely different areas - and that is surely going to be excruciating.
This is not a case of not knowing my 'true interest' now, only to discover it later. I have no 'true interest'. I have always pursued numerous unrelated things in parallel. I love all my interests equally. In fact, I love the feeling of 'being interested' more than the interests themselves. Whenever I've tried to restrict myself to one topic of study - even for a month - that feeling is lost, and I am quickly bored. As a result, my skill-set is a classic case of a jack of all trades - master of none. The worst part is - everybody knows that a PhD is about getting deep into one specific topic. It's not about breadth - it's about depth. Even if I were to choose one of the PhD programs (and I must choose one), I have a feeling that I might get bored quickly and be prone to constant topic-changing / transferring. Again, this is not about being fickle - it's about following my heart, and my heart takes me to different things at different times.
Do you think I'm likely to fail / never complete my PhD? What are the best practices for dealing with diverse interests?
Update (2018): The good news is that I received my Ph.D. last year. The bad news is that many of the concerns I described in this question did rear their ugly heads in grad school (for example I became one of those PhD students who reads and reads and reads many things but doesn't get actual research done). Though I managed to graduate, the quality of work leaves much to be desired, and I am currently facing a difficult job search, and beginning to suspect that I have no future in research.

(My experience with non-American PhD programs is limited, so some of what I say here may not be relevant or possible.)
First, I think you may have painted yourself into a corner.  More important than being specific, PhD applications should be honest.  Hopefully your applications described the breadth of your interests, perhaps with some extra emphasis and detail in one area, rather than implying falsely that you are only interested in one topic.  It's better to be rejected than to be accepted into a PhD program where you won't thrive.
I think you need to look for overlaps and connections between your various fields of interest.  Decision theory and machine learning are not that far apart.  Quantum computing and philosophy of computing are not that far apart.  Parallel computing and logic are not that far apart.  Decision theory and logic are not that far apart.  Machine learning and computer music are not that far apart.  Finding something at the intersection of five or six different areas is almost certainly impossible, but lots of interesting stuff happens at the interface between field X and field Y.
On the other hand, all the areas you describe are incredibly diverse within their own boundaries.  You may find enough different topics within (say) machine learning to keep your fickle heart satisfied.
One thing you should ask about (quickly!) is the possibility of having multiple (ie, two) advisors in different areas.  Some departments encourage inter-disciplinary co-advising; some don't.  Some advisors encourage collaboration with other faculty; others flatly forbid it.  (In many European PhD programs, students are attached to specific projects of specific faculty from day one, and moving between projects or fields is almost impossible.)
What worries me more than the diversity of your interests is this sentence: "Whenever I've tried to restrict myself to one topic of study - even for a month - that feeling is lost, and I am quickly bored".  You have to get over that.  Research requires long-term focused attention.  Early in your PhD program, you may be able to juggle a couple of different research projects at once, but eventually, you have to focus on a coherent thesis topic.  It can be an interdisciplinary topic, sure, but it has be coherent.  You will have to work on that one topic for years.  If that sounds awful to you, then maybe you don't want to be a PhD student after all.
My department head has changed fields several times in his career, so I think his advice on this topic is worth repeating.  Assuming good health and good luck, you have a 50-year research career ahead of you.  So if you're deeply interested in half a dozen different areas, you can afford to spend seven or eight years on each one.

Thanks a lot! Yes, my applications mentioned my diverse interests, but concentrated on one topic (a different one in each application). And I certainly did NOT mention that this topic was my ONLY interest. However, the reader would get the impression that it's my PRIMARY interest - although I didn't say that explicitly either. I allowed it to be thus assumed, because it's rather difficult to craft a strong PhD application with no stated or implied primary interest.

About looking for overlaps - I thought of that, and tried to do it as far as possible. However, I found a problem - the intersection of fields X and Y is usually more specific than either of them. The intersection of 3 fields is usually VERY specific. A real world example from my applications - I was looking for an area to combine my interests in relativistic physics, philosophy of computation, complexity theory, learning theory, and philosophy of consciousness.

I found such an area - the niche (obscure?) field of hypercomputation. I read up on it frantically for a week, and it was very interesting. I wrote to a professor working on it. He advised me to apply, and I did. But I have been advised by others not to 'torture myself' by pursuing a PhD in such a contentious field, and again feel that I have 'painted myself' into a narrow and obscure corner with that application.

"The intersection of 3 fields is usually VERY specific." — Only if you're assuming that you have to work in the existing intersection.  I'm suggesting that you find a new intersection.

"I allowed it to be thus assumed" — So no, you weren't honest.

Not completely honest, I suppose. I was afraid that nobody would accept a PhD student completely lacking in direction. Maybe they still would if my academic credentials were otherwise impeccable - but that isn't true either.

I did pursue the option of multiple advisors (from different departments - in one case music and CS, in another physics and CS). In both cases, things didn't work out. I am certainly still open to this option though. Thanks.

Thanks a LOT (JeffE) for the replies and advice. Who knows, I may write to you soon stating my interest in computational geometry. ;) (/kidding)

I'd start with a fundamental question: why do you want to get a Ph.D.?  It's a major commitment of time and effort, so it's only worthwhile if you need a Ph.D. to accomplish your long-term goals.  Getting a Ph.D. really isn't worth doing for its own sake, or out of a feeling that it's something you ought to do (because you like computer science, or enjoy education, or feel you should have the highest degree you can get).  Really, it's just preparation for what you'll do after you graduate.
So from this perspective, the question becomes what you hope to be doing in ten or fifteen years.  Not specific topics, but rather what sort of career.  When you look around at faculty or industrial researchers, do you see people who make you say "Yes, that's exactly the sort of work and the range of topics I'd love"?  If you do, then you should look into these cases specifically.  You can study websites and CVs, and maybe even e-mail a few questions (although keep in mind that people will be busy, so don't be pushy and don't waste time with questions you can answer in other ways).  How did they end up in these positions that appeal to you?
If you can find many people doing what you'd like to do, then that's an excellent sign, and you just have to learn how they did it.  If you can find only a few, or even none, then you should worry that maybe a Ph.D. isn't the right path for you.  In that case, if you enter a Ph.D. program you've got to hope for one of two things.  Either academia will change you, or you will change academia.  Either is possible, but neither is likely.
I don't mean for this to be discouraging, but I strongly recommend thinking this through carefully before getting too far into a Ph.D. program (if you haven't already).  Once you start, quitting is difficult psychologically even when it's clearly the right decision.  It's easy to spend years in denial, knowing things aren't really working out the way you had anticipated but hoping they'll somehow get better.  This isn't healthy, so the more thinking you do in advance, the better.
Good luck!  I hope you either find role models in this career path or find another that suits you better.

Thanks for the reply. I want a PhD primarily because I love the excitement of doing research. I also enjoy continuously discovering new ideas. Without any doubt -  research is a long-term goal for me, and I'm not doing a PhD merely for it's own sake. To be honest, I don't see how your answer relates to my original post at all. The gist of my original post was - in short - that I am finding it difficult to cope with / decide between multiple far-apart research interests. I didn't say that I had doubts about my commitment to academics / research. And I don't.

About role models - I have plenty. Since I was 2, ALL my role models were either researchers or musicians. I never fell for sports or movie stars. However, the problem with analyzing the careers of these academic role models is that it tends to give me an inferiority complex. They are brilliant people. Much as I would like to be, I am not. But yes, I have plenty of people to look up to.

Sorry if I wasn't clear (or seemed insulting - I didn't mean to be).  What I mean is that almost all academic careers, and a large majority of research careers in industry, require focusing on a topic for years at a time.  You can switch topics periodically or try to work at the intersection of several fields, but academia really doesn't reward jacks of all trades.  So the question is whether you know of researchers whose entire careers seem congenial to you.  I.e., they aren't just doing work you admire, but work where you can see yourself focusing on it to the same extent and length of time.

The part I'm responding to is "Whenever I've tried to restrict myself to one topic of study - even for a month - that feeling is lost, and I am quickly bored. As a result, my skill-set is a classic case of a jack of all trades - master of none. The worst part is - everybody knows that a PhD is about getting deep into one specific topic."  The problem is that post-Ph.D. careers are exactly the same way, at least if you want to do research and before you get tenure.  This is too bad - I believe academia puts too great a value on specialists - but it's the situation you have to deal with.

If you can identify people where you wish you could have their entire career (with the same degree of focus, choice of topics, etc.), then that's great.  Try to get one as an advisor - there's nobody better to advise you than someone who is actually doing what you want to be doing.

Ah yes, I see your point. It's true - most stellar researchers seem to have dedicated their lives to one area - something I can't see myself doing. But if my research problem is interdisciplinary enough for me (which is REALLY interdisciplinary), I can imagine myself pursuing it for years. I do know a minority of role-model researchers who have constantly changed topics / tacked very interdisciplinary problems and have yet excelled. I do look up to them. Having one of them as my advisor won't be easy though, because these academic superstars are very selective about their students! Thanks!

I found your question today. I also have "diverse interests". Worse, my interests are more diverse than yours. I am interested in quantum physics, in biology, in history, in computer, in mathematics, in electronics, in music, etc.
Your problem is just in what JeffE had found: "Whenever I've tried to restrict myself to one topic of study - even for a month - that feeling is lost, and I am quickly bored". I get bored after a month of intense reading, or after half a year of leisure reading. It might be with the "instant gratification" vs "delayed gratification" kind of thing. Picking low hanging fruits in a new field is exciting. Having to do hard work for difficult fruits is boring. You might even have procrastination if my theory is right.
I worry that you might not be able to finish your Ph.D, like me. I chose one of the above as my Ph.D direction and I lost interest in reading boring (difficult?) papers and spent easy time in other fields. My GPA was good, I had no problem to pass exams. I just did not want to read those boring papers (the truth was that they were more "difficult papers" than "boring papers") in the field. I finally dropped out after years of struggling and got a job with my master's degree. Today, a day I find out that I am reading in parallel many materials on diverse topics at the same time, I decided to google and found your question.
If you can't focus, it might be better for you to get a job with your master's degree in CS and live an everyday Joe's life, like what I am doing now. On the other hand, if you can untwist your mind so that you realize that life is difficult, research is difficult, and doing difficult work is unavoidable, you might be able to escape being bored ( Now you know it is not about being bored, it is about being unable to face difficult problems for delayed gratification), you may be able to survive your Ph.D life.
[Update after 3 years] Today I found this answer made by me three years ago. I can tell you what I have done to overcome the problem. I am proud of myself as an amateur scientist that I have focused on one narrow field unrelated to all my previous interests for three whole years and got deep understanding of it. I almost dropped all my other hobbies and interests. How?
The first reason why I can make this change to my style was three years ago I suddenly realized that the old saying that we used only 5% (or 10%) of our brain capacity thus we had enormous capacity for learning was a lie. This is easily seen if you believe in evolution (why keep an energy hungry giant brain if there is no need). The truth is we have limited memory capacity. Don't jam garbage information in it! The second reason is somehow related ---- Those highly respected big figures in the past had limited brain capacity too! I believe if a person with good IQ and required education spends 10 years (sometimes 3 years) focusing on on topic, he can surpass almost all past and existing experts in the field, except for maybe one or two greatest.
With this second reason in mind (Most great figures are average Joe's themselves) I think I have made a discovery in a field I once was interested in. I have to pick it up and set aside my current main focus for a while (maybe as long as a year). Hope the above two reasons can help some people here.

It is possible that you will have trouble finishing your dissertation and thus obtaining your PhD.
It is easy to do your coursework; each subject takes only one semester.  You'll finish your subjects before you get bored.  But a dissertation usually takes a year or more to finish.
One possibility is to take your PhD at a university which allows publication of a few papers as equivalent to a dissertation.  You can make the papers about different fields and yet related to each other.

I didn't know that was possible. Thank for the pointer, I'll try and find out about such programs.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
How to hold back from interfering with students' inefficient-but-not-wrong work?
I'm a new and junior group leader. I therefore work quite closely with my (also new) MSc students.
I try to let them work and figure out things as independently as they can, but have my door open so they can ask me for help. When they do, it will often be about scripting.
In these cases I sit with them and we work together for a little bit. That's when I see that students often work in ways that are clearly inefficient, but not objectively wrong.
I don't want to interfere too much. This is a learning process and it takes time to learn from one's own mistakes. But I have to really force myself to not suggest they use keyboard shortcuts, a bigger editor window to see more code, more sensible file and variable names, use Dropbox instead of emailing, etc etc.
I think it's important that I hold back: it would be annoying of me to point out every little thing, especially if, as I said, it's not actually wrong. Is there a good way to suggest solutions but not be unnerved if students don't use them?

As a student, I want to learn. If I could be doing something better, I want to know what and how. Just explain things to them as and when.

You think things may be inefficient. Are they? For you, perhaps, for other, perhaps not so much. Don't get into a vim vs Emacs war (or a land war in Asia). Most of what you said are, at best, distractions from the real point of student work.

"more sensible file and variable names" is hugely different from the others.  That's a matter of writing good code, which is far far more important than being efficient in a given editor.  Also, neither dropbox nor email are good solutions for sharing code; they should learn to use a version control system (like git)

In programming, several of your items are objectively wrong. Both Dropbox and e-mail are horrifically wrong ways of doing code sharing and back up. Please use source control for any code stored in plain text (and some stuff that isn't plain text). It's the definitive tool for this job. Code is written to be read and understood; poor file and variable names make it difficult to read. This makes introducing bugs easier and checking for correctness harder. Do they want their results invalidated by bugs everyone missed? Editor config/usage is the only example that really fits your question.

I think it's important that I hold back I don't. You are a teacher, so teach. Share your hints and tips with them. Do it in a way that makes clear they're just your subjective way of doing things, but holding back helps literally no-one.

A somewhat similar question can be found here: https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/251/how-to-avoid-getting-emotionally-attached-to-my-students-projects

@BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft could you please underline where OP talked about using Dropbox for sharing code? During all my 3+2 years of CS study I used Dropbox and it rarely, if ever, was for code. But it was used for most studying activity and group collaboration (i.e. sharing 3D assets, PDF documents, and so on).

@AndreaLazzarotto Although it's not explicitly stated that they're sharing code, I think anyone who has been, or worked with, computer science students can easily see that lots of people who are new to programming will use email, Google Drive, etc. to share code. I did exactly that for my first three years of university before a professor enlightened me by forcing our class to use Git. Git should be taught right from the start, but it's often not, unfortunately...

@ChrisCirefice OK but there is a tremendous difference between sharing code via email and working in a shared folder. If you have to do a HTML+Javascript assignment, Dropbox is just fine. I also started using Git only after starting to work and used SVN in a single project during my MSc, but still... if a student is sending several versions of university related files via email and he/she is not using Dropbox to backup homework, then OP is right in wanting to suggest better strategies.

Also, studying computer science is a tremendous lot more than programming. Assuming students will use Dropbox as a quick VCS is a bit narrow-minded.

As a computer science student, during my work exeperience. My manager taught me a lot of the things you're talking about. Efficiency is insanely important in the workplace. Every single person there worked very efficiently, used so many hotkeys, many had AHK scripts to add even more hotkeys or to automate certain tasks. The naming is also insanely important, all the developers gathered for a lecture/group learning twice during my year there, one was regarding Java 8 which was just released and the other was about 2 hours on naming variables and such, so i'd say its important.

Does your research group have weekly meetings? If so, you could devote 5-10 minutes at the beginning of each meeting to workflow/development hacks that you think would be helpful. If your group does not have periodic meetings, it may be worth implementing some even just solely for this purpose. Students may not like this at first, but the net productivity increase will be beneficial to everyone. Also, you won't have to point out individual inefficiencies to multiple students (at least not as often).
I implement something similar when I teach, but this is more geared towards undergraduate stuff. I discuss things like how/where to apply for scholarships and internships, tips for getting into grad school, navigating workplace politics, and also some simple workflow things from time to time. Students have commented that this has been very beneficial.
I like @Nate Eldredge's idea of coming up with a list of general development tips, but I think this alone might have some shortcomings. It may be time-consuming to write up something really high quality that covers everything. Some students may not even read it (but these students probably won't pay attention to anything you say during a meeting either). Other students might not understand your suggestions until they see it in practice. This actually happened to me the other day. I knew of Emacs' Tramp, but never understood how to implement it. I saw a tweet with an animated .gif demonstrating how it worked, and I've been using it everyday since. Perhaps discussing these things in meetings and building a list of development tips over time may work well.
You could also make some group requirements that make your life easier. For example, you could require that your group use Dropbox (or something similar) to share documents, and in the process that may encourage them to use it for their own material. (You could keep the development tips document in a shared folder on Dropbox as a start!) I do think pointing out inefficiencies in person could be worthwhile, but you definitely would have to pick your battles and only do this from time to time.

EDIT
Some of the comments indicated that the several of the OP's recommendations are "objectively wrong," but I think that this misses the point. If a more senior researcher sees ways that her/his group could be more efficient, these are likely worth sharing even without possessing the perfect workflow. Sharing code through Dropbox may not be the best solution, but it'd certainly be better than emailing files back and forth. (I'm not even sure the OP was suggesting that the group share code on Dropbox; this is just an example). Also, it's possible that the students may have suggestions for the group (or even group leader), and these could be fleshed out by gathering everyone together.
One comment also suggested not getting into a Vim/Emacs holy war... but do the students know about Vim, Emacs, other editors/IDEs, and their capabilities in the first place? I certainly didn't know about these as a Master's student, and developing skills with an editor would have helped me tremendously (I'm not in a STEM field, so these tools are uncommon; I'm not sure about the OP's field, but again, this is just an example). You could definitely discuss features and capabilities without getting into a holy war. Mere exposure might be tremendously beneficial.

I've accepted this answer because it's comprehensive and builds on top of the (currently) most upvoted answer. But all answers have been very helpful.

«Some of the comments indicated that the several of the OP's recommendations are "objectively wrong,"» Indeed this really doesn't matter because those comments are objectively wrong. Your answer is superb.

What if you were to write up a list of "general development tips"?  Then you can share it with everybody once instead of constantly giving unsolicited advice.
You can also then give it to future students and hopefully get them started off well from Day 1.

Yes - I would have been very appreciative of something like this when I was a new PhD student, and would have found it more helpful than my advisor seemingly interfering in my workflow..

This is a good suggestion. If your research group has weekly meetings, you could also devote 5 minutes or so at the beginning of each meeting to demonstrating development/workflow hacks. It may be time consuming to write up something really high quality, and students might not understand it until they see an example implemented.

...and share it online, perhaps with a channel for feedback, so you can improve your tips and your own practice.

This is a really good tip. Create a list of "development tenets", post it at your lab so that all new students can read and contribute to. Answer any questions that they have, help them out when they need... but let go through hardship on their own just enough so that they learn by themselves.

This is a very neat idea, however IMHO (and as a former CS student) restricting them to "development tips" is a bit narrow. Most productivity tips that include keyboard shortcuts, pdfgrep, Dropbox, Evernote, writeLaTeX/Overleaf and also note-taking tips go far beyond development and could be applied to their whole student career.

My approach would be much more subtle compared to João's method. Instead of out right telling them what to do, I would show them my workflow while answering a similar question. Make sure to do this on your own computer, do not 'drive' on someone else's PC.
An example would be to show them your "development method", with a large code window. Use shortcuts or the CLI while they're watching what you're doing. You can say something like "foobar saves me a lot of time", but not too much. The students which want the higher efficiency in their workflow will naturally pick up what works for them.

"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink"

Having watched other people work a fair bit I would say this is good advice, apart from not using their machine. Particularly if much of what is going on is happening from the terminal. This is because when someone has a bunch of efficient shortcuts and commands I'd love to pick them up, but I probably cannot follow them in real time. If they entered all those neat commands into my terminal I can look back at the terminal history to see how they did it. (e.g. instructor uses "cat" to display a text file, the text immediately moves the command off the screen, but I can still go back to it)

That's a really good idea! I'm just always hesitant to touch people's work stations. They might say it's okay but if you're in a position of authority they might think they have no choice.

This assumes that the new person (usually inexperienced undergraduate students) can pick up on those things that are so common to researchers / experienced developers.
I believe that talking at least once about best practices is essential, because most of the times they simply do not know why we do certain things we do.
On-the-job teaching goes without saying. If they are in the lab and write code/text/etc sooner or later they ask questions. And then we can show how we put our recommendations into practice, and they understand by themselves that their workflow needs to improve.

The OP simply wants to switch to another horse.

Personally, this is what I tell my students at the beginning of their work, and my justification in the parentheses.

Use Dropbox/GDrive/what have you for backups (if you lose your work 1 week before submission you are screwed).
Set up a wiki for project documentation in the faculty server (if you don't take notes later you don't know what to write in the dissertation).
Use Mendeley for reference management (spend time writing .bib's or writing your dissertation, your choice).
Set up LaTeX and write their dissertation in it (Word is good for up to 3-page documents).
Use Virtual Machines for their work environment and keep regular backups (Don't waste time setting up things again and again).
Email to both supervisors in CC and always use "Reply all" to work-related emails (I cannot help you if I don't know what you are doing).
Show up at the lab often (just by talking with senior researchers you learn the quickest and smartest ways to your goals).
Send me progress reports often (if you don't ask for reviews I have no idea if your work is ready for them).

(Optional)

Get an SSD for their laptop if they can afford it (patience is worth more than money).

As for stopping myself from pointing out every little thing, it's easy: it's their work, and their choice to do a good one or not. In the words of Morpheus, "I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it."

Writing .bibs takes a few seconds per reference. Learning how to use some new piece of software takes... well, longer than a few minutes. What's the point?

Seconds?? Have you written a master's thesis or a PhD thesis? It takes minutes at best, because you need to search for the correct references and go over very field in the reference. Multiply it by 100-120 which is what is expected of a master's degree or 30-40 for a full paper, add compilation time to check it things are coming ok... Well I think I got my point across. Saps your time and patience too, when you can just drag and drop pdfs and review what mendeley produces for you. Honestly, nowadays we are lucky to have such amazing tools!

Er, yes, thank you. I've written a PhD thesis and published plenty of papers. Writing BibTeX entries was not a remotely significant proportion of the time spent doing any of those things. I don't find it takes very long at all to Google a paper's title to find the bibliographic details (or look at the first page if it's the official journal PDF). Compilation time is irrelevant, since you need to compile the document anyway, and it's not like writing .bib entries is some kind of rocket science that needs more checking than writing a paragraph of text.

I applaud your patience. Personally, writing .bibs makes me want to slit my wrists with a spoon.

See? You're patient, too! :-D

Mendeley is tremendously more efficient than writing bib files, especially if you are not a LaTeX expert (students rarely are). But honestly, then same applies for LyX vs LaTeX. You should learn the basics of LaTeX, but writing in LyX is much faster. Both my theses and many assignments have been written with LyX and it saved a lot of time. I also worked on papers and reports in LaTeX though, but for instance tables were always done in LyX and then the code was pasted into the LaTeX document.

Choose the few things that are important and count as 'best practices', (being sensible or having some standard about file and variable names  seems a lot more important than the size of the edit window  or keyboard shortcut to me).  Give some rules or examples that show the guidelines in action and go ahead and be a bit picky about those.
The other things - (use a bigger edit window, shortcut) are really not 'important' as best practice. Standing over a student's shoulder and saying, press that key, etc etc is really irritating and can be overwhelming if too much information/detail is being thrown at them. (Which detail is important, which is just you being helpful?) And, they actually may have pretty valid reasons after time to do it differently (they may find other shortcuts that work better with their 'style' or that you find useful if you observe them.
However, that being said - it is very true that time-saver techniques that will save them frustration are not immediately obvious to novices. I've found the best way is to let someone play with the tools first so that they might run across some of the frustrations. But mostly, simply answer the basic questions and if there is specific question about 'easier' ways to do it, then tell them. Then later - do the one-on-one to show how you would do the task pointing out your own practices and how they avoid particular frustrations. However, at that point, just let then choose to do it how they find best. It isn't useful to keep suggesting it every time you are helping them out.
While I'm not involved in training students in coding, we do have to train novice users on equipment that is a bit tricky and has a long training period to becoming expert so the process has some similarities.
Choose the aspects that are almost non-negotiable because they are important. Don't sweat it too much when the novices keep choosing to ignore the hints you've given them that are based one what the experts typically have found 'useful' strategies to make their own life easier.

@haff suggested in a comment:

If your research group has weekly meetings, you could also devote 5 minutes or so at the beginning of each meeting to demonstrating development/workflow hacks.

An interesting idea!  Now, let's vary it a bit:

Devote some group meeting time (not necessarily 5 minutes only, and not necessarily at each meeting) to going round robin, giving students the opportunity to share their own workflow hacks with each other.

Do give them a heads-up in an email in advance so they can think about what workhack(s) they'd like to share or demo.  In other words, don't catch them by surprise.  And allow individuals to choose not to share something.
In addition, you can have some workshop-type meetings where someone volunteers to be in the demo chair, doing some code development or testing on the fly, kind of like a master class in a music department.  Then invite the students to comment constructively, with the goal being that each student find something to praise.  If they want to make some constructive suggestions on how to debug more effectively or efficiently, that's fine, but the main goal should be to learn to provide positive feedback to peers.
It is remarkable how much more effective tips and corrections from a fellow student are, compared to having them all come from the professor.

I see nothing wrong with making suggestions. After all you are teaching them and it seems not unreasonable to offer advice on how to improve the way they work, especially if the suggestion is to make something objectively more efficient.
I entirely agree that it may not be a good thing to force students to work in a certain way if it really doesn't make sense to them. Certainly my experience is that one of the most useful things about working with someone experienced (whether in a formal teaching setting or not) is that they will know  a lot of useful tricks which aren't necessarily intuitively obvious.
Once you've made the suggestion you can leave it up to them whether they want to act on it or not but at least then they have the information.

TL;DR: Make a distinction between 'tips and tricks' and 'guidelines/good practises'. Give hints towards the first, and try to enforce the latter.
If it is possible in your situation, you might want to organize a small presentation. Something like 'EditorX tips and tricks'. Where you can share with them some tips and tricks on using the editor in a better way, without pointing out any student in particular.
This is not that different from industry. I work as a software engineer, and we have weekly talks where we can give a demo on something interesting in the field. Every few weeks someone will give a small demo of some tips and tricks. Everyone is encouraged to do this.
The benefit of this approach, to me, is that you make other people see the benefit (faster development, for example) with a small demo. You'll also make them curious to finding more tips and tricks that they can share.
This being said about tips and tricks, there are also other things that are not simply tips and tricks but rather guidelines and good practises that should be followed. Wether you use a shortcut or not is quite optional, or wether you realise there is a Zero Latency Typing setting in IntelliJ (an IDE) and want to use it. Yet on the other hand we have things like Version Control, sensible variable names, keeping some documentation, which they really should be doing. The way in which they use it is once again in the 'tips and tricks' part, but they should at least know the benefit of using it and be strongly encouraged to do it.
The way I did this when teaching (academic setting), was by enforcing the usage of these things. I am not sure if you can enforce this in your position, but if at all possible I would do so. Can you set some 'guidelines' for your group? If so, enforce coding guidelines and have them documented somewhere. Put anything relevant in that document, such as if you want snake case or camel case. Give some tips on how to come up with good variable and class names. Enforce pushing to git (svn,..) and show example of good commit messages.
(A way to enforce good code style could be to use a tool that checks the syntax, variable name patterns etc.. There are some good linters available for many languages)
The ones whom I have taught did not always see the benefit of these things - but in the end turned around 180 degrees. It made me happy to see the guidelines being respected and having the students actually see the benefit of this.

it is a process, I agree, but if you don't point out the "mistakes", how would they know that they could be improved?
Personally, I nitpick everything, and so far it has worked well. I also like to make clear this exact point and remember to congratulate them when they actually do stuff right on the first try (Otherwise it seems you focus too much on the negative feedback).
Of course, it is important to remember that ultimately it is not your decision. You present all sides, pros, cons, and they decide. Another way of saying this is that you mention each thing thrice at most :)

"how would they know that they could be improved" - well, there are people who find out how to develop an efficient routine themselves.

@O.R.Mapper indeed, but my thinking was broader than hotkeys/scripting/routine, which was my understanding of the question. Basically, I'm annoying enough to have a comment for pretty much anything related to my students. Not only related to academic stuff, but steering clear of the problematic/inappropriate topics...

I agree with this, because in many cases people simply do not know what they are doing wrong. If no one ever tells them at least once that they could improve their work in a certain way, maybe they will find it on their own, maybe not...

I suggest you approach this part of teaching the craft of programming as if you were a theater director.
Tell your students you will take some time to observe each of them working and give them notes afterward.
Observe a student and take notes.  Keep silent during observation.
After your observation, "give your notes:" have a conversation where you tell the student your observations of their work, and offer your suggestions for improvement. This way you're offering your suggestions in a structured way, and not nagging them. Be sure to tell them they're not being marked or graded on this.
You can also encourage them to do this for one another.

I'll try to answer the question you are actually asking - i.e., the questions about you, not your students:

How to hold back from interfering with students' inefficient-but-not-wrong work?

...and...

Is there a good way to [...] but not be unnerved if students don't use them?

(And my answer is strictly about advice that was not asked for, like in your case. Nothing of this obviously applies when your students ask you how to improve.)
Unfortunately, you are up to something quite profound with your questions. There are two facts which can make people like you (or me), who have very efficient techniques for doing stuff, very unhappy by witnessing other people plodding along excruciably slowly - for whatever reason, not necessarily related to their intelligence at all.

Not every technique (of using an editor, upload tool or whatever) works the same for every person out there. What you may find very obvious (e.g., having most Emacs hotkeys pat down, being able to envision a good on-the-fly keyboard macro streaming right from your fingers during editing, etc.) may be utterly impossible for others. You arrived at your techniques by thinking very long and hard about it, or by intuitively finding something which matches how your brain is wired. That is not necessarily applicable to other people. Hence the VI/Emacs, Windows/Linux, PC/Mac wars, etc.
Not every person is actually able to take advice, however well meant, and apply it to their own work, for different reasons. In fact, in my experience in all venues of life (university, work, family, friends), there were only very, very few people who were at all able to take any un-asked-for advice whatsoever.

Now. I will not go into the specific reasons for these two facts, because there are many, and it does not matter. Just an example: for "1." the other person might just not know about it; his "thought routines" might just not match up with how an editor works, and so on. For "2.", you might just not be able to explain it in the words they need to hear, they might be blocked by pride etc. There may be plenty of other reason, but my answer is not about those reasons at all. Sure, for many of them, there is a way around it. But you will always end up in the position that you feel pain because you so dearly want to help but they just don't get it.
How to hold back
Just do it. Sit patiently while they do their inefficent thing. Yes. Obviously you can show them how you work, but frankly, they see that simply by watching you, if you are working in a peer environment. You do not need to make a "thing" out of it. They are students and should be used to use their brain; if they see you working blazingly fast while they take a loooooong time, they should be able to figure out that there's something going on. The point is that it is not you that needs to do something. It's not you that is responsible here.
If they see you working fast, then they are free to

Ask you to explain how you do it.
Feel bad about it and practice at home.
Sit together with their friends and "compare notes".
Buy some book and read up about it, whatever "it" is.
Download the tools you use and figure them out.
Or not be bothered about it at all and stick to their slowness.

And probably other things.
How to not get unnerved if they do not use your tips
The secret about not getting unnerved is to think this through upfront, and remove the idea that you can somehow change someone else right out of your head. You cannot change another being, ever. You can coax them, force them, lead by example or whatever, and you can enjoy the situations where they indeed improve, but you cannot really make them change.
So, by pure logic, it makes zero sense to get unnerved. That's a case of not seeing reality as it is. If you accept that things are as they are, your becoming unnerved will reduce, for sure.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
Thanking professor with dinner delivery
There is a professor who has made several reference letters for me, and I would like to thank him. However, I have some doubts as to whether it would at all be appropriate to thank him with dinner delivery to his office, say. I feel that simple verbal thanking is not sufficient at this point, but then, the atmosphere of formality is still there at the level of university relationships. What are one's ideas on this? If sending him a fine dinner would not be appropriate, especially without first discussing this with him, what is another way of thanking a professor, which would be considered "formally appropriate"?

See also: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/100543/20058 and https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/73430/20058

A meal delivered to his office?  What country is this, anyway?  Around here we could expect he has dinner plans already; maybe even a family he wants to spend some time with...

A full dinner seems too much. Usually I would have given some chocolate, coffee beans, good tea, or other small fine bites which I knew the professor enjoyed. Granted, I knew these people personally, so it helped. You could approach a colleague and kindly ask if they could suggest something in these lines.

I would avoid giving food-- especially a full meal-- to a professor, unless you know them very well. This is because you may not know their tastes or dietary requirements; for instance, unwittingly giving them a dish with nuts in if they have a severe allergy is definitely not a good idea.
It's also a bit strange to deliver such a meal to their office. They probably want to go home and eat their dinner there, rather than sit in the office and eat your gift.
While you are understandably grateful for the reference letters, the professor probably just considers this part of their job. If you really want, a nice handwritten card saying thank you would certainly suffice.


text:
Prof's neurological health is declining rapidly. What can I (TA) do?
I'm a law student acting as a teaching assistant/fellow for a tenured and notable law professor. Between last year when I took the course myself and now when I am a TA/TF, his mental acuity and health has declined significantly. He has essentially no short-term memory, tremors, and can't follow conversations. He rambles, mixes up classes and assignments, and even physically wanders off to look for things (not returning with anything...) in the middle of class.
The students know that something is wrong and often exchange looks when he loses the conversation or rambles.  The faculty certainly does know. His assistant attempted to see someone in the administration for help but they brushed her off, and once the professor found out, he never forgave his assistant and there is a rift between them.
My heart breaks for him. He's had an excellent career and I don't want him to face this kind of humiliation. But at the same time, his condition is so poor that I had to teach the two-hour class today. He must know that something is wrong, too, because he will often make awkward jokes to cover memory lapses.
What can I do? He won't see a doctor. I am afraid of burning bridges with him by confronting him, since that's what happened to his assistant. I don't want to go behind his back to the administration for the same reason. I need his recommendation/reference for my career aspirations. His family is absent. I also worry that any intervention at this stage, in the middle of the semester, will only hurt his students.
Who, if anyone, in a school administration could I speak to about this? Is there someone who handles this sort of thing? Should I? Is it inappropriate for me to insert myself in someone's personal affairs like that?
Update one year later: posted as an answer here.

One minor but important point: according to Wikipedia, the definition of mental health is the "psychological state of someone who is functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioral adjustment". From everything you've described, it sounds like the professor in question does not have a mental health issue; he has a brain health issue. Memory loss and loss of cognitive faculty is generally a sign of Alzheimer's or other neurodegenerative physical illness, and as such I think the title ought to be changed. In any case, the situation is serious, and needs to be handled carefully.

You should be able to speak confidentially with your HR representative, especially wrt what is the proper way for you to proceed in this matter.

@Compass I'm guessing so, but the brush-off of his assistant does sound like they might not realize the severity of the problem.

@ Moriarty, yes that's what I meant.@ DumpsterDoofus, excellent point, I will change the post accordingly. @ RBarryYoung, I'm a student and only employed hourly as a TA for this one class, so no HR representative...

HR should be available to all paid employees, even if you haven't been specifically assigned a representative.  This is true for virtually all institutions.  Just go over to HR and ask to speak to someone in confidence.

As a side note, it's slightly worrying that he found out when his assistant decided to tell someone. That information should be strictly confidential, even if the assistant didn't feel like it should be. It may be that the assistant spilled the beans, but if he found out some other way, that's not right.

@Daniel Hatton That may be true but in this case it was in fact degenerative.

Let the department head know what you've observed. You can write an anonymous letter if you feel uncomfortable or are worried about burning bridges.
(I've been in this situation, as a student. We - the students in the class - wrote a collective letter to the department head. He was able to arrange extra TA support for the professor for the rest of that semester. He also arranged things so that this professor had other duties in the department going forward, but no more teaching.)

Thank you so much for this. One question, though: law doesn't have departments, only a dean of the entire law school, but that's who the assistant already tried to contact and was rebuffed. Should I do it again?

@Anonymous Sure, try again. Repeated complaints are harder to ignore. If it's in writing (i.e. a letter) it may be harder to brush off. You can also check what other relevant deans exist - a letter sent to three people is again, harder to dismiss, than an oral report to one person.

Further to the answer by @ff524 , you could also write --anonymously -- to another high-up academic who has oversight over teaching and student welfare. I expect that there is a Dean of teaching, or student affairs or student experience etc., to whom you could write and mention the problem.

@Anonymous School, department, same thing. Talk/write to the head honcho, whatever their job title is.

Especially since it is a law school. They'll probably take repeated written complains very seriously

I'm not sure how this could be done anonymously.  These are small communities, there is one TA, and in the letter they will have to say something of what they have observed.  I do agree that contacting multiple people may help protect the OP.

If nobody does anything about it, it will eventually blow up, but probably not in the nicest way.
I had a similar experience with a professor that had a more than a small problem with alcohol. We were students, so we didn't want to risk our mark/course by going "against" him/her, so what we did was (as @ff524 suggested) to write some anonymous letters to the department. This lead to him/her going to seek help and everything got fixed in the end.
If nobody would had done this, it would probably have ended in some very unpleasant situation where the school probably would have been forced to fire him/her. Informing the school about the problem was definitely the best option for students, the school and him/herself.
This is just a personal experience in a bit different scenario, but I thought I may be helpful.

It is very wrong to assume that the other members of the department or the administration do not know about this faculty member's condition. It's very likely that they knew about it previously and they know about it now.
However, they are not at liberty to share the details about what they know about their colleague's health with you. This is both an issue of medical privacy as well as a human resources / personnel issue. They may be taking steps themselves to lessen his workload or to arrange a temporary medical leave -- but again, they may not or cannot share those details with you until they are officially public. And they may deeply care for their colleague and not want to publicly embarrass him by removing him from his post before they can arrange a phased retirement.
So when you speak to them, they may only be able to listen and not tell you what they know or what they are going to do. Which seems from the outside like they do not care, but it may be far from that in reality.
Now they might not be aware of some of the impact that his recent decline has had in the classroom. It might be useful to write a private letter or to talk to your chair/dean/provost about how to mitigate the impact on other grad students. But making a big public fuss and public embarrassment might be exactly what the administration may be trying to prevent.

I think you misread my post. I explicitly said that the other faculty certainly must know about the issue but clearly no action has been taken. It was the dean, whom the professor's assistant approached with concern, who brushed off her concerns and said everything was fine (they didn't tell her they couldn't speak about it or anything).

Just because you don't see any action being taken doesn't mean that there isn't anything happening in the background -- above even the level of the regular faculty. Furthermore, you should be cautious about reported speech from the professor's assistant. The administration may be reluctant or unable to speak to her about the faculty member's condition -- and she really shouldn't be sharing her conversations with the administration with students.

p.s. If the assistant is known as this sort of gossip, this may also be why no information is shared with her.

No need to make personal attacks on his poor assistant. She's been his secretary for many years and they have worked closely together. Six months ago, when this got worse, she started making his lunch every day and walking him to and from class. She is not a "gossip." The other TA and I approached her with our concerns and she explained that she had already tried to seek institutional help.

No attacks, it's just that the administration may be limited what they can say to whom. An assistant who talks freely with students may be seen as a liability in terms of information compartmentalization.

-1 For claiming that members of faculty are obligated to not keep TAs informed about this state of affairs, rather than being obligated to - which is what I believe is the case. It may be embarrassing to him, somewhat, but the faculty has a responsibility to you as the staff, and all of you together are responsible to the students, so this sweeping of things under the rug won't do.

It's been a year and I thought I should post a follow-up. I waited until the semester was over and then went to the administration, but was blown off. I even tried reaching out to his family, who didn't think there was a problem. Ultimately the issue came to a head without my involvement. He was so unable to teach that they took him off the teaching roster. Speaking engagements received very negative feedback, and ultimately there was no ignoring the issue anymore. He has since gotten medical attention and is no longer teaching, but the experience was as humiliating as I had feared it would be.
It's really a shame that it came to this, and ultimately none of my concern or help made a difference--it had to just blow up in his face. I am disappointed that the administration was too little and too late.

Thanks for following up. The university administration should be ashamed but I suspect many of then have no shame left. You are a good person and did your best. Take what comfort you can in that. In academia the best solution is often not applied, what is taken is the path of least resistance but you can hold your head high.

There is a possibility that he has (as my late father had 15 years before his death) a mere circulatory impairment, and that a simple (well, somewhat routine) "roto-rooter" treatment (balloon angioplasty) in hospital will restore his acuity. My dad got his marbles back. So can your prof, if it's the same difficulty.
Go to the Dean, and stress the importance of getting your dear professor to the doctor now, before it is too late.

We thought my grandmother had dementia, until she'd already been in a nursing home for some time, and they brought in a new doctor who changed up her diabetes treatment. She came back to her old self. All this to say that there is basically everything to be gained, and even possibly real benefit to your prof's health by pressing the issue. But it's a tough situation to be the one taking action, and I wish you the best of luck.

He could have early stage form of dementia such as alzheimer's. Addressing it earlier on is important as interventions can slow the progression of the illness. I think you should contact the department in some way to start forming some shared approach to assisting the professor. He will probably need to visit a neurologist.
I'm currently working on a project researching those with Dementia, and its quite common for those with it to deny any problems. I have spoken with families who have and elder with dementia, and some of them haven't told the elder about the problem, as they thought it would be too much for them to bear. However, there are known treatment methods for dementia and it's important to get started sooner rather than later since in the case of dementia it's a progressive degenerative disease of the brain.
Now I know there is no formal diagnosis, but there are groups like https://www.dementiafriends.org.uk which are a collective of people who share information on how to best deal with those suffering with dementia. If you reach out to them they may be of assistance also.
Best of luck.

First, a point of principle: It is your ethical responsibility as an academic and as a teacher to make sure the students do not experience a mis-taught course (or worse) due to this situation. So, you must do something and it's a matter of choosing tactics.
Second, a warning. Your Professor might get very angry at you if he does not agree he has a problem, but finds out you've gone round accusing him of being a nutty professor, so to speak :-(  Do things to mitigate this risk.
Some ideas (some complementary, some contradictory):

You wrote the other faculty "MUST know". Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't and you're just jumping to conclusions. Find out. Does he have friends among the faculty? Talk to his friends, tell them you're worried but you're embarrassed/afraid to talk to him directly since you don't want it interpreted the wrong way. They should at least be understanding and may well provide valuable insight/information. Hey, maybe they intend to do something themselves...
You wrote the family is "absent". Make them non-absent. Determine phone numbers (phone! not email!) and call them by order of proximity of relation. If you can't get a phone number, only email to say you have a delicate personal matter that worries you regarding Prof. Somebody, and that you very much ask that they agree to a phone conversation.
Try not to act alone. Are there other TAs? Try to coordinate actions with them. Do you have a faculty union? Coordinate with your union rep before going to management with this.
What about the students? If they've noticed, try having a discreet word with the relevant Student Union rep. Make him promise not to attribute any claims to you, but tell him you're concerned and if the students initiate some sort of a complaint, they will get non-confrontational backup from you (or others as well, if you're coordinated with others).
Try to ask/manipulate someone authoritative to be in the room when your Professor is having one of his spells.

I'm neither an academic nor a teacher. I'm just a student who took the class last year and was asked to TA it this year. So I do not believe I have any such responsibility, and I don't feel comfortable approaching other members of the faculty or contacting his family.

Assuming you've accepted the position - you are now an academic. A teacher in Academia. Your paramount obligation in this capacity is not passing the syllabus material on to the students, but safeguarding the well-being of Academia around you, ensuring - as much as it is relevant and appropriate - that it serves its purposes and meets its internal values. Having said that - it's perfectly understandable that you feel uncomfortable, so I would first try to talk with other TAs and not go it alone.

If you think you can handle the extra work, you could speak privately to the professor yourself, and -- cautiously -- offer to take over the lectures for the rest of the term.  He might be glad of a way to get out of this situation without losing face.

I'd want the dean's approval before going ahead with a de facto change in course instructor.

Yeah, as I said above, I'm not a teacher or academic. I'm just a student who took the course last year and was asked to TA this year.

@Anonymous Who asked you to TA? The ailing professor, or the administration?

On my opinion, simply left it alone. I explain, why.
I am sure, the administration of the university knows the situation much better as you would think. They also know, when and how to intervene. It is surely not the first similar situation which they need to handle, and don't forget: you only want to say him, what they already know. They have to solve the situation

Without humiliating,
finding a new successor,
and capable to make the switch with the smallest possible overhead.

And, what if your Professor only needs to find a doctor who prescribes some pills for him. You simply can't do this to a people so much older as you.
Going to pension is seldom a funny thing for the profs, actually, not a funny thing for everybody.
Incompetent professors are not a rare thing in the academic sphere, and most of them are not good-standing, but as you write, he is.