How to Manage Your Time

…and then use it productively

Aidan Milliff

Florida State University

Framing the Problems

Why you should listen to me

  • I am, by nature, easily distracted

  • I have spent a lot of time:

    • Thinking/reading about productivity
    • Trying new ways to trick my brain into working harder

  • I came up with a system that worked well enough to get me through grad school during COVID

Why you should ignore me

  • I am still easily distracted
  • My “tricks” are not well-tested, generalizable, or guaranteed to work indefinitely
  • The only consistent care responsibilities I have are for Pepper the Dog \(\rightarrow\)

Pepper suffering the indignity of a birthday hat

Phases of Graduate School

Early

  • Lots of small/medium deliverables
  • Frequent, firm deadlines
  • Constant oversight
  • Everyone going through it together

Late

  • A few large, complex deliverables
  • Sparse, squishy deadlines
  • Do you still go here?
  • All struggles unique, individual

Some Axioms

  1. Our jobs require lots of hard work at high cognitive load

  2. We are bad at estimating (and forecasting) effort

  3. We are bad at switching tasks (and cannot multi-task)

  4. Our little pea-brains burn out after too much effort

  5. We mostly have to overcome these limitations ourselves

Time Management

How much should you work?

The Goal: Protect Big Chunks of Time

  • Working efficiently requires long periods of focus, but our work environment isn’t (always) set up to provide them

  • “External” Obstacles:

    • Advisors, Teaching, Seminars, Service

  • “Internal” Obstacles:

    • Friendly colleagues, Twitter, Any chore you can think up, Fatigue

  • Remedies:

    • External: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    • Internal: Just hold on a second.

Tip 1: Track your Time

  • You do not know how much you work

    • Work hours ≠ Time you leave work - Time you arrive at work

  • You should want to know

    • How much time do you spend on things that aren’t useful or fun?
    • How much time do you spend on your research vs. teaching vs. work-y activities?

  • You learn by tracking at high resolution

    • Manual: Notebook, Spreadsheet
    • Automatic: A tracker (RescueTime) or billing software (Harvest, etc.)

From Rich Nielsen’s website

Tip 2: Impose Structure

  • Flexibility is a huge perk of our jobs!
  • Productivity comes from a routine (do not wait for creativity to strike)
  • Routine includes daily schedule, and pattern of work/breaks

  • My 2021 Schedule 1

    • 7:30am: Start work
    • 11:30am: Go for a run
    • 12:15pm: Eat lunch & walk dog
    • 1:00pm: Start work
    • 6:30pm: Stop work
  • Total: 9.5 hours “work” \(\rightarrow\) 7-8 hours work \(\rightarrow\) \(\sim\) 4 hours good focus

Tip 3: Respect Focus Time

  • Consider creating deadlines (or process obligations)

    • Feedback group
    • “Writing” group
  • In any case, actually schedule time to focus

  • Figure out what helps you focus

    • Low distraction environment?
    • Social pressure?
    • Background noise?

  • Treat focus time like an important meeting

    • You cannot really re-schedule
    • If you miss it, it matters

Tip 4: Respect Non-Work Time

If you treat non-work as fungible, you will…

  • Be a bore (best case)
  • Start to compromise about working during work hours (worse case)
  • Feel like you are “always working” without getting much done (worse case)
  • Decompensate (worst case)

Don’t be this guy

Productive Time Use

How do you figure out what to do every day?

The Task: Write a Great1 Dissertation

-

Process Goal: Be Self-Propelled

Tip 1: Long Term Planning

My dissertation timeline…lol

Tip 2: Short Term Planning

4-10 March 2019.

  • System:”Big” plan \(\rightarrow\) Monthly plan \(\rightarrow\) Weekly/daily plans

  • Purpose: Reduce hard decisions

  • Practice: Plans constantly fail, update regularly

  • Tools of note: Bullet Journaling, SkedPal (maybe), GTD software (Things, Trello, Todoist, etc.)

Tip 3: Prioritization

… A part of planning

URGENT NON-URGENT
IMPORTANT Unavoidable, alas (Teaching, RA work) Prioritize at all costs (Your research)
UNIMPORTANT Shirk where possible1 (Public goods provision) I have never gotten to anything in this cell (IDK, alphabetizing books?)

Resources/Tools I Have Tried

Advice

Tools

The End