I have multiple posts at various stages, but lately the time is lacking. I feel exhausted and unproductive, being pulled in a hundred different directions while I need time to focus and write an R21 and an R01 in the next 6 weeks. While barely keeping my head above water, I've been on Twitter sporadically, but yesterday I caught a couple of posts about time management. In one, which I can't find anymore because I forgot to bookmark it, the author was describing a time-management exercise. You make a spreadsheet of your day in 30min intervals and log what you do for some time. I have tried in the past to use different online time management tools to figure out where my days go, but I always forget to turn on or off the timer. I thought this more gross approximation of where time goes would be easier, so I will try for a week or maybe a month.
I have decided on simple categories: research, service, teaching and administration for work, exercise, TV, social, culture and sleep for myself. I have multiple questions in mind.
1) Simply put, how many hours a day and a week do I really work?
2) I feel like I have an inordinate amount of administrative work to do or followup on and I've been spewing random numbers when complaining about it. How much of my day is actually spent doing someone else's job?
3) Am I doing too much or too little service?
4) Can I make sure I exercise at least half an hour each day?
5) Am I happy with my activity distribution or do I want to make changes?
The first day was very informative. I worked 9.5 hours with a 1 hour break in the afternoon, because lunch was eaten during a seminar. 60% was actual research work, either writing or discussing experiments, 31% was some kind of service dealing with someone else's faculty candidate and reviewing grants. Only 9% was admin. I put in my half hour walking to work this morning, so now I feel justified going home and crashing on the couch...
I am curious now and I will report how it goes...
Two tips.
ReplyDelete1. Get Things app & readjust priorities on a daily/weekly basis as needed, then work from the top.
2. Block time on specific days for specific activities. Move the rest to next week. For instance, I have just squeezed all of my student appointments into a single block on Monday afternoon. They are not official office hours per se, but still function like them. Also, I stopped allowing meetings (i.e. I started saying no to Doodle polls for availability) on Thursdays and Fridays. These are my science days.
But even with a "system" there is always just reality and a shitload of things that manages to intervene. But at least I try.