Thank you to all who attended our ADVANCE Lunch/Discussion: Addressing Priorities/Managing Time. We would like to share with you all Professor Curtis's thoughts on time management. Enjoy these helpful tips!
Time Management – some tips from Jennifer Curtis / School of Physics, Georgia Tech February 7, 2017
1. Eat your frog every day.
2. List your top goal (or goals, max 3) for the day. Make sure they are important. You can keep a running list of other tasks under your top goal; but only do those in free space around accomplishing that main goal for the day.
3. Schedule anything that is important to you, including time to write and think.
4. Have a good sense of your main goals for the next day before you go to bed. Don’t wake up without a clear sense of mission/purpose, unless the purpose is to get organized and find your mission!
5. Make a list of your goals for different time periods: the next year and then divide the year into months. Do the same for
• Look at back at this list with reasonable frequency.
• Don’t beat yourself up too much if you don’t accomplish your goals, but adjust accordingly.
• Learn from this process with time how much time it takes and also use it as a tool to evaluate your own efficiency. Are you not getting your most important tasks completed? Why not?
6. Know yourself and your needs. Make sure your life and schedule lines up with these things.
• What do you care about?
• What are your priorities?
• What energizes you?
• What time of day do you work best? Do your most important work then
• Set your boundaries with other people so that working conditions are optimal as possible (do you prefer people to stop by randomly or have appts, do you need breaks with time to yourself or are you ok with back-to-back appts all day, etc)
7. Work ahead, if only just slightly, not behind.
• Damage from being late is like compounding interest
8. Communicate very clearly and make sure all expectations for you and others you work with are clear
. • A lot of time can be lost in miscommunication and follow up
• If you don’t know your task, you waste a lot of time
• As a manager, if your students / team don’t know what you expect, they won’t do it. Then they will lose momentum/interest because they don’t feel progress.
• Lack of certainty can cause anxiety or demotivate working on a project/task.
9. Break up overwhelming tasks into smaller pieces that are doable. If your smaller tasks are still overwhelming, break them up into even tinier pieces.
10. Set boundaries to the number of things you will do. If you are faculty, in advance, list how many invitations you will accept, meetings you will attend, outreach events you will participate in. These boundaries should be informed by your goals/priorities, your energy levels and what drains and energizes you. Don’t blindly do everything that folks ask you to do (say yes to everything)
11. Maintain your calendar well • As soon as you agree to do something, put it on your calendar – properly (on the spot!) • If a meeting/event is important, schedule it immediately • Keep some wiggle room in your schedule for extra one-time meetings. Once those slots are full, avoid sacrificing your important work time that involves working on your main goals (paper writing, proposal writing, thesis writing, thinking, planning, data analysis, etc)
12. If you are running a research program or if you are a grad student working on multiple projects, make sure that at least 65-70% of that work falls within your natural area of expertise. The other 30- 35% can be new directions that require more time and effort, for example digesting an entire body of literature and finding the ‘edge’, using new techniques, etc.
13. Collaborate – don’t do everything yourself and reinvent the wheel. Reach out to people who can help with parts of your work where you are not an expert.
14. Delegate – especially things you are bad at or you don’t enjoy.
15. Avoid perfectionism and be sure to finish any project you start.
16. Get help at home
• If your partner is also working long hours and stressful job, outsource or organize household to minimize your work.
• If you have kids, outsource work so the few free hours you have each day can be spent with them, building relation, developing and supporting them rather than cooking, cleaning, etc.
• Have a clear routine at home to maintain things;
• Make sure your outside life is as happy, easy as possible – it makes it much easier to focus at work
17. Exercise and sleep
• Seems mundane but it makes a tremendous difference, especially as you get older • If you are feeling anxious or depressed (even a little bit), do both of these things. They have impressive and immediate impact over your mood.
• I find that if I run on the treadmill for 30 minutes within 8 hours of a stressful meeting, my stress goes way down and suddenly it seems manageable.
18. Similarly, eat well
• All of the most effective people I know eat well (lots of veggies, fruit and with some thought). Food really makes a difference in your performance.
19. Use triggers to jumpstart yourself • I listen to the same playlist every time I need to focus on something – it makes it faster to transition into that kind of work
• Drinking a hot drink also helps me relax and focus to work
20. Routines make things easier to accomplish. I despise routine, but I finally realized that routines create ‘muscle memory’ and it takes less energy/ motivation to get tasks done if you just automatically do them. I read somewhere that people have only so much discipline in one day, and that once it is spent, you can’t push yourself to do much more. This is why routines are so important – it means you get important things done but you aren’t spending your discipline currency and you can save that for other challenging tasks that surely arise during the day.
21. Listen to your body. Don’t force things (always) If you are dragging, working inefficiently or just generally struggling, it may be time to give yourself an unexpected break. Its ok to do this in the middle of the week. It is amazing what giving yourself a little slack and downtime can do for your productivity. Related, is the next item
22. Be sure to refill your well. Know yourself and what keeps you balanced and energized. Do something outside of work and family and other obligations that gives you happiness and energy. For me, this involves always having a good book at hand to read for 15 minutes in the evening and going out at least once a month to hang with friends.