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

Early phase is simple, but not easy. “Just” work until done!

Some Axioms

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

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

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

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

4. We mostly have to overcome these limitations ourselves

Time Management

How much should you work?

• We means all people
• Focused cognitive effort is the most valuable input for our jobs
• I want you to think about time management as managing that input: how do you allocate focus efficiently, given global and local constraints?

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.

• Fundamental intuition: “Getting focused” is more like starting an airplane than starting a car
• Imagine it takes you 10 minutes to really get going (for me, it’s sometimes more like 30)
• If you work productively in 12, 30 minute chunks = 4 hours return on 6 hours effort
• If you work productively in 3 90 minute chunks = 4 hours return on 4.5 hours effort
• Chunk ends when your phone dings, when you go to the restroom, when you open your email, etc.

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

• 100 hour week: 7am-9pm, every day, no breaks
• 70 hours (big law, billing 55–65): 9am-11pm Monday–Friday
• Truly productive work: 4 hours a day is good, probably enough to make it through
• Getting focused: 10-15 min every time y ou break focus
• Rich works very hard and is meticulous. I definitely consider him a role model, but not every successful professor (even at very competitive departments) works like him.
• 55hr/week –> 4400 gs citations (H index 19), CUP book, 4 AJPS 2 ISQ 2 PA 3 Other

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
  

• A lot of professional writers write about having a schedule, and building that schedule to avoid distractions. Haruki Murakami, Joan Didion are some famous ones. Hunter S. Thompson was said to have a schedule but it was like wake up at midnight and then do a lot of drugs before writing furiously for 30 minutes and getting drunk by sunrise. That abides by the letter of the law, I guess.

1. Caveats: No teaching, RA work was a co-authored project, Commute was \(\sim\) 15 ft.

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

• Schedule = actually put on your calendar

• I am in a faculty writing group, have been in groups where someone presents every three months

• Figure out through trial and error how long you can actually do it, what environment is best

• We’ll talk about this later, but it’s the most important thing you’re going to do. You need to focus for long chunks of time multiple times per week, ideally multiple times per day. Do not cancel on yourself.

• I need a relatively low-distraction environment, sometimes with social pressure. So I work really well at home. I also work best in the mornings.

• Another suggestion from Rich: Work first thing in the morning. Do not check your email, do not open your phone. DO the minimum required to boot up, and then work for as long as you can. (Works better on the east coast)

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

• Work life balance is a good in itself, too
• But don’t under-estimate the degree to which it can make you better at work

Productive Time Use

How do you figure out what to do every day?

The Task: Write a Great¹ Dissertation

-

Writing a dissertation is the ultimate large, complex task with squishy deadlines. Assuming you have nailed the resource management stuff, how do you figure out what you should be spending your focus on? You cannot just sit down each day and “work on your dissertation”

1. The real task: Write a sufficient dissertation that lines you up for a great career, but that’s another topic.

Process Goal: Be Self-Propelled

Corrolary advice to “you cannot just work on yoru dissertation”: You cannot wait for guidance.

One latent measure of having “succeeded” in graduate school is the degree to which faculty see you as a junior colleague. Idiots, naive, but not helpless or dependent

Tip 1: Long Term Planning

My dissertation timeline…lol

• Work backward
• Lots of important sub-tasks completed in sequence
• Deadlines for early sub-tasks come earlier than you think
• Helps you figure out what “blocks” on other things, what can be done in parallel
• Forces you to estimate effort (you will be wrong)
• Answers the question: In order to graduate in two years, what should I do today?

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.)

• I make plans about every semester, month, week, and day
• Sunday night/Monday morning: calendar, previous week’s notes/tasks, monthly/semester plan
• Each day: big stuff planned, can sprinkle in tasks

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?)

• Eisenhower Matrix for Dwight
• Part of the point of planning is to get that top right category filling up as much of your calendar as possible. Top left will worm its way in, bottom left is stuff you ought to feel compelled to do, but it’s just like an airplane when the door flys out: affix your own mask first.

1. Mostly joking. It is very important to be a good member of your community, but it’s also easy to over-do.

Resources/Tools I Have Tried

Advice

• Ben Noble (Asst. Prof. @ UCSD)

• Cal Newport (CS Prof. @ Georgetown)

Tools

• RescueTime (Time Tracking, Distraction zapping)
• SkedPal (Plan Building/Project Planning)
• Things3 (Project Planning/Task Management)
• Bullet Journal (A little planner)
• Roam Research or Notion (Very full-featured note-taking software)

The End