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 better

  • I came up with a system that worked well enough to get me here

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

Our Conundrum

(From late graduate school until retirement/death)

  1. Our jobs require lots of hard work1

  2. Our little brains burn out after too much work-like effort

  3. We are bad at estimating/forecasting effort

  4. We are bad at switching tasks (and cannot multitask)

  5. Academia lacks structures that address problems 1-3.

Time Management

When and how should you work in order to produce as much focused cognitive effort as you can?

Protect Big Chunks of Time

… and then prepare yourself to use them well.

  • 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

    • You cannot reliably change what you do not measure
    • How much time do you spend on your research vs. teaching vs. work-y activities? All use energy, some are more important than others.

  • You learn by tracking at high resolution

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

From Rich Nielsen’s website

TheFocusProject.com

Tip 2: Find and Respect Focus Time

  • Figure out what helps you focus

    • Quiet? Background noise?
    • Social pressure? Isolation?
    • Crack of Dawn? Midnight?
  • Schedule time to focus every day

  • Treat focus time like an important meeting

    • Do not re-schedule or cancel on yourself
    • There are no higher priorities

  • Consider creating structure (or process obligations)

    • Feedback group
    • “Writing” group

Tip 3: Impose Structure

  • Flexibility is a huge perk of our jobs!
  • Good results come from a routine (do not wait for creativity to strike)
  • Routine means daily schedule, that creates time for work and breaks

  • My 2021 Schedule 1

    • 7:30am: Start work (hardest effort)
    • 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 4: Respect Non-Work Time

You need to show up to work ready to push your brain hard. You cannot do this sustainably if you do not separate work from non-work.

Don’t be this guy

If you do not respect non-work time you will:

  • Be a more boring person
  • Feel like you are “always working” without getting much done
  • Get less consistent about working during work hours
  • Decompensate

Using your Well-Managed Time

How do you figure out what to do at work every day?

Your Job is to 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

  • Intention: Reduce hard decisions

  • Reality: Plans constantly fail, updates required regularly

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

Tip 2: Short Term Planning

25-29 August 2025.

  • Week is built around:

    • Focused work on most important project
    • Immovable obligations (teaching)

  • Week is not built around:

    • Most urgent deadlines
    • Reacting to requests (though there is space for that)

Tip 3: Prioritization

… A part of planning

URGENT NON-URGENT
IMPORTANT Unavoidable, alas (Teaching, RA work) Prioritize at all costs (Your “writing” per Carlisle)
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

Here are the slides