How to Manage Your Time

…and then use it productively

Aidan Milliff

Florida State University

Who am I

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

Framing the Problems

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!

Our Conundrum

(From late graduate school until exit/retirement/death)

0. Focused cognitive effort is the most valuable input for our work.¹

1. Our capacity for work-like effort is finite, easy to “waste”

2. Spinning up to do focused work takes effort, time.

3. We are bad at all the key variables in this system.

4. Academia lacks structures that automatically address problems 1-3.

• 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?

1. I call high cognitive load “hard work,” but it’s a very cushy job.

Time Management

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

Goal: Protect Big Chunks of Time

… and then prepare yourself to use them well.

• You can’t produce much work¹ without long periods to focus, but our 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.

1. For the rest of this talk, work == research effort. That’s the stuff you need to produce in order to write a dissertation, get a job, etc.

Tip 1: Track your Time (for a while)

• You don’t know how much you work

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

• You should want to know

  • You can’t reliably change what you don’t measure
  • How much time do you spend on your research work vs. teaching vs. work-y activities? All draw energy from the same stock, some are more important than others for your medium-term success.

• 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

• 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: 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

• 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 every 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 3: Impose Structure

• Flexibility is a huge perk of our jobs, but it can also ruin you.

• 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: 11h “work day” \(\rightarrow\) 9.5h “work” \(\rightarrow\) 7-8h work \(\rightarrow\) \(\sim\) 4h 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 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

• 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
• Again, back to writers: Haruki Murakami is fanatical about his schedule, about listening to records, and about running. Hemingway, Auden, Steven King, Joyce Carol Oates same way.

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

-

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.

Along The Way, Become 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

• Intention: Reduce hard decisions

• Reality: Plans constantly fail, updates required regularly

• Tools of note: Bullet Journaling, AI Time-blocker (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 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 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 it needs to. Top left will worm its way in, bottom left is stuff you ought to feel compelled to do, but treat it like an airplane when the oxygen masks come down: 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)

• Sa-Kiera Hudson (Psych Asst. Prof. @ UC Berkeley)

• Carlisle Rainey (Wizard guy @ FSU)

Tools

• RescueTime (Time Tracking, Distraction zapping)
• Morgen (Plan Building/Project Planning)
• Things3 (Project Planning/Task Management)
• Bullet Journal (A little planner)
• Cold Turkey and Brick (Computer/Phone disablers)

The End

Here are the slides