Time Management

"Tomorrow is Friday! I hardly got anything done this whole week" one of my postdoc friends was complaining today. I listen or overhear a lot of these! How the day went by and nothing got done. There was no time to grade the exam papers, revise your hot manuscripts, meet with advisory committee members, help with re-designing course curriculum, design the new Web site for your department, take the kid to the dentist, no time to sleep or have lunch! In fact, not sleeping or waking up till odd hours is considered as something positive and I have heard several of them singing accolades of these midnight oil burners! But why????? Well, if I look around, most of them have to do all of these chores. They seem to be leading a perfectly normal life and they are equally if not more productive like any "never sleeping" faculty! Now, why is it that some are so unruffled while others are all hyper, always jumping and running as though some mad dogs are after their throats! The question is how did some of them got everything under control while others fail and try to bask pathetically in that glory! The mantra I think is ORGANIZATION and EFFICIENT TIME MANAGEMENT.

Let's see how we waste time:
As everyone you too started your day earlier. The first thing you wanted to do was to read all those pending mails and reply to them. Well, you switched the PC and then are onto the BBC homepage and spent the next 30 minutes reading some news. Finally opened the inbox and came across an inflammatory mail from a fellow faculty as to how your student is hogging up all the computational resources. You are all agitated and spend almost an hour writing and rewriting an equally inflammatory e-mail back. Then you need some more time to get back to your normal self.

As you were going through the papers, you come across your Division Director's mail asking for an updated CV for your promotion file. And the deadline was yesterday. You start searching for your CV and there are just too many and you can't figure out which one is the most current. So, you spend another hour and update your CV and mail it. Ten minutes later you realise that you haven't updated your publications. You reopen the file and while updating you realize that your research support is not current. OK, some more updates. Knock... Knock... your appointment is at the door. You finally mail your CV and drag your appointment to lunch along with you. What would have been normally taken 20-30 minutes goes on for more than hour and you still haven't helped her. You will reschedule the appointment for next week.

You open your inbox and there is another inflammatory reply from that CPU-paranoid faculty. This time it has a CC to the Director. You are even more agitated and you rush out to confront him. Fortunately or unfortunately he is not in his seat. You slowly start realizing that may be you are overreacting. So, you decide to drop the matter there and head back to your office. It's 4.00 PM and you remember that you have conference call with your collaborator and spend next 1 hour trying to convince them to change the legend for a figure in the Supplementary material! It's 5.00 clock and your PhD student shows up. Time to vent out some frustration. You start with why there has been no progress on the manuscript. Where are the results? The hypothesis doesn't make sense, etc. etc. The phone rings and your wife reminds that you have to pick the kid from the school because she has late evening meeting. You have to rush now!

I think the secret lies in effective time management and setting up short and long term goals. For instance, my long term goal is to be a successful scientist or researcher. I'm a start-up faculty, so my other goals are to get promoted with tenure. Hence, to accomplish the first part of this goal, I will need to design, plan, and execute some very decisive studies. But this requires money and to get that I need to prove to I am better or best among the peer group and I can use the money effectively. Thus, one of the most important tasks of my career is to write and publish manuscripts. After all manuscripts provide the proof that I can do my job and achieve the goals that I have set for in my field. With more publications, I will be able to pursue additional research grants to support my scientific ambition. It takes money to do science, and it takes good (published) science to get money.

The criteria required to keep my job, get promoted, and receive tenure will always be on my agenda. Although this is pretty obvious, it is easy to get caught up in all the academic service work, supporting others' research, guiding students, and lose site of this goal and what it takes to achieve it.
It all comes down to 2 important things: (1) importance of the task and (2) time-sensitivity. I strongly believe that the key to time management is to prioritize.
Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize! Do all the important stuff first, right? No this is not my new year resolution! Strangely, this sounds easy enough. But what about all those deadlines for unimportant stuff? So, I start breaking down these tasks:
Is It Urgent? Is It Vital? The answers can be

1. Yes and Yes
2. Not that much and Yes
3. Yes and Not that much
4. No and No

Tasks with an "urgent" designation are those that have deadlines. The "vital" designation is for items that are important to my career or personal life or long term goals. Some of the items I think fall into this category are meeting grant proposal deadlines, preparing my promotion or tenure review dossier, and so on. The second category are something which do not have immediate deadlines. For example, writing manuscripts. Sometimes they do have deadlines. So, Category 2 items enter category 1 as the due date approaches. Other examples are preparing slides for upcoming lectures or presentation or journal club. All these move from a category 2 to a category 1 task as the due date approaches. The third category items are those "voluntary" activities or attending those meetings (from which nothing comes out). Accomplishing these are no way related to my success. However, it is important that there are some "duties" expected of me and although not right sometimes I am assessed (evaluated) based on whether I attended these soporific meetings are not. The last category represent everything that are not even remotely related to my success. For e.g. organizing some non-academic/scholastic departmental event like a organizing a lunch or a visitors itinerary or a colleagues baby shower! The bottom line is I should be spending as much of my time as possible on vital tasks and should not let all other matters eat up my day.

That reminds me, may be I shouldn't spend this much time blogging :) So, that's it for today. More later....