Time management
I remember when I was first starting out as an academic, I had a friend — well more a friend of a friend who later became a friend of mine — who was a few years ahead of me in their career, except in the corporate world.
As they rose through the ranks, they devoted a lot of attention to what seemed to me to be management fads: how to manage email, how to understand demands on your time, how to preserve/create time for thought. There always seemed to be a new guru or a new killer app that would help them become a better, more efficient person.
Fast forward many years later and even in the sweet groves of the academy, time and task management has become, for me at least, a problem. Some of this is because of specific career choices and circumstances — I am the president of our faculty association and before that was our chief bargainer. But some of it is just what I imagine happens if you are lucky enough to have a tenured/tenure-track job and some success in research and research-funding: if you have the resources to hire people or the opportunity to have graduate students, then you also have the demands on your time that those resources and opportunities bring.
And so I find myself interested in what some might see as management fads — managing email and calendars and finding time for thought.
If you start looking for advice on this, you will find a lot. There’s a lot of money to be made out of creating systems and tools for people in management to organise their lives.
And if you read the comments and endorsements, you’ll find a lot of the the kind of enthusiasm that I found so off-putting, back in the day, from my friend-of-a-friend. People who claim that tool a or system y is ground breaking, or solves everything, or will turn you into an Übermensch of productivity.
One odd thing about this enthusiasm, especially in user groups and on blogs, is how little time people seem to have spent with the systems they are touting. I’ll often read a blog praising an app and discover on closer inspection that they’ve been using it a few weeks or even days, and less often months. Rarely if ever years. As I’ve tried out different systems, I’ve also felt the urge to write such pieces, but generally resisted: they’ve always seemed to me that they are really more notes-to-self about how one hopes to use a system or tool than necessarily informed discussions of the tool or system itself. And improving productivity and efficiency — and especially explaining how the systems you are going to use are going to work — is an activity on which you can waste a lot of time. It is “perfect/better is the enemy of good enough” in its purest form.
So what’s my system? Glad you asked…
A few years ago, my wife discovered the National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development, which is a productivity/mentoring/support organisation specifically focussed on academics. And from them we learned and adopted a few things: putting everything (including specific research tasks) in a calendar, reviewing your week before it starts (a “Sunday meeting”), using tasks lists, devoting a half-hour per day to writing, being forthright about saying “no,” and focussing on what is important to your success and happiness. (As most academics will know, those last three are extremely difficult, and something I’ve rarely had success at).
A lot of this is basic stuff found in other systems (e.g. the dumping of things into calendars and the weekly review is also a major element of GTD). Some of it is more specific to academia (the half-hour writing every day).
And for quite a number of years it worked really well for me. I really did get more done in terms of research at least and I was able to keep a productive research programme running while taking on additional service/administration duties. I even have Grand Master [“Karma”] in Todoist, the second highest level, thank you very much. I started getting up at 5am, and writing from 7am to 9am, before getting on with my day, and I wrote two book manuscripts over the last two or three years (plus another co-written and published).
So pretty good. And really productive.
Until it wasn’t so good. Or productive.
Starting this past spring, it all stopped working for me. Instead of feeling in control of my schedule I felt over-programmed. And instead of feeling on top of my tasks, I felt overwhelmed by them. I no longer liked waking up at 5am, and, as much as I liked the writing time at 7am-9am (which I did and do), I didn’t like the costs it was imposing on the rest of my life: the meetings I was too tired for at 3pm, the way I got out of sync with my spouse in my daily schedule, the tasks I wasn’t doing or the emails I wasn’t answering because… focus and efficiency.
Some of is no doubt part of the great post-COVID reimagining of work that so many of us our going through. And some of it is no doubt more specific to my institutional and personal situation: we went through a major strike and lockout last spring for which I was a union leader and spokesperson, and it took some time to get back to a normal rhythm. But some of it, I think was because the system had also stopped working for me. Or I was done with it.
To get out of the rut, I decided to see what happened if I simply stopped programming myself. I stopped calendaring anything except meetings and stopped putting things in my task app — i.e. running things the way I did when I was an assistant professor and thought my friend-of-a-friend-in-the-business-world was a productivity cultist.
But that didn’t really work. It did make me feel less pressured for large bits of time, but my productivity — by which I mean doing the writing and research, reading and thinking I wanted to do — fell off. Basically I got very little done on the work that I became an academic to do, even throughout the summer which is when you get stuff done. And also, after a while, the emails would pile up and I’d start to feel guilty and stressed about what I was missing or not doing or getting to late.
So recently I’ve started “tasking” again (i.e. putting stuff in Todoist — though the system is unimportant), and I’m taking baby-steps to calendaring things. I even took a stab at a 5am start and 7am-9am writing… but ran into that problem of the costs involved in the rest of my life. So I’m now trying to do a less structured version of my pre-strike highly structured schedule. Something that combines tracking the things I have to do — I still do have obligations to funders, students, and my admin tasks — with the freedom I’d enjoyed as an assistant professor and grad student.
The main innovation of my new system is to stop trying to calendar my research tasks at the level of the specific project or activity.
Instead of trying to book an hour here for project a or paper b, I now try to ensure that I have big chunks of “focus time” each day (well, except Mondays, which are a problem): two or preferably three hours. And within those blocks, I don’t try to micro-manage that time. They are for me as an academic: that could mean reading a thesis, or preparing a class, or writing to editors or publishers, or working on a draft, or reading, or napping (which is when I do my best thinking).
The goal is to rediscover some “maker time” in my “manager’s schedule.” I read Paul Graham’s blog on the difference between maker time and manager time several years ago, and found the distinction convincing (it also jibed with something my father — a fellow academic — once told me about an essential advantage faculty have over administrators: the ability to spend all day on something). It is not a perfect solution: Graham’s point was about makers needing a freedom from external commitments, not just large blocks of time; but my hope is that it will come closer than my previous no-longer working approach.
The goal is to create low pressure, creative time that I can use as I wish, without feeling the pressure of the next meeting coming on. One lesson I did learn from my previous, heavily programmed, system was that I can write at any time, and I can relatively quickly switch to things like reading… as long as I can feel the temporal space. This means as long as I don’t feel like I’m “squeezing it in” and that I have to do something creative within a limited amount of time.
In the best tradition of productivity blogs, it is not something I’ve actually implemented yet. It’s just what I hope will work this coming week!
