I’d love to stop and chat, but no time. I’m jammed and jammin’ and gotta rock, as soon as I figure out my schedule. Have to do some gymming, review a paper, write a paper, read a paper, catch a flight, prepare a talk, meet with the mole-lets, pack a bag, grab some lunch, work on the budget, oh, and sleep, don’t forget to sleep – ack! But not in that order. Okay, I have to get organized first. But I hate making lists. So, hey, let’s sit a while.
Time management, that favorite of organizational books (like, I’ve got time to read them!), is a myth. No matter what you do, time will continue to move on, and it won’t let you manage it. One thousand, four hundred and forty minutes will go by every day, which seems like a lot of minutes (1440, but who’s got time to count them), but somehow we don’t get things done. Why?
I get this all the time (get it?): How do you do so much? What’s the secret? Well I’m going to tell you, but let’s not rush it. Yes, this is Mole’s Guide to Time. Or “Getting Things Done.” Or “Don’t Waste Time Figuring Out What to Call This.”
If you are a biomedical scientist (and I hope you are, or else you’ve picked this up from somebody with a strange sense of humor about what constitutes a ‘good read,’ but hey, everybody has problems with scheduling, even if they don’t admit it, so maybe read on!) then your days are packed. If you are working at the bench, you are somehow designing experiments, doing the experiments, coordinating the access to instruments, collecting data, redoing experiments, interpreting the results, and reading extensively in all your spare time, while thinking hard about career plans and development. And if you are not working at the bench, you are most likely the one who decides what is going on at the bench, while juggling mentoring, teaching, reviewing, writing, submitting grants, rewriting grants, figuring out where else to submit the grant, sitting on endless committees, and thinking hard about career plans and development, while reading even more extensively in all your spare time. Spare time? There isn’t any.
But there is. Here’s some things you should know. The eleven secrets to time management, whatever we want that to mean.
The 10 minute ride. Procrastination is the time murderer. We actually crave distractions, those things that pull us from what we have to do, or should be doing (we’ll get to that), but that we can justify as needing to be done first. Here’s one trick to consider. Instead of trying to decide what you should be doing, decide to do anything useful, for just ten minutes. Surely you have ten minutes? It is pretty amazing how much you can actually get done in just ten minutes, if you just do it. Read part of a paper. Write down one method that you’ll use for your next paper. Or put together a figure from that last nice experiment that worked so you can think about it some more when you have another ten minutes. Start something. You may find that you have much more than ten minutes available, and you’re that much further along. Clean your desk. If we actually use the tens of minutes we have free every day, it is pretty amazing how much can get done. Take the ride.
Big into little. Very often, we’re simply overwhelmed with the large tasks before us. Take writing a grant (or a fellowship, or any of those sorts of things). They take a great deal of time. If I sit down to write a grant, I can’t do it – it’s just too much. So instead, don’t. Decide to write one little bit of the grant. Describe an experiment, or outline the introduction, or make the table you’ll use on page six. When that’s done, think about the next little bit. Then work on putting the two bits together. Dividing large tasks into small, manageable ones is key. If you need an hour to read a paper, and you don’t have an hour, just read the description of Figure 1. Yes, this is a bit like the 10 minute ride, only without the time limits. Baby steps.
Find out how you really use your time. By now you’ve already decided that I can’t help you at all, because I don’t understand how busy you really are. But I do understand. Try this. For just one day, keep a diary. Write down all of the hours you’ll have tomorrow, from the time you wake up until you go to sleep (assuming you wake up and go to sleep the same day). Now divide those up into quarter hours in your list. Keep track of what you are doing for one whole day. Don’t cheat – if you go to get a cup of coffee, and then have a chat with the bench monkey in line with you, don’t say you spent the last fifteen minutes reading. Nobody is going to check – really, you can burn it later. I promise, you will be amazed at how much time you spend doing things that aren’t on your ‘to do’ list (even if you don’t have one). Don’t get me wrong – you’re allowed to take breaks – I just want you to know what you are doing every minute of one day. Which leads to number 4.
Distractions. When I’m busy, and I’m always busy, I crave distraction. Anything but what I’m doing. It’s normal. But distraction, as we know, is a time killer. We even call it “killing time.” Hey, it’s why I go to get a cup of coffee. But if you find you don’t have time to get things done, it might be useful to see how to keep distraction to a minimum. Of course you can go have lunch with your colleagues, but what if, sometimes, you found a quiet place to eat your lunch and read a couple of papers? Wow, you read a couple of papers and you had lunch. Not bad. And here’s something else: don’t try to justify the distractions as important social interaction; the person you are talking to is also busy, and will appreciate it if you say “hi” and say you’d love to talk but you have some things to do. When I was a mole-let, I was often amazed by my colleagues who could spend hours complaining about how much they have to do, which they would justify as much needed diversion. Now I find that my colleagues do the same thing. Distractions lead us to number 5.
When you work, work. When you play, play. Maybe you can work all the time; I can’t. But when I play, I play really hard, and yeah, when I work, I work hard too. Don’t waste time in between, in the twilight zone between work and play. If you are stuck waiting for someone, or something, or, I don’t know, in a shoe store (I hate shoe stores, but that’s just me), a situation that isn’t work or play, be prepared. Carry a few papers in your bag, or have them on your phone (I hear you can do that) – do something. Or keep a pad to write ideas down (or can you do that on your phone as well?). Time is everywhere. You just have to know how to look.
Sometimes, say no. Because we crave distraction so much, some of us take on tasks we don’t have to do, or shouldn’t do, because we don’t have time. We justify taking things on because we want to be team players, or we want to be nice, or sometimes because we think we can do the job better (and often we can). But you might be taking on too much. Be careful, though: If you say “no” too often, you’ll be marked down as uncooperative, and that could turn into a larger problem, especially when you want to enlist some help (see #6). So make sure to sometimes say “yes” and then actually do it. Choose your tasks wisely. While nobody ever was promoted (or got a job) because they served on so many committees, the person who always refuses to help out also does not get promoted (or get a job). As a rule of thumb, only take on a new assignment when an old one is finished.
Get help. Easier said than done, right? Because everyone around you is busy, too. But there are ways to facilitate this. Reading, for example. You know you don’t read enough. Neither does the person at the next desk. Maybe you can make a pact to exchange interesting papers and spend a few minutes talking about them. Maybe you can trade off routine tasks to get more done. Maybe you can divide up the work a bit? But to do that, you need to apply a basic principle: Tit for tat. It’s a real thing (look it up, if you have time – oh wait, now you know you do have time). It goes something like this: When deciding whether or not to cooperate with someone, begin the first time cooperating (that is, offer to work together). The next time, base your decision whether or not to cooperate on the previous round – if they worked with you, do it again; but if they defaulted, don’t. It’s pretty obvious when put this way, but in fact, in real game theory, this can work (okay, game theorists object to this, but I have found that it works very nicely for me). Remember, your colleague is also playing ‘tit for tat’ (or a variation of it), so you will want to follow through as well.
It’s all about quality over quantity. When you do something, make sure it doesn’t have to be done again because you did it poorly. That is a waste of time. Again, this sounds obvious, but it isn’t. There are a number of factors that go into this. First, you need to be fit. Really. Get enough sleep, exercise, eat well, all the things you know but maybe don’t do. Pay attention to what you are doing. Spend the necessary (!) time preparing, planning, thinking (yes, these are all things that will not waste your time), and then proceed. If you are doing experiments, check your reagents, go over the protocol, ensure that the instruments are working – make it count. If you are writing a paper, same thing; go over the data, check the facts, make an outline. Simple things that make the minutes actually count. Which leads to number 9.
When in doubt, read. This is not a waste of time, it is the opposite. There is a maxim that says, “A few days in the laboratory can save having to spend an hour in the library.” In other words, you may well find that what you want to do has already been done, or can be done better, but you won’t know it if you don’t look.
If you are desperate, feed the nearest shark. Sometimes, it really is too much. The sharks are circling, and you are going to be eaten. So feed the nearest shark – do the most urgent thing first, get it done, and move on to the next one. But don’t be deceived that this is the same thing as time management, whatever that is. Get out of the water, up on dry land, as soon as you can. When you are out of danger, take a breath, and then really get to work on the things that matter. The most important thing is to be the shark, when you can – make your own priorities the real priority. What are these? Well, if you are a scientist, which I’m sort of assuming here, then doing actual science is the priority. These other sharks are just distractions, but yes, sometimes we find ourselves over our heads. Feed them, get out, and then attend to your own shark-ness.
There is no number 11. In fact, none of these suggestions will work for you if you cannot spend real time perfecting your skills, learning your field, and thinking up the things, and doing them, that will represent actual scientific progress. But perhaps by taking a few of the 1440 minutes we have today to just think about how our other minutes have been used, and might have been used better, we might find out that the days that follow will be better spent.
Hey, I’m outrageously busy, but I just wrote this. Now I’ve got to get busy on something else. And I can’t wait to see what I’m going to do next.
