Time Management

This week I decided to work on my individual development plan (IDP). I am using Science’s myIDP, which has a group of articles related to it. The body of literature related to IDP was very impressive and got me motivated to take it seriously and reflect on my skills and goals – which might be responsible for the inception of this blog as well. Upon reflecting on my skills and previous work I realized that my time management and ability to get work done is likely my most lacking skill. I used to be extremely good at that prior to college, very goal-oriented and focused. I think my time management got worse due to a combination of decreased attention span, aging effect on my ability to learn new things, and less clear end goals. I am still researching and thinking about how to handle this issue, so I will likely write about it again in a future post.

Bad time management is a big, ongoing issue since my Master’s work. It took me three years (five if I count the time I spent working on that project as an undergraduate student) to collect and analyze all the data on that project. That work is not published, yet – but was finally submitted last year. That was my first paper submission after working with research since 2009 (10 years until the submission). Now again, during my PhD, I have been struggling to write a project that has been finalized about three years ago as well as with the progress on my current projects. I have roughly 1 year left and I would like to get four more publications out. Daring and very unrealistic given my progress so far. I hope that focusing on this blog and studying time management will help me with that (instead of just being an additional source of distraction). I have decided that I will try my best to fulfill these goals, though. Especially as I have another clear goal and am set on applying for competitive post-doc grants and remain in academia. 

In the past, I have tried many, mostly devised by myself but also things like the Pomodoro method, changes to my routine and approach to academic work. I would be able to stay focused on a task for a few days but then return to my lack of direction and motivation. I have mostly moved from deadline to deadline stressing with pressure to get things finalized. 

Now, looking at my habits to try to understand my behavior and how to move forward, I see that I work a lot from my computer. I always have WhatsApp and Telegram group chats open and constantly buzzing with lively conversations. Although very distractive I am reluctant to let them go – they keep me grounded and in close contact with the people I left in Brazil. Trying to interact with these groups less is definitely a goal, but I won’t try to completely ignore them during my working hours (I have tried and failed, so I will try new approaches accepting them there and trying to analyze when and why I switch to their tabs). Actually, they are not all distraction, I brought up the time management issue in one of these groups and got very good suggestions about how to deal with it (as many people in that group are also struggling graduate students). 

In the group conversation, I mentioned that in the last week I approached my work by subdividing it into small, clear tasks that I could do in a few hours or days. Using to-do lists the main idea was to have concrete things I could do and see that I achieved something. The small tasks acted in opposition to staring too long at a larger problem, which inevitably would paralyze me for weeks with a large dose of anxiety and stress at a minimum. The smaller tasks were things that will hopefully guide me to solve the large issue but at smaller steps. If the small steps are stead enough I won’t face the paralysis too long anymore and I will be done with large problems. When I brought up the small tasks and my thoughts to my friends, some of them who were more familiar with computer sciences mentioned the existence of management methods for software developers such as Scrum and Kanban. They sent links to websites and videos and I was hooked, those seemed like great methods that could help me organize my own time better. 

I spend a lot of time afterward reading about these two methodologies and concluded that Kanban would be more translatable to manage my own time – they are geared towards managing groups. That said, it is worth noticing there was a cool article about using Scrum to run a lab as PI. Back to Kanban, after getting a sense about what it was I decided to read a book called Personal Kanban, which seemed like something that would be helpful to organize personal schedules (from work to personal life – and why not PhD research?). The book was very enjoyable and direct, explaining Kanban, discussing its core principles and ways to implement it, always illustrative examples. Putting it shortly, Kanban can be summarized in two things: (1) visualize your work and (2) have a limit on work in progress (WIP). I will definitely try to adapt and adopt it on my work routine starting this upcoming week. Got my whiteboard and post-its and I am ready to go!

I will do it all with physical objects, but obviously there are websites for that stuff too, I made a sketch on Trello. My approach will be to create a backlog folder in which I will write in a list all the stuff I have to do, using as short and simple tasks as possible (at this time I won’t record the date, but for any new task entering this backlog file after its first creation I will write the birth date (born) of the task as well). On the whiteboard I will have lists and post-its in these lists, each post-it is a task and some additional information relevant to the task – not much. The first list will be a Ready list which will house the post-its containing tasks I am ready to start at any point, I have all the information I need to start them and a tentative priority in which they will be done. When I post-it joins this list is pulled from the backlog and bring along the birth date and gains a begin date. The next list is a Repeating list, for the tasks that recur often on my schedule, such as many different weekly meetings, buying fly food, sorting flies and so on. Post-its here won’t have dates. The next is the Doing list, this list will house the tasks I am currently working on. A post-it is pulled to this list from the Ready list and gains a WIP date. There is a cap on the number of tasks that can be here – no more than 3! This limits my WIP and is one of the crucial Kanban principles. Next is the Waiting list, with tasks that require external input (such as asking a question to someone or waiting for a reply) and tasks such as already scheduled, non-repeating meetings. Next is the Today list, every day I will pull tasks from Repeat, Doing, or Waiting to this list, representing the work I want to get done that day. This list was created to accommodate the nature of the repeating tasks of things that need to be done bypassing my Doing list. Lastly, the Done list, housing tasks performed to completion. At this point, they gain a conclusion date. Additionally, there is a second folder, the archive. At the end of every week, the archive is updated with the completed tasks, at this point I have a chance to reflect on the tasks and evaluate how they moved through the Kanban flow and what could be improved.

This summarizes my tentative Personal Kanban for my remaining time in graduate school. I aim to start my week and every day with quick plannings, re-assessing priorities and identifying bottlenecks and obstacles to the traffic of tasks through the whiteboard as needed. My week will end with a time to reflect on the performed work and ways to improve it. The dates on the post-its and eventual notes will allow me to identify patterns later on. The goal is to reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed by how much I need to do and create a plan and a flow to get it done. By pulling tasks through the pipeline a more positive approach to work is generated instead of reacting to the pressure of an evergrowing to-do list. I will try this time management strategy for now and write more about my experience with it in a future post. I will leave this topic behind for a while as I experiment with my Kanban to try to make sure I am not spending all my time trying to learn how to manage it.