Time management from Stephen Will Tanner @ UCSD

written by Stephen Will Tanner @  UCSD

http://necrofamicon.com/swt/GradNotes.html

Time management

Learning to manage your time is very challenging and very important. Every day you need to be able to take a step back, scan the horizon for things coming up, evaluate what you should be working on. Sometimes this will make you take on (or drop) a major project...sometimes it will just help you avoid wasting time. There are plenty of time management books out there. The contents are mostly common sense, but the exercise of reading one can help you get committed to making the most out of your days.

Checking email twice a day is better than checking it constantly. Responding to emails in a batch is better than interrupting what you're doing. Turn off IM when you're working; it will drain your time and morale faster than television.

Note that managing your time in grad school is harder than it was in your undergrad days. As undergrads, we spend a lot of time doing problem sets. We know each problem is solvable - and we cry foul if we encounter a "trick question" that isn't, or that requires too much out-of-the-box creativity. Research work is not like that. It's a mixture of predictable tasks (read 5 articles), unpredictable tasks (track down and fix a bug), and open-ended problems (speed up algorithm X). Sometimes your professors will suggest you do things which turn out to be impossible, or unfeasible, or simply a bad idea. This is normal: Most professors have great ideas by having a LOT of ideas and having grad students help filter out the crazy ones.

Don't expect your advisor to micromanage your time for you. And remember that professors aren't always great at time management - they start meetings late and end them later, they turn in grants at the last possible day, they forget about reviews until the last minute. This is part of the academic lifestyle. If you manage your time in a non-academic way, you will have a big advantage over most of your peers.

Put research before classes. If you're in graduate school, you're likely a grade-motivated person, so it may be hard or just feel weird to put something ahead of classes. Bear in mind that grade inflation in grad school is such that if you put in a modicum of effort and don't run over the professor's cat, you'll generally get a B anyway.

Meetings in grad school can become excessive. You'll probably have a lab meeting, which is the one thing you don't want to skip. Journal clubs are invaluable at first for teaching how to present research, what negative controls to include...but not so much for the content (the stuff you learn from journal club is broad but not deep; you'd get more bang for your buck by reading a textbook for an hour). You may end up being expected to attend multiple journal clubs. At one point, I was expected to attend two lab meetings and three different journal clubs each week, and invited to two other lab meetings. There are two good ways to deal with excessive meetings. One way is to simply not show up. This works better than one might think, especially if you put in appearance once every so often. The other way is to go to meetings and quietly use the time to read or review articles, make to-do lists, and catch up on email.