Time Management

My previous post explained why people are most productive when they work at a steady pace and get lots of rest, and [Edwards2009] found that starting assignments early and working consistently predicted good grades. However, while people in industry joke that having two bosses means living in hell, students usually answer to four or five professors whom don’t coordinate due dates across their courses. I remember a week where I had two major assignments due, two mid-terms to write, and a bad cold; what can you do when this happens to you?

The best solution—or more honestly, the least bad—is to prioritize carefully. Get a piece of paper and draw a 3×3 grid. The X axis is effort: label its divisions “minutes”, “hours”, and “days”. The Y axis is time: label it “low”, “medium”, and “high”. You should wind up with something like this:

Next, put everything you need to do somewhere on the grid, and then throw away the high-effort, low-importance items in the bottom right—you aren’t going to get to those. You can then start assembling the other items into a schedule, starting with the upper-left corner. These are the things that will give the highest return on invested time; more importantly, starting with these means that if you’ve under-estimated effort, you will still deliver something.

The tricky items are the ones on the diagonal. Should you tackle one thing that is high effort and high importance or three things that are individually less important but require the same total effort? Laying things out on a grid can’t answer that question, but at least it can tell you what the question is.

If any task on your list is more than an hour long, break it down into smaller pieces and prioritize those separately. Figuring out what those pieces are can take time, so don’t be embarrassed to make “plan XYZ” a task in its own right. And remember that the future is approaching at a rate of 24 hours per day: if something is going to take thirty hours to finish, you had better allow at least five working days for it, which means you’d better start at least that far ahead of the deadline.

The point of all this organization and preparation is to be able to immerse yourself in your problem. [Csikszentmihalyi1991] popularized the term flow for this; athletes call it “being in the zone”, while musicians talk about losing themselves in what they’re playing. The good news is that you’re much more productive in this state than when you’re multi-tasking. The bad news is that it takes anywhere from several seconds to several minutes to get back into this state after an interruption [Parnin2010, Borst2015]. In other words, if you are interrupted half a dozen times per hour you are never at your productive peak. Ironically, the cost of self-interruptions may be even worse than the cost for external interruptions [Abad2018].

Finally, you will be more productive in the long run if your back doesn’t ache, and being away from the keyboard gives your brain a chance to reflect on what you’ve just been doing. You should therefore take a five-minute break every hour. Checking email doesn’t count: get up and stretch, refill your water bottle, or go and restack the dishwasher. You’ll be amazed at how often you can solve a problem that’s been baffling you for an hour by taking a short walk.