Time management in academia: How to balance a seemingly unmanageable load
If you’ve been an academic for long enough, chances are that, at one point or another, you’ve found yourself asking, “how am I supposed to get all of this done?”. There are so many different facets to this job—teaching, supervising, mentoring, research, publishing, grant writing, service on committees at both your home institution and the wider field—that it can feel like you’re constantly behind on at least one of them. So, you respond by trying to push through and work a little bit more in the evening and on weekends, but discover that that disrupts your personal life and relationships, causing you to feel behind everywhere else. Eventually, it leads to burnout.
The work that we do as academics is largely unstructured. Although we know that there are certain milestones we have to hit, the timing by which we do them is pretty much up to us. We can choose whether to submit a grant in this round or in the next one. We can put all of our efforts towards getting a paper out this month, or we can work on it bit by bit and get it submitted in three months. And then, of course, there is everything that we can’t control. Equipment can break, participants may not show up for their experiment, or final grades are due on a specific date that the department sets. When you combine the facts that 1) the work is mostly unstructured, 2) some, but not all of it, is in our control, and 3) there’s just so much of it, the end result is that we tend to spend most of our time working on whatever seems to be the most ‘on fire’. All the while, we lament that we are not working on the important things for our careers, things we’re actually interested in doing.
This is why it is critical to craft a strategic vision and to be clear on the specific goals and relevant tasks that will get you there. With these priorities in mind, you can start to organize your next steps and make a plan. An Eisenhower matrix can be a useful tool for creating a weekly to-do list; you place your list of tasks into a 2 (Important, Not Important) x 2 (Urgent, Not Urgent) matrix. The Important and Urgent tasks are those that need to be front and center on your calendar. Take a look at your upcoming week and pick times to devote to those tasks, being realistic about the time each task will require. The next set of tasks are those that are Important but Not Urgent. Here, you may end up devoting less time to these tasks, but it’s critical that you are clear on the overall time horizon in which you want to achieve these goals, and ensure that you are at least moving the needle in a meaningful way. Treat these two buckets of tasks like non-negotiables every week; they get put in the calendar no matter what. Then comes the Not Important but Urgent tasks (for instance, reviewing a colleague’s grant application); be mindful of how much time these are taking each week, and whether they are ultimately contributing in a strategic way to your overall career trajectory or to building and nurturing your community. The Not Important and Not Urgent category may be the tasks and commitments that you delegate to someone else, or ultimately decide to walk away from, particularly if they are hindering progress with your strategic vision. This matrix is a tool for you to examine the tasks in front of you in an organized fashion and facilitate priority setting.
Experiment with your time-blocking and find the schedule that allows you to work most efficiently. Some academics find that writing is most enjoyable in the morning, whereas others find flow in the evening. Pick the pattern that works best for you, and remember that what works best for you may not work well for your colleagues or peers. Creating a routine each week for some tasks may help maintain consistency with your progress; for instance, perhaps you do all of your teaching prep and grading on Thursday mornings when you have no other meetings. Knowing when you will work on a task can often alleviate the stress associated with the task itself. You don’t have to think about all of the things on your to-do list right now because you have already planned for when they will get done in the future. Another way to reduce stress is to plan ahead for larger projects and work backwards from deadlines; a Gantt chart provides an easy way to monitor if you’re on track, and if you’re not, what the consequences will be across time.
Things will invariably come up that you weren’t expecting. A manuscript decision may have finally come in after 6 months, but the editor wants revisions (including a new analysis) in the next month. A colleague asks for you to review their grant the week before its due. But, you can plan for these in advance too. Carve out some slots in your calendar and block them for what I like to call ‘contingency time’; these are the times to do the unexpected tasks, or to finish the items from your high priority list that took longer than you had originally allotted for.
When managing your calendar, be sure to set clear boundaries around your work hours so that you understand which times are then dedicated to leisure activities, household responsibilities, rest, or to loved ones. Remember that downtime isn’t wasted time, it is time that recharges you to come back to your work refreshed and more creative, and it is time in which you are cultivating meaningful relationships with your community of friends and family.
Succeeding in academia isn’t about working more, it’s about working smarter. There are going to be times in which the best of time management plans goes completely off the rails. That’s ok. Assess what happened, and try to plan accordingly for the following week. We may not achieve a healthy work-life balance within a given day, but the hope is that with enough practice, we get that balance over a month, or maybe even over a week. If you find that after a few weeks, you still feel overwhelmed, use a time tracking app for two weeks to track your activities, or simply mark what you are doing in 15-minute increments in an Excel sheet. And be honest about it: list what you are actually doing (doom-scrolling) rather than what you should be doing (writing that paper). You will likely be shocked to see where your time is really going. But don’t beat yourself up over it; use that data to plan better for the next week. And again, be honest—for example, if you know that you can’t quit social media cold-turkey, allow yourself a scheduled 15 minutes to check your feeds rather than mindlessly thumbing away a whole hour. Just make sure not to schedule those 15 minutes during your optimal time for writing or other highly creative activities.
As an academic, you know how to research, experiment, analyze, and interpret results. If you apply these same skills to crafting an efficient time management structure that meets your unique needs, you will achieve your strategic vision feeling empowered and energetic, not overwhelmed and exhausted.
If you need help and don’t know where to start, reach out! As my lab members can tell you, I love to organize other people’s lives!
Next week: Are you chasing novelty?
