Advice for Researchers

For busy people, time management is important for happiness.

In research, it is important to be smart and capable, but unless you manage your time and other resources you will not be productive and happy, which are the ultimate metrics of success (in my opinion).

When I started my job, someone gave me a copy of Robert Boice’s Advice for New Faculty Members (I’m pretty sure it was John Johnson, but I might be confusing that with a different incident involving this book which he recommended around the same time and was also super-duper valuable.)   Boice’s book is really great:  it is the result of years of research into what habits and traits make faculty members successful and how to cultivate them (and it is careful not to confuse correlation with causation).JJ.jpg

In a vein that seems to me heavily influenced by Boice’s advice, but extending far beyond it and generalizing it to researchers at every stage in their careers, John Johnson has been writing an excellent series of blog posts with advice about thinking about time and resource management:

Work-Life Balance Through Working Efficiently (Part 1)

(Part 2)

(Part 3)

Read them.  Heed them.  The man knows of what he speaks, and this advice has clearly served him well.

In short, John argues that happiness and work-life balance requires good prioritization of your work time.  This is because if you want to have time for your family, friends, and hobbies, you must decide which work-related things you will not do so you can make room in your life for those things.  This requires you to prioritize your work duties in terms of what is important and what is not, so that you can do only the important stuff.

This sounds obvious, but in my experience most scientists tend to be pretty bad it taking this perspective.  Actually seeing people practice it can be a revelation, and practicing it can make you happier.

I would like to add my two cents to the conversation.  The first penny I present in the form of an embedded YouTube video of a different famous professor spouting time management advice:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0?rel=0

The key segment is at the 21-minute mark, and is “blatantly stolen” from Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”.

The second is just three words, and is more fundamental:  Keep a calendar.  That means, put everything you have to do on it, and look at it regularly.   I use Google Calendar, I know people that successfully use a scrap of paper in their wallet.  Do what works for you.

This is something I drill into our first year undergraduates at Penn State:  a calendar is not (just) a crutch for the forgetful, it is a tool of the successful.  I know of very few productive, busy people that do not keep a calendar.

One thought on “Advice for Researchers

  1. Sharon

    I second this.
    I use google calendar, and in particular, the task feature of it to manage my to-do list of the day and month.
    Every morning the first thing I do is (to read arxiv then) to make a priority list, though knowing I won’t get to the bottom of it through the day.

    Works very well for me for the past ~year or so.

    Only caveat:
    Utterly fails when stress level is too high to work efficiently for long enough in the day…

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