Time Management for New Professors

The first piece of time management advice I got...

• Estimate how long something will take...

• Multiply the number by two

• Increase the time units by one

The first piece of time management advice I got...

• Estimate how long something will take...

• Multiply the number by two

• Increase the time units by one

• Thus a 5 minute job takes 10 hours or a 3 week project takes 6 months.

-my undergraduate advisor

The second piece of time management advice I got

• Never Start Anything Until the Last Minute Possible

The second piece of time management advice I got

• Never Start Anything Until the Last Minute Possible

• Work fills a time vacuum and every project will take exactly as much time as you have

-a contemporary and current chair of a well known chemistry department

A little seasoned advice from me

• There’s a bit of truth to what each of those guys said

• It takes a while to be good at estimating how long stuff takes, and you usually guess too low

• It’s easy to spend longer than you should on something

• Plan your time

• Figure out where your time goes

A little seasoned advice from me

• There’s a bit of truth to what each of those guys said

• It takes a while to be good at estimating how long stuff takes, and you usually guess too low

• It’s easy to spend longer than you should on something

• Plan your time

• Figure out where your time goes

• Do not forget your own life.

Don’t forget your own life

• Get married if that’s your thing

• Have a couple kids if that’s your thing

• Have a hobby

• Work hard, but establish some personal parameters and (mostly) stick to them

Plan your time

• It’s easier to keep commitments that are on your calendar

• At some point, your calendar is going to get more complicated than you can manage in your head.

• With whom do you want to share your calendar?

• Does your calendar break down all activities or just appointments?

This is not a good calendar

My calendar this week

My calendar for a moderately busy week

Broad Responsibilities

• Committee and other ancillary duties

• Important to do a good job because life is easier if colleagues like you

• Don’t go bananas volunteering for extra duty! It will come to you!

• Extra duties: may want to limit them to things that will have a “product”

• Teaching

• Important to do a good job. Lots of reasons.

• Realize the first time teaching anything is the most time consuming and you will get the worst reviews you ever get.

• Think about how to manage out-of-classroom contacts, depending on class size!

Broad Responsibilities

• Research

• Physical research: you are the best pair of hands in your lab for a while... but this slows down after a couple of years

• Good investment: training of early students - even at the expense of some other activities like proposal writing

• Paper and Proposal writing, especially after first year

• Having a cup of coffee with mentors, colleagues, potential collaborators

• Research is the infinite time suck. There is no end to what you can do...so you must make sure to schedule other things in!

Don’t reinvent the wheel!

• Experiment with available resources

• Campus or personal calendaring systems

• To-do/Project/Reminder systems —

• Among these - Getting Things Done (GTD) David Allen • Omnifocus, Things, Outlook, etc

• Time-logging software to help you see what you ARE doing

• What did you have for lunch last Thursday?

• Paper and pencil, Widget like Klok, Web-based simple calendar, Search “time tracking software” on wikipedia for leading refs for more solutions

Other people have thought about this

• Google “time management for new faculty”

• Talk to your most recently tenured colleagues

• Don’t feel bad about talking to your chair about what’s important

• But don’t get a reputation for being That Guy who goes around asking everybody if s/he has all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed to get tenure...