Time Management

  • Set some reasonable goals with deadlines
    • Identify key tasks that need to be completed
    • Set a reasonable date for completing them (on the order of weeks or months).
    • Share this with your advisor or enlist your advisors help in creating the goals and deadlines.
    • Set some deadlines that you must keep (e.g., volunteer to give a student seminar on your research, work toward a conference paper submission deadline, etc.)
       
  • Keep a to do list - Checking off things on a to do list can feel very rewarding when you are working on a long-term project.
    • List the small tasks that can be done in about an hour
    • Pick at least one that has to be completed each day
       
  • It's hard to get started working in the morning, easy to keep going once you've started. Leave something easy or fun unfinished in the evening that you can start with in the morning. Start the morning with real work-if you start by reading your mail, you may never get to something more productive.
     
  • And, he never went any further. He had his personality defect of wanting total control and was not willing to recognize that you need the support of the system. You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it. After all, if you want a decision `No', you just go to your boss and get a `No' easy. If you want to do something, don't ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don't give him a chance to tell you `No'. But if you want a `No', it's easy to get a `No'.

    By taking the trouble to tell jokes to the secretaries and being a little friendly, I got superb secretarial help. For instance, one time for some idiot reason all the reproducing services at Murray Hill were tied up. Don't ask me how, but they were. I wanted something done. My secretary called up somebody at Holmdel, hopped the company car, made the hour-long trip down and got it reproduced, and then came back. It was a payoff for the times I had made an effort to cheer her up, tell her jokes and be friendly; it was that little extra work that later paid off for me. By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life.

    Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody's has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to be? Be clear, when you fight the system and struggle with it, what you are doing, how far to go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting the system. My advice is to let somebody else do it and you get on with becoming a first-class scientist. Very few of you have the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class scientist.
     

  • One idea I came up with as an undergrad was to try to maintain balance by making sure I engaged in four different types of activities every single day. These were:
    • something intellectual (not so difficult at school);
    • something physical (like running, biking, a team sport);
    • something creative (like music, art, or writing); and
    • something social (like lunch with a friend).

    Actually, this simple rule served me so well in college that I still try to follow it today. It means, of course, that I don’t always get as much done as I would like in a day. (It means too that I have boatloads of email messages I still haven’t responded to!) But I’m in it for the long haul — as I hope you all are too — and I strongly believe that living with balance is what keeps me going day after day, and what keeps me sane.