Coffee Time Science: Time Management

Juggling projects, meetings, and deadlines – why old school can sometimes be best.

It’s time for a coffee. Again. It is a well-known fact that science depends on caffeine, copious amounts of it, in fact. So scheduling my coffee break with my coffee buddies Katja and Narges is almost as important as that abstract deadline, incubation period, and preparing my presentation for the next institute seminar. I have tried a range of different methods to keep on top of things, to make sure I don’t miss meetings and deadlines, and stop procrastinating and actually get my 12h of data analysis done. I have my work calendar that tells me about meetings, instrument bookings, and upcoming deadlines. The latter in particular I set up with early warning signals, reminding me to send out that abstract in time for co-authors to read AND submit it for the discounted deadline. All in all, for long term planning, that system works pretty well for me.

Then, there is my ‘tasks’ list of flagged emails I have to respond to, that I can never keep up with. But it means that I will – at some point – reply or deal with whatever it is the sender has asked me to do.

It’s the day-to-day stuff that I have been struggling with recently. I have several projects on the go, all of which need me to spend significant time analyzing data, reading references, making figures and writing them up. And I find that I am not progressing on any of them, even though I am constantly thinking about all of it and am spending a lot of time trying to do so. My word.doc “to do” list has color codes and bold bits and italics that I keep rearranging and trying to prioritize – apart from stressing me out (not unlike the Mac rainbow wheel that comes up when the computer is thinking), it’s not really achieving anything in particular. I stare at my desk and a pink blob comes into focus – a block of post-it notes. Why not, I think to myself. I stick one on my desk and write: Tuesday: Chemo sample analysis. Email Emily about Luminex samples. Finish figures for HIV non-progressor manuscript. No more for today.

I emailed Emily – cross out that item. I did the chemo sample analysis – yes. Manuscript figures are done – time for a coffee.

This is how I get stuff done. I have to have it visible on my desk, limit it to what fits on one post-it (OK, it is a large one, but still), and then cross each item off as I complete it. Today, Narges, Katja and I cannot coordinate our schedules to have that coffee together. So I trudge to the coffee machine solo thinking about my post-it note revelation. I bump into Katja (running from lab to office) and tell her what I discovered today. “Me, too” she says. “I have a rather complex system of context based calendars, notes and different project planning and organization softwares in the background, but eventually it has to go on the post-it note to get done”. Katja only uses the small ones. Turns out, so does Narges. One post-it per task, but same principle.

How do you manage your time during your research? Keen to hear if you have any other solutions. Do you use any particular tools, or do you eventually end up with a post-it-note? 

About me: My name is Christine, and I am currently working as a research specialist at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After my undergraduate studies in Oxford, I moved to London for my PhD and first postdoc. After 7 years in this magnificent city, I was ready for an adventure and decided to go to Boston for 2 years for a second postdoc. As love and science made me swap rainy London for alternately deep-frozen or tropical Boston, 2 years turned into 5 (and counting), and I decided to deviate from the traditional academic trajectory to work as a staff scientist (the rather fancy title of my position is research specialist). Most days, I sit with postdocs and other staff scientists over lunch or coffee, and discussion topics range from the inane to career goals and options, our research, new techniques, technology and the like. I would like to share some of those topics with you in this blog. Want to join in? Grab yourself a cup of your favorite caffeinated beverage, read along, and leave comments. You can read my other blog posts here.