There are many tasks out there and every day more and more bid for your attention. You will fail if you try to do them all, and you will fail if you don’t do them. Bellow are a few tricks I learned that allow maximum productivity and minimum pain. Caution: painless is impossible (you are in grad-school to work smart and hard).
Before you read on, there is one thing that you must accept, otherwise all of this is useless. Your goal is not to do less stuff. Your goal is to spend time doing what you want.
Good news is: laziness can be a great tool.
Bad news is: prioritizing is difficult due to shear volume and variety of tasks.
Your day will be a balancing act between task-completion and break-taking. The ideas is to maximize productivity during both of those activities. Simply put you should always be doing something. Web surfing can be a break from pipetting, getting a water drink can be a break from reading. Need some coffee? Turn it into a walking meeting, or just grab a few colleagues and talk bout science. This is my personal favorite because science moves so fast that it is impossible to keep up with all the published material. Let a few of your friends synthesize it for you over a coffee break. Just say: “I have been swamped with running gels all week, what’s been going on in (insert friend’s field of study)?” Just do it to a few buddies and you will be all caught up. Also this strategy insures that you maintain contact with a diverse group of scientists.
Though your goal is to extract benefit from every break, its not real work. Be careful not to turn your workday into a continuum of breaks disguised as tasks. A surest way to be productive and to feel good about yourself is a good ol’ to do list. I am not a huge lister, but I do recognize utility of being organized. Here is how to use a “to do list”, and prevent it from becoming a source of stress (making a list should not be one of your tasks).
step one: list everything that needs to be done in a given week. More is better, just let it all flow.
step two: Pick three things that are most important (this often means most scary). Make sure that one of the three tasks is time sensitive or organism dependent (like growing up culture, or turning over flies, or extracting DNA). This is our productivity insurance.
step three: On monday ask yourself: “If I can only accomplish one task out of the three, what would it be?” Plant to spend half a day doing that task, and half a day doing the time sensitive task. The point of the time sensitive task is to make sure that even if you are not done with the first task, you will move on. Most often though, you will be able to complete both tasks and still have room for more.
I like to repeat the above steps every evening, so I do not waste time the next day on planning. I have two more quick things. The morning ritual is necessary, no one gets out of bed blasting on all cylinders (at least not consistently). I find it best to take my breakfast and read morning mail/web at work. This way when I am finally ready to work, I do not have to deal with the commute and can jump right into it. The second thing is efficiency. There is immediate efficiency and overall efficiency. Sometimes you may have to complete a task that is time-consuming initially, but will greatly increase your efficiency in the future. Do it. I can explain it best with an example: taking an hour to read an article discussing effective ways of asking for help may seem like a waste of time. After all you are not spending that time working. In the future however, you will be able to ask for help quickly and efficiently and get rid of the most annoying thing ever; the email-back-and-forth.
