How to be Prepared and Lessen Your Stress

Preparing to Dive by Wonderland

We live in a knowledge-powered economy, and professors are the knowledge producers. Yet professors frequently express frustration to me about being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information and tasks facing them each day, feeling it is impossible to get everything done.  Meanwhile, experts discuss time management as if people could actually change the number of hours in the day. Clearly that is not possible.

The real issue is, “How do we manage all the activities we have to do, in the time we have available to do them?”  Start by asking yourself these two important questions:

·    Should I really be doing this activity?
·    If I should, how can I do it more efficiently?

Despite all the emphasis on balance in your life and academic work, a little imbalance can go a long way toward helping you with this issue. You can start by applying the 80/20 Pareto Principle to your work.  The name derives from Vilfredo Pareto, who discovered in 1897 that in every European country he studied, 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the people.  This rule has been extrapolated to modern life through the expression: “20% of your work delivers 80% of your results.”   So, what is the 20% you should really, truly be focused on getting done?

If your daily work is not dependent on email (and it’s a rare professor who can say it is), one way to get more efficient is to schedule appointments with yourself to create uninterrupted blocks of time in your daily round. If you are a morning person, try NOT answering your email until you have worked for at least 30 minutes on something of significance that must be done, even if it is unpleasant or boring. This is sometimes referred to as “eating the frog first.”

In addition to email, turn off all your other weapons of mass distraction: the telephone, the Twitter and Facebook accounts, television, radio and the Internet, unless you need it for your research. If Internet research is necessary, you will have to practice tremendous self-discipline to stop yourself from chasing down rabbit holes of interesting but irrelevant information.

How this works in practice: If you have an article due on the last Friday of the month at  5:00 PM, and four weeks to do it, spend your first ½ hour Monday pulling together all the information you need. On Tuesday, you can look over the data and begin to figure out what it means. On Wednesday, you can write for 30 minutes. Don’t worry about writing the first paragraph first.  Just begin in the middle, if that is where you have the most information. You can leave the introduction for Thursday or even Friday.  If you have trouble concentrating on an unpleasant chore (and who doesn’t), use a timer.  When your 30 minutes are up, you stop if you want to. Nothing says you have to stop if you find that you are in the flow of things and don’t have another immediate commitment.  Repeat this pattern for the following three weeks, unless you get it finished before the deadline.  Then you can take your time with editing.

For the typical 40-hour workweek, you have to increase the amount of time to 90 minutes a day, which can be broken into two 45-minute sessions per day (Chris Crouch, 2009).  But you may find that even ½ hour a day without interruption is enough to help you think more clearly and get more of your projects done on time.  Professors average a 50-hour workweek, so the time must increase proportionally.

Being prepared doesn’t mean everything always goes smoothly.  It means you are able to quickly reprioritize when necessary.   If you do not wait until the week before an article must be submitted to start editing it, you will not have to panic when the nurse calls and says you have to come collect your fevered child from school, forcing you to miss a deadline.

Acting early and regularly to focus breaks those big projects down into smaller, more manageable pieces. As Adam Smith noted long ago in Wealth of Nations (1776), doing important work in “brief bouts” helps us to persist with the difficult ones. Learn how to manage your activities in the time available and you will have increased your own productivity and taken a lot of stress out of your day.