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Scheduling, planning and follow-through. Some questions
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Posted by jamesofford
May 17, 2014 at 03:48 PM
Good morning:
I apologize for the length of this posting, and the fact that it is slightly off-topic, but I have some things I need help with(Not outlining, at least not right now.)and this group seems to have people who could help me address and solve the problems.
To put it briefly, I need help with planning, scheduling, and follow-through in my work. I used to view this as a character flaw, but I have realized in recent years that it is more of an issue of learning and habit. So, now I need some help with learning and establishing better habits.
First, a bit of history.
I spent twenty years in industry. Specifically the pharmaceutical industry. My job was as a lab head. I had several people working for me, and I also worked at the bench. The way things were managed was in a matrix. I had departmental responsibilities, and project responsibilities. As a lab head I had to keep my lab moving forward. As a team leader I had to keep projects moving forward. Teams consisted of people from several different disciplines, and the sizes varied but were always 20 or so people.
In this environment, planning occurred in teams either at the departmental or project level. We set goals, and then were kept on track by periodic review of those goals. Over time I learned how to work with this, and managed my time by focusing on goals and working on a day-to-day basis with task lists. I took early retirement a couple of years ago, and now I am a Research Assistant Professor at a major research university. I work in the lab of the department head, who is a colleague and friend of mine from our post-doc days.
I have no problem planning and executing experiments, nor do I have a problem outlining research directions. In fact, I am pretty good at that.
I am, however, having to adapt to a much less structured atmosphere. It is here I am having problems. I am having problems planning my time, and, I must admit, disciplining myself to follow-through on things. I schedule my days using tasklists, and that works well. I get my day’s work done. It is moving things forward in a disciplined way that I am having trouble with.
Part of this is having too many things to do. My boss has got me doing too many things that are not focused, and stuff is falling through the cracks. I am going to talk to her about that and get things re-organized. That won’t be for a couple of weeks since I have a grant due on the 5th of June. Even with shifting some responsibilities around I will still need help with focusing and follow-through, and that is what I want some help with and some input from the group.
Some questions: How do you plan your time long term? How do you integrate project planning into your time planning? How to you keep yourself accountable, and make sure you follow-through? I don’t necessarily need a computer based approach. Paper is fine.
I have tried using goals and goal setting in my current job. It hasn’t worked. The approach in an academic lab is much more independent and un-structured than industry, and it is hard to keep my boss focused on my goals. I am used to it, but she is not. And I am not sure I can get her to adapt. She has been doing things her way for a long time, as have I.
Any suggestions?
As I said, I will be talking to my boss soon, and I would like to be able to have something to put in place.
I will appreciate any suggestions that people can make.
Jim
Posted by Dr Andus
May 17, 2014 at 06:35 PM
jamesofford wrote:
>I am, however, having to adapt to a much less structured atmosphere. It
>is here I am having problems. I am having problems planning my time,
>and, I must admit, disciplining myself to follow-through on things. I
>schedule my days using tasklists, and that works well. I get my
>day’s work done. It is moving things forward in a disciplined way
>that I am having trouble with.
A few suggestions for the following-through problem.
For following through and not missing things I use Google Calendar. It’s always open on my PC in a Chrome browser, in its own monitor on my left. The only things that go into it are things that definitely need to be done at a given date or time or recurring tasks. I start every day reviewing the previous day, and things that I didn’t get done I reallocate to today or for the future (or delete it, if it’s no longer relevant). The main benefit is that tasks have popup reminders and get synced automatically with smartphones etc., so the reminders can be received even when away from the PC.
The key is not to overload the Calendar with things that don’t actually need to get done because then it becomes useless. Also, duration of tasks needs to be estimated sensibly. This is an important decision. Anything that does not have a deadline associated with it goes into the inbox or its own category in my Workflowy to-do list.
>Part of this is having too many things to do.
I use Workflowy to manage that problem. Again, it is multi-platform and syncs painlessly with handheld devices. I have it open in its standalone Chrome app on the PC. The benefit of Workflowy is that it can be an infinite to-do list organised in any number of ways. So it’s great for long-term memory, but also for forgetting things that are not that important. I manage this “forgetting” function by always keeping the most important stuff on the top of the list (the top of the list is the surface, the NOW). So anything less important or urgent will be naturally pushed down the list or into the belly of the hierarchy.
One important feature in Workflowy are the tags. For items that I’m waiting for others to get back to me on (which is one thing people tend to forget to track), I have a #WAITING tag, and these items can be filtered. If I need to follow up anything by a given date, I will need to enter it into Google Calendar.
As for long-term planning, in the academic type chaotic environment you describe I didn’t find formal project planning all that helpful. I’ve tried many kinds of Gantt charts etc. but if I wasn’t actually getting daily tasks done, then the overall project wouldn’t move either. For this reason I’m more concerned with tracking and squeezing productivity out of myself during the day, by timing my Pomodoros, my breaks, and tracking them in a Google spreadsheet open in another Chrome tab open next to the Calendar. I record the length of each pomodoro and the length of the breaks and add them up continuously (including word count, if I’m writing), and total them at the end of the day. This way I know whether I’m having a productive enough day or not and also can track it and manage it over the week. This allows one to learn about one’s own natural ebbs and flows.
For the overall project, I do put milestone dates in Google Calendar, but to be reminded of them on a daily basis, they are continuously displayed at the bottom of my main screen in a narrow strip of progress bars using Progress Bars of Life (which can also do popup reminders):
http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=34631.0
Posted by Paul Korm
May 17, 2014 at 08:08 PM
Perhaps the issue isn’t that you are now working in a less structured environment—but just that the environment is different and you haven’t learned all the cues yet? When I transitioned from 25 years of intense work in industry to a consulting practice in government I often wondered “what the heck are these people doing?” Ten years later, I get it and I understand the culture and its cues.
I’ve tried all the “productivity” software and eventually quit using most of them. There is way too much opinion on the internet about “productivity”—which is a cold and mechanistic concept.
Nothing substitutes for a good handwritten notebook—my freeform notes, drawings, arrows, and highlights work better for keeping track of meetings, problems and tasks than anything. I have dozens of notebooks created over the years with a Livescribe pen—I sync the notes, make a pdf from each page (each notebook is in its own folder), and I scan handouts and other work papers and interleave those scanned PDFs with the handwritten notes captured with Livescribe. I also prefer handwritten task (“to do”) lists—there is something about making a note by hand that makes the task more memorable than typing it into some software. I frequently consolidate my lists, and rewrite them—the physical act of working with pen and paper to do this routine during a quiet time every day seems to bring about a better understanding of priority and criticality among tasks. (Get yourself a very nice pen you enjoy holding and working with!)
Very few things anyone does are actual projects (in the formal PMP sense) and it’s not helpful to think of them as if they were project. Instead, consider that every job has its unique “realistic horizon”—the future period of days, weeks, or months for which it makes sense to plan because the probability of actually doing the thing you planned to do is high. For some jobs, the horizon is a few days—for others it is a few months. Once you get a good feeling of the realistic horizon for your own job, then you will know how far out to plan your work without experiencing frustration when plans fall apart.
A few simple techniques are helpful: as Dr. Andrus mentioned, Pomodoro is elegant and good discipline. I like the 1-3-5 model: make a daily note card (for your pocket) listing the one big thing that needs to be done today, the 3 important things that would be good to complete but could slip a day, and five small tasks that you can fit into breaks or as a diversion. Planning tomorrow’s work the night before is often helpful because your brain will ponder how to accomplish those things while you sleep—it can make the work day less stressful.
Posted by Dr Andus
May 17, 2014 at 09:50 PM
Paul Korm wrote:
> Planning tomorrow’s work the night before is often
>helpful because your brain will ponder how to accomplish those things
>while you sleep—it can make the work day less stressful.
This is an interesting issue. It’s probably down to personal preferences and routines. I have a strict cut-off time for work (6pm), at which point I rush to the gym. After that I don’t really want to think about any work or planning, in case it would interfere with my sleep. So I always do the planning in the morning, starting with reviewing what has or hasn’t been done the day before.
Posted by Franz Grieser
May 17, 2014 at 10:07 PM
My 2 cents:
It’s not a matter of tools (don’t stone me for saying that).
The gazillion of tools I have tried are great at organizing urgent and important things. What they are not really good at is organizing tasks and projects that are important on the long run.
What I ended up with (still not perfect):
A spreadsheet containing all my todos (off course, you can do that on paper). It has with several colums for my various jobs (I work as a freelancer for several customers and for my own businesses) plus a column for private things plus a column for long-term projects. Every day I try to get a number of urgent/short-term tasks done for my paid jobs plus 2 or so private tasks plus at least one step for one of my long-term projects. Sometimes the urgent jobs take up the entire day, sometimes even for a week. I try to find a balance between urgent, short-term and important long-term tasks/projects. But that’s something I have to do “manually”. I haven’t found a piece of software or a collection of tools to really do the job. And I don’t think there is some software for that.