You've just finished teaching your 11 a.m. lecture class. Three students came to discuss their exams during your morning office hours. Since your seminar doesn't meet today, your teaching obligations are fulfilled. There's a departmental meeting at 4 p.m. but that leaves you four hours to fill.
Let's see: You need to work on your research, run errands, catch up on e-mail messages and phone calls, submit the proposal for the colloquium you wanted to present at a conference in the spring, try to get a sitter for Saturday night, choose your health plan (since those forms are due by the end of the week), plan your seminar, review the manuscript that was due back to the journal editor yesterday, schedule appointments for the dental cleanings you and your child were supposed to have had three months ago, make some progress on your grant proposal, get your flu shot, and return your overdue books to the library.
You can't possibly accomplish all of that in four hours, but you'd like to accomplish some of it. OK, you tell yourself, just start somewhere. But where to begin?
There's a lot to be said for the flexible schedule of academic life. Even adding office hours and administrative meetings to your teaching schedule, you still have a lot of unstructured time to use as you see fit. But sometimes that very freedom can be your undoing. How do you make choices about how to apportion your time?
Most of us live in a perpetual state of stress, held captive by our ongoing obsession with what we forgot to do, should have done, must do immediately, and ought to do before we forget again. Thoughts of incomplete projects awaken us at 4 a.m. They distract us mid-conversation and make us miss the critical clue in the mystery we're watching at the theater.
Besides all the stress, the real tragedy of this way of life is that we're rarely living in the moment. If you're composing a manuscript in your head while playing with your child, you're not really with your child. If, while you're writing the manuscript, you're thinking of the seminar you need to prepare, then you're not really focused on your writing. And if you spend the four free hours you had today constantly remembering items you forgot to include on your ever-expanding to-do list, you'll never really be where you are, focused on the task at hand. And it is focused attention, more than any other single thing, that determines the quality of your work.
If you're fed up with feeling anxious and out of control, here are some steps you can take to structure your flexible schedule so that you can be productive while actually enjoying the small moments of your life:
Manage Action
The language of time management is so ingrained in us, we forget the reality that time cannot be managed. Nor can you manage getting tenure, publishing an article, or spending more time with your family.
What you can manage is the next action you will take in an effort to produce one of those outcomes.
This is a critically important distinction. Every project requires the completion of multiple steps. Unless you know exactly what step you will take next, you're likely to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy worrying about all that needs to be done and wondering when you'll get around to doing it all.
But if you've identified a single step, then you know exactly what you'll need to do next. This gives you some temporary closure to focus on the next task -- or even on what you happen to be doing right now.
Re-examine Your Commitments
Often we obsess about all the things we "should" do rather than examining what's keeping us from doing those things. Ask yourself, "Am I truly committed to this outcome?" The true test comes when you ask, "What step am I willing to take to make progress toward fulfilling this commitment?
Imagine knowing what your next step will be in every area of your life in which you've made a commitment. Nothing would be left hanging and incomplete in your mind.
Clarify Priorities
At some point you'll need to take the time to write out your "vision statement," your goals for the next year or the next five years, and your current areas of responsibility. Without a solid grounding in what matters most to you -- what you're trying to accomplish in the near term and what you want your life to mean -- you'll be unable to make choices between commitments competing for your time.
But if you know, for example, that helping your child with his math homework is something to which you're committed because you have a picture of the kind of relationship you want to have with him, and of the kind of person you want to enable him to become, then you'll choose to do this first, before you tackle the next step in the manuscript you're writing.
Organize Tasks by Location
If you're at all like me, you probably remember things that you wanted to do when you're not in a place to do them -- and then forget when you are.
Write down everything you think of when you think of it. Then organize your thoughts according to locations. You can have a file for phone calls, a file for things you do at the computer, a file for things you want to remember to tell your partner or spouse.
When you're in a given situation, pull out the corresponding file. For example, when you're by the phone, you can look at your telephone file and decide whom to call. Your choices will depend upon things like urgency, importance, your energy level, how much time you have.
And the next time you're driving your child to a play date and remember someone you need to call, you can simply jot it down on whatever is handy, and then transfer it to your phone list.
Of course, this will work only if you actually look at your lists each time you're in a specific situation. You'll also need to regularly update them. But every item will be an action, and once it is completed, you can simply write down the next step. You may need to write it in a different file, but you'll always know your next steps for every commitment and be in a position to finish them when you're in the appropriate location -- if you remember to look at your files.
Coping With the Unexpected
Everyone knows what it's like to have reality interfere with plans. But consider that every action is a choice, and that if you choose to put aside a planned action to do something that's just come up, you're deciding by default that it's more important.
If something appears in your "in box" that can be addressed in two minutes -- and if it's associated with an outcome to which you're committed -- then do it right then and there. Otherwise, decide what action you'll need to take and file it.
Imagine what a relief it would be to know what you want to do about everything in your life to which you're committed -- whether it's saving for retirement, getting your next article published, improving communication with your spouse, increasing exercise or writing a new syllabus. You might actually be able to focus on what you're doing, to be fully present in the moment, and to be optimally productive.
Obviously this is just an overview of a process that is quite detailed. If you're interested in looking more deeply into this, I'd highly recommend David Allen's Getting Things Done (Viking, 2001).
