I’ve hit the point in my academic career where my work is mainly scheduled by me, rather than teachers or administrators setting my class/TAing schedule. While this does come with a lot of freedom, I’ve been struggling a little bit with how to manage my time when its MY time, not time meant for someone else’s work. So the goal of this is to actually help me sort my thoughts out about scheduling myself, and hopefully it’ll help some of you in the meantime.
Set the schedule for the week ahead of time. Even though most of my time isn’t particularly scheduled, I still have group meetings and personal meetings and seminars that I have to go to, so I make sure that I know when all of those commitments are, and the amount of time around all of those I have. I’m careful to include things like going to the gym, since that’s something that really helps me stay happy and sane, and it’s easier if I account for that time from the beginning. Plus then I get calendar reminders.
At the end of the previous week or first thing Monday morning before I do anything else other than perhaps make a cup of tea, make a list of things that I need to continue working on, as well as potentially new things that I want to work on. There’s no limit on the number of things here, just put down everything I could possibly want to get done.
Then think about what order of things I want to do. What do I have to do before everything else? What doesn’t depend on anything else? What can only be done if I figure out the solution to a previous problem? On the list from step 2 make a rough chronological priority. That should consist of what order things have to be (e.g. finishing a calculation before I write a paper section on the results), as well as making a note of what can be done at any time (e.g. things like looking for latest literature of the field).
Keeping these degrees of priority in mind, choose 2-5 main big tasks for the day (2 if I have meetings and other commitments, 5 if it’s a totally empty day), and break them down into smaller tasks.
Once I’ve chosen what I want to do that day, I pencil in the following tasks for the rest of the week, with room to expand or change it if I finish things early, or have to push it back a day for whatever reason.
Now that everything is assigned a day, I look at my overall schedule, see how much time I have before the next commitment, and then choose what task to tackle based on how much time it would take, whether it can easily be interrupted etc. Some frameworks that I use to help guide it- what needs to be done first? What amount of waiting time will this involve, so what smaller tasks can I incorporate into it, for example waiting for calculations to finish can be a great time to do a literature search for new papers in the field or reading up on background theory. How long will this take, and can I get it done before I have to be somewhere else?
So, this is maybe not about strict scheduling, because that doesn’t work for me, but is about fitting the sort of amorphous academic work around bits and bobs I have schedules by making sure that I have my priorities straight and have a very solid to-do list that propagates through the week. I really think the biggest thing about this is figuring out how to work best for you. I’ve tried time blocking in the past, but it’s never worked too well for me, because I like to have many things going on at once and jumping between things. That’s what works best for the type of research that I do- doing a lot of calculations, waiting for them to finish, and then analyzing them. There’s a degree of chaos in how my work has to be done that doesn’t mesh well with time blocking. So I use extensive to-do lists and no real time commitment beyond what I have to have.