Where did the summer go? Time that expands endlessly in moments of boredom or obligation compresses inexplicably when we are given full autonomy over how to spend it. I know, although I hardly dare say it aloud, that soon we will be asking where the fall semester went. Then the spring semester. Then the academic year.
There is always the same amount of time, and it never seems to be enough.
For many of us, time management is not an innate skill. It is an exercise that we practice daily, sometimes failing and starting again the next day. In what follows, I will raise some questions to ask yourself and share several ways of framing time that have worked for me—and have helped me troubleshoot when I get off track.
How do you fill your day? Of the many analogies that exist to make time more concrete and thus more manageable, one of my favorites is the jar filled with rocks, pebbles and sand. In that analogy, rocks are the biggest things in life—things like your dissertation or thesis, your most important relationships, your publications or major life events. Those are the things you need to put in your jar first, because they take up the most room and are the least flexible.
Pebbles are smaller tasks or priorities, things that you need to do and that carry a deadline or a significant amount of effort but can fit around the larger rocks. Pebbles might be things like the lesson you’re planning for tomorrow’s class, the stack of grading you need to do on a deadline or your social plans for the weekend.
Sand, meanwhile, is in vast supply. If you put it in your jar first, you won’t have room for the rocks or the pebbles. You’ll be prioritizing things like email, data entry or doing the laundry. These may be necessary things—they may even be fun things, like binge-watching your favorite show for the nth time—but they are never ending. Email will survive the zombie apocalypse and the extinction of the sun.
Think of all the priorities and tasks, large and small, that make up your work and personal lives. Categorize them as rocks, pebbles or sand. Then move on to the next step.
How do you time your day? In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel H. Pink demonstrates the many ways in which the time we choose for a particular activity influences its success or failure. Imagine a graph where the Y axis is performance and the X axis is time of day. Performance builds to a peak, then dips to a trough, then builds back up to a rebound. The hours of the day when this happens can vary between individuals, but the overall pattern is consistent.
You may already know whether you’re an early bird, a night owl or somewhere in between. If you’re not sure, you can track your energy levels for a week or two and use that data to inform your own performance-over-time graph. You will likely discover that your timeline follows a pattern similar to this one: you wake up, hit your peak performance level two to four hours later, dip into a trough three to five hours after that, rebound three to five hours after that and fall asleep about two hours later. Given a sample start time of 7 a.m., this cycle can be represented numerically as 7, 9–11, 2–4, 7–9, 11.
Returning to your list of rocks, pebbles and sand, you can use your performance-over-time graph to map out an approximation of your ideally productive day. Rocks and pebbles go into the peak or the rebound; sand gets dumped into the trough and wherever else it will fit; the most important things get done, and the least important things don’t spiral out of control.
Another of my favorite time management analogies, that of “eating the frog,” fits neatly into this model. For those who aren’t familiar with the famous quotation, attributed to Mark Twain, “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” Whether you’re putting a rock into your jar during your peak performance time, or eating the frog early in your day, you’re taking care of the largest, most difficult, most important, yet perhaps least motivating task first.
We all know that life doesn’t always follow our ideal schedule. Knowing when you are naturally more and less ready to tackle large and difficult tasks can help you compensate when you’re forced into a more challenging distribution of time. Compensating might mean drinking an extra cup of coffee, taking a brisk walk, getting some extra sleep or doing whatever else gives you a boost of energy when you need it most.
How do you limit your time? If you’re anything like me, you will sometimes find that a task expands to fill the available time—and more. I suggest that the opposite is also true, that by limiting our allotted time in strategic ways, we can also limit the time spent obsessing over a given task.
You can do this in many ways. Following Paul Silvia’s lead, I “harness the terrible power of habit” to reach writing goals by blocking regular time on my calendar. I follow morning and bedtime routines to reduce decision fatigue at the beginning and end of every day. I use templates to create my lessons and apply constraints to my presentations. If all else fails, I set a timer and aim for the minimum viable product in a defined amount of time.
If you’ve taught humans, you’re likely aware of what happens when you give them an entirely open-ended assignment with no clear criteria for success. Instead of the burst of originality you anticipate, they typically submit a chaotic and unfocused work product. Applying constraints allows creativity to flourish within those limits. As with students, defining a desired outcome before you begin will limit the amount of time you spend spinning your wheels.
One outcome of this strategically limiting practice is the article you’re reading. It started life as a breakout session on time management that I facilitated for new teaching assistants in mid-August. The same general principles have been reshaped and edited for a new audience that, like me, may find itself in an eternal battle with time and needing to get things done.
What tools do you use? Tools need to serve the user, and a tool that motivates you to set aside time for regular advance planning is the one you should adopt. Individual tools depend on the individual using them—they are not universally helpful, and they are less transferable than the strategies I’ve outlined above.
That said, if you’re inspired by the sight of mythological creatures shooting across your computer screen when you complete a significant task, I suggest Asana. If you want a print system that promises to organize the rest of your life while also memorializing it, I recommend Jibun Techo. These tools allow me to plan my week in advance every Friday, which helps shift my mindset into weekend mode.
Speaking of memorializing your life, the search for lost time is not so much about regretting what we didn’t do and more about understanding what we did. As my colleague’s upcoming workshop promises, “I know what I did this summer.” Instead of bemoaning the book that wasn’t written, the archive that wasn’t visited or the experiment that wasn’t run, we should use this fleeting transitional time between summer and fall to take stock of the life we actually lived over the past three months. Of course we don’t inhabit Marcel Proust’s dreamlike remembered world, where time can be bent to the will of a child who does not want to go to bed. Having said that, I argue that no time is wasted; it is merely allocated. Where did you choose to spend yours?