the Queen's counselling centre. I heard about her from my friend Chris
Trimmer over beer at the Toucan, who said that as a result of talking to
her he had revamped his working schedule radically in a way that was
making his thesis writing go much better. I saw her in her last session of
the summer, so we got to talk for two whole hours. She is some kind of supergenius about this stuff.
I've had the idea in my mind for a long time, from various graduate school
books, that it's a good idea to be very businesslike in when and where you
work. And that's a lot of the philosophy that they teach in learning
counselling: treat school as a job, and your most important job. The other
idea I've heard though is to track the number of hours you work
specifically on *research*, on being a scientist, (not various administrivia or
TAing or anything else), and make sure you fulfill a certain quota. So
which is more important to adhere to? How do you reconcile them? Linda
basically solved it for me.
Here's how it works: you set a target for the number of hours you will
work on school/research a week. Then you go through each day and make a
plan for how you're going to achieve those hours, generally as early as
possible. This is the timetable we made together:
We started by filling in all the fixed commitments, like my lab meetings,
swimming classes etc, in pencil and yellow highlighter. We even filled in
my pretty much committed social time: friday evenings there's always
something going on, and I take saturdays 100% off. Those are blue.
Next we tried to figure out how I would make my week target for thesis
hours. My plan currently is to put in 36 hours a week, potentially a
steady 6 hours a day 6 days a week. So we put those in with the orange
highlighter at the earliest places they could go.
I was looking at it then, and I was wondering, what about these blank
slots? Do I have to fill those up too? (thinking of overly brittle time
tables I've made for myself in the past, and how quickly they've fallen by
the wayside) I did think of a couple of things to put in, like regularly
scheduled exercise and groceries. But the rest stays blank, and this is
what really makes it work: the concept of "flex time" (I also have in my
notes the term "overdraft banking" - anyone know what that means?). You
try to do your serious work during the regularly scheduled times, but if
life gets in the way there's always the flex time to make it up. Which
answers another big question I had coming in, which is how do you know
when you should make up working time. The best part is, if I make my six
hours for a day early and am not trying to make up time from a previous
day, I can do *anything I want* with what's left over. Any kind of fun or
projects with a clear conscience.
Flex time plus aggregating hours over the week is a big improvement over
my old scheme, which was daily-target based, and on bad days sometimes had
me staying up past a sensible bedtime just trying to get in my three pages
or 2 hours or whatever. Now I can give up responsibly. An excellent piece
of advice from Linda: "Don't use sleep as a reward!"
Some more great tips from the session:
- To try to work in 3 hour blocks if you're doing work that takes
sustained concentration, like writing. This has already made a huge
difference to me I feel. I'm still always thinking about how to break work
into teeny quick jobs, that are easy to pick up and put down, but the fact
is that when you're doing serious reading or writing you need a chunk of
time. 3 contiguous hours is an ideal, but it shouldn't actually be all
that hard to fit in at least one into every working day. - However this means getting in a block before lunch, which means for me
getting to work at 9, a whole hour earlier! And yes, amazingly, I have
changed my habits this way, and have been more or less following it for
the last two weeks since the interview. Who would have thought anything
could get me doing this of my own free will? And yet I love that quiet
first thing in the morning time (well it feels like that since most people
come in a little later), and the feeling of getting tons of stuff done
before lunch. - 10 minute breaks between each of the 3 working hours. Those breaks of a
particular kind which I'll write about in an entry coming up, but for
example going for a walk so that you move your body but don't get too
badly distracted with other input. - We scheduled time in the middle of the working day, around lunch, for
what I call because of Jim TCB, Taking Care of Business. Just random
paperwork, phonecalls and emails to do with school or life. (Next Action
lists a la David Allen are perfect for this) - Even with taking an hour and a half in the middle for lunch and TCB, I
can be done a productive research day at 4:30 pm! Though it's only worked
out exactly like that a few times so far, it's a very motivating thought. - I said that I felt really smart in the late evenings, and was worried I
would miss that productive writing/reading/thinking time if I switched to
working completely during the day. So I penciled in an extra hour in the
evening. This is one part that hasn't really happened, I wonder why not? - If you have a housemate or officemate working on the same kind of task,
you could try synchronizing schedules, breaks etc to help each other stay
on track. - Be real when you're filling out the template. This means for me for
example, not planning to come in at 9 on sunday, since I'll probably be up
late the night before, and realistically putting in all the time I spend
reading etc between going to bed and sleep. - Finally, as is a big theme of this blog, it's an experiment, this
timetable is a work in progress and should be constantly tweaked based on
what is working and what is not.
This new working timetable I feel has made a huge difference in the preparation of my first thesis draft over the last few weeks. Especially combined with the tricks for getting started and various other things I've picked up about project and time management, this project has gone better than any I can remember in the past.
As a postscript to this, I ran into my friend Ryan Edwardson the other
day, a post-doc who has two books on Canadian cultural history in the
process of being published (one about canadian rock and roll!), and got
talking to him about his own habits. He said that he knows some people who
are very businesslike about their research and just work certain hours,
but he's working on his book all the time. He thinks about what he will
write when he wakes up and is lying in bed, he spends all day in the
Sleepless Goat (a cafe which is a hub of hip activity in kingston) with
his laptop, then thinks about the next day's work while he's going to
sleep. He says he would be doing this for fun anyway, so why should he
have to schedule specific time for it? Something to think about.
(my first reaction is that sometimes life might be like this in my
research, but other times I'll need the kind of strong structure and
discipline described here to get me through the very unfun parts that most
major projects have, especially towards the end. As a further thought
however, from what I've read many sparklingly creative people, poets and
comedians etc, do swear by extremely regular, disciplined working times)
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