MP3 Script: THEME THREE ORGANIZING Managing Your time at Graduate School By Learning Strategies Development Queen’s University, Kingston Our third presentation on managing your time at university discusses the importance of being organized at grad school. Before you begin organizing your tasks, ask yourself the following questions What is my organizational style? Why do I use this style? How is it working/ not working for me? How can I improve my organizational skills? To get organized you need to know 4 things: • Task: Understand the task to be done • Time: Estimate the time to complete the task and the time available • Tools: Know what tools are available and how to access them • Have a sense of your Personal Cognitive style: more left or right brain? Depending on your personal cognitive style, different strategies will be helpful around “task, time and tools”. Some common organizational challenges facing grad students are: The “Loose” or Open Schedule Most grads students do not have a weekly schedule filled with classes like undergrads do. Lack of externally imposed structure may lead to a sense of openness or too much space in your schedule and this may lead to lack of productivity and wasted time. Even in the very early stages of your program when “things haven’t really started yet”, a tentative schedule is necessary. Getting into a routine too late may also lead to procrastination and reduced motivated. Therefore, it is incumbent on grad students to prepare their own fixed weekly schedule as soon as possible. Remember that you are now your own boss! You need to fix a schedule and try to stick to it as much as possible. Managing Large Projects Researching and writing a thesis or dissertation spans many years. Even with clear goals and time management skills, the project may feel daunting and energy levels may ebb and tide. In addition, there will be certain aspects of the project that are in your control and others that are not. Finally, a large project will be competing with many other tasks, both academic and personal, so managing your time is paramount. Multiple and Competing Tasks As mention in our presentation on goal-setting life, at graduate school is more complex than in your footloose undergrad days. Many graduate students have family responsibilities on top of their academic duties. Negative Thoughts Negative thoughts have a negative impact on your ability to perform. They will increase your stress levels and, consequently, interfere with concentration, focusing, and managing your time. If you are feeling this way, you might consider a professional consultation with a learning strategist and/ or a personal counsellor at Queen’s Counselling Services. In the second half of our presentation we’ll talk about strategies to help you get organized. It’s really important that you create structure for yourself. Using scheduling tools like term calendars, weekly and daily planners, and “To Do” lists are very useful. You might wish to go to our TOOLS sections of our online module and look at some of the creating structure tools such as “Task Analysis” and the “Weekly Schedule. Your schedule should include quiet time for thinking, discussing, percolating ideas, and spontaneous creative thought. Seek balanced health (physical, intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual). Give yourself permission for downtime, sleep, exercise, and socializing. Guilt-free play is very important as it recharges your batteries for the next work day. Use “found-time”: these are small amounts of time between scheduled activities that can add up to many hours over the week. Create a Positive Learning Environment: Organize your study space/ desk area. Make sure it is a quiet place where you cannot be distracted. Stick to Your Schedule: Make a contract to get and stay organized. List what you will do in the presence of a family member, friend, colleague, faculty member, or learning strategist. Have him or her witness the contract and review it regularly. Show Progression: Allow yourself to see that you are moving ahead, e.g. Mark Xs on their calendar to denote work days complete leading up to a big event. External Strategies In addition to self-regulating strategies, it’s good to have some external aids. Supervisors and faculty can offer very good support. Faculty can play a key role in helping you stay on track. So, set regular meetings with faculty involved in your learning. Have regular, ongoing email communication with your supervisor, even when your supervisor is not physically available. Keep a personal record of weekly goals and achievements and next intended steps and share these with your supervisor at each meeting. Make a copy for his or her files. Professional support and mentoring is also important. Get professional support to help you organize: learning strategists, Writing Centre tutors, other faculty members inside or outside your department. Sometimes there are retired professors in the community with expertise in your area who are very willing to lend a hand. Collegial Support Colleagues can help you stay on track, too. Find a colleague who is very organized as your role model. Ask what he or she does in terms of his or her organizing strategies. Family support Explain your student life to your partner and family, and enlist their cooperation in making realistic plans involving you. Time Management guru, David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) Approach provides us with a way to keep organized and stress-free. Allen argues that: Lack of time is not the problem but a lack of clarity and definition about what “a project” really is and what the required next action steps are. To Allen, a project is any desired result that requires more than one action step. So, some rather small things not normally called ‘projects’ will be on your “Projects” list. e.g. preparing for a presentation, cleaning up the garage, buying a new office chair, or upgrading my computer, would all be listed as “projects”. He also argues that the key to managing your “stuff” is managing your actions. “Stuff” is anything that commands our attention but you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action steps. You can control what you do with your time, with information, and with your body and focus. As long as “stuff” remains unorganized, it’s not controllable and you are at a higher risk for feeling stress and/or overwhelmed. Allen called unorganized stuff “loopholes” and he recommended closing all your loopholes. Finally, just take the NEXT ACTION STEP in a project or commitment will help. Many actions only require 1-2 minutes to move a project forward. The GTD approach is about capturing and organizing 100% of your “stuff”. WHY do you want to do this? Too much thinking about the same ‘stuff’ is time-wasting and exhausting. It also frees up your short term memory which has limited storage (like computer RAM which only has so much memory space). Most of us walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams Here’s how the GTD approach works… Take your thought or anxiety, turn it into “a project”, and then operationalize it. In other words, break it into small actionable tasks. Now put each actionable step into your INBOX. You might wish to use the 4Ds that we talked about in the presentation on goals and prioritizing. Finally, do a weekly review of your progress. Here’s an example of the GTD Approach to organizing your stuff: My thought is I need to remember to buy a birthday gift for my mother The next step is I turn this thought into a project: My project will be: I will “look into” buying her a gift. Allan calls this kind of project a ‘process’ task such as “Research and Development”. He argues that process tasks are just as important as the real work or activity. Next I’ll operationalize the project by turning it into discreet tasks: So I’ll ask my mother what she wants; I’ll look through catalogues; on Wednesday I’ll go downtown at lunch to browse shops. Trick yourself into getting started. All things we do basically come down to widgets, that is busy, very basic tasks. So trick yourself into doing the first/next step by “cranking the widget”, doing a very small but busy task. Defining a process task to trick yourself into starting, e.g. “looking into something”, is as easy yet as important as real work. Remember your goal is to find a widget to crank! This is the end of our 3rd presentation “Getting Organizing”. Continue to our next theme to learn how to keep motivated and overcome procrastination.