Megan C. Evans

It’s fair to say that 2014 have been pretty busy for me so far. Things didn’t start well when I broke my leg skiing in Japan (holiday was lovely otherwise), but apart from dragging around a full leg cast since New Year’s I seem to have been doing lots of “stuff”. In the last two months I have:

• re-submitted a paper for (hopeful) publication – this took about 4 weeks of solid work
• assisted in submission of three other papers for which I am a co-author
• co-authored a scoping report on an international environmental policy issue (a topic for future posts)
• assisted in facilitating a 2-day workshop with CSIRO and Government colleagues
• gave a lecture on conservation planning to a 3^rd year course at the ANU
• developed and ran 3x 1 hour practical sessions on conservation planning for the same course
• reviewed 4 papers for inclusion in a conference proceedings which I’m co-editing
• reviewed 4 other papers for international journals
• coordinated meetings for ANZSEE
• attended a regular Fenner School Board meeting as student representative
• coordinated initial organization for Fenner School PhD student retreat along with other committee members
• other random bits of analysis

So, that seems like a lot to me – or at least it feels like a lot (I’m a wee bit tired). That said, I’m pretty happy/amazed that I managed to get it all done. Deadlines certainly help me get motivated, and I’ve had a lot of tight ones lately. I’ve also been using a new time management strategy.

It sounds pretty simple (probably because it is), but I’ve been planning out my time using a two pronged strategy: week-by-week, plus day-by-day.

I have one table where I have one week per line; and columns for Deadlines, what Project I plan to work on that week, any Events I’m attending (workshops, conferences), and a Diary where I indicate anything weird that happened (hello broken leg). I have this table for all of 2014 – so as soon as I know that I want to attend a conference, I slot in the date and when I need to submit an abstract by.

My second table is day-by-day – now, I’ve really needed this lately and it’s helped me a lot. Every time I complete my task for the day I cross it out with a strikethrough – rather than deleting it – so I can see that I achieved that task. As days go past, I grey them out.

So, yay! I’ve been getting stuff done. Or at least I think.

I submitted my annual PhD report this week, where I needed to detail the progress I’d made over the past year, as well as set out a plan for the upcoming year. I had listed things like “submit abstract for X conference”, “attend conference”, “analysis for paper 1”, “audit this economics course” etc. My supervisor was looking over it, and gently asked – “So, what’s missing from this?”

I already knew the answer.

“Er, thesis chapters.”

Now, neither I nor my supervisor think I’m in any trouble at the moment – I am doing my thesis by publication, so writing papers *is* writing thesis chapters. I do however have a tendency to get involved in lots of things that are not necessarily my work – e.g, co-authoring papers led by colleagues, or committees, lecturing, etc etc. Of the list of things above, probably only 2 of those will contribute to my thesis itself. Now, all of the things on that list, I think, are part of the PhD experience – part of training to be a researcher. I just need to be mindful that I also need to produce a thesis at the end of 3 years!

I’m confident that, using my handy strategies above, that I’ll get through the tasks I have ahead and will make time for myself to focus on my thesis. I wouldn’t have had that confidence 6 months ago – and I think that back then, I had far fewer things on my plate.

In the past, I’ve generally worked on a single task at once “to get it done”, which would then drag out and my ‘to do’ list would inevitably get longer.

So, yes, I’ve got some things I need to be mindful of, but I’m pretty confident I can do it. And, since I’m currently walking around with the speed and grace of Quasimodo, I think things will be a bit easier when I have a functioning leg again too :-)

Do you have any time management strategies that you find useful? I would love to hear about them in the comments!