Task (Time) Management

Finding a balance between your career and your home life, or within either of those broad categories, is largely a matter of managing your time and prioritizing the tasks you "need" to do. Many books and articles have been written on time/task management; here are a few of our favorites.

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Peter Bone juggling 9 balls, photo by Luke Burrage. Image from Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education

• Setting Boundaries in the Ivory Tower, by Ellen Ostrow. Specific suggestions for clarifying your priorities and setting boundaries to achieve them.
• An Academic Life Out of Sync, by Ellen Ostrow. Redefining balance as an outgrowth of "your vital engagement in, and personal striving toward, goals that give your life a sense of meaning and purpose," instead of as a struggle to find enough time for competing demands.
• Coping with Obstacles to a Balanced Life, by Ellen Ostrow. Ellen describes some common obstacles to balance, and how to overcome them: have clear goals, tackle important work without procrastinating, avoid the trap of perfectionism, and make specific plans to accomplish your goals.
• Lessons in Time Management, by Lee Tobin McClain. How to limit one's committee work, make time for research, cut teaching preparation time, and make sure that important tasks get priority.

Articles from Rick Reis' "Tomorrow's Professor" Mailing List

• Faculty Time Savers: How to make the most of the time you decide to devote to your faculty resposibilities.
• More Help With Saying "No.": Phrases you can use to say "no" when you're asked to do something that doesn't mesh with your priorities.
• Avoid Burnout: Strategies for pacing yourself, managing stress, and creating a meaningful life for yourself.

Articles from Science magazine online

• Mind Matters: On Balance, by Irene Levine. Irene summarizes recent research on work-life balance amongst faculty members, then recaps the advice from experts on achieving a balance you'll find rewarding.
• Overwork: Does it Have to be a Life of Quiet Desperation? by Adrienne Kitts, reprinted from AWIS magazine. Adrienne explores the psychological causes of overwork, especially amongst women scientists. She also suggests methods of changing your own, and other peoples', expectations of you.

Other articles, books, and chapters

• Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen. This book on task management walks you through a set of straightforward strategies for getting and keeping your work under control: identifying all of the tasks you need to do, deciding what needs to happen next for each task, and organizing those tasks. The fundamental premise - that you can't make the best choices about what to do next until you know what all of your choices are - is simple, but powerful. Once you have a handle on all of the tasks demanding your attention, you'll be able to make appropriate choices about what to do next.
• Balance is a Nice Idea, But My Reality is Closer to Juggling, by Janet D. Stemwedel. Janet sees juggling her responsibilities as a far more practical (and attainable) goal than balance. This philosophy allows her to choose when to be good enough, rather than perfect.
• "Taking Charge of Your Life: the Management of Time and Stress," in Good Start: A Guidebook for New Faculty in Liberal Arts Colleges, summarizes the research about stress in academia and outlines time management techniques, specific to the demands (and freedom) of an academic job, geared toward coping with that stress.
• First Things First, by S. R. Covey, A. R. Merrill, and R. R. Merrill, New York, NY: Simon & Shuster, 1994. (See description on Amazon.com.) This book shows you how to go beyond the familiar reminders and lists, calendars and appointment books, and even planning and prioritizing, to adopting the "importance paradigm" of putting first things first by "doing what's important rather than simply responding to what's urgent."
• Coping With Faculty Stress, by W. H. Gmelch, London: SAGE Publications, 1993. (See description on Amazon.com.) Eighty-five pages packed with practical advice on how to deal with the whole range of academic pressures, including how to tackle the ten most troublesome stress traps for professors.
• Aspiring Academics: A Resource Book for Graduate Students and Early Career Faculty, edited by Michael Solem, Kenneth Foote, and Janice Monk. Drawing on several years of research, this set of essays stresses the interdependence of teaching, research, and service - and the importance of achieving a healthy balance in professional and personal life - in faculty work, and does not view it as a collection of unrelated tasks.
• An Empty In-Box, or With Just a Few E-mail Messages? by Farhad Manjoo. This New York Times articles offers exceedingly simple advice for keeping your email from becoming overwhelming.