StattLabWiki

How you manage your time is largely up to you, as long as you are productive and meet expectations. One important thing to realize is that in graduate school, your work plan is largely created by yourself and nobody will do your tasks for you, so if you are not organized and aim to make progress, nothing will happen. All tasks will just keep piling up until you tackle them.

Below are some specific things you can try. Please keep in mind that everyone is different and not everything works for everyone. There is also plenty of advice out there, for example

• Matt Mights' blog
• grad school productivity

You will also find conflicting advice, in this case, see what makes most sense for you.

• Write down what you did each day. First step for efficient planning is to know where your time goes currently , and to assess the situation. This will also help you to estimate how long things really take and then to make reasonable schedules based on this.
• Create a calendar system and learn how to prioritize:
  • Utilize a monthly schedule that captures major research milestones, assignments, exams, literature to read, and important meetings.
  • Use a weekly schedule to plan which tasks you will complete on what days and during which hours. Learn to prioritize the most important tasks instrumental to your progress!
  • Use a daily to-do list that captures the tasks you plan to complete that day. Take notes.
  • Protect the time you are most alert, use those time-slots for tasks that require your full attention, e.g., coding of algorithms, reading difficult papers,..
  • In general try to keep time slots as large as possible, try to avoid fragmentation of your day. You can also divide your week into general tasks and block the time slots out, e.g. mornings are for reading. Monday and Thursday afternoons are for meetings. Wednesday afternoon is for class work, Fridays are for writing (papers, grants, reports).
• Whether you’re waiting for class, sitting on a bus or train, waiting for a meeting to start, use this time to review notes and to-do lists
• Be flexible. Allow time for interruptions and distractions. Aim to plan around 60 percent or less of your time so that you'll have the flexibility to handle unexpected interruptions. When you're distracted by a new task or something that you need to remember, write it down and get back to work. Don't let a flight of ideas keep you from completing the task at hand. When you're interrupted by others or seemingly urgent tasks, ask yourself, “What is the most important thing I can do right now? What's most urgent?” Use your answer to plan your time and get back on track.
• Break down large tasks in smaller ones and add self-imposed deadlines for completing the smaller tasks towards long-term projects like papers. Treat those self-imposed deadlines seriously.
• Try out the Pomodoro method: You take 20-25 minutes to do hard work, followed by a 5 minute break, and repeat this cycle. After you've taken your fourth 20-25 minute work period, you then take a 20-30 minute break, and then start the process all over again. Some people extend the time frames to up to 1 hour.

• Populate your to do lists when in meetings, when reading, and review frequently.
• Keep to do lists for tasks, separate them by type if you find this useful: simulations to run, scripts to write, papers to read, etc.
• Keep a list of research ideas or topics, and whenever you come across something interesting write a short note about it. This list can be side-projects of your own and could lead to undergraduate research projects, or completely unrelated. Even seemingly unrelated ideas might come to fruition in a couple of years time.
• Think about resources for certain tasks, i.e., is a supercomputer needed for this, or not? Can I read this paper on the bus? Do I need my desktop for this? This way you have a list of things to do in case you don't have access to a certain type of resource. This is especially relevant for computational resources, because clusters are sometimes broken.
• Start a “fun” to-do list and put the weird, outlandish but cool sounding papers on it, a theory or technique you don't really need but kind of want to learn, a programming language you find interesting and want to learn, pet projects, etc. Put aside ~2-4 hrs a week (Friday night?) to do something from that list

• Skim papers first do decide if and when to fully read it, group them by topic so that you can read a bunch at them about the same topic after each other
• Take good notes, there is nothing more frustrating than to have to read a paper again because you forgot the main points.
• Take notes on main points, general methodology, write down controversial/open concepts or questions.
• When taking notes write down the source, it is equally frustrating when you remember a certain method or piece of information and you know you read it somewhere but you don't remember where exactly – it can take a surprisingly long time to find it again. Google reverse image search can help sometimes for graphs/plots.
• When reading a paper, write down the references in it you want to read as well. Once you are done reading the current batch, this list is the starting point for the next literature search. Don't stop for each reference you want to follow up on, note them all and then look them all up at once to minimize interruptions.
• Use a citation/literature-management system!

• Goals can be ambitious, but must be broken down into actionable chunks.
• Goals must be prioritized by importance and urgency.
• Organize all your goals in a strategic long-term plan.
• Take all goals for a set amount of time (i.e. a month) and break down each item into importance and urgency items in order to decide what to tackle immediately, what to tackle later, and what to delegate/not do.
• Revisit the goals at the end of each period and compare the goal list with how you actually spent your time.

• Make sure your workspace supports your productivity, e.g., ergonomic chair, keyboard, organized like you want to, books where they belong,…
• Decorate your work-space. Make it a fun/nice/calm place to be.
• Remove distractions (social media, e-mail, slack, …) when engaging in a challenging task, like programming or understanding a new algorithm, reading a difficult paper or starting to write.
• Take breaks, sleep.
• It is good to use perfection as a guide, but recognize that it is unattainable. Perfection is a process; not a destination, iterate toward perfection. Perfectionism inflates your workload and sinks time into work well past the point of diminishing returns.

• forward all emails to one central location
• use email filters to direct newsletters, mass-emails, etc. to sub-folders

• Don't start coding if you don't have a decent chunk of time. The overhead of getting started is large, take that into account when planning your week.
• small scripts/code
  • write a straightforward version first, e.g., implementation of equation/algorithm as directly as possible
  • Optimization comes later
  • Once a script turns out to be useful, cleanup and optimization can be done as needed
  • comment your scripts, test it
• big code/full programs
  • plan out a wish list of things the code should do, think about flexibility
  • what classes/subroutines are needed, how should they be organized?
  • write pseudocode first
  • Once that is planned, put down the skeleton infrastructure and test that
  • After that, fill in the classes/functions with code
  • write comments and unit tests while you develop the code, not after

• Write outline, loose sentences, rough notes first. Nothing is worse than a blank page.
• Try answering the first couple of questions in heilmeier-catechism to make sure you know what you want to communicate.
• Have a rough draft finished before starting to optimizing the formatting/figures etc. Use placeholder figures or rough versions first.
• Clear, simple communication is often preferable