Transcript No Slide Title

Time management
Some math
• Suppose I live
– 50 more years, to age 101
– And read a book a week
until my death
• Highly unlikely, by the
way
• I have another
– 2,500 books to read
• Right now on Amazon
– Thousands of books I’d
like to read
Before You, gulp, . . . Die
• What do you want to
do
– What books to read
– What places to visit
– What career goals to
accomplish
– What conversations to
have
• Etc etc
Spending time
• Which of these things
do you hope to have
MORE time for?
– Hanging with friends
– Hanging with family
– Listening to music,
appreciating art
– Pursuing hobby
– Developing new hobby
• Etc etc
Death Bed Regrets
• Fact:
– When you die
– There will be things you wish you’d had time to do
• One goal of life:
– No regrets on death bed about HOW you spent your
time
• Your life is measured out in units of time!
The beginning of time management
• Explicit recognition and careful thought
about
– How you spend your time
– How you want to spend your time
– How to maximize your life through efficiency
Thoughts on becoming a more
efficient researcher

My qualifications
You thought I’d brag about my research
productivity?
 Nope, my qualifications are

 I’m
lazy
 I’m greedy
 I have too many outside interests
 And my wife would kill me if I worked all the time
General topics I will cover
Day-to-day management tricks
 Research focus: broad or narrow?
 Reading and writing


but no arithmetic
Day-to-day tricks
Stop looking at your email all the
time
Here is a study I will never conduct
 Association between email response time
and productivity
 Try closing your email program and
checking it three times a day

Productivity
Timeliness of response
Other things you waste time doing?
• Media
–
–
–
–
–
Surfing the web
IM’ing
Tweeting
Facebook
Watching television
news
– Watching television
anything
• Except sports, of course
– Video games
• Commuting
• Other ideas?
Make lists

Daily and/or weekly “to do lists”
I number my to do items in order of their
priority
 when I have an hour to work, I don’t have to
spend any time thinking about what to do.


But I’m not a slave to my to do list
sometimes I don’t feel like doing the #1 thing
on my list so I go right to #2 or #3
 other times I only have 15 minutes so I look for
the top ranked item that can be done quickly

Find an ap
• Toodle do is what I use
– Links to iphone, ipad, computer
– Easy to prioritize
• But there are still times
– Scratch paper and pen work best for laying out
the day’s activities
Make long-term lists of your
goals

Every few months you should sit down and
make lists of
all the research projects you would like to do
some day
 with special attention to those you would like to
start relatively soon
 all the papers you want to write up
 the grants you want to write
 etc.

Make separate lists for each of
your projects

If you are designing a new study, make a
list of everything you need to do
to begin collecting data
 to get the data analyzed
 to write up the results

Give yourself deadlines
When a grant is due February 1st,
everybody manages to find time to write up
thirty-five or more pages of verbiage.
 Yet that manuscript you’ve been meaning
to get to has been languishing on your desk
for six months?
 Give yourself a firm deadline for finishing
the manuscript.

work like heck to get it done
 over time you’ll get better and better at setting
realistic goals

Why do deadlines work?
• Deadlines make people
– 1. Work harder
– 2. And lower their standards
• These are both good things
• #2 is especially good for perfectionists
– More on this later
Procrastination and deadlines:
Should you leave anything to the last
minute?
• Some tasks should be done as quickly as possible
– and sometimes deadline pressure speeds people up
– But that can be stressful, so find a balance
• Examples:
– Term paper for class
– Article review
• Especially a bad article
– Others . . . ?
Deadline techniques
• 1. Give yourself an artificial deadline
– 1b. Communicate that deadline to mentor/colleague
• 2. Wait until due date is near
• 3. Give yourself time limit
– “I’ll spend 2 hours on this article review.”
Just say “no”

Decide how much time you want to spend
teaching,
 seeing patients,
 doing volunteer work,
 reviewing manuscripts, etc.


Adjusting


over time you may want to adjust how much of
your effort goes into these things
Saying NO

then try to say no to everything else other than
your research!
Just say “no”, cont’d

How do you say no nicely
I’d love to review that paper, but I wouldn’t be
able to do it for three months
 I wish I could help you, but I’m on sabbatical

 Aren’t
we all on sabbatical if you look at it the right
way?

Get someone to say no for you
 Mentors
can help with this
Managing your schedule

Some tasks require large blocks of time, e.g.
3 hrs
writing 1st or 2nd drafts of difficult papers
 analyzing data
 devising new questionnaires


You need to schedule these blocks of time
for yourself

like an appointment
Find a haven for your big blocks
of time

Psychologically more productive in certain
spaces
home
 coffee shop
 library
 conference room


I come to these places for sustained thinking
no phones
 no email connection
 no one can find me

Find what works and force
yourself to do it

I need a whole day to do X?


then schedule a whole day
I write better in the morning?
block that out on your calendar
 tell people you can’t meet them until the
afternoon

Delegation
• Eventually you will maximize efficiency
– By hiring the right support staff
• What kinds of people?
–
–
–
–
–
Admin assistants
Research assistants
Med students
Masters level researchers, proj. mgrs.
Pre- and post-docs
An early key for me: cheap
employer
• Hire a 1/3 R.A.
– How do you keep him busy?
– Maybe he can do more than you thought?
• Not always time efficient
– But also a fun part of the job: to work with
young peeps
Research focus
The benefits of focused research
interests
you don’t have to keep reviewing the literature
before each study you conduct
 you also learn what questions have been
answered and unanswered

The benefits of focused research
interests

Writing is easier
you develop boiler plate language for certain
topics
 you’re really quick at coming up with the right
references
 you’re thinking becomes clearer and words
flow much more quickly

The benefits of focused research
interests

You start seeing connections between your
topic and other research

that makes it easier for you to jump on hot
topics when they come around
The benefits of focused research
interests

You will become known for your
achievements faster
this makes it easier to broaden your interests
 Stephen J. Gould became famous as an
evolutionary theorist
 then he was able to write essays about Mickey
Mouse and why there are no .400 hitters in
baseball any more

Benefit of focusing your research
methodology

This has many of same benefits
you’ll know the literature
 you have boiler plate language
 you become an expert


Sometimes your research focus can be a
method instead of a topic
So how many research projects
should I do?

Early in your career
a few at minimum
 start with two or three, add projects as you
learn your way
 brain storm about other projects to start later
and put them on the future “to do list”


Then when you have down time, you can
look on your future projects list and start
doing more brainstorming
Advantages of multiple projects

All projects have down time
IRB
 data collection
 waiting for pesky co-authors


You can work on other projects during the
down time
Advantages of multiple projects

Some projects fail

You don’t want all your eggs in one proverbial
basket
Advantages of multiple projects

Don’t forget you can get involved in more
projects if you collaborate

collaboration is one of the best ways to increase
your research productivity
What is more stultifying than
focus?

Do you really want to take your analytic model and
the same data set and simply substitute diabetic
patients for patients with coronary artery disease
and see what happens?


How fun is that?
Fact: many successful careers are built out of theme
with very few variations


you need to decide how interesting that approach is for
you
and you may need to compromise between your desire
for variety and the need to crank out enough manuscripts
for tenure
Don’t focus too much
Pick two or three areas, but not ten
 Or pick one main area with two or three
area subfoci
 Another advantage of having several foci, is
you stay more interested and that itself
increases productivity

Reading and Writing
Stop reading so much
Fatal flaw: having to know everything about
a topic before writing about it or collecting
data
 You need to know a lot about the topic



and work with people who know something
else
But too much reading just slows you down

and it reduces creativity
But I need to know everything possible to
improve my research!

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Suppose you are studying gender differences in heart
transplantation
Wouldn’t you like to know about gender and decision
making in other clinical contexts
What about learning more about the sociology of
gender



or decision psychology
or the communication literature and the economics
literature. . .
You can always learn more about the world in ways
that will improve your research

and that’s what is so darn fun about our jobs
While you stop reading so much,
make sure to read widely
I didn’t say to stop reading
 And I certainly don’t think you should limit
your reading to a narrow area
 Connections are made by reading broadly

across disciplines
 even reading things that seem to have nothing
to do with medicine


I’m just saying that at some point the
research has to come first and the reading
comes second
Some connections between reading
and writing

Writing makes me a more efficient reader
I write about topic X
 when I read about topic X, I do it much more
efficiently
 I remember the reading better and cover ground
faster


My style
start writing
 read in areas I realize I need to read more about
when I critique my own writing
 then rewrite
 Rinse and repeat

Write every week
Writing clarifies thinking
 Writing gets easier the more you do it

What do I write in order to write that
often?
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Blog posts
Outlining thoughts for a new paper
IRB application, survey draft, etc.
Brainstorming memos to yourself
Op-ed pieces
 Come
you
arethat
arrogant
Write
uponthe
talk
you enough
give to have an opinion
Dealing with writer’s block

Rule #1
Just get it out!!!
 with first drafts, just let it flow


The key to writing is rewriting
go stream of consciousness without looking
back
 revisit it more than 24 hours later

Rewriting

Read through the entire previous draft without
making any edits

does it make you depressed?
 then

come back in 24 hours
When you have had a chance to reflect on your
writing,
make some general notes about what you want to
accomplish on a rewrite
 this keeps you focused on the big picture rather than
on the minute details

Rewriting, cont’d.

Then you can start rewriting the entire
manuscript


attending to big picture and small details at the
same time
Even at this point, don’t worry if what you
write is a piece of crap
you can always rewrite it later
 just keep it flowing

The dangers of perfectionism
• Imagine the following:
– A fellow writes a paper
• Rewrites it a bunch of times, until she likes where it
is going
• Then she starts refining the language, perfecting the
syntax, eliminating unnecessary nominalizations
– Then her senior author looks at it and says
• That she wants to take the paper in another direction
Don’t perfect the wrong paper!
• When your mentor pushes you in another
direction
– Won’t it be nice that you haven’t spent time
perfecting each sentence?
• Try starting with an outline
– Maybe with a rough stab at the intro or the
opening para of the discussion section
– And with 4 versions of figures/tables
The writing ladder
Op-ed
 Medical article without data
 Medical articles with data
 An article pulling together all your previous
data
 A book chapter
 A book
 Start your own publishing house

Remember
• Efficiency and Purpose
– The keys to getting more out of life!