Academic Productivity

There has been some buzz on the blogosphere about a new book “the 4 hour work week” by Tim Ferriss. I haven’t read the book and am not sure I will, but from the descriptions I have read it appears he has useful things to say about time management. His focus in on effectiveness and highlights Pareto’s principle – 80% of the value of what we do comes from 20% of what we do. His advice is to cut out the unessentials in our lives and focus on just those things that add the most value. He encourages batching of tasks, and blocking out distractions. Some suggestions include the very sage advice to check your email only twice a day, something I often intend to do but have trouble sticking with. There is a useful post here about putting some of these ideas into practice. Another useful point is he suggests asking yourself three times a day whether you are actually being productive, or just being busy – performing a crutch activity, that is avoiding the task that you really should be doing but feels overwhelming or unpleasant.

What I found particularly interesting was that it drew my attention to a name for a concept that I was aware of but didn’t have a name for: Parkinson’s Law. Parkinson’s law states “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”, and Ferriss emphasises that a task will also swell in perceived complexity and importance in direct proportion to the amount of time you allot to it. Parkinson’s law was first discussed in terms of how a manager should assign tasks to subordinates, but it has profound implications for self time management. For academics, a lot of the work we do is defined by our own time deadlines, and we often have a reasonable amount of freedom in deciding when a given task must be done by. Procrastination is one corollary of Parkinson’s law. Have you ever met someone who is bad at managing deadlines, but says that they work best when leaving things to the last minute? The deadline pressure encourages them to focus, block out distractions, and become highly productive. They get a lot done in a short period of time, which without a deadline would have taken them forever to do.

The solution to Parkinson’s law is obvious – limit the amount of time you have to do tasks. I don’t know the specifics of Ferriss’s solution but the method that I have seen employed by highly productive academics is that for every hour of your working day, you have a clear idea of what you have to accomplish in that time. In addition, they have tasks that follow which are contingent about completion of work in the preceding time period. And if you setting up these mini deadlines in conjunction with fixed items in calendar (meetings, talks etc) it gives you a hard landscape in which to help enforce deadline pressure.

One problem in this suggestion is that any estimation of how much time a task will take you also face Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law…

 

Are academics managing projects? The thesis of this post is that we academics are project mangers without formal training in project management. You ask for money to do a research _project_. If you supervise or mentor students until they get their PhD, you are managing a project. If you teach a class, you are managing a project. Do you see where I’m going?

When we read Dilbert, we think: “Oh, the industry world is crazy. The academia doesn’t work that bad”. That is true, but I’m sure there are things we can borrow from their world (e.g., trying to write down the process we follow to achieve some results, and try to improve it). This is what Berkun talks about in his book. For example, in the processes of writing your next article, which parts could be delegated? Did you ‘hire’ -make connections with- the right person to take the parts that could be delegated? When coming up with new ideas for future research, how do you select which ones to follow up and which ones to ditch?

Topics include:

• How to make things happen
• Making good decisions
• Specifications and requirements
• Ideas and what to do with them
• How not to annoy people
• Leadership and trust
• The truth about making dates
• What to do when things go wrong
• As you see, plenty of relevant sutff for academics here.

Berkun is:

an author, public speaker and consultant. He worked as a manager at Microsoft from 1994-2003, on projects including (v1-5) of Internet Explorer, Windows and MSN.

Berkun has written what could be the first project management book that doesn’t have a load of technical information on Gantt charts and related fashionable topics in the the industry. Even though project management seems to be a hot topic for the ‘Dilbert’ people of the industry, academics have taken little notice of this trend.

One thing that is missing from time management (TM) methods is how to decide which project to work on next. TM helps (a lot) with getting things done at a micromanagement level: An academic using a time management method will probably be more efficient getting to the right task at the right time.

One of the most interesting chapters is on ‘making good decisions’. Surprisingly, Berkun says that in the interviews he performed for this book no project manager used the formal methods of decision making that we teach in judgment and decision making (JDM) departments, so one has to wonder how much of the basic research gets to applied settings like this one.

A surprising fact if that, to get a paper out of the door, we probably use methods (processes) that have changed little since out PhD advisor passed them down to us. Are academic processes good? According to Berkun, good processes, accelerate progress, prevent problems, they make important actions visible and measurable, and people impacted by them are in favor of them. I’m sure we have some methods that are far from optimal.

In summary, an interesting read; while it’s not the first book that an academic would pick to improve her productivity, the intutitions and ‘no-nonsense’ recommendations in this book are valuable. Oh, and the writing is surprisingly good.

 

Are academics managing projects? The thesis of this post is that we academics are project managers without formal training in project management. You ask for money to do a research _project_. If you supervise or mentor students until they get their PhD, you are managing a project. If you teach a class, you are managing a project. Do you see where I’m going?

(more…)

 Is the latest time management book by Mark Forster. Do it tomorrow (DIT) presents some very innovative ideas that are surprisingly simple.

Mark Forster is a time management and life coach expert whose works are best known in the United Kingdom. To give you an idea of his recognition in Great Britain, DIT is ranked #214 in sales at Amazon UK at the time of this writing. The Observer recognized Forster as one of Britain’s top ten life coaches.
(more…)