The unexpected benefit of planning my day

My schedule is packed. I have three job titles:

• Professor of economics (research, teaching, service, and advising graduate students)
• Director of Graduate Studies for our MA and PhD programs
• Co-Editor of a journal that last year received more than 2000 submissions

Each of these positions involves organizing lots of information and then figuring out what, if anything, has to be done with that information. Some of the things flying at me on a typical day:

• Professor: Draft of a dissertation. Request to schedule a final defense. Upcoming lectures for my classes. Office hours. Request from a student for an appointment that can’t make office hours. Draft of a document for a faculty committee. Notice from an associate dean about a required form that may or may not have to be submitted at some point in the future. Request from a coauthor to make final edits to a paper prior to submission.
• DGS: Inquiry about admission. Organizing the admissions committee prior to the upcoming application deadline. Review of student progress. A GTA not performing up to expectations. Qualifying exam results.
• Co-Editor: (Tons of) new papers needing reviewers. Reviewers needing reminding. Papers with two reviews needing a decision. Administrative requests.

How can you possibly handle that volume of information (I haven’t even said anything about the many messages where I’m cc’d “just in case”.) I’ve adopted a routine of scheduling each day in Todoist. I wouldn’t be able to get anything done if I didn’t invest some time in scheduling, because I’d spend all day paralyzed out of fear that I’m not going to finish everything.

Scheduling my time does not mean I write down a specific time for each activity. I can’t tell you what I’ll be working on at 9:30 am on most days - it’s way too difficult to judge how much time things are going to take for me to be able do that. In Todoist, I have a project for the current day with four sections: early morning, late morning, early afternoon, and late afternoon. I review the things I have to do and put together a realistic schedule for the day for each of the four sections.

I put items on my schedule in this order: important, appointments, urgent, and other. I have a minimum of one from each category on my schedule every day. Most of the time I create my schedule the night before. That helps me to sleep because I know everything is under control. It also allows me to start working when my mind is fresh the next day. It’s not often that I have any interest in working on a schedule at 6:00 in the morning. There’s no way I’d plan my day if I had to go through that process first thing in the morning. On the other hand, by 9:00 pm I’ve been thinking about my projects all day. I’ve been thinking about the email response I’m drafting or how I’m going to respond to the comments of a referee. By the end of the day, I’m thinking about the bigger picture, about where I’ll be in a month. It’s a relief to get all that out of my head when I’m too tired to actually do any of the work.

There’s one big benefit I didn’t anticipate when I started this process. In order to plan my day, I have to review my projects to determine what needs to be done, and then what should be done. I ask which projects should be active and which should be put on hold. That’s quite a change from the way I used to do things. I used to work on the urgent: answer email, work on research because of a deadline, prepare my lecture because I had to teach later that day. I frequently think about finishing projects as opposed to working on them because I ask questions like “How will this contribute to finishing the project?” I no longer feel good about simply doing things. I feel good about doing valuable things and refusing to do things with a high opportunity cost. “Schedule your day” is a little bit about scheduling your day and mostly about reviewing your active projects and deciding where you want to make progress. “Review your projects” is more accurate than “schedule your day” even though the final outcome is a schedule for your day.

This is all obvious with months of experience, but I didn’t even think about it when I started. I regret not scheduling my day earlier in my career. I’d have finished a lot more important things if I had.