Time and Stress Management Workshop

Idris Hsi, Lecture given September 25, 2000

Task not Time Management

· Time management should be thought of as task management not the management of time (which is a physical constant).

· Typically a typical time management routine takes parsing a day into working time and sleeping time. The working time is then divided into scheduled appointments and things with fixed intervals then the rest of the time is allocated to tasks like homework. It’s difficult to plan around time estimations. Often the variability of tasks or the uncertainty of the environment will often lead to cascading failures and schedule slippage.

· It’s often better to manage around tasks with less of an emphasis of how much time to devote to an activity but around goals where a task is complete once a series of goal conditions have been met.

Covey’s Time (Task) Management Matrix (From Seven Habits of Highly Effective People)

Urgent

Not Urgent

Important

Crises

Pressing Problems

Deadline-Driven Projects

II

Prevention Activities

Planning

Organizing

Relationship Building

Research

Not Important

III

Interruptions

E-mail

Phone Calls

Meetings

IV

Trivia, Busy Work

Time Wasters

Pleasant Activities

· Quadrant I activities tend to be crisis-oriented or have strict time restrictions that require immediate attention.

· Quadrant III activities are those that demand our attention in some urgent way but are not important to your job or things that you really have to do. Think of what happens to your concentration when you hear the phone ring.

· Quadrant IV activities tend to be those things that we enjoy doing because they help us relax or get away from problems.

· Quadrant II activities provide foundations for doing the other activities well and efficiently. They are also difficult to schedule because they lack urgency but are extremely important for helping you organize your life.

· It’s useful to categorize the tasks that you perform in a day using this quadrant. You should have a balanced number of Quadrant II activities with your other activities.

Heuristics for Organizing Tasks

· There are many ways of organizing the tasks that you have to do in a day. Here are some of the constraints to consider in your algorithm.

· Priority Order – Do the most important and pressing things first. The advantage to this heuristic is that it does force you to rank your to-do items by importance and you’ll head off a lot of crises. The disadvantage is that it’s possible to get caught up in only doing the critical tasks and you’ll miss the planning and organizing activities that help you prevent problems in the first place.

· Task Duration – Figure out which tasks will take the most and least amount of time. Organize the day by consolidating small tasks and leaving more time for large tasks. Alternatively, you can use small tasks to give you breaks from the larger one. The advantage is that you can have a block of time where you can accomplish a lot of little things and feel that the time was well spent rather than letting the small tasks become small distractions from a larger task. The disadvantage of this is that it can be difficult to estimate how long something will take. Without some consideration of Priority, it’s very easy to let small tasks consume your life.

· Category Order – Take all the tasks you have to do and figure out categories, such as work, school, home, personal, hobbies, etc. Then you prioritize the categories and use the categories as contexts to determine how to organize your time. The advantage of this is it makes you sensitive to keeping tasks within the correct context, sometimes by the environment that you know you will be in. It also helps you keep your overall life organized and not just your work/academic life.

· Traveling Salesman – The traveling salesman scheduling heuristic looks at the kinds of task constraints that affect its duration. The constraints can be one of sequence; i.e. you are waiting on something or someone else to finish before you can begin. They can be time oriented; i.e. you have to factor in travel time to reach a destination before beginning a task. You work out the tasks and their constraints in a way that promotes optimal usage of time. For example, consolidating all shopping/driving trips in one pass because of traffic and travel time.

Using Small Bits

· We tend to optimize around large chunks of time but often it’s impossible to avoid small chunks of time that seem to be unusable. The following is a list of activities that take anywhere from 1 minute to 10 minutes and can fill those bits in a useful manner.

· Planning – 10 minutes of looking ahead can be very useful

· Cleaning / Organizing chores

· Communication – Email, phone calls

· Creativity / Brainstorming – spend 1-5 minutes generating questions about research.

· Small Tasks – making shopping lists, a reference search, checking on homework, etc.

The Art of Procrastination

· Procrastination is “The Art of Delaying the Inevitable”

· Procrastination activities tend to fall into the following categories:

· Worrying about finishing on time.

· Worrying about the final outcome.

· Letting events (pleasant and unpleasant) distract you from what needs to be done.

· Doing “unimportant” things first.

· It’s important to figure out why you’re procrastinating and to deal with it as quickly possible. While procrastinating by thinking about why you’re procrastinating is fun and recursive for short periods of time, it’s also not helpful unless you come to some conclusion and work on a strategy for dealing with it.

The Zen of Time Usage

· “When You Wash The Dishes, Wash the Dishes”

· It’s often very difficult to maintain absolute concentration on one thing. But you are most efficient when you can accomplish working on this one thing. Therefore, when you’re washing the dishes, or whatever you happen to be doing, you should try and just wash the dishes. Each other thing should be dealt with in its own time.

The Principle of Immersion

· “All tasks require a period of immersion in direct proportion to their difficulty.”

· DeMarco and Lister in Peopleware studied programmers in the workplace and discovered that the biggest complaint of programmers was that they were constantly being interrupted by phones, people talking, meetings, and so on. These interruptions produced context shifts or a change in work context. DeMarco and Lister concluded that the context shifts had two effects. Not only were they taking up valuable time which could have been spent programming but they were affecting programmers by requiring them to re-immerse themselves in work.

· Let’s say it takes t minutes (say 15 minutes) to get into the mode of programming and thinking in that language. Once you’re interrupted, you leave that mode to answer a phone or something. It then takes another t minutes to immerse yourself back into programming mode.

· It’s important to consolidate your activities by context and to ensure that you are minimizing the number of interruptions that will force you to change modes of thought.

Some Days are Impossible

· In spite of your best efforts, you can’t get everything done whether due to the environment or because you have too many commitments that are out of your control.

· This can lead to stress.

What is Stress?

· Stress is the physical manifestation of your body’s response to perceived danger. It is the fight or flight mechanism triggered by the release of adrenaline into the bloodstream. Your body is essentially preparing to run away or to fight whatever is threatening its survival.

· In the modern world, we have many things that seem to threaten our survival in subtle ways. However, these problems rarely manifest themselves as a physical entity that we can fight or run away from. However, the body is still reacting in the same way as it did on the Serengeti Plain many millennia ago.

· Sources of stress include the following (but are numerous):

· Personal Pressure to succeed

· Financial Problems.

· Relationship Problems

· Deadlines

· Holidays

· Stress can manifest itself in the form of an increased heart rate, sleeplessness, anxiety, and variable appetite.

Long Term Stress

· Long Term Stress usually results from having to constantly respond to crises or having an overwhelming number of smaller problems over a period of time. Too much stress without a solution or an interval of rest can result in burnout.

· Physiologically this can be very dangerous as it can lead to digestive problems (ulcers, for example), secondary illnesses (resulting from loss of sleep), and other things that are related to depression. A basic way of thinking about this is that adrenaline affects many organs and causes them to stay inactive during periods of high stress, preserving energy for the fight/flight activities. Over a long period of time, this behavior can result in serious harm.

· Psychologically, long term stress can lead to depression and burnout. When you are burned out, you begin to feel that nothing you do matters or helps your work in any way. This can lead to job and life dissatisfaction. At this point, it would be good to rethink how your life is progressing and to take some drastic steps to change it or to seek professional help. Better still would be to avoid reaching this point in the first place.

Managing Stress

· The best way to handle immediate stress is to redirect that energy back into work or into exercise. These are productive activities that take the extra energy and burn it in the way it was designed to be used.

· Maintaining a regular schedule helps your body stay fit and adjust to the demands of stress better. You should also have a sensible and healthy diet.

· For the long term, you need to eliminate or reduce the sources of stress. These can be done partially with type 2 activities (planning, organizing, and so on can save you a lot of time that can be spent on important stuff). It’s also good to remind yourself that most things aren’t important and are, for the most part, reversible.

· Don’t be afraid to get help from other people if you feel you are in over your head.

Active Inactivity

· “Music is the space between notes” – Claude Debussy

· It is good to create empty spaces in your life for the purposes of creating pauses. What you do is pick a certain amount of time or a day where you choose to do nothing. Doing nothing lets you kind of clear everything away and put things in perspective. Very important.

Tools for Staying on Track

· Spending 10 minutes a day for planning

· Building in flexible scheduling – allowing an extra hour or two hours that are unscheduled is good.

· Using an automated scheduler or pocket calendar can be very helpful for keeping track of your appointments and to do items.

· Use a pad of paper as a running to-do list and as a good place for off-loading your thoughts.

· Wear a watch if you have a lot of time critical things. Don’t wear one if you have open ended tasks and are allowing enough time for them. Otherwise you will be compelled to break context and check to see if you are on time – which is not important for the sake of getting the task done in general.

Developing the Habit

· It takes discipline and practice to have good time management skills. It has to be your decision. You can’t let your life, job, or circumstances be the driving force. You have to decide that your time is important and that you should be the one deciding how it should be spent.

· Develop the skills incrementally by setting a realistic schedule for getting things done.

· Build in a reward system for getting things done.

Don’t Waste Time

· Spent time is unrecoverable.

· You can only waste time when you spend it carelessly or unconsciously.

· Choose to live deliberately.

The Big Picture

· Don’t schedule more than is humanly possible.

· It’s important to know when you’ve done all that you can. Don’t stress about the things that you can’t control.

· Always keep the long-term goals in mind.

Grad School Survival Guidelines

· Plan For The Long Term Future. Graduate school requires a different time horizon. You should keep future dates in mind such as conference and journal publication deadlines, qualifiers, your minor, and the proposal. These cannot be done at the last minute.

· Reserve a catch-up / rest day for yourself. You can only put off the important life things (such as laundry) for so long. It’s good to reserve a day out of the week where you don’t plan to work on stuff related to your school or research life and that is solely devoted to maintaining your personal life.

· Develop a hobby. A hobby offers a nice break from routine. Often they are social and can provide a nice bit of stress relief.

· Maintain your relationships and social connections.