academic coach

Email Addictions - Part II

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"You control your life by controlling your time."

– Conrad Hilton

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Email has changed the way we conduct our academic lives. Often it is our first choice means of contacting people – even colleagues sitting down the hall. But are we using the medium wisely?

Some of us react immediately when we receive a new email message. We operate as though we were physicians and our email program is the pager that informs us we are needed at the hospital. When we react in “emergency mode”, we allow external cues to control our time.

Instead, we can decide to be doctors with a nine to five practice who have no “on call” duties. Wouldn’t life be calmer if we didn’t treat our email as though it was an emergency pager?

To manage our time wisely, and keep work demands from taking over our lives, we need to take conscious control of our email habits.

In a previous Monday Motivator, I gave five tips for dealing with email. Here are six more tips to help you manage your electronic mail.

1) Try using a timer to measure how long you spend on email.
Are you aware how much of your day is spent dealing with electronic mail? Many of us promise ourselves that we’ll read and answer messages just for a few minutes, but we get wrapped up in our inboxes and lose track of time. We emerge much later than planned, surprised by how the electronic medium has just sucked up a large chunk of our limited work time.

2) Don’t automatically respond to email messages every time you check your inbox.
Choose whether an incursion into your inbox is for the general purpose of dealing with new mail or whether it is going to be a quick entry to send a specific message. Practice the challenging art of sending the email you intend without replying to other people’s requests.

3) Jot down your goals for each email session.
Are you someone who gets sidetracked by new messages? I’ve been known to open my email program in order to send a specific message, but somehow I get seduced by new mail, spend a half hour or more cleaning up my inbox, and only realize after I’ve logged out that I’ve forgotten to send the very message that motivated the session. Does this ever happen to you? Now I quickly make a note of the messages I need to send and start with my top priorities.

4) Find out what your most productive colleagues are doing.
Take an informal survey and ask several professors how they deal with their email. Some high achievers check their inbox innumerable times each day, but many prolific professors set strict limits to keep from having their time controlled by email. Ask whether they have a system and how well it works for them.

5) Think through the role that email should play in your workday.
Are you someone who needs to be at the beck and call of every incoming message? In certain cases, the answer to this question will be “yes.” One professor I know is collaborating with colleagues from other universities to run medical research projects in Africa. Most of his research administration takes place via email and it is necessary for him to spend two or three hours each day fielding up to 100 work-related email messages. For most of us, however, being so readily available electronically is unnecessary. Constantly checking for new messages may be a form of procrastination and our research might progress faster if we were on email less often.

6) Don’t waste your “prime time” on email.
If you are most alert and productive first thing in the morning, why do you spend your first hour at work going through your inbox? One of my coaching clients was the Dean of a prestigious private college. She received over 100 new, important email messages each day. After experimenting with different ways of managing this information onslaught, she made it a practice never to check her email until 3pm. She chose this period of the afternoon because her energy level tended to be low during that time. She was confident that if she allowed email to suck up her morning vigor she would never accomplish her goals. Keeping the demands of email in check helped her get her job done. (She also found that when people had to wait a few hours or a day for her reply they sometimes solved their problems without her.)

The basic premise of these tips is to control your email rather than allow it to control you.

Question: What would happen if each time you started to open your email browser you first asked yourself “What is the best use of my time, right now?”

Answer: You’d become much more productive.

Email Addictions

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"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have,
and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful
lest you let other people spend it for you."

                                                      Carl Sandburg

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In my experience, email is the most insidious, seductive time-waster we face.

In fact, for many of us, email is a pernicious addiction.

Checking and replying to our electronically-delivered messages seems like a necessary, innocuous occupation, but it is also a major form of procrastination.

Sometimes we open our email browser with the intention of sending someone a specific message. Often, though, we are checking our email because, well, that is what we do. We check our inbox many times a day, even compulsively.

When I am giving workshops to faculty or graduate students, I take a poll of how frequently participants check their email. Everyone seems to check their email several times, and the majority of academics admit to more than a dozen incursions per day.

How much would you weigh if you ate a piece of chocolate every time you check your email? Would obesity - or even diabetes - be the result?

Here are seven specific tips for dealing with an email addiction:

1) Stop checking your email first thing in the morning.
For many of us, this is the most difficult – and most important – habit to break. “First things first” should be the guiding principle of your academic day. Work on your own research and writing for at least a half hour before opening your email program. Take the pragmatic and symbolic step of focusing on your academic priorities before responding to external input. If you make this a habit, I promise that you will be surprised and pleased with how much more you accomplish each day.

2) Turn off any “you’ve got mail” sounds or verbal cues.
It is important to prevent the tempting distraction of automatic notifications of new messages. We often respond to these signals like a dog conditioned to salivate at the sound of the bell: the familiar sound leads to an automatic email check. Don’t let external signals control your behavior. You should choose when it is time to look at your messages.

3) Close your email program between sessions.
If you check your email reflexively and automatically it will help to make the habit more difficult to begin. When you decide to send a message, it will take longer to open the program and enter a password, but this delay will give you a chance to ask yourself whether it is necessary to go online at that particular moment. You will consciously decide whether or not to have an email session.

3) Monitor your addiction.
How often do you check your email? Is your habit severe? For a few days, try counting how many times you open your email. Do you take a quick peek dozens of times each workday? Is this the best use of your time? Probably not.

4) Decide on a reasonable number of times per day to check your messages.
Next choose specific times of the day to open your inbox. At first, you may want to write those times in your daily planner until infrequent checks become a habit. Remind yourself that even when you are waiting for an important message, such as a response to a research question, or notification of a grant award, it rarely matters whether you read the message immediately or an hour later. For most academics, three email sessions per day should be sufficient. Does this sound draconian or depriving? Then you are probably an email addict. You may want to keep checking your email on an hourly basis – but at least make it a conscious choice.

5) Cut back slowly.  Are you accustomed to letting your own work become sidetracked by every message that arrives? Try cutting back to a quick check every hour, then slowly reduce the frequency and length of your email sessions. Watch to see whether you get more of your own work accomplished.

Are you finding yourself resistant to the measures I’ve suggested? You may want to ask yourself why it is so difficult to cut back or why you don’t want to give up the habit. Is email checking the only way you permit yourself to take a break? Can you think of a more relaxing or rewarding small break from work?

The basic premise of these suggestions is that our email addictions preempt conscious time management choices.

DECIDE THAT YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF YOUR EMAIL, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

Do you remember life before email? We still got work done, right?

P.S. I think that email management is so important that I will devote further Monday Motivators to the topic.

Opportunity: Time Management Teleconference

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“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”

-- Albert Einstein

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I’m excited to announce a special opportunity.

Next Wednesday, February 21rst from 1 – 2:30pm EST
I’ll be presenting a special teleconference on
Time Management for Academics.

If you sign up for the presentation, sponsored by
Magna Publications, you’ll be able to listen to my
live talk while watching the accompanying
power point presentation on your computer.

Here's the information about the teleconference.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions.

I hope that you can be there,

Mary

Juggling Tasks

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”I am rather like a mosquito in a nudist camp; I know what
I want to do, but I don’t know where to begin.“

Stephen Bayne – Episcopal Bishop

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This is one of my favorite quotes. I love the visual and auditory image of a buzzing mosquito trying to decide which fleshy, delectable blood source to stick her proboscis . . . Where to start? Which one to pick?

Are you feeling so swamped with projects that you don’t know where to start?

Indecision in the midst of opportunity is a common difficulty.

Many of the junior faculty, post-docs and grad students I work with have difficulty juggling tasks. As one junior faculty member put it: “When I focus on one project, the rest of my life seems to fall apart. But if I scatter my energy, I don’t get anything finished.

“I’m keeping up with my teaching and my departmental duties but none of my papers are moving forward. It is my second year on the tenure track and I still haven’t gotten articles out from my dissertation.”

Do you have this type of difficulty?

Many of us feel like we can only work on one major project at a time. Preparing to teach a new course keeps us from getting any writing done for weeks. Finishing a conference paper leads to unanswered email messages. Scrambling to meet a grant deadline pushes all other activities aside.

I call this the “No Clean Underwear Syndrome”. We focus with single-minded intensity on a drop-dead deadline and even basic life maintenance tasks fall by the wayside. Email inboxes overflow, phone calls go unreturned, exercise regimes are dropped, and our dirty laundry piles up until we don’t even have any clean underwear.

However, much of the time we face the opposite situation. We don’t finish large, important projects that lack clear deadlines because we’re so busy keeping up with day-to-day chores. The regular demands of teaching, service, and life-maintenance chores push aside scholarly research and writing. There is always something pressing that pre-empts finishing the journal article or working on the dissertation.

How can we effectively juggle daily demands and yet move forward on long-term projects?

1) First of all, plan and prioritize.
A comprehensive “to do” list can help you keep track of the multitude of tasks we face. And once your lengthy list is compiled, it needs to be prioritized. Which tasks are most critical to tackle?

2) Whittle and refine this master “to do” list.
What are the items that you can realistically accomplish today? I keep a complete list of projects, but choose a doable number of tasks to work on. Otherwise I get discouraged by the overwhelming size of the list and frustrated when there are so many projects still undone at the end of a day.

3)Carve out at least a small amount of time for the projects without deadlines.
When we work for at least half hour a day on long-range projects – the dissertation, the journal article, the exploratory research for a new scholarly endeavor – we chip away at our career priorities even as we keep up with the many short-term demands on our time.

4)When you’re stuck, start somewhere.
Don’t just buzz around without sucking any blood! Sometimes I get so overwhelmed by the number of items on my agenda that I avoid facing anything. The impossibility of getting everything done kicks me into procrastination mode and I want to surf the web or crawl into bed. At these moments, I tell myself to start anywhere. I try to take a tolerable ten minutes to tackle my top priority. Sometimes, once I get started, it is much easier than I think to make headway on my projects. I feel less anxious because I am moving forward.

How do you juggle the demands of your work and personal life? Do you have systems for managing multiple tasks? How do you consistently move forward on projects that lack deadlines when there are so many pressing, external demands on your time? Do you feel like a mosquito in a nudist camp?

Feeling Busy

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“I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several
days attack me at once.”

– Ashleigh Brilliant

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Almost all of us tend to feel busy, overworked and overwhelmed.

In one study, the psychologist Robert Boice asked a group of professors whether this was the busiest year of their lives. Fifty five percent said, “Yes.”

Do you feel as though this is the busiest year of your life? If so, according to Boice, you probably felt the same way last year and are likely to feel this way next year as well!

Robert Boice also conducted research asking faculty members to estimate how much they worked. The academics estimated that they worked an average of almost 60 hours per week and spent almost 30 hours on research and writing.

Next, these same faculty members were asked to keep records of their time spent working – not just on campus but truly engaged in work. In contrast to estimates, the records of actual work time averaged 29 hours per week, just 1.5 hours on research and only 30 minutes of weekly writing.

Have you ever kept track of the amount of time you spend working, or more specifically on writing?

Many of my coaching clients and students have found it useful to keep track of where they spend their time. They’ve also noticed that when they record their writing periods they are motivated to spend more time writing. The act of monitoring their time increased their efforts.

Boice’s research also shows that the amount of worry and pressure we feel is not necessarily correlated with how many hours we are working.

Furthermore, being busy does not mean that we must automatically feel overwhelmed.

Do you remember feeling busy as an undergraduate? Do you now look back and sigh over the vast number of free hours you actually had?

Do those of you with children remember the time before parenthood when you felt swamped and overwhelmed? Do you now look back and sigh over the free hours and flexibility you actually had?

In general, the number and range of responsibilities increases as we progress in our career. And at each stage, we may feel stretched and stressed. The goal is to learn to manage our tasks so that we are productive and yet still have time for family, friends and relaxation.

Creating a balanced, emotionally stable life includes the realization that we can’t do it all.

We can’t do it all, but we can do enough. If we don’t expect to get every item on our “to do” list crossed off, we’ll feel less disappointed when we only make partial process.

It is important to begin by setting priorities. First things first, should be our motto.

The most effective and productive academics I know work each day on their most important projects. They carve out time for daily research and writing. They avoid perfectionism and don’t spend unnecessary time tweaking low-priority tasks. They make time for their own work amidst the clamor and demands of students, colleagues and collaborators.

What will you do this week to manage your time?
Will you keep track of your scholarly efforts?
Will you prioritize your “to do” list?
Will you carve out time for writing?

Technological Tribulations

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A definition:

“PATIENCE – n., A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.”

-- Ambrose Bierce

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Since early December, many of my newsletter subscribers have not been getting my Monday Motivators.

In fact, I haven’t even been receiving my own newsletters!

So far, I’ve spent several hours on the phone and sending emails to the three companies responsible for this problem. Unfortunately, at this point my efforts have been completely unsuccessful.

Technological tribulations – how we hate them.

Crashed computers, zapped wireless networks, erratic email. Gah!

Problems with modern day technology follow the long-established law of Murphy: What can go wrong will. Furthermore, what can go wrong does go wrong at the worst possible moment. Know what I mean?

In my own case, years ago, my laptop melted when I was frantically trying to revise my defended dissertation in time to file the document before paying for another semester of graduate school. I also needed to meet my deadline so that I could officially begin my post doctoral fellowship.

Fortunately, when the crash occurred, I had copies of the complete dissertation. Unfortunately, I lost all the revisions I’d made in the two weeks since the defense.

The meltdown also left me without a computer.

When I wasn’t on the telephone with the computer nerds who were trying to recover my hard drive, I was at the library continuing to make revisions. So much for late night sessions of productivity. So much for working in my pajamas with a cup of coffee in my hand. So much for scattering needed spreadsheets of statistics all over the floor of my home.

That computer crash was a major hassle rather than a devastating disaster. In the years I’ve been coaching grad students and faculty, I’ve certainly heard much worse. Dropped laptops. Burgled apartments. Devastating fires.

Do you have any tales of woe to share?

If you do, I’m sure that you back up your work with great regularity. If you haven’t experienced devastating technological tribulations, then you may not be appropriately proactive about protective measures.

This week, please be sure to back up every computer file. Email yourself the latest version of your document. Give a hard copy of recent drafts to a friend who lives in a different building. Check your spam-filtered messages carefully. Invest in an external hard drive. Start today.

Please also cross your fingers that the folks at Earthlink, Professional Cart Solutions, and 1 Shopping Cart will come to their senses, fix my problem, and allow this newsletter to be read by everyone who wants it.

And give me the patience to keep harassing people until they fix these glitches.

Write It Down

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“The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.”       

-----    Lee Iacocca

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Often we carry around in our minds a vague list of things to do and notions of our priorities.

I call this a “Rolodex mind” because we shuffle through our list of “shoulds”, spinning our mental Rolodex wheel and accomplishing little.

When we are trying to work on one project, we get distracted and overwhelmed by thoughts of all the other tasks yet to be done. It is difficult to focus on the immediate task at hand because we’re too busy worrying about other responsibilities and obligations.

A Rolodex mind is an unfocused mind.

A Rolodex mind can also be a defense against the anxiety of making a choice. We flip through mental lists, waffle about which one we’ll begin with, and avoid committing ourselves to action. We feel apprehensive or ambivalent about starting an important project, so we settle for something less challenging to act upon.

Should you work on the literature review or methods section? A difficult choice? Then why not check your email before you decide?

Should you begin your literature review with a description of theories or the history of the problem?  Why not search for a few more articles first to make sure you're not missing any relevant information on the topic?

Sound familiar?

How can we improve our focus, make decisions and take action?
The answer is deceptively simple: Write down our goals.

Far too often, we keep our projects and priorities in our mind rather than on paper.
Do you have a list of the research projects you are currently working on?

Have you made a graphic timeline for the semester that indicates all the deadlines you will be facing?

Is your “to do” list prioritized so that you can begin each day with important rather than anxiety-free tasks?

Do you have a schedule that includes blocked-out appointments with yourself for research and writing?

* Right now, try making a list of the most important projects you will work on this week.
* Rewrite the list so that your projects are ranked in order of their importance to your academic career.
* Now create a new list breaking down each project into concrete action steps. For example, “write the literature review” would be broken down into steps such as “write three paragraphs describing and contrasting Marxian and Hegelian views on property ownership.” “Write the methods section” might be broken down into “write a paragraph describing how subjects were recruited.”

Writing things down may help you stop spinning the Rolodex wheel and lay out a plan for activities in a linear sequence that can be tackled one step at a time.

If you tend to have a mind cluttered with the phrases “should do” and “must do” you may be surprised how writing down goals and action steps will free you to focus on your current task rather than on future anxieties.

Here’s the short version of this tip of the week:
Write it down. Then make it happen.

New Year's Resolutions

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“We are what we repeatedly do.”

-- Aristotle

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Happy New Year!

Do you make New Year resolutions?
I do.

This year, on January first, my list looked pretty typical. I vowed to exercise more, eat less, keep my office cleaner and keep my email inbox emptier.

What about you?

Will my resolutions fade out within a month or two? Probably.

Do I mind? Not really.

I figure even if I only exercise thirty minutes a day until mid-February, I’ll still be healthier in 2007 than I would have been without the New Year’s resolution.

I figure that if I only clean out my email inbox a few extra hours this month, I’ll still get rid of many 2006 messages I no longer need.

Some people are talented at establishing new habits. They pick one routine, stick with it for a month and then find that it is ingrained – a new habit that is a solid part of their repertoire. Their temperament – based on genetic endowment, biochemical tendencies and environmental history – makes it more natural for them to establish consistent routines.

Other people, like me, get bored with routines after a while or find it extremely difficult to avoid the slow slide towards irregularity and disorganization.

We seem to need a fairly frequent influx of new techniques, fresh resolves and renewed vows to maintain our motivation and progress.

My experience shows that some people are temperamentally able to move in linear, regular paths towards their goals. Others, like me, move forward in fits and starts, in cycles of zest and discouragement.

It has taken me along time to accept that I will never be a paragon of regularity and consistent discipline. Yet this does not mean that I should give up on my efforts of self-improvement. As I have accepted my tendency to fluctuate in my resolve, I have found it easier to manage my cycles of productivity.

I now know that when I fall off my New Year’s resolution band wagons I must look for new means of transportation towards my goals. I will get bored with routines and need variety. When my resolution patterns peter out I will seek new techniques to re-inspire myself.

When my daily trips to the gym lapse, I will join an exercise class. When my in-box fills, I will schedule a kamikaze marathon clean-up session.

Fits and starts and ebbs and flows are my natural rhythm. But I still resolve to be regular and methodical; because there is no doubt that the turtle beats the hare in the long run.

In short, accept your temperament, but even if it doesn’t come naturally, try to implement steady habits.

Take Time Off - Enjoy the Holidays

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“In short, he so busied himself in his books that
he spent the nights reading from twilight till
daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and
so from little sleep and much reading his brain
dried up and he lost his wits.”

                            -  Cervantes, “Don Quixote”

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Have a wonderful holiday. Take time off. Refresh your wits. Regenerate your spirit so that you may return to work next semester with renewed vigor.

My condolences to those of you going to professional conferences between now and the New Year!

My best wishes to those having job interviews. May you be offered the position you desire.

Procrasdistraction

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“My evil genius Procrastination has whispered me to tarry 'til a more convenient season.”

- Mary Todd Lincoln

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Did you ever notice, when you’ve finally overcome inertia, opened your word processing document, and begun to type those first few words, that a list of undone tasks abruptly leaps to mind?

You finally sit down to write and suddenly you remember bills unpaid, dogs unfed, thank you notes unwritten, phone calls unmade, dishes dirty. And all of these tasks feel surprisingly pressing. I call these thoughts that charge into your mind, blasting away all thoughts of your task at hand, “procrasdistractions.”

How can you tell that they are distractions rather than essential duties? Just wait. Wait until you’ve finished working for a half hour and then see if your sense of urgency remains.

You may be amazed, once you’ve put in a good hour of writing, how much less critical it feels to scrub your bathtub or reorganize your music collection.

One of the things your wily procrastination mind will whisper to you while you’re starting to work is that you absolutely, positively, conclusively MUST take action on this non-writing related task or else you will forget it.

“I’ve got to do it Right Now,” declares your mind, “or I’ll never remember.”

This fear suggests the easy solution for Procrasdistractions:
Write them down.

Keep a pad of paper and a pen next to your computer mouse pad, and when your wandering mind comes up with a new item for your to-do list take your fingers off the keyboard for five seconds and write the task down.

Sometimes procrasdistractions may masquerade as research gems:

*  You suddenly remember a book that you need desperately as a reference.
*  You brilliantly think of a statistical analysis that would revolutionize your approach to the methodological gap that’s been gaping at you.
*  You unexpectedly realize that a new theory encompasses all your data with unparalleled eloquence.

What should you do? Jot down the idea. And return to the document on your screen.

These serendipitous insights warrant their own separate sheets of paper – what one of my coaching clients calls her “epiphany pad.”

By all means capture these ephemeral treasures in writing, but whatever you do, don’t switch gears and start an internet search for new references, or open up your statistical program to start entering parameters, or pore through an important text in search of that perfect quote.

Wait until you’ve finished the writing segment that you promised yourself you’d complete.

When you’ve finished your daily goal you’ll be better able to judge whether the fortuitous thought nugget was a genuine gem or a glass bauble. Unfortunately, some of these insights will look cockeyed rather than piercing an hour later.

If the flash of insight was a bona fide jewel, you’ll have plenty of energy to follow up because you’ll be invigorated by having met your self-imposed writing goals.

Do procrasdistractions plague you? I’d love to hear tales of the tangents you’ve taken in the service of avoiding work.

And let me know what you come up with on your epiphany pad.