What is the best productivity or time management trick you’ve learned?
I think for me, it's knowing how my brain works. I learned this in college: I can focus for an amount of time, and then I need to take a break. So I have a limited amount of time I can focus. If I try to push past that, I’m going to be less productive. Sometimes those breaks are not necessarily stopping work, but I’m going to take a step back. I might do something almost meaningless–organize my to-do list or something, but I'm still kind of moving forward. In some ways, it’s about giving myself permission to be burnt out. I can't be focused for eight hours a day and be effective. There are diminishing returns as I go through the day in terms of what I can do and get done. So I need to figure out when in the day, I’m going to work on that project.
How do you keep track of what you have to do?
I'm actually a pretty compulsive list taker. If I don't write it down, I won’t remember it. I used to have just piles and piles and piles of legal pads. But I bought this little thing called a Remarkable. I love it because I have my to-do list on one document and I have my notes on the other. So when I’m taking notes and there’s something that needs to be done, I circle it and drag it over to the to-do list and drop it in. Then when it's done, I drop it back and I check it off.
How do you process your email?
Having my email on my phone causes me more problems because I’ll read something and then say to myself, ‘Oh, I responded to that,’ and then when I go back, it's marked as read. Probably the most important thing I do is that I go back through my email every couple of weeks and double check that I’ve answered everything. I also have keywords for certain things that people can drop into email messages or subjects, and they get dropped into particular folders. Staff knows to put the word ‘signature’ in the subject line and it gets dropped into a specific folder. Or ‘budget.’ You can set up an Outlook rule so that it brings up an alert on your computer for those. I don't want to be the person that stops something from getting purchased because I missed an email.
How do you make time and space for big picture thinking?
A lot of my big picture thinking happens outside of the office, like when I walk in the morning. That is a real space for me to put everything together. The other thing that I've started to do is bring the books on my [work-related] book list into my office. So if I have 15 minutes between meetings, I'll just read. Then that feeds into the bigger picture thinking.
If you could start your career all over again, what would you do differently?
I actually think the only thing that I would tell myself differently, as I was getting rejected for administrator jobs, is that the right job will come. As much as the term ‘fit’ can be a pejorative, especially in an equity sense, there is an element of needing to find a job that you fit into. That's what will allow you to shine. All of the experiences I had up to when I got my first gig as a dean–I don't know that I would change any of it. The path was never determined to get me sitting where I am now, but it certainly led to me sitting where I am now. I do wish that there was a stronger mentoring process for potential faculty leaders.
------------------------------------------
Something to think about:
“Vulnerability isn’t just about sharing your struggles, it’s also about standing up for your values and beliefs publicly and privately.” — Janice Omadeke , founder of The Mentor Method
------------------------------------------
The Rabbit Hole (resources, content, etc. that are relevant to the job):
Comments