Written by Darby Vickers
One of the most difficult aspects of graduate school is time management. Graduate students often play multiple roles during their graduate career: researcher, research assistant, teacher, TA, mentor, mentee, department member, etc. Moreover, depending upon personal life and preferences, students may also play a variety of additional roles: parent, athlete, event planner, entrepreneur, musician, gamer, etc. Needless to say, it is almost impossible to keep all of this in your head or balance your life without creating a method for organizing and prioritizing your time and your goals. Ideally, you will have an organizational scheme by the time the first quarter starts at UCI (and then you can modify it as circumstances change).
If this sounds daunting, don’t worry! In this blog post, I will share some tips for how to keep yourself organized in graduate school. This article is directed toward students in the Humanities and Social Sciences, but some of these skills are more universal (so it may be applicable to you even if you hail from outside these areas).
I will divide this blogpost into four sections based on theme. Each section is modular; feel free to skip to whichever section or sections seem useful to you. The sections are as follows: (1) where to begin if you’re struggling, (2) general strategies for staying organized, (3) some useful tips for the digitally-inclined organizer, and (4) some tips for “paper people”.
(1) Where to Begin if You’re Struggling
During my first two years in graduate school, it felt like my time evaporated; there were never enough hours in the day to complete the work for my classes, study for my exams, carry out my own research, and work as a teaching assistant. It was extremely overwhelming and I was constantly exhausted. While I was trying my best to stay organized, I was employing a similar organizational system to the system that I used during my undergraduate work. However, I had far fewer responsibilities during my undergraduate years and so this system was woefully inadequate.
In order to tackle this problem, I needed to do was figure out where my time was going and why my work time was spent so inefficiently. I started to solve this problem by a method sometimes known as a “reverse planner”. A traditional planner plans out the day; a reverse planner tracks what actually happens during the day. Reverse planners are a great way to audit your time, but can prove time-consuming to do consistently. If you think the reverse planner is helpful, you might want to use a more high-tech method to keep you accountable to how you are spending your time. I use a program called Rescue Time (https://www.rescuetime.com/). Rescue Time collects data from the programs and apps you are using on your computer and other electronic devices and provides that data to you. Rescue Time also gives a weekly “productivity pulse” which provides a quick snapshot of how much time goes toward your work (vs. using your computer for other things). If you don’t like the idea of a program monitoring your computer, you may want to use a device that serves a similar purpose but doesn’t track your work directly (e.g. something like Timeular).
Here is a screenshot of my rescue time for a week in June (I provided the breakdown as well below):
If you find that you’re wasting a lot of time on social media or youtube or reading things on the internet (or browsing books on Audible as you can see from my photos), you might be interested in an app called Forest (https://www.forestapp.cc/; there is an almost identical app, which I believe is entirely free, called Flora [https://flora.appfinca.com/], built only for iOS devices). If you’re constantly checking your phone (or similar device), Forest can help prevent this. Through Forest, you set a timer. While the timer is running, a picture of a tree grows. This tree prevents you from using any app on your phone while the tree is growing (if you try to use something else, you will kill your tree). Whether your tree attempts are successful or unsuccessful, the app will record your trees (and any time you used your phone while the app was running, you will see dead trees). On your laptop, Forest serves a slightly different function. In this case, Forest is a plugin for your browser. This plugin gives you two options: blacklist or whitelist. If you want to prevent yourself from losing time on a particular website (e.g. Facebook), you can blacklist facebook and Forest will prevent you from accessing Facebook until your timer finishes (unless you are willing to kill your tree). Alternatively, if you want to narrow your focus even farther, you can whitelist certain sites and Forest will only allow you to access those sites you have whitelisted while the timer is running.
Here is a screenshot of my Forest App:
(2) General Strategies for Staying Organized
In this section, I provide four general tips for staying organized in graduate school. I provide a little bit of elaboration on each one. In the next two sections, I’ll talk about how to use these tips based on your preference of electronic or paper organizational systems.
- Spend time planning
- Even though planning can be time consuming, it is instrumental in making life run smoothly. In my third year of graduate school, I began to read books on productivity and planning. I started becoming extremely organized and planning my life carefully. My productivity probably tripled. I am now spending the same amount of hours working, but accomplishing so much more.
- Set long term goals and then break those down into short term goals
- When you see each deadline, break it down into smaller deadlines. For example, if you are writing a paper, make sure you figure out how much time it will take you to review the literature, collect data, write a first draft, revise, etc. Create deadlines for each step into your calendar as well as the overall deadline for the project. This way, you hold yourself accountable and make sure that you budget enough time for each step.
- For some great resources on long and short term goals, take a look at UCI professor Barbara Sarnecka’s blog. I think she does a fantastic job of explaining how to tackle this for graduate students: Long-term goals (IDP/5-year plan), Medium-term goals (Term Plan), Short-term goals (Weekly/Daily Plan).
- Make sure goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound)
- Specific: goals must be specific so that you know how to accomplish them. For example, I love teaching. One of my major goals in graduate school was to become a better teacher. However, that goal is not specific and it’s difficult to determine whether it has been met. To make my goal more specific, I decided to enroll in University Studies 390X. This is a 10-week pedagogy seminar in which graduate students learn evidence-based teaching practices. So my goal became to complete UniStu 390X and employ at least on strategy I learned in the course each week while I was working as a TA.
- Measureable: goals must be measurable, so you can determine when you have accomplished them or how much farther you have to go before you accomplish them.
- Achievable: Achievability concerns what you have control over. I can illustrate this principle by the difference between wishes and goals. A wish might be to publish a paper in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (which is the leading journal in my sub-discipline). No matter how carefully I construct my paper, there is a possibility that the editor or reviewers will not like it. A goal would be to polish a paper and submit it to Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. I cannot ensure that my paper will be selected by the journal, but I can ensure that I submit the paper to the journal.
- Relevant: This is extremely important. No matter how amazing your goals are and how well you achieve them, if they are not relevant to the roles you inhabit as a graduate student or in your life after graduate school.
- Time-Bound: this is extremely important. If your goals are not time-bound, it is really difficult to achieve them because you can always continue to put off doing what you need to do to achieve those goals. If I want to submit a paper to a journal, it might languish forever. However, if I make an artificial deadline of 12 weeks, then I give myself a defined amount of time to get the paper out the door.
(3) Some Useful Tips for the Digitally-inclined Organizer
Technology can provide amazing resources for organizing yourself in graduate school. If you are adept with Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, you have extremely powerful organizational and time-management tools at your disposal. There are also some other great apps and features of G-suite (which is part of your UCI email account) that might help you in your life. To prevent this blogpost from becoming too long, I will provide links to a small number of digital methods of organization below and provide brief annotations. Please share your own resource in the comments on this blogpost!
- Professor Barbara Sarnecka’s Templates (link): if you want to use one of the templates, open up the template and click file→ make a copy→ save that copy into your Google Drive. From there, you can fill out, edit, and change the template.
- This folder includes templates for IDP/5-year plans (long-term plans), Term Plans (medium-term plans), a Daily Writing Log (short-term plans), etc.
- Imagine PhD (https://www.imaginephd.com/)
- Imagine PhD is a free website to help PhD students explore their career options. It is a great resource for that, but it also has a built-in goal tracker that is fairly straightforward and easy to use. This is another electronic way to manage your goals.
(4) Some Tips for “Paper People”
I am a “paper person” i.e. I vastly prefer to do your work on paper. While I’ve begun to learn how to use Google Sheets for organizing, I additionally have a paper planner in which I keep track of my tasks. Below, I will provide a few resources for paper people to stay organized. Please add your own thoughts and tips in the comments section!
- Passion Planner (https://passionplanner.com/)
- Passion Planners are great for creating long-term goals, as well as breaking them down into medium-term and short-term goals.
- If you want to look at previews of the different types of Passion Planners or try one out on your laptop or tablet, check out their free downloadable versions (https://passionplanner.com/free-downloads/)
- Sometimes, the Division of Career Pathways provides free Passion Planners to students at events
- Passion Planner has regular sales. If you want one when they are not on sale, FOR 10% OFF, YOU CAN USE THIS LINK http://rwrd.io/crk5m2a (if the link has expired, comment or email me and I will send you a new one)