My productivity routine

 As I always find I have too little time, I am also continually experimenting with my productivity routine. In case it is useful for others, let me share what I have currently converged on. The main trick with productivity is that you need to keep an overview of tasks on different time scales--years/months, weeks and days. For each of these time scales, I tend to use a different tool. Before diving into that, let me also mention that sometimes I cringe a bit by the term "productivity" because it has this strong capitalist focus that everything has to be completely efficient, forgetting the human dimension of things. Nevertheless, if you want to do good, productivity is important as well, because it helps you accomplish the goals you have and make the most use of your talents for the benefit of all. So productivity is also quite compatible with altruistic values.

The obligatory ballet picture ;-)

My weekly overview of tasks

Until this year, I felt quite happy with my data-to-day management, but I felt like I was losing an overview of the biggest tasks, so this is why I started creating a gantt chart (see picture) to keep track of large projects and events across the whole year. This also allows me to keep track of conference and grant deadlines. Then every week, I am using this "Eenvoudig leven agenda" (Simple Living Calendar) that I mentioned before. At the beginning of the week I check my gantt chart for the big picture tasks, and copy those in my weekly tasks section. I have subdivided those into 5 sections: organization, grants, supervision, teaching and papers, in line with the main requirements of my job. I enter tasks according to these subdivisions (see picture). For example, for organization I have every week "make planning". For teaching, it may include "prepare lecture" or "grade assignment 2". At the beginning of the week, I then try to plan those tasks in my calendar at times that I don't have other responsibilities. This allows me to have a reasonable idea of what I can accomplish. I also try to ensure that I have some "free time" every day in which email can be dealt with and unexpected tasks. One trick I really like is to reduce the volume of such unexpected tasks by asking students ahead of time when they expect to complete things, which would require my feedback. In then book slots in my calendar to give them feedback at those times. This benefits the student, because they have a more strict deadline, and it benefits me, because I won't be able to book that slot in my calendar with more meetings (and in my career stage, meetings are the things that tend to completely overcrowd my calendar--sometimes I feel like I am in a continuous fight against meetings, even though I also enjoy talking to my lovely students and colleagues. It's just that this makes it hard to get anything done). Then finally, at the beginning of every day I check what's in my calendar, what things did not get done previously, and I make a todo list for that day. The most satisfactory bit is crossing off things of my todo list!

Extract from my gantt chart, which is still work in progress. Different colors reflect different kinds of things: teaching courses, grants, PhD students. Every column in this Excel document is a week of the year. I so far have only done it for this year, but when I find some time I want to add more years so I can already write in commitments for upcoming years.

People who know me may wonder where ballet fits in all of this. So far I talked about work. This is very simple: ballet classes have been booked already in my calendar with the "repeat weekly" feature, so they are automatically scheduled as appointments with myself, which I pretty much never skip.

A related tip on time management is that I really like touse the toggl app. This is an app that runs on your desktop, and which you can use to track how much time you spend on tasks. This is very insightful to get an idea of how much time you spend on tasks (right now I am using it as well to see how long the blog writing takes). This allows me to improve the realism of my time estimates for tasks over time. I also use that at the beginning of every week to review the preceding week, together with the review pages of the calendar (see picture). In the review pages you write down how much you achieved your goals, what challenges you faced, and how that relates to your habitual tendencies, as well as how you feel about the preceding week. Last but not least, it reminds you every week to "take a moment to love yourself. So important!" This is especially important as it remains a continuous struggle to avoid overloading myself because I am just too interested in things, and also really enjoy being helpful. So it is important to keep a sense of humor and not give up.

The weekly review section in which you can reflect on the past week. Initially I would never do that because I felt I did not have time, but actually  it can be done in a few minutes. And taking a moment to reflect is really helpful so you can learn from your mistakes  but also appreciate what you managed to do.