Time Management Posted on October 19, 2007 Look to both your short term and long term goals, stresses Charles F. Reynolds III (bio).

Time is the most important commodity that we have, isn’t it? Without time, without health, what else do we have? Paradoxically we have all the time that there is in the world, and yet it never seems like enough, and the more successful we are the more demands will be put on our time; the two are correlated very highly with one another. So it becomes very important to think about how you’re spending your time because it’s a great gift, and are you spending your time in a way that brings happiness, on the one hand, and that allows you to move forward to doing what’s really important to you in your own life?

When I talk about time management to post-docs and junior faculty and even very senior faculty who work with me, I usually talk about day to-day time management, but I also talk about longer term time management. So day-to-day time management has to do with things like being sure you take the time to, for your own health. To have time for exercise or to have time to be with family and friends because without what Karl Menninger called that vital balance, we can’t really stay in what is a tough, tough race for the long haul.

But I also talk about the day-to-day organization of time with respect to focusing on really key tasks for research like writing. It think it’s important to write at least 30 or 60 minutes a day. Always need to be writing something, both to develop your own thinking, but also to move ahead in terms of professorial advancement. So figure out what time of day is best for your own circadian rhythms. Are you an owl? Are you a lark? Whatever it is, whatever works for you, be sure that you preserve those times of day for your writing. All it takes is 30 to 60 minutes a day.

The other part, though, of the discussion about time management has to do with taking a longer term view of your life and your career. What would you like to be doing in five years and how are you going to get there? Let’s face it, given the competition in our field today, there’s no substitute for setting goals and figuring out strategies and managing time appropriately to get those strategies in place.

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