Time Management Course

Time. Everybody knows time is relative. Time runs on it own pace and seems to be beyond our control. Especially we, PhD students, are at daggers drawn with Time. From the very first day it is made crystal clear for us that time is limited and that we should spend it right. But the question remains – how should we do that…?

In order to search for the answer, Grasp organized a 2 day-long Time Management Course, led by experts from Career Development & Training (RUG), Gerald Lier and Jan Pieter Weening.

We began with sharing the time-related issues we are facing at work: tasks we have to do but which are not actually related to our project, repeating a job until the effect is (too) perfect, hampering cooperation with supervisors, must-be social coffee-breaks, corridor chatting with colleagues, surfing the web for personal purposes, falling asleep while reading boring papers just after lunch, etc. These small chunks of time add up to a huge amount of non-productive hours. Of course, we do need to take some breaks, we do need to keep in touch with our social background, and, lets be honest, we will not become ‘the perfect workers’ immediately, but there is some place for improvement.

The trick, revealed by Gerald and Jan Pieter, is to rate your tasks according to how urgent and/or how important they are for your project. Yes, you do have right to refuse doing jobs that are not your responsibility. But secondly: yes, you do have to be a little more organized and strict with your own tasks. The vivid brainstorm we had at the end of first day supplied us with a list of tips for any problem we encounter, i.e.: you can block the websites that steal your time; sort the literature and read only relevant papers; figure out when during the day you are concentrated most and do difficult jobs then, while the easy tasks can be done after lunch; regularly summarize ‘already dones’; shift personal emails or chatting to the end of the day; if you must do something you really don’t enjoy – prepare a big reward for yourself! And, most important – plan! Make a plan that is concrete and reasonable, and stick to it. Write down everything you have to do during the day, or week, sort it according to importance and just do it. If the whole PhD project is too huge to keep it in mind constantly – make an outline, specify each chapter and then focus only on one small part at the time. Have I already mentioned rewarding yourself? Look up to your achievements and stay positive about your work!

Obviously, each training course requires some homework. What we were asked to do seemed a little bit awkward at the beginning – we had to write down everything we were doing over the whole day, every 15 minutes. This assignment was intended to make us realize how we manage our time in general, not only at work. What are our weak moments, what activities are the time-thiefs, etc. There was also an additional benefit – while writing it down, all of us tried to make a perfect day!

During the second meeting we focused on our personal development. The Rational Emotion Training Game helped us to reveal our qualities, our innate talents. By pushing these features to the extreme, and by finding the opposite and challenging characteristics, we were able to better understand our strong points, which we can make use of, and pinpoint the weaknesses, usually meticulously swept under the carpet.

The course was a great success! We enjoyed the classroom activities, as much as socializing during breaks, lunch and drinks. Because there were more people interested than we had places available, it seems a good idea to organize such a training again.