Urgency is the mindkiller

A senior colleague of mine once said (paraphrasing):

“We can all manage to fill our week with things to do. It is not difficult to be busy. The challenge is to actively and consciously steer what you decide to spend our time on, and prioritize things that will have an impact.”

When you look back on the last week or two, have you spent the week on something that you are proud of? Something that positions you better for your future?

Busy work

The possibilities what to work on are endless (write observing proposals, write funding proposals, attend or organise conferences, read papers, advise students, collaboration policies, help prepare data for someone, give comments on papers, create press releases, give outreach talks, etc etc etc). Busy work creeps up over time. What you stepped up for once, you feel responsible to keep doing.

You will even feel productive and helpful when filling your work week with such items.

Tasks seem urgent. You may discover things needed immediately by other work. But you will not discover what no one has thought of. If you do not schedule time to stop and think, being creative about scientific ideas and thinking critically is difficult.

You start to feel like you are missing out on progress. You feel like you are getting dumber while young colleagues get science done.

But it is not true. Firstly, research shows that people do not become dumber quickly, with work performance peaking at about 55 years. But juggling more mental items can feel like walking through jam.

Advice and techniques (for myself)

One technique that I could use more is to create four quadrants for tasks:

1. urgent & important
2. urgent & not important
3. not urgent & important
4. not urgent & not important

Then prioritize important tasks.

When you are in charge of administrative tasks, there is a power imbalance. The other person needs some approval from you, whether this is a travel request or a pull request of code. But they are probably highly motivated and for them it is both urgent and important. One technique, that I have found is satisfying for both sides, is to offload much of your administrative work to the requester. To do this effectively and without being a nuisance, it is best to make the requirements for successful approval transparent upfront. But you can require them to make one iteration of improvements, ideally only one.

As I become more senior, I have become more aware of other scientific sub-areas and people working on them. Tracking this larger and larger scope is mentally taxing, regardless of whether out of interest or out of a feeling of competition.

More knowledge and a wider field of view helps anticipate hurdles down the road earlier, and thus spend more time planning projects in your head. This may feel like hesitation and slow progress. But it is actually active work on experiment and project design and increases the likelihood to deliver on time and the scientific impact.