Unmanaged: Impressions on Embracing Time, for Academics

I get the local paper delivered to my house. Most Sunday mornings, over coffee, I start with reading the obituaries. Old or young, a life cut short or a life fully lived. Worldly traveler, dedicated homemaker, or a pillar of a community. It doesn’t matter, I read them all. Within each is a mix of reflections, relations, and moments of pride. That and an obligatory love for the Packers and Badgers. All compressed in a few hundred words, as seen by the author, usually another family member or a confidant, occasionally by the deceased.

Obits are all about time. The time you spent living. Where did you go, what did you do, who were you with, whose lives did you touch?

You know what’s never in obituaries? How efficient you were with your work. Or that time you submitted that report early. Or which co-worker you disappointed by not completing that extra project. Instead, obits focus heavily on relationships, who you spent time with and what joys, sorrows, adventures, and trials you went through with them. 

That aspect is what sticks in the back of my mind when it comes to advice about time management. Time is about people. Prioritize people and your relationships over tasks, and your time will be well spent.

But Ankur, you’re so efficient, so on top of everything, so productive, so quick on email, do you even sleep or eat? Well ok, I suppose I have a reputation, which is probably why you’ve decided to read my advice (or you’re just procrastinating or clicked on a stray link). Here’s what I’ve come down to: I prioritize people over tasks.

I want the most possible time to spend with family, friends, collaborators, and with myself, in conversation, play, reflection, reading, thinking, sharing a meal, or exploring. I don’t want to manage all my time. I want to find a way to do the stuff I am not otherwise motivated to do intrinsically, so I can do the things I love, fully present, engaged, absorbed. It’s the background static that I want to “manage”.

“Time Management” as “seen on TV” (or airport bookstore) is not that. It is just the same retread of Max Weber’s conception of the Calvinist work ethic, a legerdemain of a capitalist system, the bane of industrial assembly-line production over craft. But we can be more than cogs in the gears, right?

The most important thing you can do is to value your time, especially spent in company, and to stop being so hard on yourself for wasting time. No time is wasted.

Still, people like techniques, tips, tricks. Because we gotta produce while our near infinite autonomy in our jobs as faculty is unusual. The big secret: there is no one true method. Inbox zero or inbox 10 million? Getting Things Done or Pomodoro or SMART goals or timeboxing? Block large times for writing or short segments through the day? Just a paper planner and a messy desk work for you? Great! We are scientists. We can experiment. Pick one. Try it. See if it works and if not, try something else.

So here are a few of those “secrets”, in no particular order. Thoughts that have popped into my head over the past weeks and frankly, past years, as I get asked about this topic.

Preamble

First, this essay is long. It reflects many years of thinking. My tips work for me, there is no guarantee they will for you. Read what jives with you. I also acknowledge that what I write below does not address broader factors that can make our time unmanageable. Anxiety is real. Burnout is real. Trauma is real. Grief is real. Depression is real. ADHD is real. There are far more qualified professionals who can help process and accommodate those to the extent possible. 

Academia doesn’t help either. Unequal burdens and societal inequity in emotional labor, access, and expectations across gender and race are real. A corporate academic model with increasing expectations on academic productivity and service with stagnating compensation, a model that privileges the countable (publications, dollars, credit-hours) over lives touched and ideas challenged and impacted, and that  continues to shift education burdens onto contingent faculty and weakens tenure freedoms, all work against thriving. This essay doesn’t seek to solve those problems. We all have to continually push for justice and change if we truly want our times in university to be marked well for everyone. Even there, choose those battles wisely, being strategic on which to evolve from within, to let others take the lead, to let go, or to engender visible protest. With that, here we go!

Ban the busy

Time may have physical meaning, but for the purposes here, it is a construct. We make the time we need for the activities we need to do or for the people who need us. Make space to do so.

I never say “I’m too busy” when invited to do some task. I like to instead say, “I have to prioritize other tasks right now” or “I need to focus on X for now”. If I’m generous, I might suggest alternates or other times when it might be possible. It’s also ok to say, “let me get back to you”. It’s worth asking yourself, what might I be unable to say yes to something in the future by saying yes to this.

One thing I do try to do, however, is always make time to talk to people. I’ll talk to anyone for half an hour as I never know where it might take me. This is why my calendar app defaults to 30 minutes for booking meetings and necessitates emailing me if you want it longer. I also encourage people to schedule these a week or so in advance and share context in advance. 

Time extracts a cost

This might be too utilitarian of me, but sometimes, when deciding if some task is “worth it” relative to doing something else or having someone else do it, it helps for me to think about my time in terms of dollars per hour (utility functions!). If I took a reasonable hourly rate for myself (say a consulting rate I might use with a private company), then I can calculate: what is “cost” to stand in this line? Submit that reimbursement? Automate this process? Proofread this essay again? Attend this webinar? It can help me recognize that some task is “good enough” (for example, how many typos I can tolerate in shirt  (sic) emails). 

There are diminishing marginal returns to keep perfecting things (see below on imperfections). Some task are better delegated or skipped or watched later on recording/slides at double speed. Though some things, like waiting in that long line at Wiscorican for a tasty lunch, is priceless (*see prior claim that no time is wasted).

The money equation also works the other way. Are there places where spending cash to complete or ease a task is worth it? Yes! I have found it to be the case for house cleaning, for acquiring identical work setups / big monitors at home and office, for hiring someone to redesign my falling out of date website, for choosing the shorter but pricier flight to get home sooner. My biggest investment has been to secure long-term funding for our lab manager.

Send in the clones

No, contrary to popular opinion in my department, I don’t have clones (that I know about). The last point above, though, is a form of cloning. If you have good personnel, experienced students, and generous collaborators, don’t be afraid to train, delegate, and trust. Remember to be accepting that other people may do tasks in slightly different ways, in different amounts of time, and initially may take more of your time. Let it go! It will pay off!

But sometimes I have to do it all myself, under time pressure – so I multitask, maybe too much. Multitasking gets a bad rap. It’s not that people can’t multitask. It’s that most people are not that good at it and haven’t practiced getting better at it. 

We are not always comfortable with accepting that when multitasking, each task we do will not be as good as doing it with full focus. But good news, not every task we do needs full focus! Zoom call has moments that aren’t relevant? Great – time to submit expense reports. An email pops up that just needs a simple yes/no during the middle of lecture prep. Go for it – get that dopamine hit. Be quick, trust yourself in those situations. Need to listen to a seminar but also make dinner? Both can be done, just be careful with knives (ask me how I know).

And yes, there are times multi-tasking works against engagement. One-on-one meetings with individuals, “deep” work in coding or analysis, sensitive emails, and teaching all demand your full presence. Put away the distractions and notifications then. 

The finish line ain’t all what it’s cracked up to be

Not finishing things also gets a bad rap. But it turns out for many people, stopping in the middle of an intensive task makes it easier to pick up that task the next time rather than stopping at a logical endpoint. I learned this at a writing seminar a long time ago. While it feels logical to write a whole section of the paper one day, and then move to another section the next day, that method turns out to often take more set-up/re-start time than stopping when you’re on a roll and picking up from there.

Of course, there is an aspect of not finishing that is about not wanting to go on with the task due to its complexity, drudgery, implications, or anxiety. These are harder to tackle. I try to imagine how my future self would be if I finished this task or made some progress. End of your day with minimum regrets left to that future you. One paper graded is better than none. Some comments returned to your student’s thesis now are better than all of it in one neat package weeks later. A short email saying you’ll get back to the person or have them follow up in a week is better than leaving them hanging or ghosting. Don’t let other people’s pressures, communication styles, or incompetence ruin your day (“be a goldfish!”)

Distractions are wonderful, so is coffee and sleep

Speaking of procrastination, the world has so many distractions. Most of them are wonderful and should be accepted. Pick a couple and embrace them, get decent at them, teach others to do it, spend your time in them, just not all of it. 

My best ideas are on bike rides and hikes and hot showers. I’ve learned more about how to manage a lab and lead a department from the TV show Ted Lasso (the most feminist show ever set mostly in a men’s locker room) and from coach training and experience with our middle school mountain bike team than from any campus professional development I’ve sat through. Every experience can have some impact on some other part of life, sometimes unexpectedly. And memories with friends and families are always worth making.

But sometimes we have to put on the big person pants and plow through, perhaps with a strong espresso. It’s been said that our jobs are to turn coffee into code and words. There does seem to be a lot of caffeinated production in our world and late-night cram sessions to get proposal out the door, grades submitted, and presentations presented. You need to learn your rhythms when it comes to stimulants, time-shifting, and motivations. I cut back on coffee on weekends and avoid coffee after 4pm on weekdays and try to get to bed by 10:30 pm, with limited work ( like email, grading, restarting code that crashed, reviewing calendar for next day, etc….) after dinner.

Rewards work too, especially to get out of procrastination habits. I have an unhealthy twitter scrolling habit and am a junkie for pointless political news and census data and Wikipedia rabbit holes. At home, I find myself on frequent jaunts to the snack cabinet for my Costco package of chocolate chips. With these habits, I try to trick myself. Ok, write two more paragraphs. Then a break and eat those chocolate chips. Ten more papers graded, then another episode of that trashy TV show. I also like to parcel some tasks to where I am without access to my habits, like on a flight, which I find the best place to get peer reviews done, for example.

I have rarely found it valuable to give up sleep to catch up, with the exception of grant proposal writing, one of the most creative activities we do, and one that for me, I used to write best when relaxed, distraction free, at night (now I like sleep even more). A second exception to sleep habits comes at conferences or field work, where I am willing to give up sleep to maximize time with colleagues, students, and friends or due to the nature of the project (3:30 am research flight forecasting anyone?)

Alcohol can sometimes help with creative processes, turning off my filter for proposal writing or getting through repetitive tasks (grading essays and red wine pair well together), and certainly as a social lubricant for the piles of introverts we are (being mindful of inclusion/exclusion of those who don’t imbibe), though I’ve never found it useful in excess. There may also be medical and behavioral reasons that prevent focus, and professional support and medication can work wonders for some. It’s never too late to seek guidance and therapy.

On being a disappointment

I have a marginally unhealthy desire to not disappoint people (cf. I am secretly a dog). Unhealthy in that, there is no way one can live life, and certainly not in a position of leadership, where I won’t disappoint some people somewhere all the time. But internally, I am far more motivated to complete tasks if I can view it as “for” someone – for the student waiting for feedback, for the collaborator waiting for that data product, for the faculty who need a budget, for the editor waiting for the peer review, for helping solve someone else’s problem. 

It’s unhealthy if I overly focus on these, as I will de-prioritize tasks that don’t have the same external beneficiary.  But it works for me. If I am going to be late or incomplete, I ask for forgiveness. Remember, pretty much the only deadlines in academia that are “real” are grant proposal deadlines. Just let people know in advance when you need more time!

Imperfections are beautiful, like children

Often, it’s not so much about having time to finish a task but recognizing when it’s “good enough”. I see this barrier most frequently emerge in graduate student thesis writing. It is a manifestation of imposter phenomenon (not really a syndrome, mind you, as it partly arises from a social construct about hierarchies of power and oppression coupled with untreated anxiety). 

And in some respects, it’s a bit like being a new parent and inflating our sense of how much agency and control we can have in perfecting the trajectory of our child’s life.

Raising kids, I’ve found, is more about the art of letting go and being humble about my limits. This goes the same with scholarly work. We don’t have to be on top of every project from start to finish (see prior note on having generous collaborators). Set things free, share partial drafts, be ok with inconclusive findings. Let students make mistakes and help them learn from them. Not every class I teach will be perfect, and only I will notice most of the flubs. Not every paper I publish will be my best. Take joy in imperfection, wabi-sabi.

But, you say, as an assistant professor, I need my dossier to be glowing. Or for others, your promotion package, the CV, and so on to be unassailable. The tenure process is built to be a time vampire. For me, the mantra to use: it’s a marathon, not a 100 meter race. And like any long time horizon task, it’s not worth constantly beating myself up about the far future, but rather delighting in passing the short-term “mile”stones, adjusting when my times are off, and reflecting where I’ve been and what’s ahead.

The other mindset: it is a job, not different from other careers. Read the manual, know the requirements, and make a plan to exceed those. Know the stats and data on tenure rates and most common issues that lead to denial, and regularly ask if you’re avoiding them. There are more data online than you think. Then ask how can I bring my best self into it, to the extent the environment allows for that (and fight to challenge that environment when not), and have fun along the way creating and communicating knowledge, and inspiring and mentoring students. If that’s not good enough, then I’ll find something else to do with my time.

Probably the biggest challenge here is our desire to want to participate in “everything everywhere all at once” (also, one of my all time favorite movies, a great meditation on the nature of time, choices, and multitudes, in the context of a mother-daughter relationship and immigrant experience film wrapped into a sci-fi martial arts multiverse epic). I don’t like the phrase, “you can have it all, just not all at the same time”. Sometimes you can. Define what you mean by all (professional accolades, work-life balance, sleep and play) and what you mean by same time (this week, this semester, this decade?), make a choice, and move forward with it.

The concept I lean into is defining an academic career (or life for that matter) as chapters of a book. Each chapter may have a new quest, a different path, but along a common theme. The first chapter for faculty (tenure process) sets the stage, delivers on the promise of the blurb on the book cover (your interview), and wants the reader to keep reading. From there, you get to choose your adventure. Maybe it’s time to write that textbook, or engage more in community science, or volunteering, or taking on academic leadership, or raising a family, or some combination. 

By the way, sabbaticals make for nice chapter transitions and they are best used as time for reflection (and rest, see original biblical definition – scroll down to “What is Sabbatical?” back when blogging was a thing) and setting up the tools to build that next chapter.

Scientists are writers

I will contend that anyone who asks and interrogates questions about nature are scientists, writ large. What separates the amateurs from the pros is writing about it. Professional scientists are fundamentally writers ­– writers of narratives about the inner workings of nature based on systematic observations and theorizing, subject to scrutiny by peers. The implication here being that we ought to emulate the most successful writers out there, novelists.

There are many romantic notions tied up around writers of fiction novels. Consider the tortured artist, who has the late-night epiphany where a whole book comes out in a few days, becoming a beloved best-selling storyteller. But if you read about how accomplished novelists do their work, many are far more systematic, with timelines, whiteboarded outlines, and notes, with long periods of free writing interspersed with writer’s block, reading, and research, and championing steady production.

Write a lot. Write like your life depends on it. Write like you are “running out of time”. Write like you converse. Write alone. In pairs. In a writing accountability group. Write in as many different ways you can think. It all counts. From that tweet to that peer review. The more you write in all forms, the better your flexibility at producing on demand and viewing yourself as a writer. Mix up times, locations, and settings. Drop your filter, that mean internal editor, and free write. Let writer’s block be a source for contemplation.

Share “shitty first drafts”. And then edit the hell out them. Make sentences shorter. Make paragraphs concise. Have a hard time deleting? Cut and paste them into a manuscript purgatory

I like to tell students daunted by thesis or manuscript writing – a 100 words a day is not a big lift. Do it four days a week (with the fifth for editing), over two academic semesters and voila, a 100 writing days in, you have a 10,000 word manuscript or thesis!

Admire and re-read your old work, even the cringey stuff, so you understand your style and remember what you already said. Read what you write out loud or at least in your head. Handwrite for a change of pace. I used to take notes on papers I wanted to cite, print them out, and use scissors to arrange them in how I want to use them – just to have something tactile. 

Be well-read, particularly of well written works. Good writing is less likely to be found in the pages of academic journals but instead are in literature, in magazines, in popular non-fiction, in film, poetry, or music lyrics. Give yourself permission to read or watch or listen to those, not to mention the occasionally interesting academic paper far outside your field. It’s ok to emulate good writers, to practice in those styles to gain proficiency and find insight into your own. Learn about the art of narrative structure used from Greek classics to Disney epics. Heck, even play with AI writing tools and see if they help.

Start a book club in lab meeting and use it to talk about good writing. Share writing you admire with students in the lab, discuss your process, the good and ugly in lab meetings, in the classroom. Recruit graduate students first on their writing and communication skills.

I wrote this piece across the last month after a discussion at our junior faculty mentoring group, as thoughts arose, often just as scattered notes added to the document at all hours, that I filled into paragraphs when bored or inspired, then re-read, re-wrote, in bits and pieces. On the living room couch, a note on the phone on my bike commute, in the car, in the office waiting for code to finish executing, or right now in the waiting room of my kid’s martial arts class. Where I go, the laptop comes.

The process accelerated as I reached my self-imposed goal to complete this at the start of summer (see This one trick, below). Then, it occupied a greater fraction of my thought and days, every bike commute led to a new section I wanted to add. It took time, maybe time away from “productive” activity, but so what? It’s what I wanted to do and I believe it will have some pay off, if not for me, then for the folks I mentor.

Be a lazy, bored child

You know who’s really bad at time management, but still make excellent amateur scientists? Five year olds! The lazy, bored, child (TM) is my idiom to express the role of play, aimless exploration, and attention to details small and unusual to the core of science creativity. The child part refers to the importance of freeing yourself from paradigms, habits, and leaning into the parts of science that are exploration, play, and beauty. Boredom is an under-appreciated fountain of new ideas. Periods of procrastination or quiet reflection or tinkering, without a necessary aim, can be just the right kick to find inspiration, a solution, or space to finish a task. 

Laziness might seem the most out of place. Scientists are busy bees with painstaking attention to detail, systematically poking into every corner and dead end. And yet, science advances when we find ways to be more efficient at going through those, and become more mindful of protecting physical, intellectual, emotional labor that goes into academic scholarship. Laziness saves energy to be able to put that labor and time to best use.

The Sign On My Door Reads Coach Ankur

Advisees and mentees can be another source of time anxiety when their use of time impedes or evolves differently than yours. There is much to be said for including discussions on goal setting, working backwards on milestone planning from end dates, and understanding realistically how long things take. Everyone underestimates how long it takes to write. 

The mindset I like to use is one of coach over that of advisor,supervisor or PI. Our graduate advisees are training to be elite athletes of the mind. My job is to demonstrate the practices needed to be a professional scientist and to build a cohort so students can train together and push each other. Develop routines and exercises that increase the performance and self-regulation of advisees, starting small and building expectations with time. 

Model the behavior you want to see in your own actions. Then let go (see section on imperfections and children), cheer them on, and watch them excel. Get them back on their feet if they fail or stumble. I believe in infinite second chances, but being realistic about what those chances entail and the costs taken. Share your own failures, rejections and redemptions, as science is all about failure.

This one trick…

But you still want to know my method, no? Ok, fine. Here’s the raw details. I like calendars and I like simple to-do lists. Both are shared and synced. That’s all. 

Calendars are for time bound tasks – teaching, lab meetings, seminars, travel, family events. Outlook for work, so that admin folks can access/invite, iCal for family (kids are old enough to add/remove their own events), both managed on Apple Calendar. Everyone in the family can see all events, which makes it easy to schedule things like orthodontist appointments, school concerts, and the like. Recently, I made my calendar public and bookable with calendly for 30 minute appointments, zoom or in person. That has increased my need to carefully block time for those personal needs. But overall, it helps cut down email traffic on finding mutual times. It also freed up schedule for one-on-one meetings with advisees, which now float on an as needed basis instead of a regular frequency.

For to-do lists, I use a telescoping approach. The further in the future, the less detail on exact timing and details. I use Simplenote, which syncs on my phone and laptop (using Metanota as a Simplenote client). No frills. Each day of the current week has tasks, split out in details (like work on writing methods section) including copies of times for meetings from the calendar. I do not assign tasks on weekends or evenings, though I may occasionally work on them then. 

The rest of the month is split into weeks. Each week has tasks, but they may not be assigned to days yet or split out into details (it might be Week 3: Proposal budget). On Friday or Sunday of the current week, I add daily detail to the upcoming week. The rest of the semester is split into months, with more general plans (May: Write proposal narrative). At the last week of each month, I expand the weekly details for the following month. Future semesters or summers have big picture goals (Fall: Submit NSF proposal).

At the start of each semester, I develop the monthly plans. To do so, first, I create a document called “Plans”. In large type, I print out my goals for the semester and list the months I’m hoping to get to, split by categories. (Proposals -> NSF proposal: Sep-Oct). I print this one out and put it on my bulletin board, to give me something physical to stare at when I’m spacing out and to cross out with a pen when complete. This printout guides the Simplenote todo list version of the monthly tasks which are split by time and may have more detail (Sep: Proposal setup and budget, Oct: proposal narrative). 

I know some people like the more elaborate tools, Kanban boards like Trello, or Workflowy, and the like. I just like the text files, because they are simple, load quick, easy to edit anywhere.

It’s ok if tasks slip in time. I’m indiscriminate about cutting and pasting something from one week to another to make space for something of higher priority. Another trick within this is to give some space for unexpected events. I try to front load tasks, so a greater number of tasks are in the early part of the week and the early part of the month. The end of the week or month then has a lighter schedule and can allow for moving unfinished tasks or new tasks into them. If a month has 5 weeks, I purposefully under schedule anything in “week 5” – I call these bonus weeks. I do something similar with syllabi, purposefully putting in some “fluff” or “bonus” topics to have slush weeks to allow for some topics to take longer if needed or desired.

The laptop has some further organization. The Documents folder is split into research, teaching, service, and personal subfolders. Each of those subfolders have more subfolders. For example: Research->Proposals->Pending->NSF-2023->SubmittedFiles . I use aliases (softlinks) to move the appropriate subfolders to my desktop that I need that week, and drag them to trash when done working on that folder.

We have an emergency

Triage refers to the ordering of priorities for patients in a medical emergency setting. It is a useful concept when it comes to organizing repetitive work, like grading, emails, or literature review. Here’s a few ideas.

Triage grading. Assessment, especially of writing, and for larger classes, can be quite time consuming. I have mixed feelings about rubrics and checklists. What I do like is trying to calibrate my expectations and look for common themes. Instead of writing the same comment on each paper, I can instead bring those up in class. When I have a teaching assistant, I might ask them to sort the assignments with the three best and three worst at top, the rest below. Then I get a good sense of what to look for and which papers I need to put in the most effort.

Triage emails. I check email frequently because I prioritize rapid communication, especially currently in my role as chair. Every email that comes in is assessed based on the first paragraph and question. Does it need an immediate reply – if so, do it. If it’s informational, but important, file it in a folder. If it requires follow up in the near future, but not now (like a peer review response), put it in a “pending” folder that sort to the top (with names like _general, _articles, _proposals). Others, delete. I routinely go through these to catch up and clean up (for example _proposals can generate many messages that need to stay on top during proposal preparation, but then can be deleted or filed after submission). I automatically keep a second copy of all received email to another account, that is a flat file of all emails, no deletions, in case I ever accidentally delete something that I didn’t mean to and that is surprisingly easier to search. Listserv traffic, automated reports, github notifications, all get filtered into subfolders that are looked at less often. The lab uses slack, so that questions, like help on coding, or announcements, get shared broadly, and others can chime in where I may be slower or less experienced.

When writing an email, ask the question or request upfront – it should appear in the first three lines (the ones I see on the inbox on my phone). Leave details at end, like in a Nature paper. Remember to provide context – especially when bringing new people into a thread. Read it once back, then send. If sensitive, read it twice back. If very sensitive, don’t put the sender name on it until you are ready to send, and count to ten before pushing send. I avoid sending emails on evenings or weekends unless they are essential or require a response then. In those cases, I write drafts and then review prior to sending them the next morning or the following weekday. I do this especially for sensitive or difficult emails, which should never be sent at night. 

Triage reading. Read with speed, deliberation, or enjoyment. Decide which one matters when. Most of the time for academic “speed reading”, getting the gist is enough – abstract, plain language, conclusions, maybe write a sentence about it, save to Zotero, goodbye until you need to cite. Reading student papers – can I see the argument, the original thought, the struggling with ideas – the outcomes I want out of writing? If so, good enough, here’s a short comment engaging on the argument . Student research writing gets deliberation, but ask the students to share in pieces (e.g., the methods section first). If a paper, article, documentary, or Wikipedia page strikes your fancy, block the time and dive into it.

Show up

A large part of life is just showing up (see deeper remarks on this in my response to an award citation here). Be there for your friends, your family, your students, your co-workers. Go on that group ride. Come to that happy hour.

Be the change you want to see – don’t wait for permission. Show up, gather strength in numbers, listen, advocate for those who need it. Also dance in the elevator when no one is watching.

The role of friendship is underappreciated in academia. There will be trying times. I’ve found that friends in other departments and peers in the same fields at other universities have been essential for support, comraderies, fun, advice, celebrating milestones, and building out research networks.

Work-life balance is a myth. They have to blend and in many respects, is a privilege that we can do that (like attend a kid’s school music concert or pediatrician appointment mid-day without much fuss). Protect family time and set boundaries. 

I’ve come to accept that our work can be all consuming if you let it. I made a plan to not travel away from family in first year of each kid’s life and tried my best to stick to it. That decision came at a cost to some research opportunities, but none of that seemed to matter in the long run. I value eating together as a family for dinner. I try to avoid working weekends. Take vacations. On vacations, I tuck in email and some work in evenings or down times, but it is also nice to have at least one period a year that is completely shut off, even if it’s at home.

It helps to be part of an organization that has nothing to do with your work or your work colleagues, as a source of fellowship and friendship. It could be through religious institutions, other parents, social clubs, volunteer organizations, or intermural sports. Seek those out.

The next time

I appear to have splurged on a multitude of thoughts. Thoughts that have been expressed in various settings through the years, that work for me and didn’t form overnight, but now in writing. I learned time management maybe the hard way, by having a child in graduate school, a chronic disease take hold around the same time, a second at the start of my tenure-track, and a third soon after. Each necessitated a renewed need to pay attention to my use of time and for incorporating new priorities. Perhaps if I were more systematic, I might have developed routines less chaotic looking.

I have other faults that impede my use of time. I’m impatient. I’m an overwriter. I am pedantic in expression but terrible at paying attention to details. I am perhaps overly concerned about perception and emotion in others. I probably give some people too much the benefit of doubt and I’m trusting to a fault. I’m still learning to be an empathetic listener without jumping in with solutions. My article writing is still formulaic.  I still can’t imagine finding the time and practice to write an entire textbook.  

I also bear the mark of being a first-generation immigrant and not of the majority culture. Those aspects internalize a sense of needing to work harder to demonstrate my appropriateness of being here. Perhaps that leads to some unsustainable habits.

By recognizing all these traits, I can better feel the impact I make with my time and where I need to change course.

For the reader, maybe find the one section that resonates the most with you and incorporate that into your practice. Or tell me something that sounds off or with which you disagree or you have another perspective. I want this to be a living document. 

I doubt anything here is particularly original, even if expressed in a new way. I know I write from a privileged position, tenured, settled in the country in which I was born, with English as my primary language, a supportive family and partner, and a body and mind that are mostly sound. The world is on fire, and the forces that seek to undo all we value weigh on us constantly. We all have our pinch points, the emergencies, accidents, aging parents, surprises, disabilities, identities, and cultures. All I can tell you is to accept the baggage, learn to deal with it, find the support that works for you, and burn to the ground the rest in the way and help clear the field for others.

Be generous. Be kind. Be forgiving. Remember that your priorities are not always other people’s priorities. Forgive yourself and others. You are your own harshest critic.

I don’t like the concept of living each day like it’s your last. But I do acknowledge regularly that our time and the times of one I love on Earth is short, sometimes tragically so and that our connections to people can be fleeting. I make decisions about how I spend my time each day being mindful of that.

Will your time spent on any one task end up in your obituary? If so, can you own up to it? Do you care? Do stuff not for your obit, but for the living.

I hope you found it somewhat useful. I’ll come back to this now and then and revise. When a thought pops into my head or a reader has a suggestion. Or when I need a distraction. When I have time 😊

Enjoy your time

-Ankur R Desai, June 2023
Special thanks to Lela Desai for editing!