I mentioned last week that I have the honour and responsibility of being the Chair of my institute’s Postdoctoral Association. This afforded me the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to travel to Boston and attend the "National Postdoc Association ":http://www.nationalpostdoc.org annual conference. At the conference, there was much discussion and humming and hawing over acronym laden documents such as COSEPUP and COMPACT, but I feel if nothing else was achieved the meeting served to refocus the community on the strategic goals of the organization. Namely to represent postdocs at local, national and federal levels with the remit of improving our lot. And that’s not to say I think we achieved nothing. I think we did, but that’s for a different blog post.
One of the major foci of all the humming and hawing was mentorship and management. We still work within a system built decades ago when the academic world was a vastly different, and smaller, place. If postdocs are to be properly equipped to deal with the modern workplace we will need guidance from those already there. There is a great need for transferable, or so called “soft” skills that is often lacking in current postdoc training. I was forced to face the reality of the situation a couple of years ago, when I realized that my life long dream of becoming a professor at a major research university, running my own lab like a benevolent and lab-coat clad Gandalf, was never going to happen. Since then I’ve been considering my options and what to do about them. It’s all very well having the amorphous goal of being “a science advisor”, but about what and to whom? And with all due respect, just because you can perform the neatest and clearest western blots known to man, doesn’t qualify you to advise me on diddlysquat. Except perhaps how to prepare my western blot buffer solutions.
As I, and many others like me, weigh up the various options open to us I am reminded of something that was covered at the conference. “Personal Time Management”. I’ve heard of it before, and it always seemed silly that someone would have to coach you on managing your own time. But now I’m juggling committee work at the local and national levels, writing for this blog as well as for Lablit and a couple of other magazines (irons in fire…don’t jinx me), trying to balance an increasingly over-burdened chequebook…and oh yeah, trying to keep up with the literature and my share of lab chores as well as actually do my experiments. So, if anyone has any advice on “Personal Time Management” they’d like to share, or else a time machine I can use to add a couple of hours to each day, please let me know…
refocus the community on the strategic goals
well, it looks like you’ve got the Dilbert-speak down pat.
I try to keep a ‘master’ to-do list. It holds everything that I need to do. Then, it becomes like a game to try and hurry and cross things off the list.
“So, if anyone has any advice on “Personal Time Management” they’d like to share, or else a time machine I can use to add a couple of hours to each day, please let me know…”
I colour code my ‘To do list’. More needed back in the day when I had plenty and million things to do while working with different meetings with several people and juggeling things but still helpful when planning projects and deadlines etc..
So, you take a regular (weekly/monthly/tri monthly?) schedule (either paper or computerised) and plan when things should happen. In theory, I plan/think it all one specific day [friday/sunday] and fill in things to do. Then colour code. (In reality it is more that I have to rethink and replan every now and then but still, different colours for different things and importance.)
Red for “can’t be moved”, green for “would be fun to be done by now”, orange for “would be messy to shift” etc.
and all the deadlines that you need to meet – put down a purple (almost red) for your own deadline and then you still have a few more days if (when) you need to reschedule and do that experiment that kept you from writing the important report.
If this helps? Oh, and sometimes having a specific time every week for a specific thing helps. Routine and planning makes it run more smoothly, I find anyway. [Although a time machine would be helpfuly plenty of times!]
Hmmm…lists. But then I end up in repetition of how I used to make my exam study schedule when I was an undergrad. Colour coding, labelling, coordinating…so much so, that by the time the schedule was finished there was no time left to actually study…
God, I hate lists.
If you want to invest a little time, though, have a look at some of the resources in Making the Right Moves. I was in the 2002 test group and found it very helpful.
Oops – especially chapter 6. Meant to preview, not submit.