Let’s make something clear, being busy is extremely easy and can be achieved with very little effort. You can make up an almost infinite task list of trivial things that at the end of the day will have filled your working hours, maybe even overtime, but did not moved the bar much on the really important things, either at work or at home.
Being busy does not equal being productive and, vice versa, being productive does not mean to always be super busy.
As I wrote previously: productivity is doing the most appropriate task (and thus advancing the most appropriate project) at any given moment in the situation you are in. Being productive required conscious decision-making…and (some) effort.
It might very well be that the best thing to do at a given moment is nothing! Just relax, recharge and take the long walk or jog in fresh air. It might just generate that new cool idea or solve that nagging issue with an innovative solution.
In How to clam your mind, Chris Bailey further described the art of productivity as “knowing when we should care about productivity in the first place”.
Which one of these have you been today: busy or productive? Are you in a situation where you can with confidence select the most appropriate course of action at any given time (mostly)?
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
– Steve Jobs
The COVID pandemic made many of us realize that we were spending a lot of time on things that brought very little in terms of quality of life or productivity. Transit time was a clear example, with many of us spending hours daily in traffic. This time suddenly became available, and we loved it. We discovered that tasks we had been putting off became “easy,” or at least easier to tackle. For me, the second item I was trying to get a handle on was the time spent on emails.
After listening to the Time and Attention podcast by Chris Bailey, I decided to try Timeular, which combines a physical device with software. The device is an eight-sided tracker that detects which face it is resting on. In the software, each face is associated with an activity. Tracking stops when the tracker is placed on its holder, though you can also manually enter time in the software.
After using it for more than 18 months, I wish it had 10 or 12 faces, as there are things I would like to track in finer detail (and I do not want to buy a second tracker). However, it is sufficient for a broad overview in an automated fashion.
I set up the tracker with the following categories:
Review/Write: This includes all reviews of trainees’ manuscripts, master’s and PhD theses, as well as my own writing. I would prefer to have writing as separate categories.
Research, Planning and Mentoring: I combine these since much of the mentoring is linked to planning research projects, experiments, data taking, and analysis with trainees.
Teaching: This encompasses formal undergraduate and graduate teaching activities, including preparation, in-class time, and grading.
Maintenance: This primarily involves my weekly review and a few related tasks, such as annual reviews, all ensuring that my system works and is always up to date.
Administrative Duties: This includes institution committees, CAMPEP program-related activities, etc.
Scientific Meetings and Conferences, self-explanatory.
Break, lunch time and other distraction that arise during the working hours.
Note that I do not track my vacation time, transit time (though perhaps I should!), jogging/training time, screen time outside of work, social media time, etc. Timeular now has (in beta) an automatic tracking feature for the applications you use, in addition to the tracker itself. In the Apple ecosystem, Screen Time tracking across all your devices is also available.
In 2023, the first full calendar year I recorded, I logged over 1900 hours despite being on strike for several weeks and taking my full vacation allotment (23 days vacation + 12 days spread out through the years). It was an excellent year, with significant achievements including graduating 15 trainees, contributing to committees for 6 more, and publishing 14 manuscripts, one of them being an international report and another a first-in men clinical trial for a novel technology project I have been involved with since 2011.
For those who wonder about break/lunch, only 11% of these hours were in that category. This is on the low side for a creative field such as scientific research. Note that if you take a 5-minute break every hour, 1 hour for lunch and work 8 hours, this results in a 580-minute day, with 100 minutes (17%) being break/lunch time. According to one extensive time-tracking study, the top 10% most productive people take even more break with a 17-minute break for every 52 minutes of work.
Interestingly, teaching was only my fourth most time-consuming activity. This includes time spent in class as well as preparation and grading. This is because during the summer semester, when there is no formal teaching, I dedicate 100% of my time to other activities, primarily research. In the Fall and Winter semesters, the time dedicated to teaching increases significantly.
In 2023, I spent 6% of my time on emails, totalling 115 hours. Think about it, this is close to 3 weeks per year! When I started time tracking, my average was nearly twice that. I very quickly changed my email habits by:
Avoiding emails in the evening (I really try to stick to this as much as possible).
Using a VIP list for urgent emails.
Reducing the frequency of checking my email during the day.
Avoiding emails on weekends.
Within a few weeks, my average email time reduced to an average of 34 minutes during workdays. This includes an end-of-day inbox cleanup, when quickly reply to things that take less then 2 min and transform into a task anything that needs more serious attention or work. I do a deeper cleanup of all of my inboxes, including e-mail, during my weekly Maintenance session. I further notice that my average tracking entry length when up from 38 min to 61 min, leading to better use of larger chunk of time during the day.
I schedule a Maintenance event in my agenda every Friday afternoon for 90 min. This is were I review all of my inboxes, get everything sorted in my task manager and document manager, review ongoing projects, Waiting For tasks, backburner projects, …, review the previous week and plan the upcoming week. Some weeks, I need less than 90 min and others I will take a full 2h. I am also planning 1.5 days before the Holidays break for a full review and cleanup of all of my completed projects (archiving documents and e-mails associated with those projects as needed) and set the stage (high altitude planning) for the upcoming year. Overall, this account of 5% of my time (110h last year) but this is an investment and the return on that investment pays for itself.
In 2023, mentoring, research planning, and reviewing documents took up the largest share of my time at 37%. Including time spent at scientific conferences, this accounts for nearly 50% of my time in direct service to research activities. I suspect that this will and should be true every year. This is also quite interesting as for a long time, I held a position where I was 50% clinical medical physicist and 50% research physicist. Moving to a university position, did not change the amount of time dedicated to research (and related activities) in the end…
Administrative tasks represented about 16% (or 307h) of my time in 2023. Some of these are built-in my job e.g. the direction of our CAMPEP program, our department faculty meetings and so on.
Comparing the Fall semesters of 2022 and 2023, I noticed a pattern. September (start of the school year for us in Canada) and November are particularly busy, with a higher workload due to grant proposals, recommendation letters, and administrative tasks. December is also intense due to year-end activities.
The number of hours/month logged in these 4-month periods is:
1- Higher on average than the rest of the year. Furthermore, September and November have the highest time logged in both years. The monthly average for the other months is around 153h/month (for 2023, the only full year I have).
2- September (entrance, grants, letters, …) and November (everyone want their things done before the holidays and usually little happen past December 20th or 21st on the admin side, just the professors grading their finals) require a higher output, usually well above our work contract (on average this is always true, but still much higher)
3- October 2022 was low but there was also mortality on the family. In December, considering that I am out for a full weeks, it seems a lot had to be done in a short amount of time and this is true for both 2022 and 2023.
In conclusion, time logging offers valuable perspective. It has helped me manage my email time more efficiently and recognize the actual hours spent “truly” working. As a creative professional, tracking time reveals that one might work fewer hours than perceived, given the brain’s limitations in sustaining concentration on creative tasks for extended periods. Since the pandemic, I have been trying to reduce my work week by concentrating on what I consider key tasks/projects, folding in the need for breaks. I have clearly failed in that regards for the Fall of 2023, but it was also an extremely satisfying four months
Let’s start with a small disclosure: I have been a user of Things since version 0.7b, except for a short period of frustration with version 2 that sent me toward OmniFocus. However, hope was up with version 3 but did not move back until a truly usable version 3 became available. In the last 15+ years, I have also tried a few others, in particular Wunderlist (now MS To Do) that I recommended for years to students (as it was full-featured, free and cross platform) and ToDoist.
Now, the latest version Reminders (7.0) has introduced a number of interesting features that makes Reminders an attractive task manager, at least enough to look at seriously.
A reminder (no pun intended), Things 3 follows closely the GTD framework and have an organization structure that goes from higher altitudes containers to day-to-day doing starting with Areas, followed by Projects, … down to Tasks and Lists (sub-tasks). This can be done in Reminders but you have to decide if you can live with Lists as project holders OR use tasks as a project holders and sub-tasks for actual to do items. Here is a breakdown of the hierarchy for the two apps.
Things (succinctly): Areas (folder of Projects) -> Projects -> Headers (category dividers within a project)-> Tasks -> lists (sub-tasks).
In Things only projects and tasks can have notes and URL.
Projects, tasks and subtasks can be marked as completed.
Projects and tasks can be made to repeat.
A task can very easily be converted to a project (while conserving its notes, URL and tags). Headers can also be converted to projects.
You can assign due date and reminder dates to projects and tasks. I do assigned due date to projects that have a well-defined ending but a tend to refrain to assign them to tasks. I do use reminders for key tasks, though.
You can search through all tasks by words but also sort by tag or a combination of tags.
Integration of calendar events in your Today list as well as the Upcoming list. This is extremely useful when planning ahead!
Things 3 default lists
Reminders 7.0 mix of default and smart (those with small gears) lists
Reminders (in a bit more details): Group (folder of Lists) -> Lists -> Sections -> Tasks -> Sub tasks.
Only tasks and sub-tasks can have notes and URL. In Reminders, you can also directly attach a photo, a file or scan a document. This is something still impossible to Things.
Only tasks and subtasks can be marked as completed.
If a List is used to house a project, then you will need a “list info” task that can include notes and URL at the top if you want some context to your project. But such a task cannot sit at the very top of a List if Sections are used.
Tasks and sub-tasks can be made to repeat.
A Completed Group could be created to house completed lists if lists are used as project containers.
A task or a section cannot be converted to a list (or section to a task) from any menu options.
You can assign a date (and a time), and also an early reminder date/time, a location reminder and even a reminder with using Message to tasks and subtasks.
Even better, you can enter a task in natural language and Reminders will recognize things like dates (either as specific dates or concepts like tomorrow, next week…) and so on automatically.
You can search through all tasks.
You can create customizable Smart Lists based on **multiple conditions**, including tags, flag, dates, location …! This allows you to create key Lists like Anytime (to mimic Things) or the GTD list Waiting For, which still does not exist in Things (but you can filter with a “Waiting” tag). It also means that you can have tasks (and sub tasks) displayed in multiple lists! You can also pin any list at the top to customize you app (it will follow across all of your Apple devices).
Did I say location-based reminders (!) as well as reminders when writing (via Apple Messages app) to someone. In Things, the only way to do this is to set-up a personal automation in Shortcut and go over this process for each location. Kudos to Apple for their implementation in Reminders.
Allows for Kanban style (!) handling of tasks with the new column view. This is extremely useful for many things including what I call lists of never-ending tasks/projects (e.g. reading list, reviewing list, …) using Section as topics, tasks as projects and sub-tasks as tasks. Years ago, I developed something similar to extract information from Things SQLite database and this was pushed even further into KanbanView available in the Apple Store. Again, kudos to Apple for having this option in Reminders.
Column (Kanban) view of a List with Sections in Reminders
Clearly, this latest version of Reminders has a very interesting set of features, many beyond Things current options. But it also has a few interface quirks.
The fact that it is not possible to easily transform a task to a project (List in Apple nomenclature) is one of them.
Not being able to have URL and descriptive text for a List if used as Project holder is also a major drawback.
When looking at tasks that can be done at anytime (i.e. Anytime List), in Things you see only the first task under a given project (with an option to see the rest). This really helps focusing when it is time to select what you will be working on today. In Reminders, you either have to collapse everything, and only see the project title, and expand and see everything. So if you have a large number of tasks and projects, this becomes extremely crowded and, let say, unproductive.
Finally, not being able to check as completed a List makes the whole hierarchy less logical to use than Things or OmniFocus.
I must say that GUI-wise and ease of use, Things remains the best task manager out there. It has an extremely clean and sleek interface, making it very easy and fun to use (and look at). As a bonus, it is still available as pay once use “eternally” i.e. not a subscription model…at least for now (and new major versions happen only once every 5-6 years!).
In conclusion, if you have an Apple device, I think that you do not have any reason to pay for a task manager anymore. You already have everything you need available on your device out of the box. It offers enough features, even for the most demanding GTD followers, so it should easily satisfy the vast majority of users.
GTD methodology call of frequent review of projects and associated task lists. In fact, the whole system crumbles if this critical operation is not performed regularly; you need to trust that it contains everything in order to make the right decision at the right time with regard to which task(s) to take on at any given moment and not miss anything. This is the goal of the weekly review.
However to enable you to make these daily decisions that move you toward a larger goal, the latter needs to be established up front and also revised on a regular basis. Enter the yearly review!
While, you may want to review your short-term goal(s) on a more frequent basis, the yearly review is a time to perform a few key tasks, which you might want to incorporate into a yearly maintenance project that contains these as recurring tasks.
Reflect
Have my decisions/actions in the past year move me toward the longer-term goals I set for myself?
Did I meet my short-term goals?
Is there in missing actions that should be accomplished in the coming days/weeks to close some gaps?
If so, it is time to get them all of your head and into your task manager (and do a bit of planning).
Plan
What is(are) my goal(s) for the coming year?
Is the state of my system ready to tackle them: do I have all of the projects and next action items ready to launch me toward that (these) goal(s)?
If not, it is time to get them all of your head and into your task manager (and again do a bit of planning).
Do not forget, to put it all on the table, not just your work goals but also family and personal. Talking about productivity makes only sense if you tackle it from a holistic perspective. Otherwise, you are might just a busy person.
Review your long-term goals
Now is also a good time to review what GTD refers to as “the higher altitudes views”: 5, 10, 20 years and lifetime goals. These will strongly influence your early goal(s).
Tidy-up
At this juncture, you should:
Archive completed projects (ideally along related e-mails if applicable) and get them out of your ongoing projects materials (either digital or physical).
Review all remaining projects and make sure they still correspond to your need and have next action items ready.
Get any last-minute ideas, projects or tasks out of your head.
Ask yourself if your system is still serving your planning and documentation need adequately. This is a good time to make small adjustment (or large adjustment if it cannot keep up with demands) to your system.
With everything out of your mind and into paper or in your digital task manager, you are ready to spend a relaxing, worry free break. Not only will you feel better when you come back to work but new ideas will pop up and generally productivity is increased!
How much time is needed?
I systematically reserved two days before leaving for the Xmas break every year to perform the above tasks. Depending on how things went in the previous year, it could be more than enough to complete everything. Milage will vary, so you should give yourself enough time. The timing of it is totally up to you, for me the break at the end of the calendar year suits me perfectly. It is the motion of going through the four major action items listed above that is the key to an efficient review.
The yearly review is an investment in yourself…and it will pay itself back easily as you start the new year.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings totalobliteration. I will face my fear. I willpermit it to pass over me and throughme. And when it has gone past I willturn the inner eye to see its path.Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Paul Atreides, Dune
It has been sometimes since I wrote on this blog. I am ready, it is now time to get it going again!
The COVID pandemic has hit us fast and hard. We had to very quickly move our teaching online and rethink some of our laboratory courses. As a university professor, I had to learn to teach to black boxes on Zoom screens (being sarcastic but…). While not everything in that experience was negative, it became quickly obvious that the non-verbal component of teaching in front of a class takes all of its meaning: the curious face one or many students make when some concepts do not really get through, the fidgeting on the chair, … all of these get lost for the most part in translation when moving teaching online. This was a lesson learned for us professors (and some more on how to get beyond this issue).
On the research side, while numerical projects were able to thrive, experimental research programs were closed for weeks and it took months before we were able to get to full speed again. Scientific meetings got canceled and then moved online. Mentoring as well as our weekly group meeting moved fully online for almost a year. Travel all but got down to a trickle. Because of that, I had graduate students that never started their program in the fall of 2020. I will not be shy to say that two years later I can still feel the effect of this pandemic. The only positive aspect was how much materials my graduate students had been collecting before the lockdown, enough for manuscripts that they have been putting off it (procrastinating on!) for a while.
Let’s be frank, the whole situation was quite unsettling and worrisome. For me the lockdown happens right after an electrophysiology procedure to solve my tachycardia episodes (had it for years but got quite worse in the last two years before this procedure). While it was not the dangerous kind of tachycardia, I developed anxiety behavior associated with it in the few months prior to the procedure. I got to admit that the COVID lockdown did not help in that regard, and anxiety change to panic attack in particular situations. Two years later, I am still learning to live my anxiety. If any of you have any kind of triggers for anxiety and panic attacks, I understand what you are going through and do seek out help. It works!
That being said, the lockdown also had benefits. I decided to direct the time saved from commuting to start a Couch to 5K program. Never looked back and still jogging (yeah I do not call myself a runner, I think I am just too slow!) 3 times a week. In the 18 months that followed, I lost almost 15 kg (and my BMI is now in a much better range!), got my resting heart rate around 60 bpm and lower my blood pressure medication that I got two years before to the minimum available on the market and to the point that I could possibly get without it (maybe when I get rid of those last 2-3 kg to get back to my younger self!) I used Apple Fitness+ plus to start meditating and took advantage of the mindfulness trigger on my Apple Watch to introduce deep breathing moments throughout the day. I have to say, all of the above further help in decreasing anxiety and bring your mind to a much more calm (and also creative) state!
I must admit that I got hooked on my morning jog, to the point that to this day, I still miss the time when we could skip the morning commute to work: up, jog, shower, eat, deep breathing and start the day’s work by the same time I would get to work after commute. I was also able to institute a clear cut-off at the end of the day (OK mostly a clear one, but I used to never disconnect at all before the pandemic) . Wow, my evenings became so much more relaxing than my old routine.
Overall, this got me rethinking about work-life balance. When the pandemic started, I spent less hours/week working but I did not do less. In fact, I found out I was doing more. However, the unimportant stuff got evacuated very quickly, and focus on the important work, personal and family stuff suddenly got very clear. The concept of busy vs productive takes all its meaning and productivity becomes much more holistic in nature.
Furthermore, I think that many of us became more attuned not only to our well-being and that of our family and friends, but also mindful of others, in particular to the students that we are guiding, mentoring. I had always in the past told students to disconnect once in a while, not come to the lab during certain periods, like at Xmas. But now I insist much more that they take their 4-week vacation every year, adapt to flexible schedules and working from home, and so on.
Reflecting on my work-life balance before and after March 2020, I came to the conclusion that bearing obvious major deadlines (like a grant proposal!), if I cannot fit everything I do at work in a 40h/week time frame, then there is something I am doing wrong, most likely I am doing too much unnecessary/unimportant stuff, stuff that is not moving my key projects forward.
Coincidentally, I have started to track the time I spend on various activities (to take decision based on actual data), for example trying to get the time I spend on e-mail down to an acceptable level. But this will be for another post…
For many, productivity is a synonym of work productivity. This year’s pandemic had many reassessed this very narrow definition. In fact, at this year major meeting in my field (www.aapm.org), the issues related to coping, adapting, productivity and so on associated with the COVID situation has been at the forefront of the meeting.
Ruminating... 