{"id":38097,"date":"2017-03-07T13:21:55","date_gmt":"2017-03-07T21:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=38097"},"modified":"2017-03-07T13:21:55","modified_gmt":"2017-03-07T21:21:55","slug":"stop-flipping-write-good-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/stop-flipping-write-good-list\/","title":{"rendered":"How to stop \u2018flipping\u2019 (and write a good to-do list)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"long-list\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At a dinner party some time ago, an academic\u2019s husband pointed out that there are many similarities between being an academic and running a small, not very profitable business. I laughed, but since I briefly ran a small business the comment struck a chord with me.<\/p>\n

After much thought, I think small business owners and academics have two key problems in common:<\/p>\n

Problem one:<\/strong> There are a lot of opportunities that could turn into nothing, so it\u2019s best to say yes to everything and deal with the possible overwork problem later.<\/p>\n

Problem two:<\/strong> Since (outside of a teaching schedule) no one is really telling you what to do with every minute of your time, it can be hard to choose what to do next \u2013 especially if all the tasks seem equally important.<\/p>\n

Problem One leads to being over-committed, probably constantly. Problem Two makes individual days hard to organise, leading to decision fatigue and fractured attention states.<\/p>\n

When Problem One, over-commitment, collides with Problem Two choosing what to do next, the trouble really starts. The freedom to choose among seemingly equally important tasks leads to what I call \u2018flipping\u2019. \u2018Flipping\u2019 is not finishing a task properly before starting on a new one.<\/p>\n

A good example of flipping is half reading a paper before downloading the next one, or opening your email to download a reference someone sent you and then starting to answer other emails just to \u2018clean up a bit\u2019. Before long, your work days are filled with activity, but you can\u2019t see deliverables popping out the other end. It\u2019s a frustrating feeling, like you are trying to hold onto a cloud.<\/p>\n

These problems start in the PhD, but only get worse when you graduate and work as a full time researcher and\/or academic. It\u2019s not really the meetings or the teaching that are the problem for most of us, but making best use of the time in between. Flipping erodes your focus, making each task take longer than it really should, at time same time slowly eating you precious time and energy.<\/p>\n

Every time you start flipping you are creating a technical debt that you will have to pay eventually. Technical debt is the time you must spend later because you didn\u2019t do something properly the in the first place. This is a concept from computer science that I have discussed before in relation to researching.<\/a> Academic work incurs technical debt because of the inter-connected nature of most of the tasks. A simple task, such as reading a paper, relates to bigger projects which are ongoing, like a literature review. Part of finishing the task of reading the paper is processing the ideas it presented and putting them in relation to other ideas and your own. If you only half read a bunch of papers, ideas start buzzing around in no particular order. It\u2019s horribly easy for those unprocessed ideas to turn into an angry swarm, creating confusion, even panic.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d think taking notes would help, but in my experience it really doesn\u2019t. I bet you have heaps of notes in journals that you never look at again \u2013 I certainly do. The academic attempting to save time just writes stuff they noticed in a journal, hoping that will preserve the thoughts for their future self. We imagine our future self will have the calm thinking space that is eluding your present self, but how just realistic is this? What\u2019s more likely to happen is by the time you sit down to write your literature review you\u2019ll have to spend time interpreting your own notes, which more often than not turn out to be impenetrable.<\/p>\n

How do we stop all the flipping? You\u2019ve heard the advice before: make a good \u2018to do\u2019 list and commit to it. It\u2019s easy advice to dole out, but surprisingly hard advice to follow, especially in a research context. So what does a good to do list look like?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take the literature review as an example. A not very useful to-do list might look like this:<\/p>\n