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Keeping to your priority when others give you deadlines
Claire | Feb 20 2006
I've been having a bit of trouble with this lately, and I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on the matter and how to cope with it. I've only been using GTD for a couple of months now so I'm not entirely comfortable with it yet. I'm a PhD student and while I generally have a lot of work to do, most of it does not have strict deadlines - things will, to some extent, get done when they get done, and my overall goal "get phd" is still 2 years or so off, so doesn't exactly lend itself to motivation! So, most of my NAs do not have time limits, which suits me quite well. The problem comes when someone else sets me an assignment - for example, at the moment I have some exams to mark which I don't have a deadline for, but I feel I should mark as quickly as possible as otherwise my boss will start bugging me for them. It feels as though I take work set by others to be more important, and I must do it quickly so as to appear efficient, but when it's my own work, I can put it on the backburner. This would be all very well, but the sort of work which gets set by others tends to be things which aren't going to get me a PhD - prepare a general talk on our work, organise a practical class, look up the costs of office supplies etc. A lot of these things need to be done, but they don't normally have to be done now, yet I feel a great deal of time pressure when they are assigned to me. So my question is really how do you keep your own priorities whilst not ignoring work set by others? Particularly when you're on the bottom rung of the ladder and can't delegate the tasks... 4 Comments
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 When you get one of...Submitted by ggrozier on February 21, 2006 - 12:55am.
When you get one of these tasks, you need to take a minute or so to quickly ask when they need it, why they need it at a certain time, how urgent or important it is, and maybe whether there's something else that might conflict with it, so you know where it fits in with everything else and what the priorities are. And you need to break your PhD project down into smaller projects with due dates, or milestones, along the way so you don't get behind on it. Those intermediate projects can have their own NA's etc. Just leave yourself plenty of extra time at the end so you won't come up short--you don't really have two years if something doesn't work out according to plan. You may have to make some changes, a professor may not be available, etc. So make allowances for the unforeseeable by building some extra time into your plans. Can you set aside a block of time every day to work on your PhD? Maybe a couple of hours every morning, and a couple later in the day? If you establish a special place where you work on it, and a special time for it, you'll find it will build up its own momentum and you won't be comfortable unless you keep to that little routine. Good luck! » POSTED IN:
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