Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
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
POSTED IN:
 It feels as though I...Submitted by GTD Wannabe on February 21, 2006 - 5:54am.
Claire wrote:
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...yet I feel a great deal of time pressure when they are assigned to me. Hi Claire, I read your original post with great interest and was wondering what responses you would get, because I feel that I am in the same boat. I too am a PhD student, with primary research to do, plus secondary research (pays my funding, but won't get me a PhD), plus additional things I have just ended up doing, e.g., web maintentance, etc. I'm responding today because I don't think that the two previous responses have quite captured the problem. I don't think that you're suffering so much from having an unreasonable boss, i.e., it doesn't sound like your prof is telling you that you have to get this extra stuff done, and get it done now. It sounds like you yourself are the one giving a higher priority to the non-research work. I have noticed this tendency in myself. Even though I'm really excited about my PhD topic, I find that I have the tendency to do almost anything else, because everything else has a much closer deadline. After all, we've got TWO YEARS to get going on the PhD ;) The document for Project X is due in a month or so, so let's work on that, etc. etc. I know in my case, I don't need to tell my prof that I'll do such and such if I cut back on something else - he knows what my primary role is - to get a PhD done. My toughest problem is actually me. For some reason, I feel incapable these days of forcing myself to work on my primary research. Everything else "seems" important, even though I know it's not really. I think ggrozier hit it on the head when he/she said, "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". In my case, I think I'm becoming a procrastinator when it comes to my research, and I think the problem is that I kind of don't know where to start. I mean, I know what I'm researching, and I have a few NAs, but for the most part, they're pretty big and fuzzy. But when we're talking about an end result that takes years of research, how do you get it down to small, manageable, next actions? Anyway, this post probably asks more quetsions than it answers, but I wanted to let you know that you're not alone, and I'll be watching this thread eagerly :) » POSTED IN:
|
|
| EXPLORE 43Folders | THE GOOD STUFF |
