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Designing my own work week (academic) ?
msanford | Mar 24 2007
I'm completely new to GTD methodology (but will be heading to Chapters tomorrow to buy David Allen's book). I've also been listening to Merlin's podcast and getting some good ideas from it. I'm currently in the phase of preparing my research proposal for my (Master's) thesis, work on which will commence in May. As my coursework is complete, unless I'm offered another sessional lectureship next year (which is very likely barring budgetary problems) I will be at liberty to create my own work week. At most, I will have three hours of lecturing and several more hours of correcting and preparation each week to schedule. I've been looking for suggestions, studies, personal accounts, or just good old advice on setting the most efficient work week for myself. For example, I find I work best (i.e., most creatively and efficiently) in the evening. I also have obligations to family and various other extra-curricular activities (I'm a competitive level climber who's had to hang up his harness for the past 6 months for failure to make time to train!) Should I work a traditional work week? Should I take Thursday and Sunday off to break up my work so I don't lose momentum? How about never working in the morning and working 6 days a week? Just brainstorming to illustrate my idea... Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated. I hope to be able to contribute something useful from my experience to this community too! (I already posted this but it didn't appear. Maybe there's a bug relating to activated users starting a thread before being activated? In any case, that's my excuse in case this ends up being a double-post :) ) 15 Comments
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 Now that you mention it,...Submitted by unstuffed on April 18, 2007 - 5:06am.
msanford;8956 wrote:
Now that you mention it, the most successful academics I know in my institution do that exactly... Hah! I thought so. :) So you've got a highly abstract mindset, and like many creative/abstract thinkers, you're borderline ADD. In that case it probably takes you even longer to get back to the zone after an interruption. You really can't afford to sacrifice your work in order to be accessible at all hours of the day or night, and that's exactly what you're doing when you let students (or staff) just wander in. One other thing that I think I read about on LifeHacker is the use of pink noise. From what I gather, pink noise is the sort of fractal, non-repetitive natural sound that blocks out distractive external noise without drawing your attention to itself with rhythms. I think the most common ones are things like ocean sounds, wind in trees, that sort of thing. As well as blocking external distractions, they interact with your monkey brain to help induce a calm, meditative, and hopefully highly creative state. » POSTED IN:
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