Time Management Tactics for Academics

A distinguishing feature of a research career—particularly in academia—is the unstructured nature of the job.  Graduate students, research scientists, professors, and postdocs are generally masters of their own time.  Although this autonomy can be liberating, it can also result in tremendous inefficiency if one does not develop effective time-management tactics.  There are countless books on time management, and it is impossible to provide a comprehensive compendium of time-management tactics in a single post.  Hence, what I aim to do in this post is identify specific time management tactics that may be useful for academics (or anyone who works in an unstructured environment).  The tactics I have compiled below are the result of much reading on this topic over many years, as well as empirically determining what works for me.  Some of these tips are adapted from other readings, but most are simply tactics I’ve devised that seem to work…