Blog – Using Time Tracking for Time Management

Good time management is a vital skill for any researcher. It’s easy to lose track of how much time you’ve spent working, or have a poor balance between different kinds of work you may need to be doing. Especially for work with inconsistent hours, weekends, half days, busy weeks and lighter ones, it’s not always easy to keep track of how much you’ve been working. Flexibility in your time and schedule can be one of the best aspects of research and academic work settings, but this flexibility can also lead to uncertainty and doubt that you’re doing enough – especially if you’re a PhD student without a clear sense of how much you should be working.

As scientists, we understand the importance and usefulness of collecting data – after all, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Given this, it makes sense to try and actively measure how much time you spend on work or different kinds of tasks. This brings me to the solution I’ve found that’s helped me manage my time effectively throughout my PhD – “Time Tracking”.

Time Tracking comes from the wild world of productivity hacks and is particularly popular among self-employed people (who, like PhD students and many other researchers, don’t have a well-defined schedule) or people with billable hours. Conceptually, it is as simple as it sounds – you use timers to track how long you spend doing certain things – and there are a variety of apps out there to serve this end (I use one called ATracker).

Time tracking can help on both sides of the coin. Sometimes you’ve been working for what feels like ages, you feel like you’ve been working really hard, and you deserve a break. You look at the timer and see you’ve been there for 20 minutes. Hmm. Other times (perhaps more often) you feel like you’re not working hard enough, you need to be spending more time doing experiments, and feeling generally inadequate about how much you’re working compared to everyone else around you. You check the timer and see you’ve been working for 12 hours today.

Maybe it’s time to take a break.

Time tracking won’t necessarily help to make you work harder while the timer is running – but it will keep you honest about how much you are working. Many timer apps come with the ability to program in alerts once you hit certain thresholds, which can help you take breaks or can help you to stop working once you hit your ‘weekly goal’ whatever you set that to be, and be reassured that you are in fact doing enough. I also find it useful to balance out my busy weeks and my lighter weeks. Sometimes you just have to do a lot of big experiments and have a really long week. If I’ve gone 10 hours over my weekly work expectations in one week, it’s easier to justify working 10 hours less the next week. I tend to do a lot more lab work during the holidays when there’s less going on and the lab is less busy, and less lab work during term time when there are more talks and social events on, and I’m doing more teaching. Time tracking helps me to balance this out and keep me, well, on track.

The usual advice is to start simple – with a single tracker for the most important thing you want to measure. Maybe this is simply “PhD work” or “Homework” or “Research”. Maybe instead of tracking how much time you’re working, you’re more concerned about things like “Family Time” or “Being Social” or “Me Time”, and making sure you’re making enough time for other things in your life. Maybe you have a side gig or a hobby or a volunteer role that you want to be spending more (or less) time on. Maybe you’re concerned about how much time you’re spending on social media. Time tracking is extremely useful for this – not just for having concrete data, but once you get into the habit of running timers, it makes you far more aware of how you’re spending your time. I can almost guarantee you that there will be surprises in store for how much or little time you spend doing things, compared to how much time you think you spend on them. Frequently people think they’re not working enough, and then find out they’re typically working 70 hour weeks – a point for a reassessment.

Over time, you might want to use a more complex set of timers – maybe you have different timers for things like “Emails”, “Reading Papers”, “Meetings”, “Lab Work”, “Writing”, etc. This can overcomplicate things and the best time tracking system is the one you’ll actually use. When it comes to my PhD work, I simply have three timers – Lab Work, Admin, and Conferences. Over time, I’ve also added timers for other things in my life, like “Family”, “Relationship”, “Social”, “Dementia Researcher”, “Photography”, “Running”, “Podcasts”, and even other things like “Time Outside”. Some things like “Reading Books” I want to do more of, some things like “Mindless Entertainment” I want to do less of.

One of the important caveats with time tracking is that it’s like any other kind of ‘biometric’ tracking. Like calorie counting or watching your weight, there are healthy and unhealthy ways to go about it. On the one hand, you can use time tracking to keep yourself accountable, to try and spend more time doing the things you want to do, and making sure you’re not spending too much time on the things you don’t. On the other hand, it’s easy to see a set of numbers and want to see them continue on a trend. Especially on apps (like ATracker) which will generate graphs of time spend per day/week/month of given sets of timers, it can be tempting to watch a trend like “Lab Work” go up consistently over time and want to keep trying to push it higher every week – which rapidly gets unsustainable and results in you overworking, defeating the entire point of the exercise. Just because you know you’re working 50 hours a week doesn’t mean you’ll be confident that 50 hours per week is enough work.

That aside, I’ve found that time tracking has not just given me concrete data about myself and my habits (which, as a researcher, is just fun, but can also lead to useful insights) but it’s also helped me to bring far more attention and intention to how I spend my time.

With so many forces desperate to capture our attention, it can be easy to fall prey to a rogue notification and slip into the seductive embrace of the algorithm. With so much pressure to produce results and no clear sense of how much work is enough, it can be easy to over do it. Tracking makes me more aware of what I’m doing and whether it’s something I actually want to be doing – and provides me with a list of other things I could be doing alongside. Do I really want to start the “social media” timer? Or can I add to my “Writing” timer instead? Don’t get me wrong – there’s a time and place for social media use, you don’t have to be such a rigid pedant about your lifestyle. As with calorie counting or weight watching, there’s an unhealthy way and a healthy way to approach it.

Measure working time using a timer – start tracking time when you start working on something and stop when you finish (or when you switch to a different activity).

But if you are trying to do more of something – like maybe you want to spend more time reading papers, or maybe you want to spend more time going for walks outside, or maybe you want to spend more time exercising – you have to make time for it, and it helps if you can track it and keep yourself accountable for how much time you are in fact spending on it. It also helps if you can see what you’re currently spending time on to work out where you can make more time. Some apps allow you to set goals – maybe you want to exercise at least three times a week, or spend at least 4 hours a week doing craft. Affordances like notifications and reminders alongside the timing system can really help with this. Wondering why you don’t have enough time for reading papers? Maybe it’s because you’re spending 15 hours a week in meetings, and you need to find ways to reduce this. Sure, your contact hours for teaching are 3 hours per week – but when you add on preparation, marking, paperwork and admin, how much time is it really taking you? Do you know? Do you have the time to take on this new volunteer role? How much time have similar roles actually taken you in the past?

If you want to really get into the weeds on this, you can set up short cuts on a smart phone to automatically start and stop timers based on what apps you might be using or what your location is. However, I find the process of manually switching timers on and off useful not just because it makes me more aware of how I spend my time, but also helps me to notice task switching. This idea has been popularised recently and probably most notably by Cal Newport in his book ‘Deep Work’, where he presents research on how frequently we switch between different tasks, how much this has increased over the last several decades, how easily we can get distracted, and how this breaks focus and makes us less productive in the end (it turns out trying to multitask is mostly terrible). In theory, you want to maximise the uninterrupted time you spend working to be able to get deep into it, into a flow state, and minimise going back and forth between different things. If switching tasks means having to switch timers all the time, it can be quite tedious, so this actually makes a great incentive to stay on task and can help you to realise how often you’re tempted to switch.

In summary, if you think you can go about it in a healthy way, you should consider giving time tracking a try, for one simple reason: you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Your brain’s perception of time is terrible: don’t trust it. The modern world is an attentional minefield: tread carefully and strengthen your intentionality. Start simple – just track one or two things, and you can build it out over time if you find it works for you (I have about 70 at this point and track literally everything). Mining your own data can be kind of fun – and you can glean all kinds of useful insights about yourself and your habits. Most importantly, it can be a tool to help you not just manage but be aware of what you’re spending time on, if you’re spending too much or little time on it, and how you might better balance this out. Especially in the PhD and research lifestyle with such variable and intermittent time, where you could be working anytime and often therefore end up working all the time, I’ve found this can be a useful and fun way to stay sane. It’s only a matter of time.

Ajantha Abey

Author

Ajantha Abey is a PhD student in the Kavli Institute at University of Oxford. He is interested in the cellular mechanisms of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other diseases of the ageing brain. Previously, having previoulsy explored neuropathology in dogs with dementia and potential stem cell replacement therapies. He now uses induced pluripotent stem cell derived neurons to try and model selective neuronal vulnerability: the phenomenon where some cells die but others remain resilient to neurodegenerative diseases.

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