I love my job running a research lab. I love the problem-solving, the creativity, the autonomy. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have that “hair’s on fire” feeling most days. We’ve now added the stress of living and working through a pandemic to the equation. So how do I trade frantic and stressed for focused and serene?

About five years ago I decided to try a prenatal yoga class. I lucked into an awesome studio (Half Moon Yoga Studio in Franklin, TN) where I started learning the true point of yoga. It’s not about whether you can touch your toes or do lotus pose. It’s about slowly, deliberately moving your mind and body forward to increase what you’re capable of. It’s the self-discovery of realizing the strategies that resonate with you and calmly pushing aside those that don’t align with your personal or professional vision.

It was through yoga that I learned how to drop in and achieve focus to increase my productivity with less wasted energy. Here are the lessons I’ve learned after years of practice that I apply to my job and to my life:

You control your happiness and self-esteem. My yoga teacher asked us to reflect on the following questions:

1. 1. Who has the power to ruin your day? (Reviewer #2?)
   2. When did you give them that power?

I’m not sure about you, but that second question really landed with me. Don’t give that power away. It is yours to wield. Not Reviewer #2’s.

Change your drishti (focus) as needed to make progress. Indulge me and try the following:

1. 1. Try to balance on one leg (“tree pose”) while scanning quickly across the room with your eyes. Did you feel wobbly?
   2. Now try it as you focus on one fixed point on the wall (drishti). Did you wobble less?
   3. Now try the pose while focusing on a point on the floor. Did it feel different?
      

Continuing with the Reviewer #2 theme, think back to a manuscript/grant review that caused you to reach for a glass (bottle?) of wine. Push the discouragement aside to mentally pivot and find the actionable lesson. What can you learn that will guide productive strategies for the revision? My yoga teacher said, “Rejection is just redirection.” Just sit with that idea for a bit.

Be present in each moment. You can fast-forward through the whole movie if you want, but it really is more enjoyable to watch it one scene at a time. You miss a lot if you’re in a hurry. Pay attention to what is working and what isn’t working. Take time to have conversations with your peers and your team to spark creative ideas.

Eliminate counter-productive mental chatter. Focusing on physical movement and breathing is surprisingly calming once you get the hang of it. You don’t have to be a Zen master to do a few sun salutations. I even do a few in my office sometimes to quickly achieve a more focused state. Maybe listening to a quick guided meditation or nature sounds helps you. Experiment and find what speaks to you. Even a few minutes of grounding activities can help.

Balance and restoration is key. I don’t mean tree pose balance. I mean the balance provided by a counter-pose. Knees to chest is a good counter to a backbend. Child’s pose is a good counter to a strenuous pose. What is my counter pose to back to back grant deadlines? I plan something fun or relaxing. At the very least, I give myself permission to switch gears to pick up slack in other areas for a bit (manuscripts? teaching?). You don’t get very far when there’s no more gas in the tank. You lose your creative fire when burning the candle at both ends. It’s fine for short bursts, but you have to refuel.

Respect your limits. Is it wise to attempt something tough like a head stand right now? Maybe not. Learn what you are capable of and respect it. Say no to that teaching ask or whatever it is that will stretch you beyond your limits. Delegate or seek the help you need to meet your goals on time. Tune in to what you and your team have available to give right now and recognize that expecting more than 100% effort is demotivating.

Mindfulness and meditation is work. The point isn’t perfection. The key is that you regularly practice to find what works and what doesn’t. Spend the time doing the self-study and hard thinking to clear away the thoughts and activities that don’t serve your personal and professional goals. Namaste!

More Resources

Building Resiliency with Hypnosis and Mindfulness

Balancing on the Edge

Feeling Powerless in the Age of COVID (Part II)

One of the biggest adjustments in being a principal investigator (PI) running a research lab has been the near constant, usually urgent, demands on my time. Some of these demands are enjoyable (new data!) some less so (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee protocols, blah!). Gone are the days when my two main occupations were writing and experiments. Now it is meetings, protocols, training, and putting out whatever fires have arisen from smoldering tasks ignored. My bench is lonely, my inbox is full, and trainees keep reminding me about things I have apparently forgotten. In an attempt to reclaim my time and sanity, I have started protecting my time like never before. As always these days, n=me, and these are my emerging strategies for time management.

Identify strategies that work for you: Above all else, identify time management strategies that work for you. For me, my most productive time is in the morning, so that is when I sit and write. I have tried to sub-divide my morning time with Pomodoro, but the forced break times interrupt my focused time. I have also tried timeboxing, committing a certain amount of time to a task and no more. Although better than Pomodoro, I still underestimate writing time and have found my writing time is best left as a block. If I finish early, I can move on to other tasks. Otherwise, I keep working until I am done or until I cannot write anymore. Where I do find timeboxing useful is for small tasks, like responding to emails, booking conference travel, social media, and smaller service tasks that should have finite time requirements.

Limit distractions: This is easier to say than to implement. Keeping off social media during the day is easier than not checking email. On big writing days or close to grant deadlines, I do not log into email until my brain is fried from writing and I need a break. This seems to work pretty well and if people really need something, they follow-up with a phone call. I also limit the number of impromptu meetings. Unless it is urgent, I ask most people who stop by the office to schedule an in office/coffee/lunch meeting.

Use your calendar for everything: I have a full year’s worth of events on my office calendar, always in sight. This includes immovable occurrences like grant deadlines, conferences, and life events like vacations or weddings. At any moment, I can tell you whether I can commit to a date for a seminar or conference. As soon as I commit, the date goes on the board. Electronic and paper calendars work equally well, but I prefer dry erase, since this gives me the option to include a full twelve months and not just the calendar year.

Track your activities: Any activities that are not part of my research program, I document. This includes time spent in meetings, seminars, committees, etc. Part of this has to do with annual documentation on my faculty activities form, but it is also important for me to identify how much time I am spending on activities and whether they are worth the time investment. Unfortunately there are tasks from which you cannot opt out, like the departmental seminar, but that does not mean they do not count towards your percent time. Having data documenting your hours of service or teaching can be really powerful when you are “saying no” to requests.

Learn to say no: You cannot attend every conference, every seminar, and every event to which you are invited. You can also not write every grant for which you are eligible or collaborate on every project. You cannot agree to review every paper and take on every student who knocks on your door, looking for a lab opportunity. Identify the opportunities for which you have time and agree to those. If you are not sure you have time, you do not. Also, share the wealth. If you cannot do a review, speak at a conference, or participate in a committee, suggest one of your new colleagues (with their permission, of course!) who might still be trying to break into these spaces.

Travel with purpose: Travel is one of the biggest disruptors, but also the best opportunity to network and share your research group’s work.  The costs of these great opportunities are time out of the office (with tasks continuing to smolder) and a return to a growing to-do list coupled with lost sleep and disruption of home life. Identifying specific goals for work travel can help you decide whether a trip is worth the time, money, and effort. I will cover how I pick which talks and conferences to attend in my next blog post.

Do not steal time: There are only so many hours in the day. If you keep taking hours from your personal time and giving them to work time, you are stealing time. Be firm on the amount of time you are working versus not working. I am not here to tell you how many hours you should be working (Twitter has that covered), only that working too many keeps you from doing the life things that need to get done and/or are enjoyable. Of course there will be times when you work more than others. But, there are only so many weeks you can tell yourself “I just have to get through this week” or “I just have to get through this month” before it becomes a problem. This has been a recurring problem for me, and part of the motivation of implementing some of these strategies.

Invest time in yourself: This should go without saying, and I hope you are better about it than I am, but you have invested a lot of time, money, and effort into your career, so make sure you are investing some of that into yourself. It does not matter what this looks like: gym time, hobbies, travel, kid-centered activities, reading great literature or the newest young adult novel, etc. Be attentive to your health and your relationships. Building a life outside of the lab can help you weather the inevitable rejections and failures in your research program. Without this balance, a bad week in lab can feel like a bad week in life. Try to build in good things to buffer the bad work times.

I admitted on Twitter that I have been working on this post for two months. Part of this has been trying out Pomodoro and timeboxing. The other part has been overcommitting to work tasks not directly related to my science. But, these time management strategies seem to be paying off, and I am actually ahead of schedule on my next two grant submissions. Now, I just need to take my own advice and commit some time to health and wellness. Stay tuned for more tales!

Did I miss an important point? Do you have questions or concerns about the post? Or perhaps a time management strategy to contribute! Feel free to send some electrons my way in the comments, via Twitter @PipetteProtag, or through traditional electronic mail pipette.protagonist@gmail.com

More Resources

How to REALLY Manage Your Time

Tune Your When, How Much, and What in Your Days

Acting on the Essential

We hosted Dr. Paul Harris, mastermind of REDCap and ResearchMatch and local guru of efficiency lifehacks, for a seminar on honing your professional edge. He shared these choices as an eclectic mix currently engaging his thoughts.

Habit 3 audiobook

by Steven Covey

“E.M. Gray once observed, ‘The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.’ This is the essence of Habit 3. You’ll learn a new mindset of examining how you spend your time, and you’ll learn how to focus your efforts in ways that create greater success both professionally and personally.” (excerpt from Amazon.com)

• Listen to this catchy song from Jesse Miller on You-Tube to really reinforce this concept:

The Power of Habit

by Charles Duhigg

“Charles Duhigg, an investigative reporter for The New York Times…has read hundreds of scientific papers and interviewed many of the scientists who wrote them, and relays interesting findings on habit formation and change from the fields of social psychology, clinical psychology and neuroscience. This is not a self-help book conveying one author’s homespun remedies, but a serious look at the science of habit formation and change.”

• Read the entire book review by Timothy Wilson in The New York Times.

Getting Things Done

by David Allen

“GTD is best known for the Two-Minute Rule: if a task crosses your desk that can be completed in two minutes – do it immediately. If not, file it according to context, and priority level. The idea is simple: dealing with it right away clears the decks quickly. Setting it aside demands looking at it again, reviewing, re-thinking, assigning a time to get it done; all of a sudden a short task takes on far more time and importance than it’s worth.”

• Read the entire book review by Amy Guttman in Forbes Magazine.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

by Stephen R. Covey

“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey is a self-improvement book. It is written on Covey’s belief that the way we see the world is entirely based on our own perceptions. In order to change a given situation, we must change ourselves, and in order to change ourselves, we must be able to change our perceptions.”

• Read more of this in-depth book summary from Hubspot.
• Watch an animated book review from FightMediocrity on YouTube.

First Things First

by Stephen R. Covey

“What are ‘first things?’ First things are those things you, personally, find of most worth. If you put first things first, you are organizing and managing time and events according to the personal priorities you established…”

• Read more from author Steven Covey about this book at his author website.

How to Write A Lot

by Paul J. Silvia

“…Silvia is an academic himself (one with an intimidating list of publications too!) and knows academics very well. This means he understands how they (we?) like to build group solidarity around shared hardships and goes to unveil the barriers we construct on the way to becoming productive writers. He proceeds to deconstruct this pen/keyboard martyrdom, one barrier at the time. This guide also includes advice on starting a writing group and helpful chapters on the technicalities of academic writing and style.”

• Read the entire review by Ana Kedveš at PhD Life.

Essentialism

by Greg McKeown

“Our whole society has become consumed by the undisciplined pursuit of more. The only way to overcome this problem is to change the way we think—adopt the mindset of only doing the things that are essential—and do it now.”

• Read the entire book review by Lawton Ursrey in Forbes Magazine.
• Watch a short explainer video from Productivity Game (length 11:37).

Rest

by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

“If work is our national religion, Pang is the philosopher reintegrating our bifurcated selves. As he adeptly shows, not only are work and rest not in opposition, they’re inextricably bound, each enhancing the other. ‘Work and rest aren’t opposites like black and white or good and evil,’ Pang writes. ‘They’re more like different points on life’s wave.’ “

• Read Arianna Huffington’s entire review of Rest in The New York Times.

Drop the Ball

by Tiffany Dufu

“The book is packed with relatable, too-close-to-home lessons for overachievers of any ilk — whether at home, or at work. At work, it’s called delegating, and it’s not a remotely new concept. If you’re overseeing a team, you trust others to do what they do best, and you don’t do every little thing yourself. That’s why you have a team! Ever since finishing ‘Drop the Ball,’ I can’t stop thinking of its takeaways at work.”

• Read Libby Kane’s entire review in Business Insider.
• Read this review by Sandra Tsing Loh in The New York Times comparing Drop the Ball with Steven Marche’s book The Unmade Bed.

My Year of Yes

by Shonda Rhimes

“Fueled by anxiety and self-doubt, Rhimes walled herself off however she could to the point that her eldest sister told her during a 2013 Thanksgiving conversation, ‘You never say yes to anything.’ That revelation slowly ate away at Rhimes, and she decided to make 2014 the year she said yes to doing all of the things that scared her, such as agreeing to deliver the commencement address at Dartmouth College, her alma mater. In the process, she became a much happier, more enlightened person.”

• Read Soraya Nadia McDonald’s entire review in The Washington Post.

BONUS Reading Hack:

• Check out apps like this one which give you an in-depth synopsis of the book, basically cutting to the good stuff (free trial then subscription fees will apply).

This Reading Roundup selection was introduced (and informed through group discussion) during a seminar led by Dr. Paul Harris titled “Being Productive.”

Paul Harris, PhD, is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine and a Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering at Vanderbilt University. He serves as Director of the Vanderbilt Office of Research Informatics and specializes in the development of innovative software platforms to support the research enterprise. He is creator and faculty lead for REDCap – a flexible web-based data management software platform, and the REDCap consortium – a network of 2700 academic and non-profit partner sites from 117 countries using the REDCap software platform. He has extensive experience teaching short-courses in data management and translational research within the United States, Japan, China and India.

Read a book that inspired you? Drop a link in the comments, or be bold and write a book review.

More Edgy book reviews to add to your reading list:

Brene Brown Offers Academics A Thoughtful Way to Do A Holiday Reboot

Why You Should Read The Creative Habit

Radical Candor: Can It Work for Academics?

The Power of Pause: How to be More Effective in a Demanding, 24/7 World

Problem: A picture is worth a thousand words….

The Goal: Implement a project management strategy that allows you to easily organize and synthesize data, track progress and strategize future efforts.

Enter my strategy…the Storyboard! I admit it…I am a Storyboard junkie! I use them for grant writing, manuscript writing and project management.

So…what exactly is a storyboard? Think of it as a frame by frame depiction of your internal thought process…like storyboards used to outline scenes in a movie. Your storyboard will work for you because it is created by you and for you! You define the layout and the content.

Here is an excerpt from a storyboard for one of my grant applications.

Platform: I prefer Powerpoint for several reasons:

1. Easy editing.
2. Familiarity across academic levels.
3. When you have a presentation to give, just cut and paste!

How it Works – the Evolution of a Storyboard:

1. Use individual slides to create a virtual representation of a project. Start with the basics:

Why are you doing this project?

What are the questions you want to answer?

What tools do you have at your disposal (or not!) to answer them?

2. Update the slides to include design of experiments, data, data interpretations as well as action items. The storyboard should be updated regularly, at whatever intervals you find most helpful and manageable. The content will evolve as the project evolves – text will be streamlined, data shifts from preliminary to publication-quality figures, etc. Here is an example containing storyboard slides of the same data in an early version and then later versions of the project storyboard.
3. Identify benchmarks. A storyboard updated in real time will tell you when it is time to write a paper or submit a grant application for that cool (but tangential!) finding. When the data in your storyboard tells a nice story, it is time for a paper! When a piece of data doesn’t “fit” in your story, it is a signal that this could be the start of a new line of investigation (see Note).

Note: At this point, I start a new storyboard for the manuscript/grant application and pull rationale, experimental design, data and conclusions from the original project storyboard…again, just copy and paste!

How you can apply the Storyboard Strategy NOW:

1. Start small. Create a Storyboard for your own use, i.e. a manuscript or a grant application.
2. Use the storyboard as your primary workspace for organizing ideas and data. Don’t draft the paper or grant until you are happy with the flow and bulleted arguments/explanations in your storyboard.
3. Take inventory along the way…define what works for you! 

a) Identify Needs.

     Is there information you need for your storyboard that is not readily available to you,     i.e., most recent data from your graduate student or experimental design for that piece of data in your inbox? Consider implementing storyboards with your lab members that include these types of details.

b) Evaluate Outcomes.

     Did using a storyboard:

          – decrease the time to final draft?

          – improve quality of writing?

          – ease the writing process?

If the answer to any of the above questions is no, ask why. Use this answer to modify your approach to storyboarding or formulate a new method!

Remember, there are no rules. The only successful strategy for project management is the one that works for you!