While talking to my manager (Peter Hurford), I made a realization that by default when “life” gets in the way (concretely, last week a fair amount of hours were taken up by management training seminars I wanted to attend before I get my first interns, this week I’m losing ~3 hours the covid vaccination appointment and in expectation will lose ~5 more from side effects), research (ie the most important thing on my agenda that I’m explicitly being paid to do) is the first to go. This seems like a bad state of affairs.
I suspect that this is more prominent in me than most people, but also suspect this is normal for others as well. More explicitly, I don’t have much “normal” busywork like paperwork or writing grants and I try to limit my life maintenance tasks (of course I don’t commute and there’s other stuff in that general direction). So all the things I do are either at least moderately useful or entertaining. Eg, EA/work stuff like reviewing/commenting on other’s papers, meetings, mentorship stuff, slack messages, reading research and doing research, as well as personal entertainment stuff like social media, memes, videogames etc (which I do much more than I’m willing to admit).
if “life” gets in the way and more of my hours get taken up so my normal tempo is interrupted, I find that by default I’m much more likely to sacrifice the important parts of my job (reading research and writing research) than I am to sacrifice timely things I sort of promised others on (eg, meetings, doing reviews, etc), or entertainment/life stuff.
An obvious solution to this is either to scale all my work hours proportionally down or even disproportionately scale down meetings and reviews so more of my focused hours is spent on doing the “hard stuff”, but logistically this feels quite difficult and may not play nice with other people’s schedules. Another obvious solution is to have a much higher “bar” before letting life get in the way of work time, but this also seems unappealing or unrealistic.
The only real consistent exception is if I’m on a tight external deadline (eg promise X funder to deliver Y by Z date), in which case I’m both more likely to apologetically sacrifice meetings etc and to cut down on entertainment (the latter of which is not fun and intuitively doesn’t feel sustainable, but perhaps I’m overestimating the unsustainability due to the obvious sources of motivated reasoning).
So at the core, I believe that on top of my usual time management problems, I think I’m especially bad at doing important + nonurgent tasks when my normal flow is broken. This results in a pattern where I only get most of my real work done either a) on urgent timescales or b) when flow isn’t broken and I actually have my normal schedule uninterrupted. Since many important work isn’t urgent and having schedules interrupted is annoyingly common for me, I’m in search of a (principled) solution to this problem.
I hear that this similar to a common problem for many entrepreneurs; they spend much of their time on the urgent/small tasks, and not the really important ones.
One solution recommended by Matt Mochary is to dedicate 2 hours per day of the most productive time to work on the the most important problems.
So framing this in the inverse way – if you have a windfall of time from “life” getting in the way less, you spend that time mostly on the most important work, instead of things like extra meetings. This seems good. Perhaps it would be good to spend less of your time on things like meetings and more on things like research, but (I’d guess) this is true whether or not “life” is getting in the way more.
This seems like a good topic for a call with a coach/coworker because there are a lot of ways to approach it. One easy-to-implement option comes from 80k’s podcast with Tom Kalil: “the calendar is your friend.”
In Tom’s case, it was Obama’s calendar! I have a more low-key version I use. When I want to prioritize research or writing, I will schedule a time with my manager or director to get feedback on a draft of the report I’m writing. It’s a good incentive to make some meaningful progress—hard to get feedback if you haven’t written anything! - and makes it a tiny bit easier to decline or postpone meetings, but it is still somewhat flexible, which I find really useful.
This resonated with me a lot. Unfortunately, I do not have a quick fix. However, what seems to help at least a bit for me is seperating planning for a day and doing the work. Every workday the last thing I do (or try to do) is look at my calendar and to do lists and figure out what I should be doing the next day. By doing this I think I am better at assessing at what is important, as I do not have to do it at that moment. I only have to think of what my future self will be capable of doing. When the next day comes and future self turns into present self I find it really helpful to already having the work for the day planned for me. I do not have to think about what is important, I just do what past me decided.
Not sure if this is just an obvious way to do this, but I thought it does not hurt to write it down.
I think that all of us RP intern managers took the same 12-hour management training from The Management Center. I thought that there was some high-quality advice in it but I’m not sure if it applied that much to our situation of managing research interns. I haven’t been to other such trainings so I can’t compare.
Thanks salius! I agree with what you said. In addition,
A lot of the value was just time set aside to thinking about management, so hard to separate that out without a control group
(but realistically, without the training, I would not have spent ~16 (including some additional work/loose threads after the workshop) hours thinking about management in one week.
So that alone is really valuable!
I feel like the implicit prioritization for some of the topics they covered possibly made more sense for experienced managers than people like me.
For example, about 1⁄3 of the time in the workshop was devoted to diversity/inclusion topics, and I’d be very surprised if optimal resource allocation for a new manager is anywhere close to 1⁄3 time spent on diversity/inclusion.
A really important point hammered throughout the training is the importance of clear and upfront communication.
Again, I think this is something I could have figured out through my usual combination of learning about things (introspection, asking around, internet research), but having this hammered in me is actually quite valuable.
I find a lot of the specific tools they suggested intuitively useful (eg, explicit MOCHA diagrams) , but I think I have to put in work to use them in my own management (and indeed failed to do this my first week as a manager).
Yeah, I can also relate a lot (doing my PhD). One thing I noticed is that my motivational system slowly but surely seems to update on my AI related worries and that this now and then helps keeping me focused on what I actually think is more important from the EA perspective. Not sure what you are working on, but maybe there are some things that come to your mind how to increase your overall motivation, e.g. by reading or thinking of concrete stories of why the work is important, and by talking to others why you care about the things you are trying to achieve.
While talking to my manager (Peter Hurford), I made a realization that by default when “life” gets in the way (concretely, last week a fair amount of hours were taken up by management training seminars I wanted to attend before I get my first interns, this week I’m losing ~3 hours the covid vaccination appointment and in expectation will lose ~5 more from side effects), research (ie the most important thing on my agenda that I’m explicitly being paid to do) is the first to go. This seems like a bad state of affairs.
I suspect that this is more prominent in me than most people, but also suspect this is normal for others as well. More explicitly, I don’t have much “normal” busywork like paperwork or writing grants and I try to limit my life maintenance tasks (of course I don’t commute and there’s other stuff in that general direction). So all the things I do are either at least moderately useful or entertaining. Eg, EA/work stuff like reviewing/commenting on other’s papers, meetings, mentorship stuff, slack messages, reading research and doing research, as well as personal entertainment stuff like social media, memes, videogames etc (which I do much more than I’m willing to admit).
if “life” gets in the way and more of my hours get taken up so my normal tempo is interrupted, I find that by default I’m much more likely to sacrifice the important parts of my job (reading research and writing research) than I am to sacrifice timely things I sort of promised others on (eg, meetings, doing reviews, etc), or entertainment/life stuff.
An obvious solution to this is either to scale all my work hours proportionally down or even disproportionately scale down meetings and reviews so more of my focused hours is spent on doing the “hard stuff”, but logistically this feels quite difficult and may not play nice with other people’s schedules. Another obvious solution is to have a much higher “bar” before letting life get in the way of work time, but this also seems unappealing or unrealistic.
The only real consistent exception is if I’m on a tight external deadline (eg promise X funder to deliver Y by Z date), in which case I’m both more likely to apologetically sacrifice meetings etc and to cut down on entertainment (the latter of which is not fun and intuitively doesn’t feel sustainable, but perhaps I’m overestimating the unsustainability due to the obvious sources of motivated reasoning).
So at the core, I believe that on top of my usual time management problems, I think I’m especially bad at doing important + nonurgent tasks when my normal flow is broken. This results in a pattern where I only get most of my real work done either a) on urgent timescales or b) when flow isn’t broken and I actually have my normal schedule uninterrupted. Since many important work isn’t urgent and having schedules interrupted is annoyingly common for me, I’m in search of a (principled) solution to this problem.
Somewhat related: Maker’s schedule vs manager’s schedule (though I think the problem is much less extreme for me than most forms of programmer flow).
I liked this, thanks.
I hear that this similar to a common problem for many entrepreneurs; they spend much of their time on the urgent/small tasks, and not the really important ones.
One solution recommended by Matt Mochary is to dedicate 2 hours per day of the most productive time to work on the the most important problems.
https://www.amazon.com/Great-CEO-Within-Tactical-Building-ebook/dp/B07ZLGQZYC
I’ve occasionally followed this, and mean to more.
So framing this in the inverse way – if you have a windfall of time from “life” getting in the way less, you spend that time mostly on the most important work, instead of things like extra meetings. This seems good. Perhaps it would be good to spend less of your time on things like meetings and more on things like research, but (I’d guess) this is true whether or not “life” is getting in the way more.
This is a really good point, I like the reframing.
This seems like a good topic for a call with a coach/coworker because there are a lot of ways to approach it. One easy-to-implement option comes from 80k’s podcast with Tom Kalil: “the calendar is your friend.”
In Tom’s case, it was Obama’s calendar! I have a more low-key version I use. When I want to prioritize research or writing, I will schedule a time with my manager or director to get feedback on a draft of the report I’m writing. It’s a good incentive to make some meaningful progress—hard to get feedback if you haven’t written anything! - and makes it a tiny bit easier to decline or postpone meetings, but it is still somewhat flexible, which I find really useful.
This resonated with me a lot. Unfortunately, I do not have a quick fix. However, what seems to help at least a bit for me is seperating planning for a day and doing the work. Every workday the last thing I do (or try to do) is look at my calendar and to do lists and figure out what I should be doing the next day. By doing this I think I am better at assessing at what is important, as I do not have to do it at that moment. I only have to think of what my future self will be capable of doing. When the next day comes and future self turns into present self I find it really helpful to already having the work for the day planned for me. I do not have to think about what is important, I just do what past me decided.
Not sure if this is just an obvious way to do this, but I thought it does not hurt to write it down.
Side question: what was the management training you took, and would you recommend it?
I think that all of us RP intern managers took the same 12-hour management training from The Management Center. I thought that there was some high-quality advice in it but I’m not sure if it applied that much to our situation of managing research interns. I haven’t been to other such trainings so I can’t compare.
Thanks salius! I agree with what you said. In addition,
A lot of the value was just time set aside to thinking about management, so hard to separate that out without a control group
(but realistically, without the training, I would not have spent ~16 (including some additional work/loose threads after the workshop) hours thinking about management in one week.
So that alone is really valuable!
I feel like the implicit prioritization for some of the topics they covered possibly made more sense for experienced managers than people like me.
For example, about 1⁄3 of the time in the workshop was devoted to diversity/inclusion topics, and I’d be very surprised if optimal resource allocation for a new manager is anywhere close to 1⁄3 time spent on diversity/inclusion.
A really important point hammered throughout the training is the importance of clear and upfront communication.
Again, I think this is something I could have figured out through my usual combination of learning about things (introspection, asking around, internet research), but having this hammered in me is actually quite valuable.
I find a lot of the specific tools they suggested intuitively useful (eg, explicit MOCHA diagrams) , but I think I have to put in work to use them in my own management (and indeed failed to do this my first week as a manager).
Thanks, good to know!
Yeah, I can also relate a lot (doing my PhD). One thing I noticed is that my motivational system slowly but surely seems to update on my AI related worries and that this now and then helps keeping me focused on what I actually think is more important from the EA perspective. Not sure what you are working on, but maybe there are some things that come to your mind how to increase your overall motivation, e.g. by reading or thinking of concrete stories of why the work is important, and by talking to others why you care about the things you are trying to achieve.