On Practical Time Management

Self-reflection leads to sustainable time management, with a personal case study

Feb 18, 2025

Effective time management has spawned an entire productivity industry—apps, tricks, and hacks promising efficiency. Strategies range from laissez-faire to drill sergeant-type obsessivity. Yet, no silver bullet exists, as case studies of the world's best and brightest show.

This comes with the promise of finding a suitable strategy in the end and with the challenge of succumbing to many methods if you do not know yourself. The procrastinator needs strategies that are different from those of a perfectionist. If you are both, well, you guessed it will be more complicated.

Know thyself

The first step is self-reflection to determine what is important and what works for you. Some questions to ask yourself

Do you spend hours at the coffee machine (it is a good thing on its own!)?
Are you prone to doomscroll?
Can you focus when working from home? In a coffee shop?
When can you focus, and when are you creative?
When do your best ideas come?

Identify when you work best—and protect that time at all costs.

One key factor is your chronotype (think night owl vs. early bird). Your current sleep schedule might not reflect your optimal rhythm. I transitioned from an owl to a lark years ago and haven’t looked back.

So what?

Your chronotype affects when you are best at creative and focused work. I protect my mornings at all costs, i.e., no early meetings. Starting the day with focused work lets me accomplish the important and gives me a sense of accomplishment, even if I get drowned in emails or red tape in the afternoon. On the other hand, my creative work goes well even in the afternoon.

Focus beats effort: the rule of three

The amount of hours you work has diminishing returns. For focused work, our limit is around 1.5 hours (called one ultradian cycle) three times a day—but this needs to be built up slowly.

A sticker on my monitor reminds me of "The Rule of Three"—if I have three bouts of focus1, I am happy for the day.

Constraints help

Too much time can lead to procrastination. Counterintuitively, constraints can kickstart progress and invite focus. After building up momentum, maintaining it is easier. Scheduling dinner with a friend or a call with family forces you to finish work—granted that your load is realistic.

Consistency is Key

Consistency is what matters. A bad day is OK, but a bad week calls for rethinking your approach. Work on raising the floor rather than shooting for the stars on any single day. As the math tells you, sustainable progress has the best returns in the long term.

Hemingway always stopped short when he still knew what to write. That's what you are looking for: not burning out by putting in 14-hour days.

Corollary: seasonality

Academia is seasonal: think semesters or conferences. This means aligning yourself with this seasonality. Intentionally pushing for a short bout is OK. But doing it for every deadline will lead you to burnout.

Plan ahead. Writing your first paper in the last two weeks is OK. Doing it all over again is not. Lack of sleep can have similar effects as alcohol consumption, and you probably want your creativity and sanity intact.

Offload your memory

You don’t need to remember everything, so offload trivia. Meeting times go into a calendar, to-dos in a notebook/notetaking system. This frees up the mental capacity to focus on important problems.

Plan on multiple levels, flexibly

Years ago, I scheduled every task, leading to constant frustration as things took more time. Now, I combine Cal Newport's multi-scale planning approach with flexibility:

Formulate quarterly goals,
Set the intention for a week, and
Identify the tasks for the day

I do this without time blocking, which provides a supporting structure without frustration.

For example, my quarterly goal might be a submission at a conference; for the week, I want to prove a theorem, and for the day, I am checking whether an assumption makes sense.

Expect the unexpected

Things will go wrong. You cannot predict what, but you can be sure that urgent matters will derail your plan. So ask yourself in advance: what could go wrong?

Put in buffers accordingly for meetings2 and tasks. You will need to revise the paragraph, change the plot, and rerun the experiment. Will you have the time for it?

Life will also throw interesting opportunities at you like talks to attend or people to meet. You might think (as I did for a while) that these are interruptions. You can seize these opportunities if your schedule is supple enough to adapt.

Do something else

One of the best antidotes to get through failures and lack of motivation at work is not improving your willpower but leaving your desk and doing something else. Meet friends and have a hobby (preferably move a bit, even if it's just a walk around the block).

A personal case study

My first conference submission was an (in hindsight) ridiculously overhyped and overstressed - with a lot of fun, sure, but with an unhealthy level of obsession.

I believe that a PhD is about learning, so let me share my latest experience of how I tried to apply what I preach above. The conference had a submission deadline on January 30th. Sprinkle in the Christmas season and my delightful travels eating up the first 15 days of December, you can see that this was a perfect test of whether I can outplay the deadline crunch3. As the pressure would increase towards the deadline, I started chipping away on the two submissions during the holidays. But I did not forgo rest. I spent days with my family, recharging my batteries. But I did trade in small bouts of work for reduced stress in the future.

Bboth projects had a good starting point in January. The least, the psychological hurdle of the blank page was gone. From then on, I went into execution/logistics mode. The meetings we had with both teams had an agenda, we were focusing on who should do what by when. Our plans were distrubed—but in a team, someone could take up the slack. Setting up constraints like doing sports and approximately keeping my bedtime helped me to focus.

I was not single-mindedly obsessed: progress in any other walk of life made me think about the day as a success—even if we decided to scrap and restructure one paper's core on the very last day. Also, I operated in psychological safety: it was safe to fail, which dampened the stress. Admittedly, I scaled down exploratory coffee chats with friends, but I did not eliminate them. I used them “strategically” to recharge my battery4.

Key Takeaways

It wasn't perfect, but hopefully, you see the arc of improvement. To recap:

Know how and when I work the best to set meta-objectives of what you want to achieve
Plan, but expect the unexpected to reduce stress
Do things outside of work to release pressure and keep spirits high
Sleep enough to have the mental clarity and energy to perform