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A recent Harvard Business Review article offers some advice for people who are assigned multiple projects at once. And that’s all of us, isn’t it? Faculty are evaluated on their teaching, scholarship, service, continuing professional development, and contributions to student development. That’s a lot of projects to juggle at one time. (And staff, I admit that I don’t know the terms of your contracts, but I doubt your evaluation criteria are much easier.)
HBR recommends the following steps:
- Look at the big picture by mapping out all of your projects (committees, manuscripts, courses, etc.). Prioritize the projects, break them into chunks, and work on them one at a time. Few people actually multitask, and all that serial task switching slows you down more than you realize.
- Block out time to work without interruptions, scheduling the most important or complex tasks for the days and times when you’re at your most alert.
- When working with a team, communicate clearly and often. Your messages don’t have to be long, but they do have to let others know the status of your portion of the work.
- Approach the experience as professional development. As long as you’re working with the other people who are experts in their own right, take advantage of the opportunity to broaden your skills or knowledge by learning from them.
- Schedule time for reflection. Sure, you have three other projects waiting in the wings, but taking a few moments to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what you’ll do differently the next time will make you more efficient the next time.
Last week, Amazon delivered my copy of Agile Faculty: Practical Strategies for Managing Research, Service, and Teaching. The author of the book, Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark, teaches professional communication at Elon University. I have known Rebecca for nearly a decade, and in the past several years she has been adapting ideas from fields like software development and product design into practices for managing productivity. In Agile Faculty, she applies the Agile project management framework to faculty workload.
What is Agile and why should you care about it? The Agile method breaks up large projects into chunks, then schedules each chunk into a block of time. The chunk can be big or little, but it must be complete by the end of the sprint, or pre-determined block of time. (I’m no expert on this, but there are a couple of folks up in IT Solutions who are. You can also learn more about Scrum, a variation of Agile, at https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-scrum)
There seem to be two important steps that anyone can start using today:
- Break big projects into smaller tasks. For example, even these weekly emails consists of five steps: (1) gathering information about upcoming events, (2) brainstorming ideas for the week's teaching and learning tip, (3) researching the topic as needed, (4) writing a draft, (5) proofreading the draft, (6) emailing it to the faculty and staff.
- Choose a few tasks each week and commit to finishing them before you leave for the weekend. This is the crucial part! Be realistic about the amount of time you can give to those projects. If your schedule is filled with candidate visits or if you're collecting a big assignment on Tuesday, chances are you won't have much time left over for your project. Pick one or two and wait for next week to do more, but you must complete the ones you choose.
I’m hoping to invite Rebecca to join us for a workshop in March, but in the meantime, think about a project you’re working on.
- How would you divide the project into chunks?
- Can you divide those chunks into even smaller pieces? How small can those pieces get?
- What piece(s) could you complete by Friday?
- What piece(s) could you complete by next Friday?
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