Time Management Tactics for Unstructured Work

Time can get away from you, especially when your day is unstructured, or if you’re working from home. Here’s a tactical playbook for reclaiming control over your days.

A distinguishing aspect of a research career — particularly in academia — is the unstructured nature of the job.

Graduate students, research scientists, professors, and postdocs are generally masters of their own time. Although this autonomy can be liberating, it can also result in tremendous inefficiency if one does not develop effective time-management tactics.

There are countless books on time management, and it is impossible to provide a comprehensive compendium of time-management tactics in a single post. Hence, what I aim to do in this post is identify specific time management tactics that may be useful for people who work in an unstructured environment. If I could recommend just one book I’ve read on time management in the past couple of years, I would instead recommend a book on habits, which is the foundation of time management:

• Atomic Habits by James Clear has tons of useful tips on how to structure your workflow and schedule to achieve big tasks with an accumulation of small tactical steps.
• Cal Newport’s Deep Work is another excellent book; some of my tactics below are essentially versions of tactics that he suggests in his book (e.g…