Time Management & Planning: Home

This guide aims to break down the ideas and skills behind time management and planning into manageable tabs. It is written with researchers in mind, but anyone can use and apply the information in this guide to their lives.

The first tabs focus on:

• Your Resources: A key aspect of planning is more than time management; it's really managing several resources including time, energy, and attention. 
• Alignment & Accountability: Thinking about the "why" behind what you do and how you respond to different types of expectations. 

Then, the process of planning and resource management is divided into four key phases to provide a general structure:

1. Capture
2. Schedule
3. Execute & Track
4. Reflect

The hope for the resources provided is that you will choose (and maybe even experiment with) the strategies that you think might work best for your particular situation. No one strategy works for everyone; it is about finding the system and strategies that work for you and your current circumstances. 

The last tab of this guide provides an overview of various tools that you might use for time management and planning. 

Image Credit: Ph.D. Comics (Jorge Cham)

You will see use of the word "productive" many times throughout this LibGuide. How we each define what productive means is going to vary from individual to individual; thus, the process of time management and planning is heavily individualized. There has been a lot of recent focus on sustainable success and slow productivity, especially in the face of burnout. I strongly encourage you to contemplate the question: what does healthy productivity and sustainable success look like for you?

Additional Reading & Resources: 

• "Slow productivity worked for Marie Curie--here's why you should adopt it, too" (Gulland, 2024, Nature)