Managing Your Time

Balancing responsibilities as a GTA can be challenging. This section offers strategies for tracking, prioritizing, and scheduling your time effectively. Discover techniques to improve productivity, combat procrastination, and make time for personal well-being. Find tools and tips to tailor these strategies to your unique needs.

Many GTAs struggle to manage their time, whether they are new or experienced. This section provides advice and strategies, many of which can help all grad students juggling many responsibilities. However, your own circumstance may present additional challenges (such as childcare responsibilities, the need to work additional jobs to financially assist others, neurodivergence’s, etc.) that make some strategies less effective. You may find that other KU resources can provide support that is more specific to your needs.

Know Your Time

Knowledge is power, so the most essential step to better managing your time is to first understand how you spend it. Time tracking can help you better know your own needs and habit. For example, you may budget an hour to get ready each morning but discover that you consistently need more than that; there is nothing wrong with needing more time for certain tasks, but you can’t give yourself that time unless you know you need it!

Try to simply track how you spend your time over the course of about two weeks. There are many ways to track your time, both analog and digital. You can simply write down when you start and stop tasks using a notebook, a note-taking app, a spreadsheet, etc. You can also use free time-tracking apps, such as Toggl or Clockify to help you with this. There are also analog options, like planners with hourly schedules for each day or bullet journaling, that may work for you.

At the end of your tracking period, take stock of how you used your time:

  • Did you finish everything you intended to?
  • Which tasks or projects were most time consuming?
  • What times of day were you most productive?
  • How is your time allocated between your different responsibilities and projects?
  • Is the way you spent your time In line with what you hoped for or intended?

Prioritize Your Time

Prioritizing is often easier said than done, because we often tend to tack urgent projects first, regardless of their importance. To best use your time, it helps to distinguish between urgent tasks (those with an impending deadline) and important tasks (those that have major consequences for you). An Eisenhower matrix can help you categorize tasks to better prioritize your time.

One potential downside of the Eisenhower matrix method is that it doesn’t impose any actual time frame on your tasks. Methods that may help with this aspect are a Gantt Chart or the 5/4/3/2/1 approach. A Gantt Chart puts project tasks onto a timeline is a visual way, so that you can map out the steps toward your goals. For the 5/4/3/2/1, you first identify major goals, and then break these down into 5 year, 4 month, 3 week, 2 day, and 1 hour goals. This method can be helpful in breaking big projects down into smaller pieces.

Schedule Your Time

In addition, to scheduling your meetings and appointments on a calendar, you should also schedule time for work that you need or want to do. This includes both teaching-related tasks, like lesson planning and grading, and research-related tasks, like analysis and writing. Spend 30 minutes planning each coming week and protect your own work time the same way you’d protect any other time commitment. Each week:

  • Outline weekly tasks that align with your plan for the semester
  • Assign each of these tasks to a block of time
  • Troubleshoot tasks that don’t fit by delegating, asking for help, requesting an extension, reevaluating standards, etc.
  • Try to leave one day each week with no meetings
  • Be sure to leave unscheduled and unstructured time for planning, reflecting, etc.
  • Be realistic based on your time tracking data and don’t forget about travel time
  • Plan the most challenging tasks for times when you have the most energy

Use Your Time Effectively

It is so easy to procrastinate on important work! Sometimes, you spend so long getting set up perfectly to work that half the day is already gone. Other times, you work on less important but more interesting tasks. Using the Pomodoro technique or building a system of accountability for yourself might help you combat procrastination.

The Pomodoro technique lets you break a long workday into smaller blocks of time. It also helps you assess how long tasks actually take to complete, which can allow you to improve your planning in the future. Set a timer and work for that length of time (25 minutes is usually suggested as a baseline). When your timer goes off, take a short break (usually 5 minutes). It’s best if this is a screen-free break, especially if you are working on your computer. When your break is over, start your next work session. After four work sessions, take a longer break (generally the same length as your work sessions). 

Creating an accountability system for yourself can feel intimidating, but this is especially helpful for longer or more difficult tasks that don’t have a built-in deadline the coursework and teaching responsibilities often do. One way to do this is signing up for a group, such as the Writing Groups or Fridays on Fourth Write-Ins with KU’s Wingspan Center (aka the Writing Center). You can ask your friends or fellow graduate students to be “accountability buddies,” checking in regularly or meeting to work together. Working with others also give you the benefit of a “body double,” which many people find helpful. The basic idea of body doubling is that having another person present, even if they are working on different tasks, help create external accountability and allows you to stay more focused. You can also find writing communities online, such as through websites or social media groups.

Other things to look out for as you strive to be effective in your time use include identifying things that regularly rob you of time you thought you had. For example, by turning off email notifications to minimize interruptions, you might find you are able to get into a workflow more quickly. Or, you may have colleagues who like to stop by to chat and find that closing your office door while working on important tasks helps you work more effectively. Look for these ways you can maximize your available time.

Finally, remember to make time for yourself. Schedule time for physical movement, hobbies you enjoy, and socializing with other. Be careful about your time online, especially on social media, and fight the urge to compare your grad school journey with others’ paths. Prioritize your sleep and nutrition, so that you can recover from stress most effective. Fight the urge to make “being a stressed grad student” your identity!

Work Cited

Chapman, S. W. and Rupured, M. (2014, April 25). Time Management: 10 Strategies for Better Time Management. University of Georgia Extension. https://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=C1042&title=t…

Kroemer, T. How to Manage a Research Project in Graduate School. Gold Biotechnology. Gantt Directions from: https://goldbio.com/articles/article/how-to-manage-research-project-in-…