What are your best tips for productivity and project management?

This is probably not what you want to hear, but I procrastinated a lot in grad school, and learned a ton as a result. If you are a chronic procrastinator, consider the possibility that it may be for good reason.

However, I am busier now as a junior professor than I even have been, and I still struggle with time management and organization. I have tried nearly every method, tool, and system out there. They each have their merits, but they are all equally easy to ignore when you want to. I seem to always get to a point where I have a highly "effective" system running smoothly, and at some point I just ignore it completely for one reason or another. Maybe it is due to burnout or a curveball from life that exposes its (or my) inflexibility.

I always end up coming back to pen and paper (without necessarily making things neat and clever with tables, color codes or whatever else). For me, whatever tools I rely on should be truly simple---simple enough they can be picked up and put down or completely reworked fairly easily. Versatility is important to me, probably because I am more of a "plodder" than a planner. Plans are easier to break and ignore than they are to make.

Anyway, after a lot of time spent with various methods and systems, I learned that I cannot expect any of them to make me organized and efficient in my work. Life, for me, is too dynamic for that to be realistic without simply ignoring too much. Instead, I have grown to prefer tools and methods that help me organize information and manage time. This is why versatility and simplicity are important to me. I don't want an organization system to be a whole lifestyle in itself, because life changes frequently. Having reliable techniques available when you need them is helpful, but in order for them to be useful and applicable, they should be easy to pick up and put down when neccessary. The corollary to this (and this is the big lesson I have learned) is that minimizing the "stuff" in your life grabbing at your attention is the best way to manage it.

A project management board of some kind helps me a lot. I learned to use them at work and translated the practice to non-work applications.

I have a trello board for my home projects where I keep things like parts lists, paint colors, measurements, etc. My wife and I go over the board regularly to rearrange the priority of the items on the board and whenever one of us has some free time we know what to work on next.

I have boards for my hobby programming projects. I keep track of bugs, features I want to add, testing that needs to be done, that kind of thing.

You could do the same for your school work. Keep track of all of your projects and their due dates, make sub-tasks for research or whatever, and plan out your study sessions ahead of time so that you don't waste valuable time deciding what problem to approach first when you do have time.

I’ve read and tried multiple books and methods over the years. When I was 18 I got a moleskine with a promo code for Evernote and since then (12 years later) I have tried everything from apps to books to systems.

At work I practice inbox 0 and David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

The most important part is to set up folders or tags in your email (we use outlook at work), keeping my inbox empty and either filing things as @action (something I have to do), or @waiting (something I’m waiting for someone else to do) or simply archiving everything else, has been fantastic for my email productivity and I work in an exceptionally high email volume job (100 emails a day).

In terms of note taking I keep a bullet journal (type that into YouTube to see what I mean). I mostly keep daily and monthly logs alongside a year long future log and special collections like vacation planning, business travel planning etc.

For my knowledge work and daily work notes I keep a running org-mode file. Org-mode is a part of the emacs text editor and it’s honestly the best todo app I’ve used. (I have tried a bunch including all the most popular ones).

I attribute most of my productivity to reading a lot of books, writing a lot in my bullet journal, keeping clean inbox and following up on items fast, and storing my todos and notes in org-mode. I’m also obsessed with stationary and find sketching, designing, writing with low fidelity tools like fat sharpie pens helps me to ideate a lot. I am from a mechanical engineering background, working in tech product management now, but I try to think and work like a product designer.

The busier I am, the more I track my deadlines, tasks, and even time box my schedule. Personally, I like to keep my tracking tools simple and as low-barrier as possible, otherwise I know I won't bother using them.

During grad school, I meticulously kept a physical daily planner that came with me everywhere, even colour-coding entries. I logged and tabbed deadlines, wrote down to-dos so nothing slipped my mind, and used it to prioritize my time. During the busiest couple of months, I went a step further and time-blocked every day into 30~60-minute increments to keep experiments, writing, and classes on schedule. I wrote these on a large month-view calendar so I could see everything at a glance.

In the working world, during busier times I make running to-do lists to dump tasks, organize them, and track them. I'm pretty basic, and mostly keep checkbox lists in One Note. Or, when I've had an overwhelming number of small tasks going on, I've gone a step farther and set up a simple Kanban-type board on my office wall using sticky notes (but, I do my best to avoid being that busy).

To others' points, there are lots of project management software options that you may find better suit you vs. my very analog methods. Eg, Trello, Asana, Monday.com; some open-source options but the names are completely escaping me at the moment... Or, you could consider relying on your phone's calendar to set alerts.

Ultimately, I think it's most important to find methods that suit you, so you'll actually use them.

While it can be a tedious task. A good work breakdown structure (wbs) will be your best friend. https://youtu.be/BVcd9uy9kuQ?si=GQ9mG9LvPyZY8a2P

The best organization systems are ones you stick with.

For me personally, that's a calendar on the fridge that my SO and I both jot down on to let each other know when we're busy, the built-in iOS reminder app that I use for short-term obligations (e.g. "water the plants tonight"), and most importantly: a todo.txt file on my computer desktop.

I've worked professionally as a project manager in the past, and for me, nothing was ever better than that damn plaintext file on the desktop. WBS, Kanban boards, and all the other PMBOK crap were just window dressing over bullet-point meeting notes, stored in a "notes" folder on the desktop as <date in YYYY-MM-DD format>-<meeting description>.txt.

For grad school, maybe you could save class notes as <date in YYYY-MM-DD format>-<class name>.txt and jot down a special signifier like [DUE DATE] - test on 2023-08-25 and then search your notes for that [DUE DATE] signifier whenever you want to check what's due. Bonus points for syncing that search up to a calendar automatically.

There's been plenty of ink spilled about standard formats for the todo file, but I make it up for the most part. The two important things to me are a status indicator (denoted by a -, ~, or X) and breaking things into sections - but the point I hope to convey is to keep it extremely simple and flexible, because doing so makes it easy to get information out of your head and into a place you can quickly reference it, with no distractions or barriers. Here's an example file:

--- Backburner ---

 - Replace lightbulb in garage
 - Sample frontend dashboarding libraries
    - grafana/plotly/bokeh?

--- Active ---

[-] Email Jim about the report due on Tuesday
    - Include the HMS file sent by Carol

[~] Push the new research platform prototype out
    - Soft deadline 2023-09-21, hard deadline 2023-09-30
    [-] Setup auth module to handle JWT handshake
    [X] tweak `lms/src/deploy/install.sh` to call the deployment script

--- Archive ---

<completed tasks that I copy & pasted from the Active section, in reverse cron order>

Based on what you've said in this thread so far, the easiest way for you to start might be a deadlines.txt file. Brain dump every due date for school and work, and whenever you sit down to start working, pick whatever seems most salient, tackle it, and mark it off the list.

So I’ve found the hardest part is just staying disciplined with any strategy I use. So any technique I’ve used works, but only as long as I’ve used those techniques.

Accountability is really the biggest assist. When somebody else can help keep you on task while you do that task. If you’re in college you can sometimes access learning centers and tutors who help you set goals and work towards those goals in a single sitting.

Outside of college you can pair up with another person and co-work. Basically you act as another person’s task keeper and they act as yours. So you both sit down and work for 45 minutes, and if the other person starts to drift you nudge them back on task and vice versa.

You can do this remotely as well. It requires an extra monitor and you and the other person screen share. Something about screen sharing in front of another person creates this somewhat competitive environment where it’s so much easier to bust ass and work. Ideally this would be somebody from the same company/school but you can do this with people working on other things as well.

Another trick I use blocking out my calendar to work on specific tasks. Set one hour windows with 15 minutes to get ready for a given task. Do not block your calendar to 100%, actually schedule some fuck off and make up time into your calendar.

Reorient your goals. You can break down tasks into smaller items to try and trigger the reward centers in your brain more frequently. If you have a lot of tasks, do all the small easy ones first just so you can build up momentum. Something I’ve been trying lately instead of breaking down tasks into smaller chunks is to orient my goals towards time on a task. I can reward myself for working on something for 45 minutes. This guarantees a sense of gratification even if I don’t finish a task, very useful for complex tasks, but I really like it because sometimes breaking stuff down into smaller stuff ends up chewing up time anyways.

Use a giant whiteboard to organize your goals. Make sure you use a bunch of different colored markers. This gives you a more physically tangible board to organize your goals on. You can toss in post it notes and create a physical Kanban / Trello style board.

The last trick is morning momentum. I don’t know why, but I have more energy and focus in the morning. Make it your goal to get all your actual work done before 2pm, then the remaining time in your day is to organize and prepare all your tasks for the next day. If you have the ability to schedule meetings with other people then pile it up at the end of the day where you’re better able to absorb info than perform tasks.

What are you struggling with? What problems are you facing? That’s a very broad subject, so some examples would help with advice.

I get easily overwhelmed by tasks and projects so I try to break them down into the smallest steps possible. So for example, going to the gym seems daunting or like too much to do when I'm feeling lazy, but just putting on my workout clothes is simple and easy. And once I'm dressed, it feels natural to just proceed with actually going.

I'm assuming you need project management for your non work stuff. I would recommend having as little project management as possible, it is a huge time sink and working on it makes your brain think you are accomplishing things when what you actually need to do is not getting done.

For me what works best is making a list of tasks and a calendar or something to easily see deadlines. Try to estimate the amount of effort each task is going to need and then try to fit them in your day to day. You are going to be rearranging these estimations often as new stuff come up or current tasks need more / less effort than expected, so don't put too much effort on them.

You can do all this on a notepad and a wall calendar, or on the default apps of your phone, or any of the billions of productivity apps that are out there, just remember that time learning those tools is not time working on what you need to do.

A friend recently reccomended this article on the todoist. The article has a quiz to reccomend a productivity style that meets where you're at. I thought it was interesting to see my results and Read about the different methods.

https://todoist.com/productivity-methods

I like simple productivity tools to avoid spending too much time just tracking. For my personal projects I try to let them be organically. When I feel like I'm not making progress and have too many projects started I'll use

• lists to gauge what I have going on
• prioritize
• focus on the top 1 or 2 projects I have time for

For time keeping I use reminders on my calendar. Then I don't worry what I'm missing, my phone reminds me.

What works for me is the bullet journal method. Not so much the pretty designer stuff but the actual method as described in the book. I always kept notes and a planner, but this (combined with Jira) is what's helped me keep on top of things since I became a team lead.

However, the best method really depends on your needs, type of work, and personal preference. I need my notes and planners to be physical items, but they morphed through years, and I tracked my tasks using everything from pre-printer planners to poster-sized pieces of paper on my wall. A researcher friend of mine tracks everything in Notability. Other people find that kanban boards are the most helpful. You got some really good recommendations in this thread; I'd suggest you think about what your needs are and what your personal planning style has been like so far, then make your choice accordingly. After all, you know yourself best :)

I honestly found this very difficult during my master's, because towards the end there was so little external structure for me to rely on -- I was just writing a thesis, so I didn't even have classes to force me to be in a particular place at a certain time. The biggest thing that helped me was graduating and starting to work in industry, where even though I work from home I have way more structure than I did during my master's (and way more guidance and personal attention from my boss than I ever got from my advisor 👀).

The next most helpful thing has been finding an app that works for me -- I've really liked Sunsama. It costs money but the free trial doesn't ask for your credit card and it won me over during that period. I organize my tasks and events there each morning during my "get settled and check my email" phase and it's worked well. But what works well for me might not work well for you, so consider it just a soft suggestion. Whatever you can find that works for you and that you can keep up with regularly is the right system.

I finished my graduate degree a few months ago and the biggest thing for me was having everything in a digital calendar (I use google's) in time blocks. I have my sleep and meals as a base-line structure and then I had my classes, but also deadlines and tasks I had to accomplish. Having something that actively notifies me of things is the most useful part of it for me.

Since my degree required me to finish a lot of group projects, I had the tasks assigned to me turned into mini deadlines, aiming to be done with them a few days before the actual delivery deadline to account for delays and just general Life getting in the way.

With that structure in place it was pretty easy to know when I should be working on stuff and on what and when it was fine to rest.

Personally, I've tried other methods too, like trello boards, bullet journaling, GTD, and many apps but nothing works for me quite like the time-blocking with notifications.

I've had a stint of working full-time in grad school. But that was well before the current vast array of gadgets and methodologies for project management. What kept me sane was a ring-bound paper one-year planner with day, week, month, and blank pages. It was basically a task- and deadline-focused version of a bullet journal. There was room for scratch notes, and I'd hang color-coded Post-It notes off the edges of day pages with critical deadlines for work, school, or personal life.

I've since ground through multiple professions and careers, often mingling project management and technical roles. There is no single strategy that works for every scenario. I've used Microsoft Project and OneNote, Evernote, Salesforce, Jira, Trello (Kanban-style task management, suitable for /u/DeaconBlue's recommendation), Asana, Wrike, Todoist, Zapier and IFTT automations... And these days, I find I'm doing nearly everything necessary through Microsoft Outlook/Excel/Word/StickyNotes and/or the Google equivalents. We're using Wrike for collaborative project work, and unfortunately, the project managers built out the templates for themselves, not for anyone else who has to use it.

For a "waterfall" type project, which is what writing a thesis usually comprises, there are three major time-dependent things to keep track of:

• milestones (the tasks whose completion is required for getting other work done);
• general tasks; and
• deadlines.

[I'm leaving aside the other details of big projects, like documenting (scope, requirements, budgets, design, etc.), scheduling labor hours for multiple contributors, logistics, budget, etc. For managing personal projects, you can do some of this to assure that you have a clear understanding of what you need to accomplish, but it's less essential when you don't have many projects stakeholders who need to remember their RACI roles.]

Milestones are usually the biggest items - they're the tasks that require the most effort, (e.g. "buy a car", "write a grant proposal", "gather requirements"). Milestones have lots of subtasks (e.g. "research car and insurance prices, get a loan", "investigate prior successful grants, schedule meetings with advisor and sponsors", "verify project scope and prior work done"), the subtasks might have their own prerequisites and dependencies, and all of it can be a dangerous drag on your project's progress if they aren't finished.

Charting out all of the waterfall milestones, tasks, and deadlines is what Microsoft Project was meant to do. The first problem is that the UI has had all kinds of other project methodologies, labor scheduling, budget reporting, and other bells and whistles grafted on, to the point that mastering the tool is a job only for full-time project managers (and even they swear at it more than is seemly).

The second problem is that you have to be able to envision your entire project from start to finish, with a rather granular idea of the tasks and approximate time each one takes. A change in requirements during a waterfall-type undertaking can mean redoing most of the work, at great cost in time and effort. This is why people can spend far more time specifying/designing/communicating the project and maintaining its documentation than executing the project tasks.

When you are the only manager/designer/implementor/customer, you can't eliminate the "project manager" role, but it can be much less time-consuming. You can easily make a GANTT chart in Excel, if you need that visualization - there's no need to pour your time into Project or other high-level tools.

Todoist is a much faster, simpler tool for personal project management. It's got good notifications, it's easy to organize, and it integrates easily with other tools. There's more flexibility than in Project or similar big PM products, for brainstorming new tasks as you go, deleting the unnecessary, rearranging tasks, making long annotations, and designing hierarchies. It can be used collaboratively, if needed.

Another thing I like about Todoist is that it supports Kanban cards. It gets complicated when you have to manage life + projects. Life is a lot more like Kanban, where you have buckets of independent tasks of greater or lesser urgency, with shorter timelines, fewer fixed deadlines, and less time spent coordinating with large groups of people. Todoist uses tags and labels for tasks, so you can designate items to show up in Kanban lists on your daily board. Ultimately, Todoist would be the tool I'd choose if I had to go through the life + grad school grind again. Remember the Eisenhower Matrix for prioritizing your task lists - it's easy to tag items as Q1, Q2, etc. as you add them. Pricing is comparatively inexpensive at $48/year, but the storage limitations mean it's not a one-stop shop for all your project documentation.

I'm assuming you're not a software developer, or in the development entourage of UI/UX designers, dev/ops, and other related roles. Jira is the workhorse tool for Scrum/Agile project management. The less said about it the better, from where I'm sitting (somewhere in "I've sat through your three-hour user story session to figure out what you want from my 15 minutes of configuration and provisioning work. This could have been an e-mail..."). On the other hand, Agile/Scrum is great for incorporating feedback from testing and requirements changes, with multiple short work cycles and no fixed, global definition of "done". You don't run so much risk of starting over from scratch. Agile is bad at incorporating dependencies on physical-world events, like delivery of equipment, travel, facility construction, etc.

I know this is kind of a brain dump, but one more essential thing... If you have a partner(s), maintain a shared calendar someplace, and put your "don't interrupt me", "I'm away", and "we're doing this together" time blocks and events on it. Harmony in your personal life is essential to effective professional life, and keeping each other in the loop is just part of good communication.