One of my younger colleagues was talking to me recently about how he struggles to manage his time at work. He often works long (10 hour or more) days, and usually blames this on the poor management skills of his supervisor and the managers of the projects he's working on. Only recently, has he started to entertain the thought that he might share some of the blame.
I don't know his supervisor well enough to know whether or not he is a good manager- all I can say is that he seems like a nice guy. One of the project managers in question is definitely quite poor. He is an excellent scientific lead, but actually takes pride in the fact that his project has no timeline. He is of the opinion that scientific projects can't have timelines. (I do not share this opinion, and we have other projects that would seem to be excellent counter-examples for him, but that is a subject of another post.) Needless to say, this causes a lot of problems for the departmental managers who are trying to balance their work load- they never know when this project is going to need material produced or studies run.
Regardless, my young colleague also bears part of the blame for his long hours. For one thing, he continues to work them without complaining up his management chain (complaining to me doesn't count- I run a completely different department and have almost no influence in his management chain). This sends the wrong information to his management- they can plausibly claim that they are unaware of any resource crunch. (I do not think this is true. I think anyone with two neurons to rub together could see the resource crunch, but that is also the subject of another post.) More importantly, though, my colleague isn't taking any steps to improve his use of time. I know, because I am the head of IT and I see the web usage logs, that he streams
a lot of video. I know, because I sit right next to him, that the video he streams is episodes of Top Gear and not anything related to his work. Now, I don't think it is my business to tell people how to spend the "down time" that inevitably occurs while experiments are running. Some experiments run for more than 8 hours, and sometimes, people need to just relax while they wait. This is why we don't block YouTube. However, I have also seen my colleague sitting at his desk after his experiments are done, working on reports. He is always complaining that he can't keep up with his notebook and his reports. A smart time manager would do the reports from previous experiments during the experimental downtime, and leave work earlier.
I've tried (at his request) to give my colleague some pointers- for instance, I've suggested breaking his tasks for the day down into lists, and prioritizing them so that he gets the things that absolutely have to be done
that day done first. He always has reasons why my ideas won't work. I suspect he thinks that I don't understand the constraints of experimental science, since I now work exclusively with computers. He forgets that my PhD work was 90% experimental. And anyone who thinks that computer work can't be a time sink has never chased a bug or fallen down the rabbit hole working on a difficult design issue.
All of this has got me thinking about how we learn to manage our time. Are time management skills something that we can learn, or are they largely a product of our personalities? I dont' remember ever explicitly learning how to manage my time. But maybe that is because I learned these skills when I was really young? I do not know. If we
can learn them, is there a "golden period" during which it is easier to learn them, similar to the way it is easier to learn a new language when we're young?
It has also reminded me of the marshmallow experiment. This was all over the web a while ago, but in case you somehow missed it, here's the synopsis: a researcher gives a 4 year old a marshmallow and tells him that if he can wait 15 minutes before eating it, he can have TWO marshmallows instead of one. The research team followed up with the kids much later, and discovered that the ability to delay eating the marshmallow was an amazing predictor for success- all of the kids who
could delay eating the marshmallow turned out to be "successful". Some of the kids who couldn't wait to eat the marshmallow turned out to be successful, too, but none of the kids with the ability to delay gratification turned out to be screw ups.
Here is
a TED talk on the subject, if you want to know more (and see some cute video of kids trying not to eat marshmallows).
Hubby was very taken by this experiment. He read more, and learned that in South Korea, they were trying to develop curriculum to teach the ability to delay gratification. I thought this was perhaps taking the conclusions from a small research study a bit far, but oh well- it probably isn't doing any harm. Hubby wanted to try to teach Pumpkin, too. He would give her some M&Ms with her snack, but would dole them out slowly, throughout the snack, and would try to convince her that this was the better way. I just laughed at him. She was only two, after all! Of course, she wanted to eat all of her M&Ms NOW. She wanted everything NOW.
But Hubby may have the last laugh. Last Thursday, Pumpkin got two M&Ms right before day care, because she went pee on the potty. She asked for a brown one and a blue one. She ate the brown one right away. Then she rode the entire way in to day care (about 20 minutes) carefully holding the blue one between her thumb and her forefinger. She wanted to show her blue M&M to one of her favorite teachers. We got to day care, and she walked up to her teacher, showed her the M&M, and only then did she eat it.
So, did Hubby teach her the ability to delay gratification? Or was that just something that was always going to be part of her personality? We'll never know. And does this mean that she's guaranteed to go on to a "successful" life? I don't think I'll count on that just yet.
book, but she doesn't always need to eat when she wakes up and she already goes to sleep for the night on her own- as in we put her down awake- so I'm not really sure what that training will entail).