Analyse what you are doing
7.3 Managing your time 163
Grains of time
Grains of time are those small periods of time you gain during the day that you don’t use effectively – for example waiting for someone to turn up to a meeting, finding your
tutorial has been cancelled, sitting on the bus to college for 30 minutes and so on. Make sure you don’t waste these grains of time. Have something that you can pick
up quickly and do to fill these periods – for example, some revision notes with you that you can read on the bus, a notebook log book so that you jot down some ideas, the
morning’s post that you can sort through. You’ll be surprised at how productive you can be when you make good use of those grains of time.
Email
You will undoubtedly use email during the course of your project – contacting friends, clients, users, your supervisor and others. Although email is an invaluable tool for com-
munication, it can waste a lot of your time too. You will probably receive a lot of junk email or spam that takes time to deal with, and you might also spend a lot of time com-
posing messages or replies when a simple response or telephone call would do. Following are some useful tips for managing your email effectively:
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Make use of mailboxes to store messages that you have dealt with. Try to keep your email inbox as small as possible. If you receive an email that can be dealt with quickly
something needing a quick reply, for example, do it there and then. The message can then be deleted or moved to an appropriate mailbox if you want to keep a record
of it. In this way your inbox should only contain five or six long-term items that you need to keep an eye on or do something about.
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Make use of your email system’s filtering and anti-spam facilities.
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Some email systems provide two windows when viewing emails – one with a list of emails recently received the inbox, and another showing some of the content of the currently
selected message. You can skip through your list of recently received emails in your inbox and glance at their content in this other window. In this way you should be able to read
most of what you need from a message without actually opening it and you should also be able to spot spam or junk email which you can delete straight away.
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Set up signatures so that you can quickly add your name and contact details to an email you are composing without having to type these details out each time.
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Keep your list of contacts up-to-date in your address book so you can quickly com- pose an email to someone you know rather than having track down and type out
their email address each time.
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If you have been away for some time and you find you have a large number of emails in your inbox, you can quickly sort out junk mail and spam by ordering the messages
according to who sent them. You may well find that the same company or organisa- tion has sent you several unwanted messages sometimes the same one several times
and you can quickly select these and delete them all in one go.
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If you are away from your email for some time over a week, for example you may want to set up some sort of message forwarding or auto reply system that informs
people that you are away. In this case, if people are expecting an urgent response from you, they will be informed of your absence.
164 Chapter 7
n Controlling your project
Unfinished business
It may appear obvious, but until a task is completed, it is never actually finished. Don’t start things that you will not finish. All the time you commit to half completing a task is
wasted unless you finish that activity off.
Interruptions
Everyone is subject to interruptions of one kind or another in their work: people calling in to see you, the phone ringing, people asking you to do things, etc. Some of
these are unavoidable, but it is how you deal with them that counts. One way to deal with interruptions is to avoid them by finding a ‘hide away’. This might be a quiet
place in your university’s library where you know you won’t get disturbed. You might want to put a notice on your door saying ‘do not disturb’ or go away for the weekend
to get away from it all. If you do find that you are constantly being asked to do things you also need to learn to say ‘no’. Don’t deal with junk mail – just bin it. Remember
your priorities, and if your project is due in, you must avoid doing other things and focus all your energies on it.
Perfectionism
Don’t fall into the trap of trying to be perfect at everything you do. It can take a lot of time to improve something you do from ‘good enough’ to perfect. This time is
wasted. For example, if you need to reply to a letter, don’t waste time drafting out and redrafting a reply on a word processor with figures, clever fonts and letter heads. If you
can, write a brief reply on the letter itself and post that back. If a brief reply is all that is required, do it.
Losing things
You can often waste a lot of time through your own inefficiency with data, files, doc- umentation and papersarticles. Keep things in good order and references up-to-
date, and have a means of managing all your paperwork. Gather together things you will need for a task before you start work. This will stop your concentration being
broken and wasting time getting back ‘up-to-speed’ when you return from finding the things you need. Think about ways of managing your software back-ups too –
for example, by using date-stamping or version numbers. Section 6.9 presented some ideas on this issue.
Short breaks
Sometimes work can get too much for you and you need to take a break. A useful tip here is to make a note of where you are up to and what you were intending to do next
when you take a break from your work for example, when you have finished your work for the day. This will save time later when you return to work and you try to
remember what you were doing.
7.4 Working with your supervisor 165
Long breaks
Because student projects can last for six months or longer, it is often the case that you will be away from your university for holidays, term breaks and field trips, etc. – times
when you will not be able to do any detailed work on your project. While it is useful in this case to make notes as outlined in the ‘Short breaks’ section above, it is also useful to
try to keep your project ‘ticking over’ during longer breaks from your work. For exam- ple, is there a book or journal article you could be reading while you are away? Could
you work on some designs or requirements or could you proof read your report, etc.?
Make sure you do not completely forget about your project for one or two months away. You will find it much easier to pick up where you left off when you
return if you have managed to do something no matter how small to keep it in your mind while away.
Log books
Many institutions insist that students maintain a log book during the course of their project and this can prove to be an invaluable resource. It will help you keep track of how
your project has progressed and where you are up to useful for short and long breaks. It can be a useful place to jot down ideas as they come to you whether you are on the
bus, in a lecture or wherever. It can be used during meetings with your supervisor – to minute the meeting, show what you have been doing and what ideas you have. You can
use it to record literature you have read and to note important references.
Log books can take many forms – from detailed diaries to loose-bound notes kept in a folder see Section 7.1.2. If your department has no formal requirements for a log
book, use an approach with which you are comfortable. You should ask your supervisor for their advice on this issue during one of your first meetings with them.
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