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: n 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. n Make use of your email system’s filtering and anti-spam facilities. n 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. n 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. n 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. n 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. n 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. •

7.4 Working with your supervisor

7.4.1 What is a supervisor? A ‘supervisor’s primary professional responsibility is to develop his or her research students so that they can think and behave as independent academic and scholarly researchers in the field of study concerned.’ Cryer 2006: 47 One of the main resources of your project is your supervisor and, as such, how you get along with and how you use this individual needs effective managing. Chapter 3 dis- cussed some ideas on how you should choose your supervisor if this is possible within your own institution and what to look for in him or her. The purpose of this section is to discuss ways in which you can make effective use of your supervisor during the course of your project. Although most institutions have similar guidelines for the supervisorstudent re- lationship at the research degree level, for taught degrees institutions have quite dif- ferent rules, expectations, roles and responsibilities for supervisors. Some institutions 166 Chapter 7 n Controlling your project will expect you to work very closely with your supervisor, perhaps meeting with him or her regularly each week during the course of your project. Other institutions pre- fer to emphasise the independent nature of project study and would only expect you to see a supervisor on rare occasions for advice and guidance. The role of your supervisor can also differ. Blaxter et al. 2006: 138 identify two roles that a supervi- sor can perform: n A manager n An academic advisor. As a manager, your supervisor is responsible for managing your project in ‘a more general sense’. She will be concerned with your overall progress; are you meeting the milestones you have set for yourself? Are you coping with your project and balancing it with other commitments? Your supervisor will also be concerned with ensuring you are following institutional guidelines as part of this role. For example, are you aware of all the guidelines, regulations plagiarism and copyright issues, for example and assess- ment requirements relating to your project? Are you producing the right documenta- tion at the right time? As a manager, your supervisor should also advise you on which procedures to follow to submit your dissertation, what forms to complete, how to lay out the report and when to hand material in. A supervisor also arranges access to appropriate hardware and software for you as well as for you to attend appropriate courses, seminars and conferences. As an academic advisor, your supervisor is more concerned with the ‘academic’ or technical content of your project. Are you reading the right journals and books? Are you following the correct research and data gathering methods? Are you performing the right analyses? Are you developing your software in the correct way, etc.? You may need your supervisor’s academic expertise to advise you where to go next, what areas to develop further, to clarify particular topics, provide technical help with programming or design issues, to advise you which techniques and tools to use, and to discuss recent developments in your technical field. You should also expect your supervisor to tell you where you are going wrong; for example, is the academic quality of your work not up to the standards required for your course? The University of Warwick 1994: 24 list the following areas which your supervisor should be able to advise you on when acting in an academic capacity: n research design and scheduling n literature surveys n theoretical and conceptual development n methodological issues n development of appropriate research skills n data collection and analyses. Sometimes you will also need your supervisor to act in a pastoral role for you. Under this role your supervisor will be more concerned with your emotional and general well being. Are you maintaining your motivation? Are you under pressure from other work? Have you any personal problems that she can help you to deal with?