Time Management

This is a 101 collection of classic time management tools. It helps you to become more productive or more relaxed (which in turn will make you more productive).

I wrote everything here with the needs of PhD students and postdocs in life science laboratories in mind. You may find it useful if you work in a different field, although you may find the biologists’ humour hard to understand.

I hope the time you spend reading this ebook will be time well spent ;-)

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Contents

• Quotes on Time
• Multitasking does not work
• Activity Log
• SMART Goals
• Prioritizing with the Covey Matrix
• Five Options
• 10 Ways to say No
• Focus with Pomodoro
• Using a Kanban Board
• Burndown Charts
• The four Gears of Work
• The best goal is no goal
• When the Time Fairy knocks
• Basic Time Managemant Tools

Trainers Guide

• Instructions for Trainers
• Workshop Overview
• Icebreaker
• Preparations
• Warm-up exercises
• Managing Tasks Exercise
• Poster session
• Question & Anwser Session

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Sources

The sources of this document, all images and material for exercises can be found on https://github.com/krother/time_management.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jörn Manz for sparking my interest in Time Management, the PhD students Kasprzak J, Milanowska K, Musielak M, Philips A and Puton T for helping me field-test, Toastmasters International for many hours of practical expertise as a trainer and Wojciech Potrzebowski for the opportunity to present this content before a large audience.

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License

© 2023 Dr. Kristian Rother (kristian.rother@posteo.de)

Distributed under the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike License 4.0. See creativecommons.org for details.

You are allowed to modify and share this material, or even use it in a commercial setting, given that you attribute the author. So ideally you get rich, both of us get famous and everybody else gets their work done :-)