Billable Hours - Brady

I've been struggling for awhile with how to manage my time in graduate school. As nice as the flexibility of a student's schedule is, it can be hard to make yourself sit down and work on something that won't be due for months. And I think that time management is a big reason some people stay in PhD programs forever. (Which I do not want to do.)

Last quarter I started experimenting, trying out ways of organizing my time. I first tried working 9-5 every weekday. That was okay, except I ended up doing what a LOT of 9-5 workers do - which is procrastinating (making a snack, surfing the internet, etc.) instead of completing actual important projects. Plus, I was missing out on one of the cool benefits of being a grad student - freedom to decide where and when I want to work.

After that I tried setting goals for each week. I had to work until I met them. That meant that if I dilly-dallied I'd end up putting in hours over the weekend, but if I was super productive and finished all my goals by Thursday, Friday was all mine! No school! The problem with that strategy was that I'm not a good judge yet of how long research or writing an academic paper is going to take. And many of my goals are really long-term, so in order to make this system work I would have had to spend a bunch of time breaking down big goals into little ones. And I just didn't want to.

But now I've got it. I borrowed the idea of "billable hours" from lawyers. In the legal world, a billable hour is an hour in which an attorney is working on something for a client - something they can charge for. Many law firms have billable hour requirements for their staff. I appropriated this model and made myself my own boss. Every month, I have to "bill" 160 hours (40 hours a week for 4 weeks). "Billing" an hour means actually working on something - being in class, reading for school, running statistics for a project, etc. If I take a break to check my email or read a blog or make a snack, I have to stop counting time. This forces me to be productive but allows me the grad student flexibility I really enjoy. If one day I have to do a long run, for example, and don't want to get started with work until 10 a.m., I can just bill that 9-10 hour another time.

(Oh, and I have a detailed spreadsheet where I keep track of this. Nerd alert.)

This also gives me a chance to read interesting books or articles in my field that I'm not formally assigned for a class. For example, two weeks ago I had a light school week (called Spring Break) and didn't have 40 hours of "billable" work to do. So I made some - I read a book by the founder of Teach for America. I think exposing yourself to lots of different intellectual ideas, even if they're not part of the official curriculum of your program, is important in grad school.

So that's my brilliant solution. I'm loving it so far, and I think it will serve me well when I'm completely done with classes and have to depend on self-motivation to complete a dissertation.