Tackling overwhelm: the think-want-do framework

Having far too much to do is, by far, the most frequent thing I see holding course participants or coaching clients, back from turning their ideas into grant applications, and refining those to increase their chances of success. People feel lost, overwhelmed, and as if they are simply drowning in a sea of small, but vital to-dos that must be done as part of the day job before they can free up time to think ahead and turn their research ideas into grant applications.

Having far too much to do, far more than can actually be achieved in a day, is a common problem for many people, and extends far beyond academia. For some it results in overwhelm, and yet others seem to cope, or possibly even thrive! When it comes to research grants though, I strongly suspect that these feelings are reinforced by only a chance of success with a grant application vs the necessity of marking, or student supervision, in other words inevitably focusing on grant applications, whilst important, gets put off, and put off, until it becomes BOTH important AND urgent, driven by a submission deadline, or a growing clamour by a head of department, or our prospects of promotion.

For those that thrive on to much to do, you’ll still manage to get done all that you want to get done, for those that don’t over the next few months you’ll see a series of blog posts appearing here which will share tools, which whilst they can’t magically take away any excessive pressure to do, they hopefully will help you tackle the overwhelm that is probably holding you back!

The first tool I’d like to share is the THINK-WANT-DO framework; a time management method that will enable you to analyse where your time is actually going, compare that to what will actually serve your long-term goals and thereby be able to do something about the time traps that don’t serve you! As usual, this blog will give you all the info you need to use the tool, and to make life even easier for our Inner Circle members there’s a downloadable template within the Inner Circle members only area. The inner circle is FREE to join, and will remain so, having resources within our online course platform simply makes it easier to see which tools are most helpful and the keeping everything up to date process easier on the RiF admin team! You can access the template here: https://onlineaccess.researchinfocus.com/products/rif-inner-circle/categories/2156589807/posts/2183102585

The think-want-do framework is extremely simple to share, but will take time to actually implement, though my hope in sharing this is that it will be a good investment because you’ll have data which will underpin positive change for you:

1: Decide which area of life (or all) you want to analyse e.g. just my professional activities, or my whole life, or just my home life.

2. Brainstorm what categories of activities fall into that area of life e.g. large group teaching (lectures), preparing for large group teaching, small group/individual teaching (tutorials), small preparing for group/individual teaching (tutorials), supporting teaching (marking), preparing grant applications, supporting PG students, supporting PDRAs, etc., group admin, departmental admin, supporting colleagues with their grant applications, etc.
3. Cast a critical eye over the list of activities you’ve come up with. A later step will be using these to actually measure your time. Does this look feasible, do you need more/less granularity in your categories?
4. Think: estimate how much time you think you spend on a particular category of task and then put that aside, do NOT look at your estimate until you have completed all other tasks!
5. Want: write down how much time you’d ideally like to spend on each of these categories. Be pragmatic; whilst I’m sure there are activities you’d rather not do, they might be legal, or moral requirements that cannot be missed, or perhaps even delegated.
6. Do: now you’re going to measure what you actually do each day. A number of techniques can help, try one, if it doesn’t work for you, try something else until you’ve come up with a system that you think is workable for at least a week:
7. a) every 15 minutes starting at the point you first start that part of your life write down on a piece of paper, or within an app what you were mainly doing for the preceding 15 minutes e.g. if you were marking whilst commuting, and you want to measure what time is expended where in a professional context, you probably want to note marking rather than commuting. You may find that you need to increase, or decrease the time gap to capture the level of detail that is useful to you. There’s a template that you might find useful here.
8. b) if you spend almost all of the part of your life that you wish to measure on a phone, tablet, or computer, you can use one of the numerous apps available (which are changing all the time, so I’m not going to provide a list!) to automatically track what you are doing, and provide the analysis to you.
9. c) if you’re already a fan of time blocking on your calendar, just analyse what that tells you. To do this successfully you may need to adjust the actual time allocated by how long the activity/task actually took, then you’ll have a realistic time spent analysis.
10. d) once you have a workable system measure what you do for at least a week. If you’re measuring a professional academic life it is almost certain that your activities will vary significantly during the year, therefore it would be advisable to re-do this measuring activity in different representative periods.
11. Once you have a representative sample of where you’re actually spending your time, compare; where you’re actually spending time to where you thought you were and where you’d like too. What gaps between thought/desire and reality exist? Where are you spending more time than you’d like, where less and where are there significant differences between what you think you’re doing and what you’re actually doing?
12. Lastly, develop an action plan. How can you get reality closer to your desired situation? Given that there is little chance of reducing our to-do lists to only things which can be accommodated within the time available it’s likely that hard decisions will have to be made! Which things will you do less well than you potentially could in order to make them fit within a pre-determined maximum time? Can you delegate anything? Can you simply NOT do something? Hard decisions like this will be needed to free up opportunity to spend more time on things you want to do, or that will help move you toward a compelling long term vision for that area of your life.

Re-prioritising our time can be non-obvious and tricky; after all if it were obvious we would have done it by now! Likewise, handling the reactions of others when we take more control of our time and energy can be challenging, especially if we are just starting out in our careers, or feel we have some sort of moral responsibility to those following us (lone, or one of very few Professors of a particular gender/class/radical group in your department/research area???). Watch out for future blog posts where I’ll share other tools that might help if these are challenges for you, or check out our time management bite sized course: (coming soon), download the template from the RiF Inner Circle, or sign up below for our newsletter and you'll get occasional (10 times per year max!) alerts about relevant content direct to your inbox.