Some thoughts on time management

Life is busy. And as I've gotten older, it's gotten busier, to the point where I need a strategy to manage all the stuff I'm supposed to do. Here's are some general thoughts and some specifics of what I've found that works for me in case this is useful to someone (most of this comes from workshop for young faculty I did some time ago that Uri Alon had organized–thanks Uri!).

The main problem that we all face is a large number of meetings and administrative tasks that clutter up our mind, preventing us from doing more useful and meaningful things. A few observations:

1. Once you have a lot of tasks, there is a lot of cognitive overhead associated with remembering the tasks. Like "oh yeah, I'm supposed to e-mail that person about the seminar." Multiply that by 100 (or 1000) and you get the average faculty member's academic life these days. To do lists are valuable because you can spend less time stressing about what you should remember to do and more time just doing them. But they can rapidly become overwhelming and unmanageable if not used with care.
2. Most of us are very bad at prioritizing these tasks.  Eisenhower had it right when he said "What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important."
3. Technology has made it so that one can deal with a lot of administrative stuff without administrative support. However, while technology has facilitated this ability, others have taken advantage of it to inundate us with huge numbers of requests to do things like scheduling meetings, etc. These would have seemed unreasonable in the past, but now that the overhead to ask someone to do something is very low, we have a problem.
4. The feeling of a lack of control over how we spend our time largely stems from our desire to please others, leading us to agree to do too many things. There's a good reason for this, because being a responsive member of a social group, however defined, is a good thing. The key is how to have your cake and eat it too.

In order to deal with this, I have come up with the following system, which I guess is more a set of guidelines than anything else.

First up is the to do list. I have used a to do list since I was a postdoc. But it became completely unmanageable as things progressed. I use the "A, B, C, D task" system, where you have a 2x2 grid of important/not important, urgent/not urgent and put tasks in them. By FAR the biggest problem for me is distinguishing the B vs. C task, which is [important, not urgent] vs. [not important, urgent].

1. "A tasks" (important, urgent): grant due by deadline, prepare lecture for class at noon. These are things that would be catastrophic if you didn't do them.
2. "B tasks" (important, not urgent): study literature for a new research direction, read that highly relevant paper, come up an experimental strategy, finish writing manuscript. These are things that lay the groundwork for the future.
3. "C tasks" (not important, urgent): file reimbursement paperwork, review a paper for a journal, send that collaborator some images from that project. You should do it, but the world won't end if you don't.
4. "D tasks" (not important, not urgent): Write a blog post. :)

I use a piece of software for this called OmniFocus. It has a bewildering array of options, but for me, I organize tasks by project and then have a context for A, B, C and D. That is working well for me, especially since it has a system-wide hotkey for adding in tasks.

A few comments: if every task is an A task, you're doing it wrong. That's a recipe for being overwhelmed. Taking control of your time means making choices. It's hard, and I'm still working on doing a better job of it. But it's essential.

The B/C distinction is a big challenge, both in assignment and execution. B tasks are, by definition, more important, but seldom give the quick little adrenaline rush of completing a task that you can tick off. C tasks are those little things staring you in the face all day, like responding to some e-mail or filling out a Doodle poll for a thesis committee time, that give you the sense that you're accomplishing stuff in the moment, but leave you with that empty feeling at the end of the day (you know what I'm talking about). The temptation is to finish off all the C tasks to have a "clean plate" for doing A and B tasks. Avoid this urge. C tasks are sponges for time: they take up whatever time you give them. So limit the time you spend on them–remember, they are NOT IMPORTANT. Also, many of these requests, while well-meaning, simply would not have existed a decade ago, and the world still went around. A surprising number of these will just resolve themselves, like a "delegation mirror". Remember also that many of your C tasks may have been someone else's A task. The person who needs feedback on the seminar schedule will write to you at 10am about it because it's important to them. Which is fine, but this doesn't mean that it has to be important to you. You can do it later.

This leads to the next point about strategies for making the most out of your day. I function best in the morning. So I try to reserve morning for things that are my A and B tasks. For me, this means interacting with my group and some important writing tasks like manuscripts and grants. I try and avoid the temptation to do those silly e-mails and forms and whatever. After lunch, I'm a bit... less... sentient. So I try and schedule other stuff then. For me, the strategy is clear: PROTECT MY MORNINGS at all costs, and try to make the most of them. One way to do this is to explicitly block off time in your calendar for A/B tasks in the morning (or whatever your "go time" is). It's important to you, and so you have to commit to it. Think of it this way: if someone out of the blue wrote to you asking you for a protocol in the middle of a meeting with a collaborator, would you respond to it right then? Then why do it when you're in the middle of quietly thinking about a project? The point is to reclaim control of your day for you to do the things you want to do, which is presumably what you were hired for anyway.

The other main bugaboo is the dreaded endless e-mail reel. I keep my e-mail on all day long in case something important comes through, but I try and deal with the vast majority of the others on the morning train ride (~15 minutes) or in the evening. During the day, I just try to stick to the ones that really really matter (to me). It seems to be working okay, actually.

Anyway, those are some thoughts on some time management, and there are tons of other approaches to this as well. Probably most senior faculty have already intuited and incorporated many of these suggestions into their day to day life, but I offer them to anyone who's feeling a bit overwhelmed by the number and variety of demands on their time and is looking for some way to deal with it.

Oh, and one other thing. A lot of this thinking goes in reverse. So before sending that e-mail asking for 20 people to figure out dates for a conference call, just be mindful that that single e-mail is generating work for a whole lot of people, most of whom are probably just as busy as you are.

Gettin' scooped

Was just thinking the other day that the only thing worse than opening the Nature Table of Contents and finding out you got scooped is... opening up the Biophysical Journal Table of Contents and finding out you got scooped.

Not that this has happened to us. Yet.

Some further interpretations of Hedia’s lincRNA data

I’ve been giving some talks on Hedia’s work on non-coding RNA at some meetings where people talk about non-coding RNA, and I’ve realized that we can actually make some further claims that we didn’t think about at the time. Quick recap: we show (by RNA FISH, natch) that knocking down non-coding RNA (linc-Hoxa1) at the transcription site results in transcriptional upregulation of the nearby Hoxa1 gene. We also show that the RNA binds to the protein PurB in vitro and in vivo, and that knocking down PurB destroys the anti-correlation in expression between linc-Hoxa1 and Hoxa1–normally, they are strongly anti-correlated, which is what led us to think that linc-Hoxa1 negatively regulates Hoxa1 in the first place.

One question in the lincRNA field is whether the RNA itself is what regulates transcription, or if it's just the DNA sequence. For instance, if you knock out the DNA sequence including the RNA, can you be sure that it’s the RNA that causes the effect per se, or is it rather the DNA acting like a conventional enhancer (with the RNA itself being just an unimportant byproduct). Our results showing that knockdown at the site of transcription show that the RNA itself is important: the DNA sequence remains intact, but removal of the RNA causes the change in transcription.

The next question is whether it’s just the transcription of the lincRNA that affects transcription, or whether the sequence itself is important. The clearest way to show this would be to just replace the lincRNA sequence in the cell line with different ones and see what happens, but we didn’t do that. However, I think our PurB result argues that the sequence itself is important for transcriptional regulation. If it were merely the act of transcription, then knocking down a potential cofactor would not have any effect, since it’s the RNA that matters. PurB is a purine-binding protein, and seems to bind to a hundreds-of-bases-long sequence of Gs and As in the RNA, so it seems very likely that the specific sequence of the lincRNA is important to the regulation.

In summary, I think the important points are that, in the case of linc-Hoxa1, the RNA itself (and not the DNA) is responsible for the regulation, and that it’s not just the act of transcription but the presence of RNA with a specific sequence that is necessary for the regulation to occur.  Whether this is the case in general is of course an area for further study.

Simple tips to improve your presentations

Lots of stuff out there on how to give a good talk, but if I were to pick my top three tips that would really improve most academic presentations, I would pick these (courtesy of Uri Alon):

1. Your presentation should be centered around you, not your slides. The slides are your props, but you are delivering the material.
2. Make sure every slide has a title that is a complete sentence. Sentence, verb, object. This was transformative for me. It ensures that every slide has a point.
3. Remove all other text from the slide (other than axes, etc.). Text distracts. The audience should not be reading text, they should be listening to you.

Uri Alon's "cloud"

I’m sure many of you have already heard of Uri Alon’s “cloud”, which is that time when you’re working on a science project and everything is unclear, all your original hypotheses no longer make sense, and you have the occasional existential crisis. I’ve gone through that myself several times with virtually every project I’ve worked on, perhaps with one exception. If you haven’t heard of the cloud, though, check out this video:

TurboFISH live demo video

So we finally got around to making a video of one of the coolest things in the lab, namely Sydney's turboFISH protocol.  In this video, she literally goes from cells growing in the incubator to RNA FISH images on the microscope in 12 minutes total!  Check it out:

Storytelling in science

There were just a couple of interesting pieces on storytelling in science on Nature Methods (point, counterpoint). Basically, one article says that storytelling is an important part of communicating science, and the rebuttal points out many of the dangers of the storytelling viewpoint. I think these writings put forth many of the basic aspects of the debate: storytelling makes things simpler and more compelling for the reader, increasing interest in and broadening the audience for your work, but storytelling also disfavors alternative hypotheses, unbiased presentation of the data (i.e., non-conforming data = supplementary figure 38) and so forth. All valid points, and I’m sort of on the fence about storytelling.

Here are some thoughts on the matter that they didn’t really touch upon very much in these articles, though. Firstly, although I haven’t read nearly as many papers in other fields, I think that biology has a lot more storytelling than other fields. For instance, you might read a chemistry paper about the photostability of fluorescent dyes. No real story, but the work can be extremely high impact. I’m wondering if the reason we have more stories in biology is that, unlike in other fields, the universe of things you could study is so large that you have to devote a pretty significant portion of your thinking to explaining why you chose to study what you studied; i.e., why is this interesting? I could be completely wrong about this, but in physics, I think there are just fewer different (non-applied) phenomena to study, and so you don’t have to have a story–nobody would question why you study dark matter or the Higg’s Boson. In principle, I like the idea that one could just measure things in biology for the sake of filling in the knowledge of the universe, but in reality, I think we’ve all seen those “so what’s the point of this?” papers. On the other hand, it’s hard to really know the point of anything; we just make stories about how it could be important because of evolution, which is sort of a cop out. Anyway, I’m not sure which way I stand on this.

One other argument I have against storytelling is something fundamental to the very idea of storytelling, namely that a story has a beginning, middle, and an end. It’s the last part that’s the problem. By definition, the end means that it’s all wrapped up. Where does it go from there? What avenues do these results open to further study? In a way, the more satisfying the end, the less need for a follow up. Take, for example, our 2010 C. elegans paper with the title “Variability in gene expression underlies incomplete penetrance”. Well, the title pretty much sums it up. So what do we do from there? I guess you can find more examples of it to test the generality of the conclusion and so forth, but that’s definitely diminishing returns and not exactly how you want to start a new lab. Don’t get me wrong, I like that work a lot, but to me, it felt like that story had an end and I didn’t know where to go from there. Maybe that’s my own lack of imagination, though–any thoughts? On the other hand, our PLoS Bio 2006 paper was much more open ended, and I think it had a much broader impact. There, we characterized a phenomenon (transcriptional bursting and cell-to-cell variability) and made some measurements of it, which raised some interesting possibilities.

Which leads me to another few observations about biology and storytelling. In physics, you can make measurements of something important (like the g factor) and the results are meaningful without a story. In biology, it is very hard to make absolute measurements of something, so everything must be relative, like LGR5 is 5 fold more abundant in condition A than condition B. Even with RNA FISH, which does give absolutes, the context could be different ("oh, you used this media prepared on this day, which is why you got a different answer”). So there are no biological “constants” to measure. Maybe you could argue that measuring crystal structures is like measuring biological constants? Certainly not the endless compendiums of high throughput RNA abundance data, which are not really very good resources for a variety of reasons.

Another thing about biology is that the tools and approaches render negative results far less meaningful than positive results. The storytelling approach (as Gautham pointed out) is one in which you experiment based on “Wouldn’t it be cool if X?”, whereas the opposite result of “not X” would be considerably less cool. In principle, shouldn’t the negative be equally informative? In some cases, yes. But what about a genetic screen? What is the meaning of a negative result? Not much, I think. But Gautham’s point is well-taken. I think it’s a lot better to go about asking questions for which the answer is cool either way. Or, let’s say, where the answer is interesting either way. I never really was good at knowing what was cool to begin with.