Conquering the Grad-life Hydra

The Hydra Torch

You just graduated. You feel great. Excited. Powerful. Like Hercules. Then, you set out on a challenge. You unwittingly decide to be a graduate student. Much like how Hercules went on a challenge to slay the Hydra. You swiftly tend to your classes, just as Hercules swiftly cut off the Hydra's head with a stroke of his sword. Unfortunately for Hercules, and for you, the challenge doesn't end there. In place of the severed head grows a multitude of other heads. These come in the form of a new job, your duties as a member of a laboratory group, your research, etc. What you and Hercules need are a new Hydra-fighting-tool-thing. A torch. This represents your brand-new redesigned productivity system, because the old one that you relied on just for school probably isn’t enough anymore. In fact, you probably weren’t thinking about productivity systems, since all you had to do was follow the highly structured education system: listen to your professor, do your homework, (cram) study for your exams.

There are many articles and videos online about different productivity systems, so this post is going to focus on helping you set up the best configuration for your workflow. This way you’ll have a clear image of the big picture while you experiment with different components of your system. Believe me, it’s probably easier this way instead of trying to find a solution when the problem is already threatening a certain aspect of your life. This blog will probably have follow-up posts tackling how you can use individual components at greater depth.

 

What's it for?

Before you start designing your productivity system, you first ought to realize what it's for. It's important to keep in mind what you need your productivity system to do for you while you explore its many different aspects. I think a good way to think about it is as a set of tools, that allow you to emulate the kind of structure to your life that you’re used to. The thing is, no one’s going to tell you what to do anymore. They’re just going to tell you what they want from you by a certain deadline. Your productivity system will help you organize your thoughts such that you can deal with them at the time you allot for them.

Components of the Hydra Torch

The most basic components of your productivity system will be your to-do list and your calendar. You’ll use the to-do list to record internal tasks that you will have to do. While you’ll use the calendar to record external events that you will have to attend to.

I used to have a pen-and-paper to-do list, then I upgraded to a planner, but with its bulk I just didn’t bring it around with me as much as I’d like. So, for both components I now use apps on my phone (which I carry around everywhere) which synchronize with my laptop. I use Google Calendar and Google Tasks. I made Google Calendar my web browser’s homepage, so that when I open my browser I just have an immediate feel for the things I must attend to at the moment and in the near future. I also have to give a special mention to Day by Day, which is an Android app with a homescreen widget that synchronizes Google Calendar and Google Tasks in what is called an “agenda view” which I find very useful. This view is a list which shows your to-dos and events for the day at the top, and as you go down you see the tasks and events for the succeeding views. The app is free, but it has a premium version with added features. However, I only use the free version since the premium features are also available in Google Tasks, which syncs with the app, so…it’s basically free premium.

Honestly, you could probably survive with your academics and your work using those first two components, but then you also have the Hydra heads which correspond to your personal life as an adult. So, you got to add a bunch of other components. These include, but aren’t limited to, a handy notebook or a note-taking app (I use Google Keep and Notion), a habit-tracker (Habitica), a financial record app (Money Lover and also Notion), a pomodoro app (Productivity Challenge Timer), an exercise regime or app (I don’t use an app for this), a digital file system (you can check our post about this here), apps that remove access to distractions such as social media or video websites (there are various apps and browser plugins for this, depending on what you need to restrict yourself from), and a reference manager (Mendeley).

 

Finding the components that best fit you

Okay, for some of the components you can use pen and paper if that’s your thing, but for the rest, there are a lot of apps out there. Each one is slightly different from the other. To determine what you want, you need to make a list of everything you need from each app. It’s fine if your list only has one or two items to start with, and you can refine it as you try out other apps. This can get down to very minute details, like:

• Can I edit it offline?
• Can I sync it with Google Calendar?
• Can I sync it on my phone?
• Can it auto-move tasks which weren't successfully completed yesterday to today?
• Can it set alarms and reminders?
• Can it repeat tasks based on certain patterns (e.g. MWF, every other week, 1st Monday of the month, etc.)?
• Can I use multiple tags on a single note?
• Can I assign colors to notes?
• Can I attach photos?
• Is my nation’s currency available?
• Can it record debts and loans?
• Can it produce graphs and pie charts of my daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly expenditures?
• Can it carry over any excess funds from last month to this month?
• Are its ads bearable?
• And even: does the phone app have a nice-looking widget with a semi-transparent background that I can put on my phone's homescreen?

 

Feeding the flame (Hydra Torch maintenance)

You can't expect to be productive forever just by having these tools and apps installed. You're probably going to feel good about them for the first few days or weeks, until a big wave of requirements approaches. When this happens, you need to make sure to stick to your system. It will get tempting to stop listing tasks down on your to-do list because you know you have to focus on this one big thing that's due tomorrow, or because there are so many to-dos you get tired of writing noting them down, trusting that you'll remember them later on. But I'm here to tell you, DON'T TRUST YOUR OWN MEMORY. Trust your system. This is exactly the same reason why we need to be diligent in writing down our notes during fieldworks. We all have that experience of not noting something down at an outcrop because the thought seemed so obvious we couldn't possibly forget about it. But when we get back to camp our minds are blank, and we check our notes and all we see there is that the outcrop was vegetated. smh