Blog: Improving Your Workflow

Have you ever wondered how your colleagues keep on top of their e-mail? Have you figured out some smart tricks to manage your workflow, but haven’t been able to share?

Working in an academic environment, we can often feel like our day-to-day workflow is conquered by e-mails and administrative tasks that jump onto our desks without warning. This leaves no time to think about and share how we manage all of this. How should you keep a balance between daily tasks and your bigger projects? How should you prioritize urgent administrative matters and research or teaching: Should you first make your inbox sparkly clean or should you dive head-first into writing that paper?

In January, Frank van Caspel and Britta Westner from the Radboud Young Academy led the Workflow Workshop, with the goal of drawing on joint experiences and practices, compare personal strategies, and distil approaches and tools for academic workflow. With a diverse group of researchers and professional services staff from various faculties and institutes, we spent a productive afternoon, guided by our proposed “workflow machine” – a conceptual structure to help structure the discussions and ultimately our workflows. Split into smaller groups, we discussed topics such as planning for long-term projects, focussed work, efficient to-do lists, note-keeping software, or work-life balance. In this blog post, we share some of our take aways from this workshop – read on and pick your favourite tricks to implement!

Getting in the flow: talking about workflow
The key takeaway was that everyone benefited from reflecting on and talking about workflow strategies. We learned that most of us have a system, but that nearly everyone could improve on it by explicitly considering what they are doing and comparing that to others. The very act of taking the time to consider your workflow turned out to be quite useful, and we got some nice ‘hacks’ to boot.

We thus recommend teaming up for your long-term planning: One of our participants called it “zooming out time”. Meet with a planning buddy and discuss your long-term goals and plans, give each other feedback, and talk it through. A thing to be mindful of, however, is that there is not just one way to work: stay curious about how others plan and work, but also stay true to your own needs. And, importantly, accept that also your own needs might change. As one participant remarked: your worfklow today might not be a good workflow for your future self! The reflection with a buddy can thus also help identify workflow tools and processes that do not serve you anymore.

Our favourite workflow hacks
In the closing round, participants also shared their favourite “hacks” with us: things they would like to implement right away – or even already implemented or learned how to do during the workshop. This included, for example, prioritizing work on a weekly or daily basis using the Eisenhower Matrix. Using your e-mail archive and keeping only e-mails that require immediate action in your inbox was another habit participants want to implement. The new version of Outlook supports snoozing of e-mails, which means you can have e-mails you will only have to deal with later come back at an appropriate time – making it possible to end your day with an empty inbox: so refreshing!

How you start your day and week can make a difference to your workflow. too: starting Monday morning with a favourite task (e.g., research or teaching preparation) instead of doing administrative work can set the tone for the week. Planning dedicated e-mail time into your week or opening Outlook to calendar view rather than the inbox can help you in sustaining this practice.

Support your workflow by using a note-keeping system that works for you. Any system is better than an unsorted and unsearchable pile of physical or digital files and participants shared their note-keeping systems with both paper notebooks and software solutions at the workshop.

When working in a concentrated manner, taking breaks is important. Sometimes we label breaks as “procrastinating” and fill them with habits we don’t enjoy while feeling guilty about it. Why not reclaim your breaks and do fun things for five minutes? One of the people at the workshop was thinking about starting a knitting project at work and spending a five minutes break knitting on a sock every now and then, while other participants will seek out a gezellig moment at the coffee machine.

We thank all participants of this workshop!