Working with my chronotype: Better use of a task manager
When I cover chronotypes in Intro Psych, I tell my students about the research that found that employees whose work schedules match their chronotypes have higher work satisfaction (Amini et al., 2021).
I’ve always been a morning person. Even as an adolescent, I routinely awakened at 6am without an alarm. Now, deep into adulthood, I routinely awake around 4:30am. Interestingly, to me anyway, that time had been 5:30am, but my brain seems to have never adjusted after last fall’s time change. So, 4:30am it is.
As a college student, I preferred taking the early morning classes. As a college professor, I preferred teaching the early morning classes. When I changed colleges, the new course schedule was very different. The early morning classes were 50 minutes each and five days a week. The afternoon and evening classes were longer sessions and met twice a week. I had to choose between my chronotype and my preferred teaching schedule. I went with my preferred teaching schedule. It worked out fine. At the beginning of the term, I could muster quite bit of energy for class. As the term wore on, my energy waned, but my students were anticipating a high energy class, so they brought the energy, and that was enough to carry me through. Thanks, everyone!
One term, I taught an evening class that started at the ungodly (for me) hour of 7:30pm. When I covered chronotypes, I asked my students if evening classes were a match or a mismatch for their chronotype. Every student said it was a match. Good for them!
As the new executive director for the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, I have a lot more items on my to-do list–currently 49 recurring tasks and counting–so I needed a more robust tracking system than I’ve ever needed before. (Most of those recurring tasks are monthly or yearly; only a couple are weekly) For my new task manager, I opted for Todoist, which seems to be working really well. Todoist allows me to tag each task. When I started creating tasks, I was tagging by task type, such as Membership for any task having to do with managing the STP membership database or Website for any tasks having to do with updating pages on the STP website. That was fine, but those tags weren’t feeling particularly useful. If I needed to do it today, did it matter if it was a Membership task or a Website task?
My greatest challenge is not being executive director; it is keeping up with my writing schedule (currently, that means revising my Intro Psych textbook). That’s been a challenge with the 20+ hours I need to devote to my executive director role. What I had been doing was getting all of my small tasks done first thing in the morning so I could leave the rest of the day for writing. Too often, though, those small tasks would eat up my entire morning, and in the afternoon, I was too mentally drained to write. It felt like death by a thousand cuts.
When I was telling a friend (shout out to Ellen Carpenter at Virginia Commonwealth University!) about my tagging system, it hit me that I was using tags all wrong. I really only need two tags: Morning and Afternoon. Because—thanks to my chronotype—I’m mentally stronger in the morning and weaker in the afternoon, any task that is cognitively demanding needs to be tagged as a Morning task. Any task that is lighter needs to be tagged as an Afternoon task. If I look at my to-do list and everything is tagged as Afternoon, then I don’t even bother reading what the tasks are: I go directly to writing. I’ve been really happy with how this working.
The next time you cover chronotypes, consider sharing this time management strategy with your students. They don’t have to use Todoist. Even if students are putting their tasks in their calendars, the morning people can add their cognitively demanding tasks to the morning hours, and the night people can add their cognitively demanding tasks to the evening hours—you know, when I’m already asleep.
Reference
Amini, F., Moosavi, S. M., Rafaiee, R., Nadi Ghara, A., & Babakhanian, M. (2021). Chronotype patterns associated with job satisfaction of shift working healthcare providers. Chronobiology International, 38(4), 526–533. https://doi.org/10.1080/07420528.2020.1869028