Avoid overwhelm & procrastination through multi-lens project management

Dear Reader,

Most academics and students struggle with their workload.

But I found that poor task management leads to either overcommitting or procrastinating, making the problem far worse and more emotionally frustrating than a time shortage alone.

It's not your fault if you struggle with these things.

It's just that nobody at university teaches how to effectively manage projects, while countless books are written on the subject for the business or private domains.

Let's change that.

The problem: Your tasks are scattered across emails, sticky notes, a calendar, a whiteboard, and a running list in your head. You know things need to get done. But when you sit down to plan your week (if at all), you're making decisions with incomplete information.

That's when important work slips through.

There are two big problems to solve here.

The first is a priority problem: you react to whatever is loudest or easiest, while larger, high-impact tasks quietly fall behind.

The second is a strategy problem: you know what needs to be done, but have no clear path to actually doing it. e.g. "Write the discussion" is not a task but a vague direction.

The key idea for a solution is to go digital (with, you guessed it, Obsidian) and assign "properties"(urgency, priority, timeframe, project, etc.) to tasks for effective planning.

Your tasks don't change, but you can now view them through multiple lenses — by urgency, by status, by week, or project — gives you the data to make better decisions.

Read on how to set up this system with the "Kanban Task List Plugin". It's a fairly new addition to my project management workflow.

Summary: The article proposes two problems in getting things done. Poor prioritisation, leading to reacting to what's due right now and forgetting bigger, more important tasks, and a lack of strategy, which leads to vaguely defined to-dos like "write discussion", which are obvious but unclear. The solution is to use a multi-lens project management approach. The same tasks are grouped by priority, due date, status and project using tags. The Task List Plugin allows for the display of the same tasks in multiple boards and enables more efficient planning of what to do when.

Thanks for being part of EA!

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​

The Effortless Academic is a community, newsletter and learning place for the modern academic, where you can learn to leverage academic tools, digital note-taking strategies and AI for a stress-free, successful career.
​
If you're ready to dive in, start with the foundation of Digital Note Taking to remember and synthesise ideas, the AI Lit Review Course to learn about recent (AI) tools for finding, reading and skimming relevant academic papers, or the AI writing and publishing courses to effectively publish your ideas.