Step 3: Cut back anything hindering or distracting you from your impact
In this step, we will consider how you can make room in your busy schedule for impact-generating activities grounded in trusting relationships with the people who might be interested in and use your research.
Time is in short supply for most researchers. That’s a problem if you want to take a relational approach to impact, because investing in relationships takes time. That’s why this step is designed to help you become more efficient and focused as a researcher, so you can make time for relationships with those who are interested in your research (and those other important people in your life, whether or not they are interested in your research!). Prof. Reed has written more extensively about this in The Productive Researcher. Here, we want to summarize some of the key lessons from that book and point you to some additional ideas that can significantly change how you work.
Prioritize
How to prioritize is the single most important lesson we have learned from our reading, from interviewing some of the world’s most productive researchers, and from our own experience. You might think you already know how to prioritize, but the key thing that seems to set the most productive researchers apart from the rest of us is their unusual ability to retain a laser-sharp focus on their priorities from minute to minute, day after day and month after month. This unusual level of focus comes from the way these researchers set their priorities. These priorities are more than mere preferences; they express the researcher’s values and identity. Priorities that come from this deep place stand the test of time and are deeply felt. As a result, they motivate researchers to stay focused on their priorities, making it easier to say “yes” to what is most important and “no” to many things that might otherwise distract them.
Be mindful
Start by paying closer attention to how you spend your time each day and how each task connects to your impact goals and broader life goals. In this step, you will identify at least one regular task or activity that you can either remove from your schedule entirely or cut back substantially.
Think about how work is distributed across your team. Are there colleagues who would benefit from taking on some of the smaller tasks on your to-do list, such as reviewing papers to help them learn how stronger academic writing is structured?
You should also consider where AI tools can help you reduce routine administrative work. Used carefully, AI can perform some of the functions that might previously have been delegated to a Personal Assistant. For example, AI can help you tidy meeting notes, summarize workshop outputs, turn rough ideas into structured task lists, format reference lists, prepare first drafts of routine emails, compare travel options, organize information from documents or suggest the next steps for a project.
The point is not to hand over judgment, responsibility or sensitive decisions. It is to stop spending high-value time on low-value tasks where the first draft, sorting, formatting or summarizing work can be done more efficiently with the right tool and clear instructions. Where confidentiality, accuracy or institutional policy matters, check what you are allowed to upload, review outputs carefully and keep final responsibility for the work.
For many academics, gaining back even a few hours each week is worth more than a modest pay rise, financially and psychologically. So the next time you think about productivity, do not only ask how you can work harder. Ask which tasks no longer need your full attention, which could help someone else develop and which could be safely supported by AI.
Lack of time = lack of priorities
We believe that the problem all academics will recognize, of the day never being long enough to do everything we are meant to do, comes down to poor priorities. Lack of time = lack of priorities.
Perhaps you are regularly working evenings and weekends, and don’t have time to think (let alone do anything) about generating impacts from your research? We’ve discovered something interesting over the years, which we’ve recently found have names: Parkinson’s Law and the Pareto Principle.
Parkinson’s Law simply recognizes that tasks will swell to fill the time you give them. Therefore, you need to limit the time you give to the tasks you need to do. The strange thing is that the end product is usually as good, and sometimes even better, than if you spent double the time on the task. The reason is that the level of focused attention a forced deadline provides actually enables you to produce more focused work.
Prof. Reed first discovered this in his teaching when he was told he had to head up a research center and had significantly less time to prepare his lectures. Without intending to, he ended up regularly preparing his lectures on the day of delivery, and although it was more stressful, he was surprised to discover that his student ratings increased significantly. Admittedly, he had a fairly good grasp of the subjects he was teaching, but the key difference was that he was now relying less on his notes and more on his intuition. As a result, his passion for the subject became far more apparent, and this enthusiasm was infectious. He also did more class exercises rather than bore students with information overload, which meant students actually learned more. He did the same with a literature review, giving himself just one week to read and write the first draft. It was a hard week’s work, and he made many edits and changes before the final version was published. But this is now by far his most-cited paper (>2000 citations) and has played an important role in establishing his reputation in that field.
What 20% of your working day produces 80% of the outputs you value most?
The Pareto Principle suggests that for most people, 80% of the outputs you value most come from only 20% of the time you spend working. In reality, it is not exactly 80:20, but we believe that the principle holds for most of us. We think this principle is the source of many researchers’ greatest frustrations and disappointments, because we spend so much of every day doing the urgent thing everyone around us is shouting for at the expense of the less urgent, but far more important things. So that paper or book we dreamed of writing stays unwritten, and we accumulate regret and frustration for the sake of keeping everyone around us happy.
We’re not saying that we should stop being team players and be selfish with our time. But if you’ve got a really important goal in your work, try and spend some time on it every day, even if you only manage half an hour, and you’ll be amazed at how much more satisfied you feel day after day, week after week. Some people we know get up at five or six in the morning to spend an hour on an important task, whether writing or whatever. We’ve never been motivated enough to do that, but the point is that you don’t have to spend all day doing the important stuff; you do have to keep chipping away at it.
When you start focusing on the important things, you suddenly realize that many of the urgent things you’re being told to do aren’t actually that important. With this revelation, it becomes easier to say ‘no’ or take a few shortcuts to do a ‘good enough’ job on those tasks, so you can get back to the really important stuff.
So, what 20% of your working day produces 80% of the outcomes you value most? Write a list of everything you did yesterday, and if possible, estimate how long you spent on it. Be brutally honest about how long you spent replying to emails, on social media and doing other things that yielded very little tangible outcome. For us, this isn’t necessarily about cutting these tasks out — you’re not going to be popular with your students or colleagues if you stop replying to emails. But it is well worth considering how you could be more strategic.
What could you cut?
Here’s a list of the things we have drastically reduced time on, which might inspire you to consider what you could cut:
- Social media: We no longer try to read everything in our feeds, and limit ourselves to a 30-minute ‘news’ window every day, which we receive and read in X/Twitter. In addition to mass media outlets, we’re following a targeted social media strategy designed specifically to help us achieve impacts through our research. Now we’re not blogging into thin air — We’ve got a strategy to drive traffic to our most important research outputs and to engage with specific audiences around key messages that link to the impacts we want to achieve.
- Email: We scan the most important and urgent emails in the morning and only reply to them, ignoring the rest until the afternoon, often after lunch when we’re feeling most tired. If necessary, we will send a holding email to acknowledge receipt and explain that we’ve got a busy morning and will reply later in the day. If we’ve got a writing deadline (even if it’s self-imposed), we will put an out-of-office reply up, explaining that we’re working towards an important deadline and not checking emails for the rest of the week, so please send us a text message if it is urgent. Otherwise, we’ll get back to them as soon as we can.
- Reviewing: None of us can escape this; it is part of our duty to review others’ work in as timely and constructive a way as we would hope others would review ours. However, sometimes we feel a false sense of duty to review more than we need to. We personally feel that we have met our moral obligation to the academic community by reviewing around three times as many manuscripts and grant proposals as we submit (on the basis that most of the papers and grants we submit will receive three reviews each). In addition to reviewing only papers in our subject area, we will review only those from which we expect to learn something useful or new (based on the abstract). This rule also has a handy way of ensuring you don’t end up reviewing papers for “predatory” journals.
- Committee meetings: There is usually someone absent at each committee meeting you go to, and no one really minds, as long as they aren’t always absent. What would happen if you decided to make your apologies for every other committee meeting or shared the role with a colleague so you could take turns? What would actually happen? Would the meeting cease to function? If you missed out on a key piece of information or decision, would there be no other way to find this out or influence that decision? Obviously, it is wise to check the agenda, and if you’re chairing the committee, that won’t be possible. If you’re not chairing it, do you really have to be at every single one?
- Chat: It is incredible how much time is wasted just chatting in the corridors or with people who randomly pass by your office door and want to say ‘hello’. Rather than leaving your office door open to invite interruption, make yourself fully available by appointment, and then stack all your appointments into a single day or a couple of days each week. This doesn’t mean that you need to become a hermit and avoid all social contact, but now you can be strategic and targeted in who you actually invest time with, whether professionally or as friends, by taking these people for coffee or lunch, where you can have quality time together. If you’re working primarily from home, you can come into the department on selected days for meetings and socializing. Keep the rest of the week for being productive and focused.
Those are just a few of the things we’ve done over the years to increase our productivity. We’re not suggesting you should cut back in the same areas, but hopefully this list gives you a flavor of what might be possible.
Do less to do more
Many of us think somehow that the world will end if we stop doing some of the things that all other academics do. But stop and ask yourself: what will actually happen if I stop doing this? Really? Think of your worst-case scenario, and then consider if you could reverse, cope with or recover from that situation. If you’d manage to cope with the worst-case scenario, then go ahead and cut it. In almost every case, the worst-case will never actually come to pass.
We all know that there will always be many more things that we ought to be doing every day, which we run out of time for. The art of being a successful academic with some semblance of work-life balance is more about what you choose not to do, rather than what you do. The more time you give to your work, the more tasks will fill it. That’s why we never work weekends, and now we’re one of the few academics we know who work only their contracted hours and take their full allocation of holidays. We feel rested and refreshed on a Monday morning, and we don’t resent my work. That simple act of managing our time is one of the reasons we have been so productive.
The message is this: do less to do more. Limit your tasks to the most important, so you can shorten the time you have to work. Then, shorten the time you have to work, so you are forced to limit your tasks to the most important ones.
If you want to take a deeper dive into how to achieve more in less time by focusing on what matters, check out our The productive researcher workshop.
Your tasks for this step
1. Make a list of everything you did during your workday yesterday (or your last typical day in the office), and how long you spent on each task, including menial and non-work tasks during the workday.
2. Commit today to removing one thing from your schedule to make room for impact-generating activities. If you can, commit to removing as many other things as you can, so that in addition to being more productive, you can get a better work-life balance (which, of course, will make you more productive in the hours you do work).
The Fast Track Impact team
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