Professional Etiquette

Tips for Staying Organized

Ian McCarthy, Emory University

Economics PhD Professionalism Workshop

Have a system

  • Must have some way to keep track of your projects and your many obligations
  • Increasingly important as an assistant professor (teaching, service, research, life)
  • No single system works for all people

Old school or digital

  • Writing things down helps, so good ’ole pen and paper is hard to beat if you can keep it organized. Try a journaling method (e.g., bullet journals) if this is your jam.
  • I prefer always having my lists and “journals” available at all times, which just isn’t feasible for me on paper.

Main considerations

  • Project management/tracking
  • Calendar
  • To-do list

My system

  • Project organization with digital notebooks (OneNote)
  • Calendar management with different calendar types (Google Calendar synced with Outlook Calendar)
  • Student sign-ups with “youcanbook.me”, which syncs with my calendars
  • Simple to-do list that I can quickly edit and organize (Google Keep)
  • Use email inbox as to-do list (only move or delete after I’ve acted on it)

It is very rare that I drop the ball without knowing it.

Other considerations

  • Block out time for yourself (manually in the calendar, forced time in extensions like freedom)
  • If you are easily drawn to social media, I’ve heard good things about freedom
  • Detailed project management software, like OmniFocus

My take: I’m not a huge fan of detailed project management software because it becomes a lot of trouble to update.