Chris Humphrey (Wed)

My day starts with more coordination work on the project management training programme. I have a short meeting with one of our co-workers who’s going to be leading a session on personal time management. Obviously good time management is an important skill for anyone working on projects! That said, time management is a somewhat tricky subject for a training session in that it can be (A) quite dull and (B) quite personal (especially for those who know they need to improve). So we’ve gone for an approach where we’re getting participants to answer a questionnaire ahead of the training session. This will get them thinking about their own approach to time management. Then in the session itself we’ll cover common causes of time wasting, and present a method for managing your time effectively, using a 2×2 matrix to categorise tasks as urgent/not urgent and important/not important. I’m already thinking of the potential to lighten the mood by not starting the session on time and over-running the finish …

We wanted to use a mixture of facilitators to deliver the training, using project managers like me as well as co-workers with expertise in particular areas like time management or the emotional side of change. This helps to break down barriers between trainers and participants and shows that project management is a skill set that’s valuable for everyone to learn. In fact I think it’s a 21st century life skill and that’s one reason why PhDs have an advantage on the job market – because they already have project management skills, even if they don’t have a formal qualification. I’ve written a blog post on the subject of transferable skills and the PhD which may be of interest to readers of PhDs at Work.

Today we have a monthly team meeting where I catch up with co-workers from IT, Business Systems and Office Services. We all take it in turns to provide a light lunch for the meeting and today we have a birthday in the team, so there’s a cake too. I’m a representative on the branch’s co-worker forum, so I give some feedback from that meeting to the team. Co-worker forum members have been asked to find out how we can best recognise one another’s achievements in our day-to-day work. We already have a gold card system, where co-workers can receive a small token of appreciation for going above and beyond what’s expected of them in their job role. We also want to encourage people to say thank you and well done informally too, so I ask everyone to try to do this more often.

In the afternoon I chair a meeting on the marketing push that I was preparing for on Monday, making sure all of the printed and electronic material is ready for the next phase (it is). After the meeting a co-worker asks me what I’m a doctor of (having noticed the ‘Dr’ on my email signature), and she laughs out loud when I break the news that I’m a doctor of Medieval Studies. Not often that I get a laugh: more often than not, people are envious that was able to pursue my own research interests and get published. I’ve never tried to hide my doctorate and I’ve worked with some fantastic PhDs over the last decade, including a former bank co-worker who’s now the Chief Executive of a charity, and other PhDs who are company directors or senior consultants. In the UK at least, PhDs are welcomed for the unique skill-set they can bring to organisations.

On the way home there’s a fire on the side of the track and I sit for an hour on the sweltering train, just outside my station. Now about that time management training …