A while back, my husband asked if I’d come talk to his lab about project management. He’s a neuroscience research professor at MIT, and like a lot of research teams, his group was drowning in the classic combination of too much to do and not enough structure in which to do it.
After I agreed, I realized I’d never had to explain project management to people who had never thought about it as a discipline. Researchers are smart, skeptical, and busy. They don’t want frameworks for frameworks’ sake. They want practical things that actually work.
So I built a talk. The process of stripping PM down to its essentials — no jargon, no certification-speak, just here’s how to organize your time and yourself — turned out to be useful for me too.
Here’s the condensed version.
What is project management?
At its core, project management is planning, organizing, and directing work within constraints — time, budget, and scope. That’s it. Everything else is just tooling and methodology layered on top of that basic idea.
You don’t need a PMP to manage projects well. You need a system.
Start with a to-do list.
I know, everyone already has a to-do list. However, most people’s to-do lists are actually an undifferentiated pile of everything they need to do, ever, with no indication of what to do first or what actually matters.
A few principles that help:
Be specific. “Work on report” is not a task. “Draft the executive summary for the Q3 report” is a task.
Limit your daily list. If you have 25 things on your list for today, you don’t have a to-do list — you have a wish list. Pick what’s actually happening today.
Review and update it. A to-do list is a living document, not a dumping ground.
If you want more structure, here are three methods worth knowing:
The Ivy Lee Method is for people who don’t usually use lists, or who get paralyzed by too many options. At the end of each day, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Just six. In the morning, work through them in order. Don’t move on until the first is done. The constraint is the point.
The Eisenhower Matrix is for people who struggle with prioritization. It sorts tasks into four quadrants: urgent and important (do it now), important but not urgent (schedule it), urgent but not important (delegate it), and neither (delete it). The hard part is being honest about which quadrant something actually belongs in.
Kanban is for visual thinkers and teams. Tasks move through columns — typically To Do, In Progress, and Done — and the core rule is limiting how much work you have in progress at once. Visualizing the work and limiting work in progress (WIP) reduces chaos.
Time management isn’t about doing more.
The goal of time management isn’t to pack more into your day. It’s to protect your attention so that the things that matter actually get done. There are a million time management strategies and theories. I like these three:
Pomodoro is the one for procrastinators. Work for 25 minutes, take a 5-minute break. No cheating on the timer; no interruptions during the 25 minutes. The short intervals make starting feel less overwhelming. If the 25/5 isn’t working for you, try shorter intervals.
Time boxing assigns specific blocks of time on your calendar to specific work, and then you honor those blocks like meetings. It works best when you’re realistic about how long things actually take and when you ruthlessly protect your focus time from interruptions.
The Pickle Jar Method is a prioritization metaphor: fill a jar with rocks (big priorities), pebbles (medium tasks), sand (small tasks), and water (time-wasters). If you fill the jar with sand first, the rocks don’t fit. Schedule your most important work first. And don’t be above actually drawing out your jar and your rocks (tasks) if you’re visual!
Writing is a project management problem.
Two principles I live by:
Do not start with a blank page. A blank page is a trap. Before you write, give yourself something to react to — an outline, a rough draft, someone else’s document you’re adapting.
The goal is not perfect. The goal is complete. Get to MVP — minimum viable product. A draft that exists is infinitely more useful than a perfect draft that doesn’t.
Practical strategies for avoiding the blank page:
Outlining: Thesis, main points, supporting details. Hierarchical structure before prose. We were all taught to do this in grade school, and if you need to download an elementary-level cheat sheet to get started, I support that.
Freewriting: Write without stopping, without editing, without caring about quality. Get thoughts out of your head and onto the page so you have something to work with.
AI-assisted drafting: Set parameters, give it something to react to, and use it in combination with your own thinking rather than as a replacement for it.
Overwriting: Start with a previously completed document, salvage what you can, and delete the rest. Faster than starting from scratch.
Everybody has too much to do.
Having more tasks than time happens to everyone. The question is what to do about it beyond just working harder and sleeping less.
Break it down. Big tasks are overwhelming because they’re too abstract. “Write the grant proposal” is overwhelming. “Draft the project description section” is doable. Find the natural break points and identify discrete sub-tasks you can actually schedule and complete.
Triage. Not everything on your list needs to be done by you. Not everything needs to be done today. Not everything needs to be done at all. Ask honestly: Is this related to my top priorities? Is it time-sensitive? Does it actually need to happen? Does it need to happen by me?
Find a thought and accountability partner. Find someone with similar goals and challenges who understands your work, and check in with each other regularly. Not a manager, not a coach. Just someone you trust who will notice if you’ve been saying you’re going to finish that thing for three weeks.
And when all else fails: delegate, change your environment, or say no.
The tools.
For teams (or for yourself), a project management tool can make a real difference. The ones worth knowing are Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and Monday.com — all free or low-cost at the basic level, all with different strengths. Monday.com is the one I demoed for the lab because it’s flexible enough to handle both research workflows and administrative work, and the visual layouts (table, timeline, Kanban) map well onto different types of projects.
The takeaway.
You need a to-do list. Really.
Beyond that: this is a toolbox, not a prescription. The Ivy Lee Method works brilliantly for some people and feels like a straitjacket to others. Pomodoro is transformative if you’re a procrastinator and irrelevant if you’re not. The Eisenhower Matrix is only useful if you’re honest.
Try things. Keep what works. Throw out what doesn’t. The goal is a system that fits your actual brain and your actual work.
Want the slides? Download the original presentation here.