How I Blew Up My Project Management System (And How the Einstein Principle Is Getting Me Closer to Promotion)

I blew up my project management system this week.

Actually, calling it a "system" is generous. It was a pile of Post-it notes that generated a list of to-dos in my planner, informed by project due dates I'd sketched onto my calendar at some point in the past. It wasn't a circular process. It wasn't even a spiral. You know the somewhat-bounded, perpetually swirling cloud of dust that follows Pigpen around in the Peanuts cartoons? That was my system. A somewhat-bounded, random cloud of dust.

So what finally made me scrap this obviously well-engineered method? A project big enough that everything else had to go on the back burner, or off the stove entirely. My clinical schedule over the last couple of months also dragged me miles away from the JT Path to Promotion I'd so thoughtfully mapped out last spring when I was preparing for my yearly evaluation. I looked at my Post-its, my to-do list, my calendar, and felt genuinely confused, like I'd had nothing to do with any of it, despite the fact that it was completely in my own handwriting.

A podcast lit the fuse. Cal Newport's recent episode "How Do I Finish Meaningful Projects?" opens with the fact that only 8% of people finish their yearly goals. He then revisits a system he built as a grad student, back when he was writing "how to succeed" guides for other students: sort everything into a few broad categories (school, work, personal), then rank each item by how urgently it needs to happen and how much it actually moves you toward your goals. Anything without a hard deadline gets a rough two-week plan to keep it moving quietly in the background, while the bulk of your focus goes to the few things that are both time-sensitive and genuinely important. The logic: you cannot do everything at once, and multitasking doesn’t work. Research, not to mention history, backs him up. What's come to be known as the Einstein Principle asks you to abandon the minor stuff entirely and pour every ounce of cognitive power into one gargantuan challenge, which is more or less how Einstein spent 1912 to 1915, working out the math behind general relativity. If it's good enough for Einstein and Cal Newport, who am I to argue?

Your categories are yours to invent. As a DINK, I skipped the "kids" column, though I'd add a "family" column the moment I had a goal that required one. (Currently, everyone in my orbit remains reassuringly status quo.) I focused on the professional pile, since that was the one generating the most angst, and moved it all to a single surface.

Then I sorted by whatever theme surfaced first, starting with "Promotion" and "No Promotion," to get honest about how much of what I was doing actually moved me toward becoming a professor in the next five years. The "No Promotion" pile got big. Fast. The same altruism that draws us into medicine, paired with the people-pleasing we've mistaken for what made us successful in it, means we accumulate academic flotsam and jetsam that no promotion committee will ever ask about. To manage the overflow, I added "D/C" (self-explanatory), "Get It Over With" for anything that would take an hour or two and then be permanently finished, and "Timing Not Right Yet" for projects with due dates in the distant future or ones waiting on someone else to catch up first.

"Promotion" and "No Promotion" were still the biggest piles, but I could finally see my way out of my own Pigpen cloud. Every "D/C" Post-it got either an email killing the project or an email to a mentor asking whether it could earn its way into "Promotion" with reasonable effort. Half the "Get It Over With" pile disappeared within the half hour, including a parking ticket I'd been refusing to pay out of principle (though apparently unable to locate the amount of principle required to just throw it away instead).

What I have now is a real path toward getting Einsteinian: a short list of gargantuan challenges (gargantuan to me, anyway; we can't all be the father of relativity) that move me somewhere.

This is a good moment in the academic year to check whether your own system is clicking along, needs a tune-up, or needs to be detonated and rebuilt from the studs. We're far enough past the start of the year that the shine has worn off, and the lift of orienting new learners has gotten lighter. You can go analog: Post-its, painter's tape, and a Sharpie, the way I did. Or you can go digital; I hear good things about Monday.com from entrepreneurs and business people. What matters isn't the platform. It's having enough nerve to change something that isn't working, to trade "not good enough, but adequate, I guess" for something better.

So: what's sitting in your own dusty, bounded cloud right now? And what would it take for you to finally blow it up?