Just say no: A young researcher’s thoughts on prioritizing projects and ideas

Most scientific papers end with “This calls for more research”! As such, there is always another idea and another potential project. And as a young researcher, I have been eager to pursue them all. However, at some point I started losing track of my projects. What was important? And what was simply ‘nice to’ projects? More importantly, the important stuff started to wither due to lack of attention. At the same time, my hair was greying at a rapid pace and the sleep deprivation was setting in. Does this sound familiar? 

Over the last few years, I have challenged myself to work very actively with prioritization and to improve my ‘nay saying game’. I am happy to say that I have managed to reduce my project portfolio to about half its size – but twice its quality. In this article, I will present the practical tools which I have developed along the way, in the hope that they can be useful to someone else.

Just say no!

It sounds so simple, yet it is so immensely difficult. The reasons are many. You want to prove yourself. To your supervisors and to your peers. And most often also to yourself. And you are afraid of missing out on a project. What if this turns out to be really important? Your (lack of) experience does not allow you to distinguish clearly, so you had better err on the side of signing up!

Obviously, there are situations where ‘no’ is not an option. If the department head swings by your cubicle to ask you to do a project, it is generally (but not always!) wiser to ask where you should sign than to challenge the idea. And the first year or so of your career, your PhD supervisor probably handles most prioritization for you. But the wiggle room increases over the years and sooner or later, you are faced with a project idea and a question: Are you in?!

I have worked actively with setting up some ground rules that I can use to prioritize. Importantly, this is not a philosophical process but a very real and practical issue. Once a project idea comes about, I bring out the list of tools and apply a few of them, after which I decide whether to join the project or not. Some of these tools I have developed myself, some I have picked up along the way, and some have been handed to me. Many more tools have been tested, but the eight tools listed below complement each other and constitute a toolbox that I ultimately feel does the trick. I hope they will work for you as well.

If the wall of text below is already making you want to say no (to reading it…), a brief and printer-friendly one-page version can be found here: antonpottegaard.dk/HowToSayNo.pdf

The Mydstkov Criteria

Named after a Danish jazz musician, Hans Mydtskov, these criteria are the most important tool I have. The original criteria apply to musicians and how to decide, whether you should accept a certain gig. There are three criteria: Nice pay? Nice music? And nice people? That is; are you paid handsomely, is the music interesting in itself, and are the other musicians people you want to spend time with? This can easily be translated into science: Will this project give you a nice ‘pay’, either in funding or in high-impact publications/citations? Is the scientific endeavor in itself fun and interesting? And lastly, are the people you would work with a group you want to work with?

As a junior researcher, you need to require at least one of these to be fulfilled (you will be surprised by how many projects that score zero points!). As you get more experienced and have the wiggle room to prioritize a little more, you can require that a project scores at least two points. That is, you should do a project even if the science is boring as long as the ‘pay’ is nice and you work with nice people. And you can do a project with horrible people, as long as it ‘pays’ well and is interesting. However, if it is boring science and you would work with horrible people, you should not do it – regardless of how well it ‘pays’. And, you should not do it if it is boring science, and with limited or no ‘pay’, regardless of how nice the people are. And of course, priority should always be given to the rare but wonderful “3 of 3 Mydtskov”-projects!

The 72-hour rule

We all know the feeling of excitement when a new idea is born. The room is boiling, problems are quickly followed by solutions, and everyone’s adrenaline levels are through the roof. This process of hammering out new ideas are one of the most rewarding and most exciting reasons to work in science. However, it is probably also the worst situation in terms of prioritization. The adrenaline has clouded your judgement and makes you feel like you can handle anything. And before you know it, you have not only seen an idea being born, but also committed yourself to setting up the experiment and writing up the paper.

The 72-hour rule effectively addresses this situation: When an idea is born and I’m feeling excited about it, I always ask that we all step away from it for 72 hours. If we are equally excited in 72 hours, we are probably on to something valuable. However, the 72-hour quarantine allows the adrenaline to evaporate and also allows time to apply other tools (e.g. the “To do-comparison” or “Tickbox optimization”). Surprisingly often, we reconvene three days later and have all arrived at the conclusion that the project idea needs more time to mature before we pursue it.

To do-comparison

When a new project lands on your desk, it always looks shiny and fresh. But is the grass really greener on the other side? Is this really important? It has to be, because your current portfolio will inevitably suffer from you taking on another obligation. Whether a project is exciting is perhaps not the right question. The more relevant question is whether this project is more exciting than what you have already taken on? If not, is it then more exciting than other ideas you have recently had or heard about? These questions are easily answered by looking at your current to do-list and in the “list of other ideas” that many of us have in our top drawer. If it fails to compete with current tasks, it is probably wiser to add it to the “perhaps later” list and close the drawer again.

Tickbox optimization

How many tickboxes can you tick if you do this project? In general, you should aim for at least 2-3. Very rewarding projects can sometime take care of a whole range of issues all in one go. Here, we are not talking generic rewards (e.g. another publication), but specific issues that you have identified that you would like to address.

This is perhaps best illustrated with an example. A project idea that I discarded using this tool involved a closer look at older patients’ use of statins. The project idea was interesting in itself, but the specific project had no synergy with other activities. We ultimately ended up doing a project on deprescribing of a certain drug class, which 1) allowed me to collaborate with two departments I have always liked to work with, 2) fund a candidate that I was looking to fund, 3) had important synergy with other ongoing activities within the same area, 4) allowed me to work with this drug class that I had worked with previously, 5) used a new method for patient recruitment that I was keen on working with/improving, and 6) ensured activity in a research network I was trying to bolster.

In addition to highlighting projects that are not worth pursuing, this tool also quite often allows you to qualify the projects you end up doing – sometimes even very minor tweaks to a project increase the number of ticks you get from doing the project.

Senior input

A famous quote in health science is Doug Altman’s “We need less research, better research, and research done for the right reason”. And Doug Altman was a very smart guy. One of the gurus within my own field (epidemiology), Ken Rothman, once tweeted “I’ve never regretted saying no!”. That made me think of all the times senior colleagues have asked me to prioritize. These guys made it – many of them to a much greater level than I ever will. Maybe I should stop and listen? That is, if the ‘village elders’ argue that saying no is not a bad thing and that we need to prioritize what we do, do it better and do it for the right reason, then there is no reason to feel guilty when you turn down a project.

Vision?

You and your colleagues have most likely agreed on a visionary statement at some point. Perhaps it is a few years back and perhaps you have not thought much of it since. Or someone higher up in the system have presented something to you and your colleagues that you, by now, hardly remember. Regardless of how this visionary statement came about, someone, perhaps yourself, have at some point spent quite a bit of time thinking about what direction you should move in. All this effort was done for the sole purpose of prioritization. Will the project you now have to decide on bring you closer to fulfilling that vision? In other words, is the project in concordance with what your organization has found important? If not, you should probably consider saying no.

Joy Of Missing Out (JOMO!)

When you succeed in saying no, you should set time aside to  ponder the fact that you are now not doing that particular project. Put in a 10 min celebration session in your calendar a week from now, allow yourself an extra-large piece of chocolate on the drive home or whatever you would like to indulge in. The important part is that you should spend some time actively thinking about how nice it is to not do this project. How nice it is that you do not have to allocate time to do it. This, of course, does not help you in saying no – that already happened. However, it helps you build confidence for future dilemmas.

Constant reminder

Despite our most strenuous efforts, most of us need to be constantly reminded that we need to prioritize. How you do this best is most likely highly individual, but it goes without saying that it needs to be integrated into our daily routines. In my case, I have put a picture on my desk, both at the office and at home, of my daughters looking directly at me with a very skeptical frown. The same picture has been put as the lock screen on my phone. Every time I see this photo, it reminds me of the need for prioritization – and why I need to prioritize.

I hope that you will find some of the suggestions above to be useful. If you have any comments or suggestions, you are very welcome to reach out to me at [email protected]. Together, I am sure we can rise to the challenge and say no!