Monthly Status Reports (A random walk through how I run my lab, Item 4)

In the business world, or in "Office Space," everyone has seemingly heard of the TPS that must be submitted to your boss at arbitrary (but far too often) frequency. More annoyingly, the TPS often appears to remain unread serving only to occupy one's time with busy work. So it is with ironic amusement that I rediscovered this tool so as to improve the efficiency of my lab. After all, theorists are out-of-the-box thinkers who don't want to be constrained by the mundane, right? And yet this monthly task is exactly the extra structure my students needed to maximize their progress, liberating them to not even see the "box."

For nearly two years, I have asked my students to submit a Monthly Status Report (MSR). It includes only four components: accomplishments, accountability, goals, and pain-points. The goals include not just what is to be done in the next month, but also their overarching plans. In accountability, they summarize what was performed with regards to the previous month's goals. If they succeeded with all of their goals, then that serves to calibrate a more ambitious plan for the following month! The pain-points provide a quick summary of which items I might need to help them with or which I am overdue on. (Yes, I also need help keeping all the balls in the air!) The MSR needs to include items regarding their educational plan, and not just their research projects. To this end, I ask them to include a running clock of the time spent as a graduate student or postdoc. The clock increments by one month each time, of course. The total number, though, reminds us to track professional development activities appropriate to the student's educational timeline. The key to insuring that this is not a totally pointless exercise is that the MSR is followed by a 1:1 thirty-minute meeting discussing progress and charting out meetings and tasks for both student and me to follow up on. I've found that this "meta" meeting is critical to ensuring that both the student AND her or his projects succeed. When I had a smaller group, the MSR wasn't necessary, but now it's critical. I have found it to be more effective than the annual Individual Development Plan (IDP), if the latter is done exclusively, because the IDP is yearly and that feedback isn't often enough. Indeed, the MSR makes the IDP easy for students to complete and increases the effectiveness of the IDP.

Again, the MSR is a simple tool from business school 101, but don't scoff it if you want to help your students increase their productivity and maximize what they learn in graduate school. The key is to use it as a vehicle to hold a frequent and periodic conversation between you and every one of your students!