Emily Riehl is a mathematician (category theorist and professor at Johns Hopkins), a musician (bass guitar), and an athlete (rugby, Australian Rules Football). During a 2017 "PhD + epsilon" interview by Beth Malmskog, Professor Riehl describes how she is a highly productive professional using a radical time management strategy:

I read Hardy's A Mathematician’s Apology in high school and my main takeaway was from the forward written by C P Snow, who described Hardy’s typical day: he devoted four hours in the morning, from 8-12, doing math, and then spent the afternoon watching cricket. It struck me as a particularly aspirational life style and so I’ve always focused more on working well than on working long hours. My main time management strategy is to start work on the thing that is due the soonest last, when I'll be the most focused. So, for example, if I have a referee report due in three months, I wait until almost three months have passed, and then start to read the paper. I also do the preparation for my teaching in the hour or hour and a half before class, in what often feels like a race to figure out how to prove all the theorems before I rush across campus. Occasionally this gets me in to trouble, for instance when I was trying set up a transfinite induction over the reals and couldn’t understand why the intermediate stages were all "countable" (aside: I'm now firmly in the camp that believes that the axiom of choice is clearly true, while the well-ordering principle is clearly false). But this approach is very effective at reserving time for research and other long-term projects.

Riehl's career vision is awesomely inspirational:

In a decade's time, I hope I'm working on projects that I can't even imagine now and have found a way to be a part of larger mathematical and public conversations.

(cf If You Need a Theorem (2018-11-08), Clarity, Understanding, Community (2020-09-03), ...) - ^z - 2023-06-28