Introduction

As of this writing, I have been a PHD student for almost 5 months, and I’ve learned more about myself and how I operate in terms of work routines and structures than I ever did as a university student. I have had a mild burn-out already from over-working myself, and I have also experienced not feeling like I had any energy going forward (we’ll talk about perfectionism in a later post, not to worry).

In the following, though, I’ll be outlining the four biggest insights I’ve had as a PHD student in my last 5 months with respect to structuring my day.

Treat your PHD as a job

A PHD-program is a full-time job. Yes, you have a lot of freedom and a lot of options for how you want to structure a PHD, particularly if you are working on a solo research project through a stipend from the university like I am, as opposed to a research group or an externally funded project with potential stakeholders and conflicts of interest that might narrow your options and hold you more accountable to a certain extend. Yes, it is also an education, and the point of taking an education is to learn and be more process-oriented, at least ideally. But no, it is a job, and you have to approach it as such. You’ll be faced with a variety of different tasks and cooperations you have to manage, and you need to get good at structuring your day in accordance with what works for you. You’ll have external obligations and numerous of people to be accountable to, so your work day needs to intersect with that of other people\s at least to a certain extend, even if you choose to work from home.

One particular challenge I am still working to solve is to find a way to divide how much time I spend on different activities in accordance with my temperament. I have never been very good at multi-tasking; I prefer to work on one thing at a time in a very linear fashion, but that just isn’t feasible when you have 3-4 different activities to manage each week. As an example, the following is my general tasks in the next 6 months, and the allocated amount of hours (This is of course a rough outline, but this presupposes that I have a 40 hour work week and need to structure my tasks in accordance with this limitation.):

  • teaching a beginner programming course once a week, along with preparing the material; approximately 9 hours/week
  • Working on a technical course project to gain the necessary skills (and ECTS credits) I need; approximately 8 hours/week
  • Tweaking experiments and preparing an article about evaluation of a lexical sentiment resource to publish at an international journal, approximately 8 hours/week
  • Gathering data for my research project in hyperbole detection; approximately 8 hours/week
  • Reading theoretical articles about my subject of choice; approximately 4 hours/week
  • Administrative work, including meetings, responding and following up on emails, and applications for funding for external research visit; approximately 3 hours/week

Have I followed my own advice so far? No, not as much as I could have. I have fallen into the trap multiple times of prioritizing things that interest me the most and piling up the mundane things, and as far as work/life-balance goes, let’s just say that in the first half of january, I worked 12 hours/7 days a week for at least 2 weeks in a row to complete a deadline, and then crashed hard for the remainder. I get very hyper-focused on whatever I’m focusing on, for better or worse.

Get some sleep!

Seriously, this one is crucial. You might think that it doesn’t matter if you stay up until 3 at night to work on a project with a deadline, but if there is something I’m starting to notice after implementing better sleeping habits, it is that consistency is important. A recent study, finding strong correlations between sleep quality, consistency, and duration and study performance. One major point that I found interesting is that sleeping well the night before a significant milestone, like an academic test, did not correlate with performance. However, consistently good sleep appeared to massively affect performance.

I realize there could be a certain ‘duh’ factor in the statement that sleep is very, very important, but as we just saw, this is a genuine problem for many students and adults alike. My own history with sleep has been buggy; it’s as though my brain lights up at night when it has sometime to relax and wander off into the distance. Sometimes it wanders to speculating on a research problem, like the role of formal semantics in NLP and how to utilize predicate logical structures in claim strength detection, or it jumps to the far future and speculates on the use of bio-weapons and gene editing technologies, or it speculates on patterns and insights in my private life. In the worst case, it starts an elaborate analysis of all the things I still need to do, and beats down any solutions with excessively perfectionistic standards, or it will invent problems to solve that prooves I am not at all doing enough with my life. In short, my brain can go anywhere, and it really, really wants to party.

I’m finding that taking sometime off in the hours before going to sleep to relax, read a good book, or meditate/reflect substantially reduces my mental monolog. I’m also implementing better phone habits, as I do tend to want to check my news feed or talk to people, which actually seems to influence my ability to sleep, particularly if a lot of new information and data is coming in.

Another thing that can help with reducing mental chatter is exercise, which is why I’ve implemented a 20 minute routine before I sleep to tire myself out. Yoga stretches, weight-lifting, or general agility exercises seem to work to remind me that I have a body that needs things, and sometimes it needs sleep. Again, ‘duh’, you say, and now go sit in the corner and be quiet while I finnish this post.

Realize that you’re going to make plans, and they are going to change

When I first applied for my PHD, I had to make a project proposal and a rough plan for each semester, detailing key goals and milestones on my project, courses I wanted to teach/take, and where I wanted to go for the compulsory guest research stay. Regardless of what kind of program you are taking, I’ll venture to say that planning is going to come in at some very early point in the process. Awesome, right? You made a plan, and now you can stick to it and make sure you build your perfect schedule, because you can predict the future and know exactly what you want to be doing 5 years ahead, but you didn’t consider all the little bumps along the and you forgot to eat for the last 3 days. Well, that is, if you are me. You might very well also think that making plans is completely unnecessary to start with. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle: Plans ensure that you have a rough idea of how your program is going to look, and at the very least, it shows the people assessing your potential as a PHD candidate that you are able to realistically plan your schedule in accordance with the allocated time. However, once you start the program, don’t expect that plan to remain stationary. You’ll run into scheduling conflicts, unanswered questions that you need people to help you with, and just straight-up things that are not possible within the time frame.

One of the most impactful advice in project management that I’ve seen is to realize you’re failing early, then readjust. I’ve had to readjust many plans already, and I’ve also gotten stuck in processing decisions way longer than I ought to have, even if my perception of the situation that lead me to the decision has usually not been wrong. Usually, this is because of one of two things:

  1. I don’t have enough information to go through with the decision, and I’m procrastinating on getting it because it requires me to explain myself in a phone call or an email.
  2. There legitimately is no better decision than the other, and I just have a hard time figuring out which one will get me to where I want to be.

The advice I would give my past self, even as of one week ago, and which I was also given by somebody very close to me, is to actively stop yourself from processing while you are in problem-solving mode rather than rumination mode, and start doing. Get the information you need, or make a final decision and don’t look back.

Finally, do whatever works for you

In this post, I’ve outlined some of the things I’ve had to massively adjust since starting my PHD, and I’ve written this with the intention of giving useful pointers. I also find that writing them down as advice provides me with a detached perspective on what works for me. So, if you find this post far too one-sided or you know these things (A) won’t work for you, or (B) are not a problem for you whatsoever, great! Society has all kinds of metrics with which to evaluate work productivity and work ethic. However, when it comes down to it, the most important thing is to find your own flow and do what you know works for you, not what any productivity books or PHD moles tell you works for you. Be experimental, figure things out as you go, and you’ll be fine, but be honest about whether what you are doing is truly fascilitating your goals. What do you really want? In the end, that is really only a question you yourself can answer.