5 tips for becoming a more productive PhD student
How to use goals, planning and a work-life balance to achieve more in your research.
Being a PhD student can be tough — with long days, lots of pressure but no imminent deadlines, it can be hard to find the motivation to work hard and get the most out of your research. But being more productive at work will not only help you get more done but also feel more accomplished and in turn motivate you further. The following are my 5 top tips for being more productive as a PhD student.
1. Plan out your day
This is undoubtedly the simplest thing you can do to make your days more productive. Planning your day means you can be as efficient as possible with your time. For example, if you know an experiment must incubate for an hour, or code needs to run overnight, then plan ahead. Start tasks early in the day and identify smaller things you can do in between so you’re not just waiting around. This will also help you leave the office or lab sooner — if you time things badly, you’re likely to have to stay longer!
Remember not to over-plan though. You don’t need to know what you’ll be doing every minute of the day in advance. Moreover, you need to build in buffer time for the unexpected tasks that come up during the day. But planning what you want to do in a day, either first thing in the morning or even the night before gives you a purpose for your day and can make your work feel much more efficient than just winging it, and who doesn’t love feeling efficient!
2. Make SMART goals
Setting goals is the key to being productive. For those who haven’t heard of SMART goals, they’re absolutely something you should be using! And for those of us who have been told about SMART goals, how often do you actually use them?
SMART stands for Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant and Time-bound. This means making goals that have a specific aim, that you allow you to quantify your progress, are realistic and have a time limit. Let’s take the following example:
“I will run a marathon”
While running a marathon is a good thing to aim to do, this goal itself is pretty unhelpful. What marathon will you run? How fast do you want to run it? How long do you have to prepare for it?
Let’s adapt this to make it a SMART goal…
“I will run the London 2021 marathon (specific and time-bound) in under 5 hours (measurable).”
The attainability and relevance of a goal are personal — if you’ve never run before, make sure the time you’ve set is feasible for training for a marathon. Moreover, if you don’t have a good reason for running it, is it even a relevant goal? And these goals apply to your PhD as well. It’s important to know exactly what you’re aiming for in order to make the work you do useful and help you feel productive.
The most important part of SMART goal setting is that they’re time-bound. In practice, this means working towards goals set for different time frames. It’s no good only having long-term goals, for example ‘write my PhD thesis’, as these seem unachievable and can put you off even starting. Conversely, only thinking about what you want to do on a certain day can also be limiting — if something distracts you in the day and you can’t complete those goals, you may feel like you’ve not achieved enough. Similarly, with no long-term goals, you won’t be able to see the bigger picture.
Personally, I set work and study goals on 3 different time scales. Here’s an example of how this works.
Weekly goals e.g. immunohistochemical staining of 12/18 samples
This is essentially a to-do list of everything I want to do that week. This means that even if I don’t complete something on a certain day, I know I still have time in the week to finish it. I also find this gives me a direction for each week and helps me focus on getting the important stuff done. These goals should be achievable for the week, and they don’t necessarily have to be finishing something off, just making progress towards your…
Monthly goals e.g. complete immunohistochemical staining and analysis of all samples
This list is a bit broader and includes goals that consist of multiple steps or factors. For example, in order to achieve this goal, I need to stain the samples, image them and analyse them, which I can’t complete in a day or even a week. Therefore, having monthly goals helps me to work out what I need to do week-to-week to get work completed.
Yearly goals: publish a paper
These are big targets that without the smaller steps will feel very daunting. However, each month you should set goals that over the course of the year will help you reach this overall aim. Your yearly goal acts as the motivator to do all the little things along the way and gives you a purpose to what you’re working on.
3. Reflect on your progress with “progress reports”
But let’s not forget about the Measurable aspects of your goals. You need to be able to assess your progress towards a goal and reflect on what you’ve achieved in order set better goals in the future. Moreover, it will help you identify influences that might be preventing you from achieving those goals. Reflecting on your progress can come in many forms — your supervisor may ask you for a weekly report, or you may have regular meetings in which you need to present your findings. In this case you’re in luck, you have to reflect on your progress regularly in order to present it.
However, if your supervisor is less involved in your day-to-day work, it may be useful to create reports for yourself. At the end of each week or month, write down everything you’ve done that time and compare it to what you wanted to. Really hold yourself accountable and decide if you’ve actually done enough. If you easily completed everything then great, and maybe consider setting more ambitious goals for next time. But if you didn’t meet those goals, think about what stopped you. Did you get distracted, or did something more important take priority? Sometimes we can’t control what prevents us from doing what we’d planned but taking the time to reflect on your progress can help you to identify easy-to-change factors that are negatively influencing your productivity, as well as assessing if cutting them out boosts it. This process can also provide extra motivation when you don’t feel like working. Nothing motivates me more than being able to tick something off a list!
4. Get into a sustainable routine
There are 2 types of PhD students — the tortoise and the hare. The “hare” students work long hours for weeks on end, often immediately before a deadline, but often crash and end up not achieving everything in the long term. On the other hand, “tortoise” students steadily make progress so that they don’t need to rush before a deadline or exhaust themselves.
It’s pretty clear you want to be a “tortoise” kind of student, but this involves getting into a good and healthy work routine.
Getting into any old routine is easy. When you’re busy, it’s easy to slip into working long hours that over time become the norm. Alternatively, you may be sleeping in and getting into the lab late, so have to stay late to make up for it. The vicious cycle can quickly turn into a very unhealthy routine. Either way, you may feel like you’re getting everything done, but part of being productive is getting the most done in the minimum amount of time. If you think you could do the same amount of work in 6 hours as you’re currently doing in your ridiculous 12 hours days, you’re not being as productive as you think!
Therefore, in order to maximise your productivity, you need to stick to a sustainable routine. This means creating a rough day plan that means you get everything you need to do but without exhausting yourself, but also without leaving everything to the last minute. This helps to create the sense of a deadline of the end of the day that in general PhDs lack, hence helping you to work more efficiently towards your goals.
5. Don’t let your PhD be your sole focus
This tip sounds counter-productive. Surely focusing entirely on your PhD will help you get more done? Well, in the short-term this might be the case, but in the long-term, you’ll be able to stay motivated about what you’re doing if you also work on other things. This way even if you’re not feeling like working, you can productively focus on something else. Some ideas include:
· Join the committee of a society you’re involved with
· Plan a charity fundraiser
· Work on something that will help advance your future career.
You’ll quickly get bored if all you do is your PhD research, and having hobbies gives you other transferrable skills that will help in your future career. You know what they say, if you want something done ask a busy person — well, to get more done you need to make yourself busy!
Hopefully these tips have shown you that increasing your productivity is simple. Just planning out your day, setting goals and most importantly assessing your progress is the best way to make consistent progress through your PhD and help you feel more productive and fulfilled along the way!
