PhD: An uncommon guide to research, writing & PhD life by James Hayton

Author:James Hayton [Hayton, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: James Hayton PhD
Published: 2015-04-10T05:00:00+00:00

MANAGING MULTIPLE DEMANDS

During my PhD, I had few other commitments. Being funded meant that I didn’t need a job, and my only other responsibilities were sports coaching on some evenings and a little bit of work to help out in the undergraduate labs.

For some it’s not so easy. If you have a large teaching burden, a full-time job or a young family to look after – or all three – it can be hard to find the time to do any PhD work at all.

One of the difficulties with a PhD being a long-term undertaking is that there are few short-term consequences to your decisions. If you work as hard as you can for 18 hours today, any positive output is likely to be tiny in comparison to all that you have still to do. Likewise, if you do nothing today, it’s unlikely that anything terrible will happen. So if you have something urgent but unrelated to your PhD, it’ll probably take priority.

If, for example, you are doing a PhD while running your own business, the consequences of missing a client meeting are more immediate and painful than missing a morning of PhD work, so the client meeting pushes the PhD aside.

Having a schedule for the week allows you to plan ahead – and this is easy to do – but it is essential to treat the PhD work with equal priority, even if it is less urgent.

If you had a meeting with one client, and another wanted a meeting at the same time, you would say to the second that you were unavailable. Treat your PhD the same way; book yourself to work on it, and make yourself unavailable to all other external demands.

Emergencies happen, and if a family member is sick then you might have to drop everything and go, but otherwise you should protect the time allocated for PhD work.

Most external circumstances are not that urgent, but if you are always responding to them as if they were then you’ll never have control.

Effective scheduling

Think in terms of spending time working exclusively on a problem, rather than telling yourself that you must solve the problem in that time. Even when there is little flexibility in terms of your schedule, you must still accept that research is unpredictable. You cannot always control the outcome. All you can control is the care and attention you put in. If you spend the time properly focused, it is a success.

Try to leave some gaps between the blocks of time you allocate to each task, partly because it takes time to switch your focus from one thing to another, but also because you need rest between intensely focused bouts of work.

Simplifying

As research tends to increase in complexity over time, you might find yourself trying to manage several strands of research at the same time. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but if you keep taking on more then eventually you’ll end with too much.

Working harder might help, but if you push yourself beyond the point of fatigue then you’ll be less able to cope.

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