Remember, time is a greedy player who wins without cheating, every round!

Baudelaire

Getting PhD Work Done… or Cleaning the Kitchen

I felt elated when I won funding to spend three years focusing on a PhD on something I love. What could go wrong? I’ve got plenty of time. This is going to be a walk in the park, or so I thought. The reality was that it was one of the most challenging things I have done. The constant uphill struggle of sitting down at my desk or in a cafe with my computer seemed such an abhorrent thought. Suddenly the kitchen needed cleaning, washing needed to be put in the machine, clothes needed hanging, the cat needed shampooing, anything other than having to look at my work. It was only when I had mounting pressure that I sat down to write, reluctantly. The perfectionist in me spent hours revising the same paragraph or sentence and feeling a sense of achievement when at the end of a productive day, I ended up with three hundred words.

What helped me with writing and studying was how to manage my time and seeing the thesis as nothing more than a very long essay. I remember attending my first post-graduate meeting, when we were all enthusiastically unphased and being told nuggets of wisdom. “Don’t be so precious”, Kate McGowan, the head of the Graduate School told us as we looked up at her with wonderment and innocence, “this isn’t your magnum opus, good enough is fine”. This made sense, but it was only three years in did it start to mean anything.

Taking Control of Your Time

Time management techniques were also important. They helped me be far more productive than just sitting down for hours on end and coming up for air, exhausted and wanting to die, resulting in the rest of the day in the recovery position or face down in a darkened room. Instead, I broke my hour up into 45 minute sessions with a 15 minute break with longer for lunch. I wrote down the start and finish times for each session and could manage to complete seven or eight sessions per day. This worked well for me and I found I could get more done in a day and I had a sense of achievement after ticking off each successful session.