Graduate students are often stressed and overworked; a recent Nature report states that grad students are six times more likely to suffer from depression than the general population. Although there are many factors contributing to this, I suspect that a lot of it has to do with poor time management.

In this post, I will describe why time management in grad school is particularly difficult, and some strategies that I’ve found helpful as a grad student.

As a grad student, I’ve found time management to be far more difficult than either during my undergraduate years as well as working in the industry. Here are a few reasons why:

Loose supervision: as a grad student, you have a lot of freedom over how you spend your time. There are no set hours, and you can go a week or more without talking to your adviser. This can be both a blessing and a curse: some find the freedom liberating while others struggle to be productive. In contrast, in an industry job, you’re expected to report to daily standup, you get assigned tickets each sprint, so others essentially manage your time for you. Few deadlines: grad school is different from undergrad in that you have a handful of “big” deadlines a year (eg: conference submission dates, major project due dates), whereas in undergrad, the deadlines (eg: assignments, midterms) are smaller and more frequent. Sparse rewards: most of your experiments will fail. That’s the nature of research — if you know it’s going to work, then it’s no longer research. It’s hard to not get discouraged when you struggle for weeks without getting a positive result, and start procrastinating on a multitude of distractions.

Basically, poor time management leads to procrastination, stress, burnout, and generally having a bad time in grad school 😦

Some time management strategies that I’ve found to be useful:

Track your time. When I first started doing this, I was surprised at how much time I spent doing random, half-productive stuff not really related to my goals. It’s up to you how to do this — I keep a bunch of Excel spreadsheets, but some people use software like Asana. Know your plan. My adviser suggested a hierarchical format with a long-term research agenda, medium-term goals (eg: submit a paper to ICML), and short-term tasks (eg: run X baseline on dataset Y). Then you know if you’re progressing towards your goals or merely doing stuff tangential to it. Focus on the process, not the reward. It’s tempting to celebrate when your paper gets accepted — but the flip side is you’re going to be depressed if it gets rejected. Your research will have have many failures: paper rejections and experiments that somehow don’t work. Instead, celebrate when you finish the first draft of your paper; reward yourself when you finish implementing an algorithm, even if it fails to beat the baseline.

Here, I plotted my productive time allocation in the last 6 months:

Most interestingly, only a quarter of my time is spent coding or running experiments, which seems to be much less than most grad students. I read a lot of papers to try to avoid reinventing things that others have already done.

On average, I spend about 6 hours a day doing productive work (including weekends) — a quite reasonable workload of about 40-45 hours a week. Contrary to some perceptions, grad students don’t have to be stressed and overworked to be successful; allowing time for leisure and social activities is crucial in the long run.