time management is obviously a really
important factor in a PhD because you
have so many different things to do and
so little time to do it... but it's one of
those things that often goes wrong. So a
typical situation would be you feel like
you're not getting enough done, you feel
like you need to be more organized, so
you make a plan... you timetable out your
week or possibly several months and it's
all color-coded so you've got all of the
different tasks and you know exactly
when you're going to do them. This gives
you a temporary sense of control but
it's before you've actually done
anything... so you feel better before
you've actually done any of the work... and
then once you actually start to do
things you find that this idealized
timetable doesn't necessarily match up
to reality because there are all sorts
of unexpected things... so the timetable
that you've done, it can become a burden
that you're not living up to instead of
a useful tool that actually helps you to
make progress. There are a lot of
different factors that go into effective
planning, but one of the things that I
think you should consider is this idea
I've been talking about in some of my
recent videos of decision fatigue (so the
idea that when you have to make a lot of
decisions in your work then that's
tiring and the more tired you get the
harder it becomes to make good decisions
and then you know the more stressful it
becomes) so if you're aware of that
effect you can start to arrange the
different aspects of your work so that
you're not doing too much of that kind
of work all at the same time... or you
don't have entire days or weeks where
everything is this kind of exhausting
decision-making kind of work. So if you
have, for example, writing which involves
a huge amount of decisions but then you
have some kind of routine stuff which is
relatively easy... you have the knowledge
and the skill and the experience to do
it without really having to think that
much about it because the decisions and
the process are already set...
then you can alternate between those two
types of work. So for example if you
do two or three hours of writing in the
morning when you're at your freshest
then if you have a break...
if you go back straight back to writing
then perhaps it just gets more and more
and more tiring... but if there's other
stuff that needs to happen to help the
writing, for example inserting references
into your document which doesn't take
that much thought once you've got
process, then you know you take a break
from all that sort of decision making
stuff... so if you alternate between these
two types of tasks then it
becomes much easier to actually sustain
progress because you're not working to
exhaustion... so try it out... try and
factor in these two types of work; the
heavy decision-making work and the
kind of routine stuff and let me know
what you think in the comments below
