If you are a doctoral student struggling to move your dissertation forward, especially in the face of additional jobs, teaching, family, or other obligations, the thought of becoming more productive can be very appealing – to the point of becoming a sort of obsession. After our review of (somewhat caricaturesque) doctoral productivity and anti-productivity arguments, in this post I summarize some of the ideas in Oliver Burkeman’s recent book, Four thousand weeks, which I have found very helpful to reach a balance between my own productivity obsessions and the abandoning of all hope of being any good at my daily research activities.

Does the thesis bring you a sense of anxiety, fear or discomfort? As we saw in a previous post, that is not an uncommon experience at certain points during the PhD. At the heart of many of our unsuccessful strategies to deal with these symptoms (including distraction and addiction) is the notion of avoidance. In this post, we’ll explain what avoidance is, its key role in many mental health afflictions, and suggest exercises and strategies to help us overcome these challenges.