Looking for tips, tricks and advice to finish your doctoral thesis on time and with high spirits? Baffled by how little information is out there about how to support PhD students to become independent researchers? As an ex-doctoral student now co-supervising five students, I feel your pain.

“A Happy PhD” is a blog where I distil what has worked for me, as well as recent research in doctoral education, psychology and many other fields. Join our newsletter, or follow the blog on Twitter, Facebook, or via RSS.

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Are you looking for…

Common problems and challenges in doing the PhD, from mental health (e.g., depression or anxiety) or productivity challenges, to writing or dropping out of your PhD.

Mental health and wellbeing tips and advice: common mental health symptoms in the PhD, tips to avoid dropping out of the doctorate, the importance of sleep, holidays or advice from positive psychology to keep yourself motivated during the PhD.

PhD productivity tips and advice: from the classic Pomodoro technique, to avoiding to-do list overwhelm, dealing with multiple projects and priorities, staying productive and motivated, how I manage my daily tasks or how I do my weekly reviews.

PhD-specific tools, like the CQOCE diagram to conceptualize your PhD, the NABC method to structure your research presentations, or the process I use to write scientific papers or make big career decisions.

Supervision tips and advice, about giving feedback on student papers, or supporting a sense of progress in your doctoral students.

Recent Posts

image from Productivity as Avoidance, or How *Not* to Think about Doctoral Productivity (book extract)

Productivity as Avoidance, or How *Not* to Think about Doctoral Productivity (book extract)

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.

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image from Is Doctoral Productivity Bad?

Is Doctoral Productivity Bad?

In this blog I have written a lot about doctoral productivity tools and advice. Yet, many doctoral students out there may also think that the focus on productivity is exploitative, dehumanizing, and counter to the very spirit of the scientific endeavor. Should we reject the quest for being productive altogether? Should we “quiet quit” our PhDs? This post tries to clarify what I mean by (doctoral) productivity, which may not be the “narrow productivity” view you find in certain research policy or journalistic articles about the topic. That way, you can decide whether it makes sense for you to follow my advice, or get it elsewhere.

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image from Tiny idea: To-do lists are menus

Tiny idea: To-do lists are menus

Overwhelmed by your endless to-do list? Stressed because of the many PhD-related tasks you need to “go through”? As we discussed previously in the blog, you are not alone (and ask any already-doctors whether this feeling goes away after graduation). Lately, as I struggle with not-so-new-parenthood-unproductivity in my own research, I have been reminded several times of a mental reframe I first encountered in productivity writer Oliver Burkeman’s work. This simple metaphor helped me change my relationship with my to-do list, without hurting my productivity (more probably, the opposite).

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image from ChatGPT's doctoral productivity advice... and four ideas the algorithm will (probably) not give you

ChatGPT's doctoral productivity advice... and four ideas the algorithm will (probably) not give you

We know that making progress is a critical motivational factor in finishing a PhD and maintaining good mental health while we do it. In turn, our productivity plays a big role in whether we make progress on our dissertation or not. As the first post in a series on doctoral productivity, I could not help but fall into one of the thèmes du jour: whether ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence (AI) tools can write a good piece about this topic. In this post, I go over a couple of iterations of (pretty good) computationally-generated advice, and finally give you a few ideas that I think are overlooked by the algorithm.

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image from Tiny idea: Use the Regret Test for daily decision-making

Tiny idea: Use the Regret Test for daily decision-making

Have you ever spent an hour scrolling on Instagram (or your ​social media addiction of choice​) and later realized with a pang of regret that such a time could have been spent much better doing something else you deeply ​value​? This sort of realization is at the core of this week’s blog post: a tiny practice to guide our daily decision making about what to do next. This idea will also be familiar to long-time newsletter subscribers, as it was an early “newsletter exclusive”.
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More

Breathing through the PhD: Breathwork in the doctorate

Tiny practice: Boost your workday happiness with natural spaces

Tiny idea: Subtraction

Tiny practice: Granny's rule

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