We spend a lot of our time trying to avoid pain, effort, and discomfort. In the PhD, this can take a myriad shapes: reading too much literature (rather than writing our own ideas), not reading a competitor researcher’s latest paper (it may render our work unoriginal), doing email first (vs. that hard, laborious qualitative data analysis), making a research plan with concrete deadlines (accountability, yikes!), asking questions at a research seminar (will we look dumb?), delaying reaching out to potential participants in our research (cold-contacting strangers is awkward, right?), meeting our supervisors… Then, one day, we realize that avoiding discomfort is exactly the opposite of what makes the PhD a meaningful endeavor. This post delves deeper into that realization, deriving a “mantra” to support us during hard times in the doctoral journey.

In the blog we have written a lot about doctoral well-being, from different angles… but what personal and contextual factors seem to affect it? A recent study out of Italy asked 216 students about this and about challenges to their well-being. In this post, we summarize the study and its findings, connecting these results with prior ideas in the blog, and how we can apply them in our own doctorate journey to find better well-being.

A family member dies, or their health fails catastrophically, requiring intense caregiving. A workload spike at our thesis-unrelated job becomes an ongoing plateau. Life’s logistics somehow magically align to get in the way, again and again. The experience of a “hair on fire” emergency morphing into a prolonged thesis progress slump is more common than we think. My recent hiatus from blogging has helped me see this common problem of doctoral students in a new light (and to experience it firsthand). This post explores mindsets and strategies that can help us return to making regular progress on our non-urgent but important projects (a.k.a. the thesis).

Have you ever wished for advice from this blog, tailored to your specific questions or situation? For getting a tl;dr of our blog posts on a certain topic? For an “A Happy PhD” podcast? In this post, I detail step-by-step an easy way of using AI to get information and advice tailored to your questions, about the blog’s very topics and contents.

Co-writing a paper, especially beyond one or two co-authors, can become a protracted process. If, on top of that, you try to have multiple feedback cycles (as we recommend), co-authoring a paper can feel like swimming in molasses. This brief post describes how the most effective PhD students I know handle this kind of feedback situation.

Is there a way to be productive in our PhD without falling into all-out work obsession and burnout? What habits and systems could help us make good use of our (inherently limited) time and effort, taking into account that we could die tomorrow? In this second part of our Four Thousand Weeks book summary, we look at some of the tactical and strategic advice stemming from the productivity mindset shifts the book suggests – filtered and contextualized for doctoral students aware of their finitude.

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.

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.

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).

One of the top barriers to PhD productivity is procrastination. Have you ever found yourself with a big ugly task getting stale in your to-do list, repeatedly postponed because it is too big, too abstract, or makes you somehow uncomfortable? This tiny practice post gives you an simple trick to beat this sort of procrastination.

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.

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”.