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”.

During the doctorate (and in our later lives as researchers) we have to deal with a wide variety of situations and tasks, some stressful, some requiring focus or calmness. Going to therapy, doing therapy-inspired reflection exercises, journaling, and other practices are all very useful, but they require us to step away from the difficult situation. If only there was a simple, free, portable tool to help us in such situations, something we could do in any occasion and which is evidence-based… Wait, there is! This post is about breathwork, an array of tools with an increasing body of scientific evidence demonstrating its effectiveness. The post describes how we should breathe for better health and cognitive performance, and how different kinds of breathing patterns can help us cope with common challenging situations throughout the PhD.

We often come up with complicated and costly schemes to improve our lives (buy that new gadget, watch that new show everyone is talking about), when simpler zero-cost solutions may have better chances of actually having a positive impact. In another tiny post, I share a quick tip on how to enhance your lab/work-life by using natural spaces. This idea will also be familiar to long-time newsletter subscribers, as it was an early “newsletter exclusive”.

In our efforts to fix our life’s problems, we often keep adding stuff to our lives and ideas to our theses, ignoring there’s an alternative. In another tiny post, I quickly share how you can harness the power of subtraction. This idea will be familiar to long-time newsletter subscribers, as it was an early “newsletter exclusive”.

We all tend to delay difficult, uncertain or scary tasks unnecessarily… especially, those related to our thesis. How to avoid such procrastination? In this new kind of short post (so far only available to our newsletter subscribers), I share tiny practices or ideas that have had an outsized effect on my thinking or my research practice.

Feelings of being stuck, of not knowing where we’re going, self-doubt, guilt… are not exclusive to the doctoral thesis journey. Despite their smaller scope, other long projects with little feedback or structure (like a master thesis) share the same motivational pitfalls and may induce the same kind of uncomfortable experience at times. In this two-part post series, we review key advice and simple practices which could also be useful to help us face these capstone projects. But these can also be very useful if you are a PhD student just starting out!

In a PhD (and as doctoral supervisors) we often face situations where we feel blocked, with no idea of how to get out or what to do next. In this post, the first of a series distilling wisdom from the latest round of “A Happy PhD” workshops, we look at a peer advice technique we have repeatedly use in the workshops to help students (and supervisors!) unblock. All you need is… a little help from a small group of people.

In recent times I’m having the fortune of seeing several of my own doctoral students approach the end of the doctoral journey (yes, it does end!). As they submit the dissertation and prepare for their defense, there is one piece of advice I find myself giving again and again, about how to tackle the impossible task of presenting multiple years of research work in less than one hour. In this post, I describe a “presentation design pattern” for thesis defenses, which builds upon classic conceptualization exercises advocated in the blog.

Doctoral well-being is one of the central topics in this blog (indeed, it was the one that started it all, more than three years ago). While I have tried to base my writings in the peer-reviewed research of this area, so far my reading of it has been rather unsystematic. How do doctoral well-being researchers summarize this body of knowledge? In this post, I distill from the findings of a systematic literature review on doctoral well-being, teasing out topics and factors that we already knew about from previous posts as well as novel ones that we can try to act upon.

We have established that finding long periods of time for deep, creative research tasks (be it writing a paper or designing our next study) is critical to achieve our thesis milestones and finish the PhD. Yet, we are all very busy and have limited time for such creativity. To help in solving this conundrum, this short post describes a technique I’ve been using lately to squeeze a few extra hours a week to make headway in those hard, creative research tasks.

Very often, the myriad of obligations, additional tasks, jobs and activities in our daily lives block us from making progress in our most important goals (like finishing that doctoral thesis!). This is especially true of part-time doctoral students that have a day job to make ends meet, but even full-time students face this challenge. Our behavior needs to change, but we can’t find what to change (or the energy to do it).

The ability to concentrate and do focused, cognitively-demanding work is crucial to finishing a PhD (and doing research in general). Yet, we often spend our days in emails, meetings and other busywork that does not bring us closer to completing our goal (e.g., the thesis!). How to keep the busyness at bay so that we dedicate more time to the important stuff? In this post, the first of a series based on Cal Newport’s classic book Deep Work, we look at the high-level shape of a deep-worker’s calendar. What are the strategies that doctoral students have successfully used to find time to advance in producing their thesis materials?