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?

Do you feel like the prose of your papers is burdensome and rambling, even after lots of outlining and feedback? Do you often get feedback from co-authors about it being ambiguous, aimless or vague? Do you keep making the same writing mistakes again and again? The final step in drafting a paper (generating final prose and editing it sentence-by-sentence for clarity) is laborious and often overlooked. In this short post, I point you to a set of proofreading/editing tips from another blog, and share with you one tip to help you detect those pesky errors and make your prose more punchy.

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.

Do you start your workday full of energy and eager to tackle your research but find yourself by mid-morning already spent and demoralized? Does this happen after a flurry of email interactions, social media scrolling, or passive meetings? You may be experiencing the differential effects of creative and consumptive work on your motivation and energy. This post will go over a (still half-baked) idea about how different kinds of work energize us, and simple rules that we can implement for a more sustained sense of progress and satisfaction with our (PhD or otherwise) work.

Are you spending more time on social media than you would like? Is your use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok… hampering progress on your doctoral research? You are not alone: many doctoral students report in our workshops that spending too much time scrolling compulsively on social media is one of their biggest productivity challenges. Building upon the insights about dopamine and addiction from our previous post, here I go over eight concrete steps we can take to break this compulsion and do more of the things we think are really important (like finishing that thesis).

Social media, porn, eating sugary things, shopping, alcohol, or spending our days anxiously reading the news… Most of us have behaviors or substances we do compulsively, to the point that it damages our relationships and our ability to achieve important goals (including, of course, finishing our PhD thesis). Dopamine is at the heart of these addictions. In this post, I distill lessons learned from reading Anna Lembke’s book “Dopamine Nation”1 about how dopamine works, how to face our addictions, and do more of what we think is important.