The ability to pay attention is one of the most important assets of a PhD student (or researcher) and plays a crucial role on our focus and productivity, but also on our creativity and wellbeing. In this month’s “Monday Mantra”, I give you not one, but two sentences that you can use to remind yourself to manage this resource wisely. Choose your favorite!

In a previous post, I proposed the use of your favorite calendar app to store all your TO-DOs and avoid over-committing. I’ve been trying this productivity trick on myself for the past few months. In this new kind of blog post, I report on the results of this self-experiment, and the effect it has had on my own productivity and wellbeing. I also provide some practical tips and tricks, in case you want to try it out for yourself. TL;DR: It works… if you are a bit careful.

Despite the emphasis I have made so far in developing productive and healthy everyday routines (from to-do lists to pomodoros), not everything about productivity happens at this tactical, day-to-day level. In this short post, I guide you through what I think is the centerpiece of my own personal productivity system: the weekly review.

Have you ever felt that you have too many threads open in your research work, and you cannot seem to make substantial progress in any of them? You are not alone. After closing the long series of posts on “happiness in the lab”, a bit of a lighter read this week. In this post I give very short advice that you can use as a “mantra” for this and the coming weeks, somewhat related to staying productive – but with a twist.

In this blog I have often covered the mental health and wellbeing problems that may come with doing a PhD, if we are not careful. In this series of posts I look at the flip side of that, diving into the research on thriving at work, to find out which practices may help us be a little happier during our research, and how to diagnose ourselves about what aspects of our research activity can most be improved.

Writing research papers is one of the most dreaded (and most unavoidable) activities for many people during the PhD. In this series of posts I explore some of the reasons why writing research papers is difficult when one arrives at the PhD, and explain what concrete writing process I find myself following after more than a decade of academic writing.

Even if you feel that your research contributes to a bigger purpose, even if you work at it with great engagement, even if you’re resilient to setbacks and misfortune… still your time working in research can suck. This week I look at the final missing piece in our search for a happier (research) workplace: the quality of our social interactions with others. Particularly, how positive connections and prosocial behaviors can help us thrive at work (not just survive). In this post, I examine some of the main components of a prosocial workplace, how to assess them for yourself, and a few research-backed practices to make your lab a kinder place.

No matter how meaningful your research feels to you, no matter how engaged you are when doing it, sometimes things just don’t work out as you expected. Papers get rejected, proposals are not funded, data gets mangled and needs to be collected again… plus all the non-research-related stumbling blocks that life throws at us, from sickness to accidents or family tragedies. How fast and how well can we recover from those setbacks that throw us off balance? This fourth post in the series goes over the concept of resilience as an important pillar for staying happy and fulfilled while working in research. Read below for instruments you can use to gauge it, and practices to help you stay resilient in the face of difficulties.

Have you ever found yourself avoiding your supervisor, or the thesis meetings, or just not wanting to open the manuscript file you have to finish? Then you might have some problems engaging with your research work. In this third post of the series on finding more happiness in your research, I look at how engagement at work is defined, how to assess your own levels of engagement, and some research-backed practices to help you engage better with your work and find your “flow”.

Continuing with last week’s post on “happiness at work”, in this post I explore the first of the four pillars for a happier workplace: the sense that your work has a purpose, that it is personally meaningful to you. Read on to learn to self-assess your sense of purpose at work, and get some ideas on how to make your research work feel more meaningful.

Being a Ph.D. student and being happy sometimes feel like two incompatible states. However, we all know someone that seems to enjoy greatly their work, even their dissertation work (heck, I have to confess I’ve been one such annoying person myself sometimes). What things make people love their work? Apparently, an entire branch of positive psychology has been delving into this question for decades. This post is the first of a series that adapts insights and practices for greater “happiness at work” from a massive open online course (MOOC), to the work life of doctoral students (and academics more generally).

When we present our research to others, in a conference or in writing, we often feel insecure: is what I found obvious? is there a fatal flaw in my reasoning or my data analysis? will the audience finally unmask me as the impostor I am? This week’s short “Monday Mantra” goes at the heart of such unproductive self-talk. What is all this really about?