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).

As we saw in a recent post, “task conflict” is a common productivity challenge of doctoral students. As PhD students, we often have to juggle different identities, priorities, jobs, projects… along with doing the thesis itself. Yet, so often, it is the thesis-related tasks that keep getting pushed back. In this post, I will go over tips, practices and techniques that might be useful if you find yourself struggling with this particular challenge in your PhD.

Do you ever feel, during your PhD, that you are not “productive enough”? Guess what, you are not alone. In this post, I share the three most frequently-appearing productivity problems voiced in doctoral workshops we have run in Estonia and Spain. I hope this shows PhD students that they are not alone… and gives PhD supervisors hints about the hurdles their students often face (whether they mention them explicitly or not). Also, I will give a couple of simple rules to know if these are a problem for you particularly.

We know that steady everyday progress is a crucial factor in finishing a PhD. In previous posts, we have seen productivity techniques to support us in taking more of these daily steps. Yet, a lot of walking does not necessarily get us anywhere. We need to know that we are actually getting past key reference points, closer to our final destination. In this post, I propose a diagramming exercise to map out key obstacles, milestones and the “everyday fuel” that propels us past them in our journey towards PhD completion.