If you are like most of us, by now (end of February) your New Year’s resolutions will have fallen by the wayside. In recent years, I have stopped doing resolutions altogether. This post is about what I do now instead, heeding the advice of productivity systems and psychotherapy approaches: a yearly review. This post goes over my particular yearly review process, and how it can give your research motivation (and satisfaction with life) a yearly boost.

Journaling during your doctorate can have a host of benefits (for self-knowledge, mental and physical health). However, not everyone will benefit to the same degree, and different kinds of journaling have different advantages… if done correctly over a sustained period of time. In this post, I will go over different research-backed journaling exercises and tips to make your journaling most effective.

Do you ever get the feeling, at the end of the day, that you have achieved nothing? or that days and weeks pass by, indistinguishable from one another, time slipping away like water between your fingers? Is your mind an unfocused maelstrom of swirling thoughts, ruminating again and again about the same worrying (or plain silly) things? Journaling has been proposed (both by ancient philosophers and modern researchers) as having many benefits, from dealing with stress and trauma, to just understanding ourselves a little better. But, can journaling be useful for us in facing the challenges of a PhD? In this post, I will take a look at the research on different kinds of journaling and what are their effects for mental and physical health.

During a PhD (or any research) we need to answer not only the research questions we have set for ourselves, but also a host of other questions. Many of them are reflective and/or open in nature. Yet, we often slap whatever answer first pops into our brains, and run with it. In today’s “quickie” post, I share a simple practice that can help in getting over this availability bias to get deeper, better answers to your open reflective questions.

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.