Better late than never


August 31, 2021

I am just over half-way through my PhD journey (time-wise, not amount-of-work-I-have-to-do-wise) and New Zealand is back in a full-on lockdown. It struck me as the perfect opportunity to start documenting the trials and tribulations – and hopefully also the triumphs – of life as a PhD student. I have to be at home, there are minimal distractions; I can finally get round to doing something I promised myself I would start when I began studying at UC.

Like with many things in my life, I have put off starting a blog for a long time. “Why?” you ask. “Writing a blog will be fun, why would you put off doing something that you want to do?” Well, you see, I am the world’s ultimate procrastinator. To give you an example: just before I began writing this, I thought of a song I wanted to learn on the guitar. I’ve been brainstorming songs to play while we’ve been in lockdown, and so I had to go and check if the tab was on ultimate guitar before I forgot about it. Then, once I found it, I obviously had to try it out to see if the tab was any good. Before you know it, an hour had passed, with the birth of this blog almost falling to the wayside for the umpteenth time. 

It’s a real problem. Especially if you’re doing something like a PhD. While I managed to scramble my way through my MA and Mres by doing most of the work very last minute, I knew this would definitely not work out in my favour this time around. Writing 3000 words the night before something is due – very doable. 100,000 words – that’s another matter. As I made the leap from one degree to the next, I knew my habits needed to change. From what I wrote earlier, you probably believe that I failed dismally in that task. It took me a year and a half to start a blog, I understand you’re probably a bit sceptical that I’m a changed woman. But when it comes to academic work, I’ve actually been more or less keeping on top of myself. 

How did I manage this? By actually making myself organise and plan, and by holding myself accountable. 

Accountability 

I would say one of the biggest things that helped me was that I began to set myself deadlines, and tried my best to hold myself to them. It’s so much harder to get started on designing an experiment or writing a draft when there’s no specific time It needs to be done by. I just kept telling myself I’d start something after replying to these emails- or actually, after reading this paper- or actually, after I’d had lunch- and then a week went by and that something still wasn’t started. Setting an exact date means you have a time to work towards, and there’s nothing like the fear of a looming deadline to act as a good kick up the back side. 

However, if you’re anything like me, and you have become desensitised to the effects of a self-imposed deadline (surprisingly, nothing bad ever happened after I missed one…), start telling other people your target. The more the merrier. Flatmates, friends, family, and perhaps most importantly: your supervisory team. The more people you tell, the more people will be able to hold you accountable, and encourage you when you’re feeling stuck. For me, the thought of letting down my supervisors thwarted any thought of procrastination a lot more successfully than the thought of letting myself down. 

I set up weekly meetings with my supervisor to do this. They don’t have to be long; I simply update him on what I’ve done that week, and then we talk over whatever project I’m working on and I let him know what I’ll get done before I next see him. Then we distract each other for 10 minutes talking about how long you could hold your breath for, or the latest censorship scandal happening on social media. Hey- I never said I’d completely eliminated procrastination! 

If you’re part of a wider lab group, you could even go to the extreme of putting together an accountability team. During the first lockdown here, my supervisor decided to set one up. This was a great idea, while at the same time it was like a waking nightmare. Each week we went round the virtual room, telling everybody the goals we had set ourselves for the week. You then actually had to meet these goals because otherwise, as you let the group know you did not meet your goals, you’d be overwhelmed with a sense of shame so deep you could barely meet the eyes of the faces looking pityingly at you over zoom. I would be lying if I said I didn’t hate it (and I don’t think you’d believe my lies anyway), but to give credit where credit is due, it worked for the most part. I am not a big fan of talking in front of a group, however, so the one-on-one meetings worked a lot better for me. 

Organisation 

I used to think that I didn’t need to write a plan down for everything I needed to get done, and I could keep it all in my head. That may have worked before, when I just had a single project to work on. But now I have several ongoing projects, along with many other commitments. Trying to keep it all in my head meant I just forgot things; it was all a bit of a jumbled mess. I now sit down every Friday afternoon, write down a plan of what I want to achieve the following week, and stick it above my desk. Having everything planned out in advance means I don’t have to sit and brainstorm what to do next every time I finish a task—and for me, this is a time that procrastination normally kicks in. Sometimes it’s productive, and I spend it doing an easy task like replying to emails. More often than not, I end up scrolling on Instagram, or doing the daily crossword (the Guardian’s are the best). 

This sort of short-term planning helps me meet my more long-term goals, when the deadlines are simply too far away to scare me. Also, sometimes when a task is really big – like, for example, writing a manuscript for publication– I find it hard to know the exact steps I need to take to get to the finish line. And when I don’t know what I need to do, I end up procrastinating. So, I break up the task into tiny chunks. I don’t mean things like, write the intro, analyse the data, write the discussion… Those are still too big. I set goals for researching/ writing specific paragraphs, for simply tidying the data, for running specific analyses. This helps prevent me from feeling stuck, plus, the added bonus of having more things on the to-do list means I get more of that adrenaline rush every time you tick something off. I never knew I could find such satisfaction in something so simple. It’s honestly exhilarating. Is this what it feels like to get old? Or have my standards lowered simply because I’m a grad student? 

 
Just because I have all of this in place, doesn’t mean I don’t struggle from time to time. I often fall back into the procrastination pitfall. But the fact of the matter is: I am now over a year and a half into my PhD, and I think I am just about on track to finish on time! Little things, like planning out your work week, or telling your supervisor your deadlines, can make a world of difference, even if at the start it only feels like you’re making a small change. 


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