When Procrastination makes your Motivation sink

More Q&A time! (Yes, I'm currently trying to work through a backlog of questions that deserve a longer answer).
The question we are dealing with today is about procrastination, and was posted as a comment on 7 ways to motivate yourself.

The original question was the following:

I dont find it very motivational..everyday I make new strategy but do not why its never implemented ....what should i do now...I know that I have to follow it very strictly...but I wll defer work every time...and the end of the day I am very angry at me...please help me somebody!!

And my quick answer read as follows:

Take a break, get rid of the stress, high expectations and pressure on yourself in the first place.

Then, make a planning that looks too easy - and try to stick to it. If you manage to do so, treat yourself to doing whatever you feel like in the evening (great dinner, movie, bath, you name it).

Let's look at the elements of the original question, and break these down into parts that we can discuss.

1. everyday I make new strategy

Don't try a new day planning or strategy every single day. Instead, try to set up a template for your day planning, and gradually implement it.
For example, try to implement a healthy morning routine, then set aside an hour for reading, then 2 hours for data analysis, then half an hour to clear your inbox to zero, then the afternoon for writing and the evening for whichever activity you like. This is just an example, listen very carefully to yourself and try to figure out which part of the day you have the right energy for each of these tasks.
You won't get it "right" from the start. Just be gently on yourself, acknowledge that you are experimenting with your schedule, and see where the flow takes you.

2. My planning never gets implemented

Here's where you need to get your monkey brain under control and reason with yourself. Checking facebook might give you pleasure at this very moment, but at the same time you are depriving yourself of the ability to go home early and do something you really enjoy.
Try to first observe your own behavior: What type of procrastination are you susceptible to? What triggers this kind of procrastination? How often do you feel the urge to leave your work and do something else?
Now that you know what is really going, try to watch the urge, and just hang in that feeling of unpleasantness, and then watch the urge go away. This mindfulness technique is one of the most powerful methods to get a hold of your impulses.

3. I know that I have to follow it very strictly

NO!!!! You're not trying to whip yourself to death, you're not trying to work yourself to exhaustion. What you need is a continuous movement forward. If you are constantly putting stress and pressure on yourself, you will dislike your work day. Try to find pleasure in your work. Remind yourself of why you were drawn to PhD studies in the first place. Remember that being able to do research is an intellectual privilege that not many people are granted. Most people have to obey a boss and do back-breaking mind-numbing work. If you have the opportunity to do research, pursue your intellectual whims and enjoy academic independence, you should realize that you are actually very lucky. So remember that science is fun, and find that lightness back in your work.

4. At the end of the day I am very angry at me

It's awfully frustrating to realize at the end of the day that your day was pretty much wasted time. I know the feeling very well, and I think many of us can relate to it in some way. You might have spent the entire day trying to get your computer back running. You have a crash in the late afternoon and lose a couple of day's worth of writing in your article/dissertation. You might have fretted the day away doing minor tasks such as e-mailing, doing some admin work, and *bam* time is up.
Know that this happens to everybody from time to time. If you have a procrastination problem, it might happen often to you. But consider yourself as "in rehab", trying to kick a bad habit. Don't get mad at yourself. If you fail today, tomorrow is a blank slate again. Tomorrow you start again with 24 hours to fill at your disposal. It might help to journal. When I go through bouts of having poor concentration and not getting my work moving forward, I journal about it. I grade myself for a couple of days. One day will be a 4/10 in terms of productivity, and then I analyze in my journal what precisely went wrong. The next day might be a 7/10, and then I celebrate my success and see why I was feeling motivated. It could be because I worked out in the morning. It could be because I ate something that did not make me lethargic. It could be some good news that made feel like a million bucks.

I hope these thoughts help, and if you have more questions, feel free to reach out to me!

The first semester of teaching, and my current struggles

Most of the time, I'm broadcasting joyful stories on my blog, sharing what I learned throughout the years as a researcher - few as they may be, I've had my fair number of Euraka moments, which I love to share with my readers.

But at the same time, I value authenticity - in academia, as well as in the web 2.0. People that are walking good news machines look just phony to me.

So today, I want to dedicate a post to the struggles I am encountering in my first semester as an assistant professor.

Sure, I had a few of mitigating circumstances: I have moved countries (and I still am trying to get all my paperwork settled and get the local drivers' license, for example), and I skipped the post-doc and went straight into a faculty position.

Besides that, I am combining two jobs: my part-time research position in Delft with my professorship in Quito - and I want to do great for both institutions.

At USFQ, I'm currently in charge of putting together a laboratory, and teaching 3 new courses, which I'm developing from scratch, with my own examples and material for the most part. And it all takes a lot of time.

I wrote a post about my schedule for this semester earlier. So far, I've been mostly following my weekly template, with the following exceptions:

1. I forgot to schedule time for grading

Grading takes time - and in setting up my weekly template, I only calculated the 4 hours that it takes me to prepare 1 hour of lecture. I didn't calculate in the time it takes me to grade, to put the grades into a digital system, and to write out a detailed solution of the homeworks and midterms to hand back to the students so that they have a full solution of their work. And that, too, takes me more time than I'd imagined.

2. I'm preparing courses on a weekly basis

Instead of preparing my classes the day/night before, I'm currently batching the preparation of classes on a weekly basis. One week I try to prepare a number of classes of one course, and then the next week I go onto the next class. I'm about a month ahead of my lectures at the moment, so I can take the liberty to arrange things a little differently.

3. I have two major research tasks to fit in there

I only scheduled time for my research for Delft, and not for the research I need to do for putting together the laboratory - so I'm still struggling how to balance these 2 research responsibility without dropping the ball on any pending things.

4. I still have more admin stuff coming up than I'd like

I schedule an hour a day for mail/admin stuff, but I end up running around and trying to get things arranged more often than I'd like. Since I still don't have a computer in my office, and have been on and off the possibility of printing from my laptop, most of the time, I have to bring files to the copycenter to get my prints - and that takes time to get there, time to wait there - very often 20 minutes in total.

5. I find it hard to switch tasks during the day

Even though I do well on working in shorter chunks, I tend to start lagging behind my schedule as the day progresses. I find it hard to cut off one task (for example, writing a paper), and then move to my next task on my schedule (for example, preparing class). Especially when I get engrossed in a task, I tend to lose track of time, and need to either move things around in my schedule or (very often) just work later into the evening.

Give these challenges in my schedule, I've been having a hard time juggling all the tasks I have at hand, and a few tasks are balls that I've been dropping too often instead of keeping them in the air:

1. Replying emails

I don't consider replying email as an important task, but I tend to let messages bulk up into my inbox without getting back to people in a timely fashion. As I start to lag behind on my schedule during the day, I often give up on my allotted time for archiving and replying mails. And too often that is something I end up doing over the weekend - say, on a Saturday night.

2. Keeping in touch with my family

Not enough Skype dates with my friends, and not enough calls home. The time difference is one of the factors that make it hard for me to make calls during the day, but I want to keep in touch and I enjoy so much being able to talk a bit of Dutch every now and then.

3. Exercise

I know I'm a big evangelist of living a healthy lifestyle, but I'm currently having a hard time combining everything into my days. I've been practicing yoga from home, but I still haven't signed up for a gym and I haven't pumped iron in months.

4. Self-care

Reading, studying, meditating, playing music, drawing, writing - at the end of my PhD, I had a schedule that worked very well for me, and I managed to find time for my other creative endeavors. But at the moment, I just can't seem to make my schedule work.

5. Sleep

I hate to admit it - but I'm not getting enough sleep, and I'm feeling tired most of the time and progressively tired towards the end of the week. A bit of sleeping in on the weekend is not what I need, and throws off my sleeping schedule more than it does any good in helping me get over the fatigue.

I know the first months in any new job are challenging, and I remember that, when I started my PhD, it took me some time to get my life on the rails. Eventually, things will start working out - but at the moment, I'm just trying to hold my breath until the semester is over.

How was your first semester of teaching? Do you have any good advice for me?

Time management in Academia: Balancing teaching and research

Spring 2014 is my first semester in which I have a full course load to teach - and from now on, I'll (most likely) be teaching 3 courses in Spring and 3 courses in Fall. This semester. I'm teaching 3 new courses - courses that I'm developing from scratch for the students at USFQ.

As we saw earlier, it takes about 4 hours to prepare an hour's worth of lecture. Since I'll be teaching 9 hours a week, that puts me already at 45 hours a week (1 hour teaching + 4 hours preparing => and this 9 times a week). Add in some time for grading, and regular admin stuff, and replying emails, and you can imagine that my time is running out quickly.

And all of that is just teaching - what truly matters, on the tenure-track, in my field, for my institution and for my overall career, are my publications. I made an ambitious schedule for churning out a large number of journal papers based on the novel elements in my dissertation (and the massive amount of test data that we produced), but I'm already experiencing that, even though everything is written in my dissertation, it takes more time to write the papers.

With a number of papers in the submission process as well, I forgot to keep time and space in my planning to deal with the comments of the reviewers. Overall, I'm now slowing down from initially wanting to submit a paper per month of 1,5 months to a paper per 2 or 3 months.

Nonetheless, given my part-time appointment in Delft, I want to carve out at least 10 hours per week for research and writing. Ideally, I'd love to up that number to at least 20 hours per week, but I'm afraid that will be hard in my first semester.

As I was scratching my head, and wondering how to fit teaching and research into my schedule (and still find time to eat, play music, play with my cat, given some attention to my husband, exercise, meditate, read for pleasure, sleep at least 8 hours per night, maintain this blog and explore this country), I turned to Twitter for advice. You can find the Storify of the tweets at the bottom of this post.

The main take home message from the tweets was to plan time for writing. This advice closely corresponds to the idea of making the weekly template, as I saw earlier on the blogs of Tanya Golash-Boza and Raul Pacheco-Vega.

As such, I made a weekly template for myself. Over time, I'm planning to change this template in line with ideas from Alisa Vitti's monthly cyclic approach (as outlined in her book WomanCode) and Laura Vanderkam's 168 hours mathematics (see 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think). I'm also planning some trials of writing first thing in the morning, from 6am to 8am, as well as going to the gym first thing in the morning.

Taking into account my previous reservations, and highlighting that this schedule is in its experimental face, I'm here sharing my current weekly template.

What to do when your planning fails

Planning your progress and learning how to manage your time are two essential skills for a successful PhD. As we've discussed a number of times here about systems to track time and manage time, I'd like to focus on a different topic for today:

What should you do when your planning fails?

First and foremost: Don't give up on planning! Don't fall in the trap of saying that planning is just simply not for you.
We all need a planning - the degree of detail of planning might differ from person to person, but the question of what we should be doing and when to get stuff done, is essential to all of us.

Until you have found a planning method that works, I encourage you to do the following: test out different methods, try out different tools, and reflect on what works for you and what doesn't.
 This method might sound like throwing spaghetti to the wall and seeing what sticks, but if you evaluate how you do with planning honestly, and try to figure out why a certain method is not working, then you'll reach convergence and a working system much more quickly.

Here's a quick recap of a Twitter discussion I had on this topic:

For your convenience, here is the link to the Monthly Progress Monitor, and the programmer method of scheduling time.

Planning for Success - an update on my time management system

As I'm constantly experimenting with what works for me, and how I can optimize my workflow, it should be of no surprise that my time management system tends to gradually evolve over time.

The last time that I discussed my time management system on PhD Talk is more than a year ago. Since then, I've changed some of my tools.

Even though I haven't changed my overall top-down approach for planning what needs to be done, I've made some changes in the tools that I use: I tried to reduce the number of tools that I draw upon, to improve the fluidity in my planning.

I was reminded of critically analyzing my time management system recently, after reading The Sunday Meeting on Inside Higher Ed. I still do my planning usually on a Friday, before heading home for the weekend.

My current approach looks like this:

1. Tools for planning

I split up my planning from the general overview, down to the daily task lists:

- The general overview
With paper deadlines and conferences always planned several months in advance, and teaching duties coming up, I need a good overall view of what needs to be done in which month.
I am keeping the general overview in Google Calender, and I've added additional calendars with my personal planning, the academic calendar of USFQ, the Dutch holidays and more. More and more, I am gravitating towards Google Calendar for planning.

- To Do lists
I've given up filling out the Word documents with my monthly and weekly to do lists - something that I have used during my entire PhD. Instead, I've started to incorporate Google Task lists. These integrate better with my planning in Google Calendar. I still review my planning every Friday evening, to make my daily appointments. That precise moment also serves as a moment to reflect on my progress and to ask myself why or why not I met my goals for this week; a method inspired by the monthly progress monitor.

- Daily appointments
Rather old-fashioned, but I keep my day-to-day appointments in a paper-and-pen type of planner. (It's bound in red leather with a pattern of roses on it, if that explains why I can't switch to a digital version). I write down my most important task(s) for the day, and have all my appointments written down and planned. Also, I write down my To Do list for the evening at the very bottom of the day page. I've expanded on how I structure my To Dos in a different post.

2. Tools for tracking

I'm not using RescueTime anymore, and since leaving my office and office computer in Delft, I've also not been adding what I did to ManicTime anymore. I do plan to start using ManicTime again - but I'd need to sync it over different machines.
LeechBlock and Cold Turkey come in handy when I need to ban myself from the distractions of the internet, but most of the time I prefer a different approach: whenever I feel the urge to give up my task and go browse around, I smile, acknowledge the urge, let it pass, and continue working.

3. Tools for reminding

This part of my approach did not have a solid foundation earlier, but by applying the Task lists in Google Calendar, and having both my planning and deadlines in a visual display together, I've overcome this hurdle in my planning.

How does your time management system work? Has it changed much over the past year? And what did you learn from changing your planning habits?

Silver Linings: Hormones and your health

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you might have seen that I occasionally share some of the work of Alisa Vitti, founder of FLOliving. Even though mostly aimed at women with PCOS and other hormonal issues, I think her work is valid and interesting for all women.

When she was a student at med school, Alisa was diagnosed with PCOS. Instead of going for a life of medication and more medication, she opted for going out in the wild and finding a way to a better health, by delving deeper into the science of food, genes and hormones.

The result of her studies is what she calls the "WomanCode" - a protocol that suggests which foods, skills, types of exercise and other elements of self-care you should emphasize depending on where in your cycle you are. The result is an organic form of time management, that feels more natural than other linear approaches to time management. Stop wondering why sometimes you feel outgoing and other times you want to stay on the couch with a book - you can fit both elements into a monthly planning.

Dealing with PCOS myself, I've been following Alisa's course over the past months, and I've been trying really hard to implement her recommendations into my schedule. Traveling to conferences and moving from one place to the other has been a challenge, but overall I noticed improvements in my energy levels. If you are interested in her work, but don't want to make the time and financial commitment to the course, you can check out her book WomanCode,

If you are interesting in her work, I recommend you to start by checking out her recent GoogleTalk here:

6 Essential Elements in Writing To Dos

In a not-so-recent Lifehacker post, I read the rather surprising stats about To Dos (logged in a particular type of software):

41% of to-do items were never completed.
50% of completed to-do items are done within a day.
18% of completed to-do items are done within an hour.
10% of completed to-do items are done within a minute.
15% of dones started as to-do items.

This post had me thinking about how I structure my own to do lists. In fact, I simply write in my planner what needs to be done on a given day. My office and research to dos are on the top of the page, with the appointments I might have marked at their time slot, and at the bottom I scribble down my to dos for the evening.

Given the fact that so few to do items ever get finished, and some others get finished almost right away, it is necessary to spend some time reflecting on when an item becomes a to do task, and how to treat these.

Over time, I've put a lot of effort into optimizing my own time management system, and writing to dos, as well as planning tasks is an essential element of organizing your time.

Here are 6 essential elements that you need to keep in mind when writing a to do.

1. Focus on the essential

Identify your Most Important Task of the day, and put that on top of your list. It might be tempting to go and do a lot of small things (reply some mails, file some papers, pick up a delivery, ...) but the most important task is what you really need to do.

2. Assess your time

Before starting to put 5 tasks on your to do list for the day, assess the time you have, and the time you think you need to finish them. If you don't really know how much time certain tasks take you, start tracking your time.

3. Distractions

If there is one thing for sure, you will get distracted. Allow for some buffer time in your schedule. If you work 8 hours, you can't fill these 8 hours with net work on your tasks. When adding to do items to your list, make a quick assessment of how much time of your day is lost by distractions.

4. Be early

If a task needs to be done, start working on it early. Don't put items a day before their deadline on your to do list, but plan them over a longer period of time. Take your own deadlines seriously, and work accordingly.

5. Think long term

Identify the tasks that really move your work forwards, and spend enough time on these. Don't let the tasks that are not urgent but important slip behind in your schedule, but place them high on your to do list.

6. Alternate tasks

If you can't focus on the same task for the entire day, add different types of work on your to do list. For example: combine writing a section on a journal paper with sorting out data in a spreadsheet and reading a paper. Not only will you get some more variation in your tasks, but you will also set shorter, defined times to work on these tasks. Short time slots are beneficial from your overall productivity.

How do you handle your to do list? Do you get your tasks done or do you find it hard to deal with distractions?

Why do we procrastinate?

By understanding the reasons why we procrastinate, and what actually goes on in our brain causing us to procrastinate, we can find ways to tackle this bad habit.

Vik Nithy gives us an insight in the parts of our brain that are in conflict when we doubt between checking Facebook or writing our paper. He also shows what our inner monkey mind is capable of doing, and lists a series of subconscious reasons why we procrastinate.

Finally, we get a look at what we can do to tackle procrastination (it involves some planning).

If you are a procrastinator-de-luxe, make sure you carve out 10 minutes of your time to watch this video. You'll learn what goes on in your brain, what prevents you from getting things done and how you can circumvent your bad habit.

One powerful trick to boost your productivity

 If you want to move a project or task forward, there are many techniques that you can apply to give yourself that little extra kick.

You can prepare yourself by starting with a 5 minute meditation.

You can use the Pomodoro technique.

When your deadline is not near, however, you might find yourself browsing over the internet, or chatting in the hallway with your colleagues.

When you have 4 years to finish a dissertation, you might not even feel to need to impose deadlines on yourself.

But, dear PhD students, this is reality calling.
Reality tells you that you need to push your project forward continuously to secure your success in the end.
Reality tells you that only a handful of PhD students finish within their 4 years of time (in the Netherlands).

To succeed, you need frequent bursts of productivity.
You need to regularly squeeze in a few hours of concentrated, uninterrupted time.

I do the following when I want to push myself to finish a task (writing a subsection of a chapter, or a paragraph of a paper, or execute a set of calculations):

Unplug your laptop from its power cord and use the battery.

Finish your task before the battery runs empty.

Here's why this trick works:

1. Urgency

Suddenly, you have a clear time-frame defined to finish your task.
You might reach the same effect with the Pomodoro technique, but in my opinion, Pomodoros are better to divide a large task into manageable chunks, while the Laptop Unplug works best when you have a clearly defined goal that takes about 2 hours to finish.

2. Ideal writing time slot

Writing two hours a day is the ideal writing diet in academia. Devoting 2 hours, preferably in the morning, to writing will lead to a larger output than writing a few days uninterruptedly whenever a deadline is near.

3. Walk away

The Laptop Unplug works best for me when I take my laptop away from my computer table in my room, and place it on my desk. My desk is my devoted study and work area at home, while my bed and computer table are for browsing the internet.
When I sit at my desk, my mind knows that I'm at my designated work spot.

Now it's your turn! Give this technique a try, and please come back to tell me how you liked it, or why it didn't work for you.

Focus Booster

I've been experimenting with Focus Booster over the past days, and wanted to share some of my thoughts on this.

Focus Booster is a simple software tool to use with the Pomodoro Technique . You can start a Pomodoro with this, it runs for 25 minutes on your desktop (while gradually changing color from green to red), rings a bell and then times a 5 minute break for you. After this break, you can start a new Pomodoro time slot. Focus Booster also keeps track of the amount of Pomodoros you've accomplished over the day.

Previously, I was using the stopwatch on my cell phone to see if I can concentrate for 20 to 45 minutes before changing tasks (I was nicknaming this the "egg timer trick", but now that I am continuously with my eyes glued to my computer screen, I thought I could try a little app for this.

Here are some of my observations:
- I like how it "forces" me to take breaks. I've noticed that I can work the entire morning with only a few breaks, but then I feel really empty and unable to work in the afternoon and evening. Taking little breaks has helped me to be able to work more productively throughout the entire day, without burning all my energy in the morning.
- Having an app on your screen makes it very visible. It challenges me to start racing against the clock in the last five minutes of a 25-minutes slot. It also tells me that after 5 minutes of browsing the internet, I need to get back to my calculations.
- Whenever another thought crosses my mind, I just write it down on a piece of paper and get back to it later. And this "later" doesn't feel so far away, as every chunk of time is only 25 minutes.
- This method feel intuitively right for me. I used to work in time slots of 20 minutes, as this used to be the amount of time that I was spending on my homework in secondary school. When I went to university, I simply felt I could not really concentrate deeply for longer than 20 minutes, so I started to divide my time in sets of 20 minutes each (trying to study one proof at a time, for example).

Even though I'm not really familiar with the original Pomodoro Technique, I've been easily able to implement this software tool into my regular way of working, and by doing so, found a way to optimize my "egg timer trick" method.

If you are interested in the Pomodoro Technique itself, and how you could implement it into your work and benefit from it, I recommend the following blog posts as well:
Easily Stop Procrastination in its Tracks and Become a Productivity Machine: One Tomato at a Time
Productivity help with Pomodoro

How to tackle a large task

Writing a doctoral dissertation is a large task, but not the only large task to face during the PhD. A few examples include:
- writing an article,
- preparing a research report,
- the literature review itself,
- developing a method,
- ...

One way to get started is to take a blank page of paper, stare at it, and then get started hoping you'll end up with your required result. This used to be my approach, but I've gradually moved to a more structured approach. Here's a description of my typical workflow.

1. Break it down

Every large task consists of a series of smaller and more tangible tasks.
In a first brainstorm session, I always sketch the roadmap which I plan to follow for completion of the task ahead. Sometimes I make a mindmap, sometimes I sketch the smaller tasks. Once I have an idea of what needs to be done, I write a list of the steps I plan to go through from start to end.

2. Estimate the time needed

It's easier to estimate how much time a smaller task needs than to estimate to time needed for the entire task. This helps to plan the time needed for completion and to add these required blocks of time to your planning.

For example, it's easy to estimate that you need:
- 2 hours to read a paper,
- 15 minutes to archive it and add it to your references managing system, and
- 45 minutes to type out the important information into the literature review.
If you have a certain amount of papers which need to be read for a background study, you can guess how long it takes to process the papers. Continuing with this example, you could estimate that after processing the papers, you need 1 day to proofread and mark up your notes with important information and 2 days to rewrite the document.

3. Sharpen your pencil

I like having all the necessary tools and documents within my reach before I get started. Having to go after a missing document can really disturb my train of thought, so I like to have all my armor ready and shining before I enter the battlefield.

4. Keep track of your questions and assumptions

I recently started using a few extra sheets/documents while working on a larger task. In one document, I jot down all questions I need to ask my supervisor for verification. In another document, I list all the assumptions I have made. This makes it easier to talk through a large task with others (for example, my advisor).

5. Document the process

I keep all my draft document with their date in the title and I keep notes and to do lists in binders. It's like keeping a research journal or a lab book, but then for a different task. The longer I'm in doctoral school, the more it appears to me of the utmost importance to document all the steps I make.

This method might seem more time consuming than simply getting started and work towards the end, but I've noticed that a little extra effort at the start brings me faster and more reliably to the finish.

Decisions and priorities

In roughly two weeks I'm leaving for a conference, and then a holiday, and suddenly it seems as if I'm overloaded with work with so many tasks waiting to be finished before I can leave with a peaceful mind.

At a certain point, one week ago, I felt like starting to yell at the top of my lungs and run away from my office. Instead, I took a deep breath, a nice cup of tea, and I made a list of what precisely I had to do before leaving.

Then, I looked at these tasks and started to make an order of importance. Which tasks do I really need to do? Which ones are important and which ones are urgent? I remembered the important-urgent matrix about which I learned previously.

picture taken from this article

However, I found it quite difficult to categorize my work. All tasks seemed to be urgent, but for various reasons. I can't postpone registering for my next conference, booking the flight and arranging my administration because that would mean I can't go to the conference. However, I tend to classify "writing the paper which is due mid May" as more important, and I've been giving priority to this over the past week to allow for time to discuss it with my supervisors.
Likewise, I would be tempted to postpone my experimental work so I can finish all the other tasks at hand and not get too physically tired (my new setup seems to break my back when I'm using it - I still need to solve this too).

This rambling of thoughts made me feel quite stressed out. I needed another deep breath and another nice cup of tea to shift the tasks into categories of this matrix.
And indeed, more thinking did result in the following tasks per category:

Category 1: Important and urgent
- Paper deadlines
- Registration deadlines
- Experiments when I'm in a series of experiments

Category 2: Important and not urgent
- the core of my research
- planning experiments
- calculations with my results
- keeping up with the literature (which sadly always ends up way down in my list of things to do or in my weekend)

Category 3: Not important and urgent
- educational tasks
- phone calls, e-mail
- someone showing up in my office

Category 4: Not important and not urgent
- lunch and coffee breaks
- sticking around
- blogging

Realizing this, I decided to focus on finishing the paper, arranging my next conference, trying to discuss some things with my supervisor and just carrying out my experiments. I've been classifying my basic test results, but I will program my Matlab code for the plots of my experimental data after my conference and holiday. I'm skipping coffee breaks, but not lunch breaks, and I'm not skipping the gym nor choir practice. And, if everything works out alright, I'll finish my most urgent tasks this week and will have some time to think and move forward next week (I like the idea of having buffer time).

How do you handle extremely busy periods of time? Do you skip tasks or do you work more hours?

My analysis report or How to analyze large amounts of test data

The past two weeks and today, I've been continuously working on my analysis report. Today, just before lunch, my first draft (which still needs introduction and conclusions) was rolling out of the printer. I thought it was not so bad how I put together a 23k words document and a large number of graphs and tables in only 11 days' time (including the time to make the analysis calculations).

I wasn't in my best shape in terms of concentration (my housing situation has cause me a lot of tension lately, although the final solution is very near), so I've been randomly clicking around the interwebs too much. However, I still think my workflow with regard to making this document was neatly organized.

Only a few months ago, I spent about the same amount of days on an analysis document of less than half the size of this one, and I spent all those days working until 8pm (instead of 5 - 6pm as I'm trying to do now).

So here's how I organized this project:

1. Review what is already done.

I already had two previous versions of the analysis report of my experimental work, so I could recycle at least some material. I ended up mainly recycling the style of my graphs, and reanalyzing my data since my new test results were screaming to be included in every possible subchapter. I also knew my advisor had suggested changing the amount of data points I'm squeezing into the plots. I waited until this version to make this change.

2. Check the expectations.

Before starting (or better, before realizing another deadline in our project was coming up), I had an appointment with my daily supervisor who told me very clear which questions our funder wants to be answered. I really appreciated that I knew exactly in advance what the expectations for this report are, so I can work towards this in as much as I can.

3. Know what needs to be done.

So I knew what the expectations were. I printed out a previous version of the report and started to reread it. In every section I jotted down what had to be altered, recalculated or added. I also changed the order of the sections, and ended up with a document filled with pencil-scribbling to guide me what had to be done, section by section. I started off with putting the sections in my word document into the right order, and then I could get started altering, improving and adding material to the sections.

4. Give the reader some framework.

Previously, I just referred to the reports with the test data. I now added a short chapter with a sketch of the test setup and some basic information about the specimens. I think that was a good idea.

5. Study the parameters as resulting from the tests.

And so I've spent 11 days playing around with data in Excel and having rows and rows and columns and columns of data flying around before my eyes. My first action was to filter my data into nice plots and tables per parameter which we had been testing.

6. Compare to calculation methods in general.

My second action then was to compare the experimental values to the calculated values. Turn out, I had to recalculate most of my calculated values as I had only made rough predictions before the tests, and I did not implement the properties as we had measured them on the test data. Luckily, I have a nice set of MathCad sheets that do the job for me. Also, once I had a spreadsheet set up to analyze my data through one method, using the next method was only a matter of copy and paste.

7. Compare how the studied parameters are reflected by these methods.

Since the comparison with the Dutch code as calculation method gave me quite disappointing results, I decided to go and check per parameter the comparison of test value to calculated value to see where exactly the weak spots of the methods are. Doing that, I did some nice observations, which motivated me to play around some more with all my data.

8. Give recommendations.

It doesn't really help the fund to produce graphs and tables and let them look for the answers to their questions in all the material I've produced. So today, I printed out the document, started reading from the beginning, and jotted down the most important recommendations - per calculation method and in general.

9. Review your material.

Does it make sense? When reviewing my material today, I found that one of my tables raised my eyebrows. I went back to check it, doublechecked my calculations, and then I discovered that I had been reading results from the wrong column.

How do you analyze large amounts of test data? Any advice for me? I'm just hoping to give my funder a report which gives them as clear as possible the answers to their questions, but also gives them enough background to these answers.

Five ways to jumpstart your day

For a PhD student, I am quite an early bird. I start every day at 8am, and I arrive to my office some time between 7:50am and 8am.Having a steady routine seems to be a great way to work continuously towards my goals.

Every now and then I start the day (too) slowly, and I end up without much work done before noon. To avoid this, I have some ways which help me to get my day started right away.

1. Don't snooze

I've never really understood why people like to push the snooze button on their alarm clock anyway. Once I am awake, I just come out of bed and start my day. Before I even realize that it's rather early, I'm already washed and dressed. 

2. Breakfast!

I'm not a nutritionist or anything, but you can't ignore all these articles which say that you need a good breakfast to start your day. I just always wake up very hungry, so skipping breakfast is not an option for me. What I've noticed over the years, is the importance of my breakfast. I've shifted from sugary cereal to honey covered cereal to wholesome cereal with dried fruits and nuts. I started to notice how much more energy I get from a breakfast without all the sugar. Recently, I've also started to have oats in the morning. The hot milk makes me a bit sleepy, but the oats themselves fuel me for a long morning.

3. Bike to university

Nothing wakes me up as well as a good bit of exercise. Biking to university involves climbing uphill (on a bridge, that is), and that makes my heart all pumping and ready for the day. I like clear, crisp mornings which give me a good dose of fresh air. I really dislike the foggy, smoggy days on which I feel I can hardly breathe.

4. Know your most important task for the day

I usually leave in the evening my most important task for the next day on my otherwise cleared desk. I also keep the document I need to work on opened on my computer. That makes me ready to get started with it right away.

5. Enjoy the silence  

(not just the Depeche Mode song). I can get great progress in the morning before people start walking up and down the hallway and students start dropping by to ask questions. My officemate is an early bird too (he starts at 7am), but his presence doesn't disturb me as much as the footsteps in the hallway. I assume the footsteps distract me so much because I always try to figure out if they are on their way to my office to come and ask me something, or are headed somewhere else.

I know this all sounds really good, but too often I start with reading e-mail and surfing the internet. I'm still working on breaking this habit and doing these low-energy tasks at my low-energy moments of the day.
How do you get started in the morning?

5 tips to boost your productivity

Today has been a day of great and fast progress. At 2pm I had a meeting with my supervisor to discuss a proposal that I had written for a design code which is in progress. We discussed it, and he asked me to add more to the background document I wrote for it. When I asked him how much time I had for it, he informed me that the meeting is this weekend, so that he would need it before Friday.
I calculated in my head that it would probably take me 2 or 3 days, so I should be able to do it. The timing was a bit unfortunate, as I was just informed about another deadline a few days ago.
At 3pm I was back in my office, with a nice warm cup of tea and a clear desk to start on this project. At 5:55pm it landed into my supervisor's mailbox.

So what gave me my productivity wings today?

1. Time pressure

I had a clear deadline, given by the person who has the highest authority over me (although I'm not treated as if there is some hierarchy in our university), and I knew he is taking this material to a very important meeting. I felt very motivated to simply pull out my sword and slay this calculation dragon right away.

2. A clear and defined task 

I knew exactly what I was expected to do, and so I could start right away doing it. Most of the time, my tasks are not very defined. I'm asked to do something rather vague (write an analysis report and pay extra attention to the dutch design practice), so I need to spend quite some time thinking how I will approach the task, set out what I precisely need to do and only after defining these steps I  am able to actually get started.

3. Curiosity

Since this piece of my work is taken to an important meeting, I felt that this is an opportunity for me to show some experts what I am doing (although it's taken to the meeting as a formula and its background document). Other than that, I was simply curious to go and carry out my supervisor's suggestions. The largest tasks he suggest were related to checking the validity of my formula against some test results from the literature. I was quite curious (and a bit anxious) to see if my little mix-and-match formula would be standing strong when comparing it to other experimental work.

4. Having material ready

I could provide such a quick response since I had all the main ingredients for the calculations ready. I already had a little summary of those test results from the literature in the literature review on which I am still working. Besides that, I also had a spreadsheet ready which I used to compare my test data to my newly developed formula. All I needed to do was to alter my spreadsheet so that I could use it for the experiments from the literature, and then plug in the properties and take the answer out of it.

5. An after-lunch walk outside

I was very sharp today, and I think one of the reasons is that I finally went to have a walk outside after lunchtime. I didn't feel my afternoon dip at all today, even though I'm emotionally tired and distracted as a result of all the trouble with my roommate. Before I started tackling the task at hand, I also opened my window for a few minutes to let in some fresh air. I think my office really needed some air traveling through it, since I've been keeping my door closed for most of the time and the windows haven't been open since September.

7 ways to motivate yourself

Do you find it hard to meet your self-imposed deadlines and work on your personal goals? Well then, this post is for you and covers my way of meeting my own deadlines and goals.

I've become really good at meeting my own deadlines: my papers are always submitted on time and usually a few weeks before the deadline, I haven't had to study the night before an exam since my very first year at university and I developed the habit to start a homework right after the assignment was given in class.

As a result, I feel much more confident and I avoid last minute hasty and sloppy work.

Here's an overview of the 7 key points to increase your inner motivation

1. Take yourself seriously

I used to find it very hard to meet my self-imposed deadlines, as I felt as if they were not real. Deadlines imposted by school or others were the ones I used to never fail, but my own deadlines were rather optional, just in case I don't have anything better to do.
However, at a certain moment, I realized that it is important to take myself, my goals and my deadlines serious. Many of these deadlines help me work towards goals which are important, but not urgent. Those are the tasks which really move my life, studies or research forward, but they just are not urgently burning in my mailbox or on my doorstep.

2. Plan towards it

In my case, I usually try to draft a conference paper relatively soon after the notice of acceptance of the abstract is sent to me. Typically, I will work on the draft 2 or 3 months before the deadline. I won't lock myself down in my office and work on it, but I will schedule a week or two in which that paper is my most important project, while keeping the labwork and educational tasks running at their normal pace. I've figured out that I need to work on the draft that early, since my supervisors are very busy and it can take some time between my finishing the draft and having an appointment to discuss it.
If you have a completely different goal, say training for a 10k run, then too, you need to start planning months ahead and build up your routine bit by bit. And, of course, this is only possible if you take yourself serious and will take the time to go training on the days and times you've scheduled with yourself.

3. Schedule time 

As I wrote in the previous point, I for example make writing the conference paper my most important task for the week. I'll try to either reserve blocks of time in my planner to work on it (block of about 1,5 hour work best for me), or just make sure that I can focus on it. Most of the time my planner isn't really fully booked with meetings, as in the end I mostly work on my own research project, but I tend to work around on scattered little projects and administrative tasks. Having my own time management system helps me to schedule time to work on my most important task.
The same holds for the running example. As I wrote before, you can only run 10k after training for it, and scheduling these trainings.

4. Log your process

Visualizing my process is a great way to motivate myself. One of my new year's resolutions is to get enough sleep so I can concentrate better during the day and think more clearly. I've started to keep a little log in which I track my bedtimes. The first two weeks were quite sad, with only one day a week in which I got to bed in time, but the past week I've been having 4 successes and this week it will probably be even better. Just keeping this little log makes me keep this resolution serious.
I've also seen people keeping track of their weight loss by visualizing it on a graph or by keeping it in a log.

5. Talk about it

By making your goal public, you will have some external pressure or additional motivation to work towards a success. Regardless of what I am working towards (drafting a paper, training for running or trying to get enough sleep), I always tell someone about it. That person then will every now and then ask me how my progress is. And of course, it's always nice to share good progress.

6. Track your results

Unlike logging progress, tracking the results is more oriented towards the results. Of all new year's resolutions I started off with, which ones did I keep? Now that I am getting more sleep, how is this affecting my creativity? 

7. Celebrate your success

Last but not least, celebrate your successes! I used to skip this point, and rush off to the next task on my list, but now I've started to enjoy the feeling of accomplishment. Reaching a goal that I wanted for myself, such as drafting a paper by the time of my self-imposed deadline, is a success in two ways: I've done something that I wanted to do and of course, the result itself is something to be proud of too.
Ending with this positive feeling serves as a motivation to fulfill more of  your own goals, as it drags you into a circle of personal wins.

To summarize, the main idea behind this is that you become your own mom, boss, coach and teacher.

Mastering your PhD by P. Gosling and B. Noordam - Book Review

Mastering your PhD was the very first book I read about the process of doing a PhD. After one month into my PhD, I went to my university's annual PhD event, and there all participants received a free copy of the book. It took me until last February to actually read it, and since I was new to this material, there were a lot of good thoughts in it for me. A fair amount of the book's content can be found here

What I like about the book, is that it is a very entertaining piece of reading. It offers short, well-structured chapters, a lot of bulleted lists (I like lists, in case you didn't notice yet), and at the end of each chapter a story about 3 PhD students is told so it's very easy to relate to the material.

Here is a list of topics which I found most useful from this book:

1. Setting goals

I especially liked the description of the action plan as you an see in the article:
1. clarify your goals and objectives
2. write down a list of actions
3. prioritize
4. organize your actions into a plan
5. monitor and measure your progress
and of course, you need to have SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-related) goals.
Further down the article they discuss the 80/20 rule: 20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results.

2. The monthly progress monitor

The idea of the monthly progress monitor has been the basis for my different levels of to do lists.
The progress monitor has 4 questions:

1. Of the results I obtained last month, which are the most important?
2. Did I deviate from last month’s planning? If so, why?
3. What are my most important goals for the upcoming month?
4. How do I overcome potential hurdles?

Although I don't write out all these questions, I do reflect on it when making my monthly to do list. By now, I'm able to estimate very well how much I can get done in one month's time.

3. Celebrate your success

This concept was totally new to me. I usually just think "well that's nice" after a success and then I just keep on going. However, finding the joy of little successes has given me much more satisfaction in what I do, and it works very motivational. It gets even better when others come to celebrate your success! Last week, my lab technician brought me flowers to celebrate my large-scale experiment number 100.

4. The final year

This material is not really covered in the online series.
In the book, you can see an overview of the schedule of a last year of a PhD. Before I read this book, I didn't realize that there are so many extra things that take up a fair amount of time which need to happen before you can defend your thesis. Some of this is typical for the Netherlands, but this chapter was a good wake-up call for me to make me realize that I need to save probably the entire last year for writing.

5. Lessons learned

At the very end of the book, two phrases are highlighted:
1. Planning is essential
2. Communication creates harmony.
As for now, I've already learned to appreciate this first comment. Even though a PhD is all about unknowns, planning is indeed essential and will help you not to loose your way when you're out there in the woods.
I can as well relate to the second statement. I might have beautiful results in the lab, but in order to pass this knowledge on to the scientific community, I need to be able to write about my results, and to present them to an audience of peers.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book a lot. I hope you will take some time to look at the online series of articles, there might be some good thoughts in there for you too.

How staying longer at work resulted in getting less work done

Yesterday, I stayed in my office from 8am until 7:30 pm and -oh horror- I got much less work done than on other days.

I knew I could stay longer in my office because I was planning to go straight from my office to my choir practice. That's why I stayed late.

Since September, I haven't been staying long in my office. I've been scheduling aerobics classes at relatively early hours to make sure I leave my office in time. All this is the result of my attempts to find a work-life balance as a PhD student.

Knowing that I'll leave my office at a certain time, usually 6pm, forces me to plan my day, and fit my work in my schedule. I've tried and tested this, and I am getting as much done as when I was staying in my office from 8am to 8pm before September. I even feel like I can focus better during the day.

Yesterday, I thought during the day several times that I could do this and that in the meanwhile (unimportant tasks) "because I was staying longer anyway". Around 5:30 pm my concentration was gone, and I started to instant message my boyfriend. And then I started to read some blogs and have dinner. And suddenly I had to leave and run for choir practice, leaving the paper I wanted to read unread on my desk.

I've learned my lesson :)

How a few software tools created several hours per week...

One day, about half a year ago, I was browsing around on the internet during my workhours, and reading the news of the day. One of the articles of the day was about time management software. I read the description and I thought it would be a way too confronting. In the end, I can only concentrate about 20 minutes, and I need a break every now and then, so I thought.

But I kept thinking about the idea and a few days later I downloaded my first tool Rescuetime. Initially I was enjoying the free trial period of the extended version in which the software asks you after an idle period what you have been doing (meeting - phone call - other).
After two weeks of using this software, I realized how much time I actually need for my activities in the lab. The software clearly showed me that I do not only spend the time in the lab which I need for an experiment, but I also go downstairs to check regularly, to help the technical staff here and there and the discuss our planning, material schedule and casting dates. I also need some time after every experiment to sort out my labnotes and to put certain data into the computer. All those small tasks are necessary, but they take up 10 and 20 minutes every time and add up to the total time I actually need per experiment.

A second conclusion I drew from using this software is that, in total, I was spending a way too much time per day on surfing around on the internet, reading the news and playing around on social networking sites. I saw the results of my "very distracting time" per day, per week and per month and I was alarmed about it. However, I did not take action right away. Somehow I couldn't just give up on my bad habit. But after a two-week holiday and a one-week sick leave (related to that holiday, unfortunately) in which I had not had any time at all to visit social networking sites, I realized I could do without these sites during my workday. At the beginning of the new academic year, I decided to simply block my distractions.

The result is that by now I can go home about 1,5 hours earlier per day and I feel much less guilty about spending time in my office on social networking sites. I now have time in the evening to go to the gym and play some music at home. In turn, having these activities in the evening which help me unwind, results in having more concentration during my work hours and being able to focus better. It's a giant win, and apparently a software tool was the impulse to act which I needed.

Once I started to see the advantages of Rescuetime, and my free trail period ended (it still keeps track of my very productive and very distracting activities nowadays), I decided to try out a few more other time management tools. I downloaded a few tools which were of not much use to me. However, ManicTime turned out the perfect addition to RescueTime's free verion. ManicTime is an incredibly easy to use tool. It obviously tracks the software and documents which you use, but at the same time you can also tag slots of time with the activity you have been carrying out. I can tag the time that I spend in the lab, or the patches of time I use to write a paper.

All this helps me to estimate how much time I need to finish a certain task, and I am sure this knowledge will help my planning and will help me reach my goals in time within the next years of my PhD.

Friday already?

Before last February, I used to feel a sort of panic on Friday afternoons, thinking: "Oh no, this is the end of the week, and I have done so little!"
What I changed last February is that I started to make different levels of To Do lists. I used to go with one list, and that worked perfectly fine as long as I was attending school and finishing classes at the end of every semester. With something as vast as a PhD-project, that didn't really seem to work for me though. The list kept growing, and my sense of panic grew alongside it as well.
My different levels of To Do list are the following:

1. General research ideas
This is my little goldmine of research ideas, that might keep me busy for quite some time after I graduate, provided that I can stay in academics/research; or ideas that could work for a master's thesis. There's no timeline attached to these, I just keep this file as a source of ideas.

2. To Do list
This to do list consists of well-defined small projects that need to be done by a certain month or date. It includes for example the deadlines for conference papers which are a few months ahead, or the next few parameter studies I would like to carry out.

3. To Do in Month X
Very clear: the list of what I need to get done this month. I subdivide it in a few categories, and try to be as realistic as possible.

4. To Do in Week Y
About a quarter of the contents of To Do in Month X goes into my To Do in Week Y. I then take my planner and write down per day what I should focus on: testing 1,2 on day 1, testing 3 on day 2 along with reading paper z and so on.

At the end of the week, on Friday afternoon, I review again my weekly and monthly documents, add what I have done, and see what still needs to be done... and usually leave my office with quite a sense of accomplishment.