PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: First aid when you are feeling overwhelmed

This post is part of the series PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: posts written for the Dutch academic career network AcademicTransfer, your go-to resource for all research positions in the Netherlands.

These posts are sponsored by AcademicTransfer, and tailored to those of you interested in pursuing a research position in the Netherlands.

If these posts raise your interest in working as a researcher in the Netherlands, even better - and feel free to fire away any questions you might have on this topic!

When you start your PhD trajectory, you may at times feel a bit bored, as you spend the entire day on one single task. But at some point during your PhD, you will find yourself juggling a number of tasks: supervising students, teaching, carrying out your own research, writing abstracts, writing papers, helping your supervisor with smaller tasks, and preparing deliverables for your funding institution.

As the number of tasks that come your way increase, you may feel a mild sense of panic. The number of items on your to do list is growing and growing, and you start to put in more hours. You feel like you are continuously behind on work, and that everybody is waiting for you to do something.

When you feel overwhelmed by the amount of work that you have to chew through, you need to sit down and make a plan before you keep on plodding further forwards. Here's a quick method of eight steps that you can work through when you feel stressed out by all the requests and demands on your time.

1. Make a list of what you need to do
First you need to know what needs to be done. Do you have an organized to do list? Do you have a list of your tasks?

For this first step, take a sheet of paper or use an app for tasks. Make different categories, for example "writing papers", "research", "tasks work", "service appointment", "teaching", ... and organize your tasks in each category. Add the deadlines, and, where needed, a range of dates when you should be working on this task to meet the deadline.

2. Prioritize

Once you have an overview of all your tasks, identify which tasks fit where in the urgent-important matrix. Remember that you have four categories for your tasks: urgent-important, not urgent-important, urgent-not important, not urgent-not important. Highlight the urgent-important and not urgent-important tasks in your list of tasks. These tasks are your priorities.

For each task, ask yourself what would happen if you don't meet a deadline. Does somebody need your input for his/her project? Would you miss the opportunity to present your work at a conference? Do you risk losing your funding? Prioritize your tasks further based on the risk involved with missing a deadline.

3. Plan

Now that you know your priorities, estimate how much time you need to finish each task. When will you be able to work on each task? When do you expect to be ready with each task? Which deadlines can you meet, realistically speaking?

When you plan your activities, never plan more than 75% of your available time - distractions will come along, and if you start to run behind on your planning from the first week, you will feel demotivated.

4. Use a weekly template

If you need to combine a number of tasks, it can be helpful to use a weekly template to see how you will be able to combine all your responsibilities. You can allot different timeslots for different categories of tasks, and plan your tasks of these categories accordingly.

When you develop a weekly template at the beginning of a semester, you also have a better idea of how much hours you have available on a weekly basis for your writing projects and how many hours for your research. If you know in advance how much time you have available, you will be less likely to over commit.

5. Communicate with your collaborators

After scheduling when you will be working on which task, get in touch with your collaborators. If everybody seems to be waiting for input from you, and is perhaps bugging you with reminder emails that increase your stress, send them a short update in which you tell them when they can expect an answer from you.

Communicate your new schedule and your planning with your supervisor, so that he/she knows what you are up to, what you can deliver, and by when you expect to be able to deliver your results.

6. Delegate and enlist students

See if you can delegate tasks, especially from the not urgent-not important and urgent-not important categories. Are there institutions or people in the university that you can rely on to help you out with some administrative and practical tasks? Can the secretary help you a hand with scheduling appointments and meetings? Most often, a lot of administrative work ends up with academics, but if you have support systems, use them as suitable.

If you are a young faculty member and have students working with you, see if you can enlist the help of your students. You can send smaller research tasks to your students, or you can ask them to go pick up some material for you from the library.

7. Focus

Avoid spending long days in the office when you need to get a lot of work done. Instead, see if you can make every minute count during your regular work day. Work in a concentrated way, and stay with your mind on the task at hand. You can use the pomodoro technique if you need an extra push, and track your output in terms of words to stay on track with writing.

If you notice that your attention is drifting away, don't beat yourself up. See if you can take a break to get some fresh thoughts. If you are running low on energy after lunch or towards the end of the work day, switch to less intensive tasks.

8. Stay healthy

If you want to keep a clear focus, you'll need to have your brain in good shape. To battle the fog in your brain, stay healthy: get enough sleep, exercise, and eat a nutritious diet. These essential self-care elements should be a no-brainer, but when you are busy, they may be the first things that go out of the window.

Remember that, if you don't take proper care of yourself, you'll get sick and exhausted sooner or later - and you won't be able to do any progress on your projects at all. Avoid this situation by treating your body and your head right.

Writer's Lab: How to stay motivated when writing an entire dissertation

That very beginning of writing your dissertation - chapter 1, the introduction - and then nothing but the flashing cursor in your writing software... This situation is probably the beginning of 99% of all dissertations.

The end is also quite the same for most of us: compiling a list of notations, adding the references if you haven't used an automatic importing system, and compiling the table of contents.

What happens in between those moments can be a bit messier. You might just sit down and write it all out, or you might come across gaps in your work and spend a few more weeks to figure things out.

Even though you might be able to write your dissertation quickly, chances are still that you will hit a rough patch at some point in the process. If you want to stay motivated when working on such a large project, here are 7 ideas to try out when you need to pick up your motivation again.

1. Reread an important paper

If you want to get your inspiration flowing again, then try to remember which work inspired you in the first place. When you are stuck somewhere, reread an important paper that was essential to your work. Or read a new publication in your field. Remember how we discussed earlier how reading sparks creativity?

2. Edit a previous chapter

Do some work that doesn't require much of your hard thinking deep working capacities, but that needs to be done to move forward. You can for example edit a chapter that you wrote earlier, and wait until your bad mood drifts away.

3. Think about your propositions

If you need to defend both your dissertation and 10 propositions as in the Netherlands, you might like to take your thoughts and worries away from your dissertation and look for good citations or ideas to use for your propositions.

4. Take some time off

You know yourself best - when you need a break, take some time to recharge and refuel. That doesn't need to be an entire holiday, but you can simply take an evening off and indulge in some things you love, or you can take a weekend to yourself and try to watch some inspiring documentaries or read some thought-provoking books.

5. Have a discussion with your supervisor

If you're really stuck and you are doubting the quality of your work, then don't suffer in silence. Speak up and ask for a meeting with your supervisor to discuss the difficulties that you are facing.

6. Don't stress over it

Friction and creative blocks are inherent parts of the entire process of creating something - and a 100k word thesis is certainly "something". So be prepared: you will run into some creative blocks, but that is just fine! That does not mean that something is wrong with you as a PhD candidate.

7. Set boundaries

At incredibly busy times in the lab and with my funding agency, I've ran on an 8am to 10pm schedule to get all the measurements done and all the simulations run. For writing, that just doesn't work (or at least not, to write an entire thesis). Set office hours for yourself, even if you work as a part time PhD. Know when you can work on your dissertation, and make a realistic planning of what you can achieve.

How did you get from the flickering cursor to compiling your table of contents? What challenges did you face along the way, and how did you resolve them?

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

RSA Animate made an interesting video of what motivates us:



We all know that sticks and stones won't make us get our PhD.

In this video, we get a few glimpses of how motivation really works. In the light of PhD research, we can think more deeply about some of the results that are shown in the animation.

The most interesting part is the three factors that lead to better performance:

1. Autonomy
"If you want engagement, self direction is better".
In these terms, PhD research is among the most self-directed types of work you could be doing.

Take-Home Message: Take ownership of your research. Own your project, push it forward, and take pride in it.

2. Mastery
"We enjoy getting better at skills over time"
There's a large number of skills that you learn during your PhD. To stay motivated, it's important that we track our progress and see how we are getting better at our skills - and these skills cover a wide array: planning our work, coding, measuring data, writing,...

Take-Home Message: Identify a number of skills that you develop in your research. Measure your performance and track your progress, so that you can visualize your path to mastery.

3. Purpose
"We are motivated by a greater purpose".
In our research, it is easy to get absorbed by the specific problems we need to solve: how we should code a routine, how we should measure a variable in an experiment and similar issues. It is important to realize frequently the greater impact of our research.

Take-Home Message: What is the greater purpose of your research? How will it impact society? Is it related to the economy, the environment or our society?

What motivates you? Do you recognize yourself in this video?

The Creative Process: Reading Sparks Creativity

Reading as part of the creative process? I've discussed reading, and reading loads at length in a previous series of posts discussing archiving, understanding different levels of reading and keeping up with the output.

Reading a lot and keeping up with your field is not only important to have an understanding of what is going on, but it actually fuels your creativity. One of the big wins I noticed during the development of my theoretical work, is that I immediately could link a question to a paper I had read in the past 3 years.

Let me give you an overview of the different ways in which a good understanding of the literature can help you in your creative work:

1. Don't do double work

It might sound obvious, but you wouldn't want to figure out that somebody has already done precisely what you were working on for the past months or maybe years, and has published that work already. Carrying out a literature review before starting is key to understand what has already been done.

2. Identify the boundaries of the current knowledge

So you are going to develop a theory that explains Life, the Universe and Everything in your field... And thus you sit down in a cabin in the woods with paper and pencil and work on your brilliant idea, right? Well, to have a clue where you should get started, provided that you want to advance your field, you need to know what has been done. And you should critically revise the work that has been done, testing the assumptions and wondering where the caveats lie. Through such an analysis, you can determine where to start from with your own work, by working on an open question that you come across when studying the state of the art. Asking questions with regard to the existing work can teach you much more than what is purely written in the existing papers.

3. Know where to find important bits and pieces

Developing theoretical work requires you to look up parts of theories that are already fully developed. If you have carried out a proper literature review, then you have a good overview of these theories. Once you need to implement these in your own model, it is crucial to have read and understood that material. A good background knowledge is of the utmost importance when trying to come up with a novel theory. If you run into an obstacle in your creative work, it is important to be able to quickly go through your memory to see if you've already come across a similar problem in the past.

Never Grow Up: Today, but also Tomorrow

Never grow up is our theme for today. Today is the day to eat from a Happy Meal lunchbox, to hop around and shake to the lunchbeats, to make some new friends, to play games, kick some balloons and forget about the reality of the world.

It’s a day in Neverland and you’re Peter or Tinkerbell today. Almost a year of preparations, brainstorming and having fun along the way have brought us to the Big Day. Your five sense are to be thrilled. Your imagination is about to take on a soaring flight. Sit back, but don’t relax – engage with everything and everyone around you.


But this evening you’ll be walking out of these doors again, and when you look back, Neverland might be gone forever.We don’t want the atmosphere to just dry out like that – we want to keep the flame for many more days to come.

So, how can we bring the spark of childhood into our lives? Here are a few ideas I have:

1. Stay curious
Keep asking questions – we already mentioned that. Keep wondering about why you do things, and which constraints these decisions place on your life.
Keep learning, evolving and improving yourself. Reinvent yourself from time to time. Nothing is written in stone.

2. Living light
Remember The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera? Let all that gravitas go, it will only weigh you down. A lost day is just that: a lost day.

3. Play
Play with children, play with pets, play with random objects – there’s no reason why you should give up playing because you’re a grown-up now.

4. Surround yourself with like-minded people
You’re already at a TEDx Event today, with people that love to learn and be inspired. But that shouldn’t end today – there are many opportunities to connect and learn with like-minded spirits.

5. Laugh and sing
Laugh out loud, sing in the shower and whistle while you work – Gretchen Rubin has some good ideas for you on that topic!

This post originally appeared on the TEDx Delft website. 

The Creative Process: The Creative Habit

In a first post on this series about the creative process, we looked at the conditions you need for creativity. In this post, we focus on a long-term way to find more creative solutions to research questions.

Some people might be naturally more creative than others, some people might seem to enjoy to be creating things and ideas all the time and some people might think that creativity is just not for them. Well I think creativity is something you can develop over time.


Here are a few ways you can use to foster "The Creative Habit", and train your mind to think out of the box:

1. Creativity over a whole spectrum

Pick up an artistic hobby, start blogging and journaling, sketch, get interested in fashion, arts, literature or anything that helps you break out of the bubble of your regular thinking. Debate politics and read up on history. Get your grey matter working!

When you get used to divert your thoughts and focus on other topics, pulling ideas together by looking at them from a different perspective becomes easier as well.

2. Daily creativity

Creativity comes when you make it a habit, when you train it on a daily basis. Try to break out of your research shell on a daily basis.

You can for example schedule activities (music classes, photography classes, painting workshop...) that push you to take time to be creative. Or you can pick up a challenge, like a 365 photography project, or try to write a set of poems within a few months.

3. List ideas 

When you are solving a problem in research, don't immediately go with your first idea. Try to sit down and look at the problem from every possible angle. Make a list of possible approaches, and notice that once you start thinking about different possibilities to solve a problem, you will start generating more ideas on how to approach it differently. Again, it's all about the mindset, and knowing that you don't have to come *snap* with a solution, but can sit and reflect.

4. Mindmap ideas

Mindmapping itself involves sketching and drawing, and is in essence a creative process as well. When mapping out ideas, try to explore all the tentacles of your mindmap spider web and explore them just a little deeper to try and seep out some additional thoughts and ideas.

5. Courses on creative thinking

If you're completely stuck, or can't find a way to think in creative ways, know that there are courses out there that are especially aimed at creative thinking for scientists. I haven't followed any of these courses, so I can't come up with a recommendation (I'm the kind of person with more ideas than time to develop them, so a lot of bubbling is always going on up in my mind). The NWO in the Netherlands used to offer classes, it'd be good if they'd bring them back!

How do you develop your creative habit?

The Creative Process: Conditions

Inspired by my recent theoretical work, I'd like to dedicate a series of posts to the creative process.

The first idea I'd like to discuss is which conditions you need for creative work? Before you get started on developing a new theory, or developing a new design, it is necessary to reflect on what we need for creativity.

In my opinion, you need very little to deliver creative work. As Feynman discussed, you don't need a cabin in the woods and all the time in the world to come up with good ideas.

Now let's look at what I think you need to push forward creative work:

1. Scheduled time

You don't need all the time in the world; I think 2 hours of undisturbed time in your planning can be enough. The key here is to claim that time, free up your schedule and plan those 2 hours - and use that time to the maximum. Use it for creative work, don't start using the "free" time to clean out your mailbox, or catch up on administration work.

2. Comfort

You don't need a cabin in the woods, but to help yourself getting into the right zone, you might like to sharpen your pencil, have space on your desk, have all material ready, a cup of coffee and music to block out the (lab) noise.

3. Mindset

For creative work, your mindset is key. I had been building up quite some tension with regard to my theoretical work - in fact, I hadn't been doing anything yet since all my time was devoted to experimental work, and my promotor had conveyed the message I really had to get started on it because it would take a long time and a lot of effort and searching and frustration. The mere thought of all that brought me panic and lots of impostor thoughts.

Then, I decided to turn around my entire mindset. I thought to myself: "I am just going to answer a question." My entire chapter 6 is the result of a smart question of my co-promotor, which I decided to flesh out completely. So, for my theoretical work, I decided to ask myself questions, and answer them, and if the answer would bring up another question, then I'd continue with answering that question.

Changing my mindset took away most of the pressure I was feeling, and it woke up my curious inner child.

Which conditions do you think are necessary for creative work? I'd love to hear about your experiences!

Towards better concentration in five steps

Recently, I was asked in the comments of my post on motivation for my input on concentration. I've quickly given an answer in the comments, but I'd like to expand on the topic in a full post.

Concentration is not my natural strength. With a concentration span of about 20 minutes and my generally super-scattered brain, I've needed to work hard when I started university and couldn't simply study 20 minutes before an exam anymore.

My first years at university were not a big success (or at least, my grades were not as good as I would have wanted them to be), mostly because I didn't put my concentration where I had to.

Bit by bit, I started to learn how to focus (still working on it though!), and at the end of my studies, I was back to studying very few hours per day during exams, but with more concentration and dedication - which also resulted in significantly higher grades.

Therefore, I've gained some experience in observing my own habits and how to improve your concentration. I've already given my 10 tips for a better concentration, but here you can find 5 easy steps to implement and work towards a better concentration:

1. Know your tools

Identify the length of your concentration span: during a few work days, note down precisely how long you stay at one task. You can as well use a software tool, like ManicTime, to tag your time slots (but then, make sure you consistently tag whenever you leave your thesis document and go browse online or run off to the coffee machine).

Knowing how your brain works regularly is absolutely important to improve your concentration. Only once you know what you can work with, you can also work towards expanding your concentration span.

Action: map your concentration span!

2. Clear goals

This example should give you a sense for setting clear goals: compare "write thesis from 8am to 6pm" on your to do list to "write 400 words on paragraph 5.3.4 in thesis between 10am and noon". Setting clear goals, and knowing what precisely you need to do in which time slot, allows for less drifting off in thoughts.

Action: take your planning tool and schedule clear goals.

3. Frequent breaks

If you want to have several hours of deep concentration in a work day, then it is absolutely important to unwind every now and then. In the Pomodoro technique, 25 minute sets of concentration are alternated with 5 minute breaks, and a longer break after 4 Pomodoros. If you try to force yourself to sit on your chair for hours and hours, your mind will start to wander and you'll make slower progress. The key is to take short, but frequent breaks such that you can stay at a decent level of concentration throughout the day.

Action: build some air into your schedule and try a timing technique.

4. Take care of your body

You can't concentrated when you're tired, sick or generally unwell. Therefore, it's important to find time to prepare wholesome food, work out, relax and get your hours of sleep. Sleep deprivation is one of the most common reasons for poor concentration.

Action: Take that planning tool again, and schedule time to take care of your health (gym, cooking a healthy meal,...) or skip some commitments to safeguard your 8 hours of sleep.

5. Meditate

If you want to improve your focus over a longer period of time, there is no better way than to work out your brains. Meditation is indeed nothing more than a good workout for your brain (plus all the benefits that are associated with meditation!). As a researcher, you're "paid to think", and therefore taking good care of your brain and optimizing its performance is very important.

Action: Look at your schedule. At what point during the day can you guarantee 5 minutes for meditation?

The active bird catches the worm

Over the past 10 years, I've been a student, and thus living as a student in shared houses. In total, I've had 36 housemates so far (if I didn't forget to count anyone), and I have lived with different characters. But most of all, I think you can subdivide people in the go-getters and the sedentary folks.

When I started studying, I was already juggling a lot of activities: my studies, my band, my music classes and an active student life. Nowadays, I am juggling a PhD, lots of transatlantic trips to see my husband, almost daily workouts, taking care of my cat, actively playing music, blogging here and there, reviewing CDs, daily meditation, daily journaling and a tadload of other activities. You might get tired at the very idea of buzzing around all the time, but it mostly boils down to having the right mindset. Admittedly, I might come across as 10.000 Volts kind of person, but moving around and doing different things is exactly what fuels me up and what sparks my creativity.

Here's how you too can make the switch and become a go-getter:

1. Different activity, different location

For me, moving to different places and having appointments here and there is key to finish one task (for example my research day), and then get to the next place (for, say, a workout).
When I plan to work from home, eat at home, and do some yoga at home - my day becomes too blurred and I might not get much out of it. When I take the energy level up and move from the office to the gym to home and maybe some store on the way,  I actually feel fueled up.

2. Good planning

Vague ideas on the different activities you'd like to add to your schedule won't actually get you there. Know the dates and times and plan accordingly. Also, a good planning will help you to get more hours out of your day - we all know that, but really, having a schedule can prevent you from sinking in the TV/internet/... black hole.
Having a fixed day or gym class will help you consider it as an appointment. Not only will you be more productive during the day because you have something to look forward to, but you will also notice that additional activities energize you.

3. Be active, everywhere

What I observed over time is that the go-getters are the people who work hard, play hard, and, while they're somewhere, see what needs to get done, roll up their sleeves and get it over with. You won't easily catch me staring in the blue while I wait for my food to cook. I typically will start putting dishes aside, cleaning up part of the kitchen (very much inspired by Zen Habits cleaning as you go) and prepare lunch for the next day.

4. Put your heart and mind to it

Being active is easier when you put your heart and mind to what you do. When you're fully dedicated and passionate about your activities, it's easy to keep the flame alive.
In the end, it's about knowing what you can do, and simply doing it.

5. Really enjoy relaxation time

The fact that I like to be jumping around and going here and there doesn't mean I don't value downtime. It only means that I more consciously enjoy my downtime: relaxing in the sauna after the gym, drinking a cup of wine in the evening, watching something online - I experience downtime as much more rewarding when I have been active for the entire day. It's similar to the idea of celebrating your successes in research.

How I started to take my own deadlines and planning seriously

In this post, I'm elaborating on the first way to motivate yourself which I described earlier on. 

The very basis for my habit of taking my own planning seriously dates back to the time when I was studying in Brussels. In the Belgian system, exams only come twice a year, at the end of a (if I remember correctly) a 13 weeks period of classes. When I started, some courses were still year-long courses and if we'd fail the exam after the first semester of that course,  we could still recover the course by taking an oral exam on the entire course at the end of the academic year. After 13 weeks of class, we were having 3 weeks to study and then 3 weeks of exam, with usually 3 days in between the exams. Homework is not coming that often as in the US system, and the amount of theory is typically much larger in my impression. We'd have to memorize entire books with proofs and derivations for every course.

In my very first year I ended up with 50cm of paper which I had to put into my head some time during the next 6 weeks. I was not having class, so I was mainly in isolation, and with an amount of material I  had never seen before. I was not too positive about ever being able to pass any exam at all. And I indeed failed Linear Algebra (I'll never forget that), and I barely passed Chemistry. Before that, I had always passed all exams in school with flying colors, but suddenly I was struggling. I was merely struggling with the amount of material I had to work through, taking my short concentration span into account and my average need for sleep and relatively large need for breaks and creative activity.

In the Belgian system, every class typically leads to two exams: a theoretical exam (about the derivations of formulas or proofs which you should study) and an exam of exercises. I used to do pretty bad on the exercises, since I never really managed to prepare for those. Or I would try to work through a bunch of examples the day before the exam, not giving my brain the time to really master the material.

Bit by bit, I realized I had to change my way of working. One reason was that I wanted to get rid of the insane amount of stress I'd have during those weeks of exams (I'd get sick almost every time) and the other reason was that I wanted to master some subjects - not just study to pass the exam and then forget the material.

So I started to study during the year. With 40 hours of class a week and compulsory labs which need preparation, it was hard to find time to study (and still being able to practice sports, take music lessons, sing in a band, go out and all that). I started to actually understand what we were doing in the exercises, and put all the material together and understand the whole story behind all the theoretical work. I would make a planning half-way the semester and start working through all the proofs and derivations in the books. Some classes I skipped deliberately to work through the material on my own, during the hours of the lecture. I found what was working best for me, but in order to be able to do so, I really had to respect my own planning.

As my planning became better, I started to get better results, started to be respected by my classmates and my self-confidence grew along the way. I also started to enjoy studying. In spring, I would take my plastic table outside and sit in the pleasant spring weather to study during the day, and then I would reward myself with relax-time in the evening.
Getting such positive results from learning to work in advance became my main motivation to start in time and respect my self-imposed deadlines. By now, it has become a habit and I would never want to end up getting so stressed that I am brain-paralyzed again.

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.

Overcoming fear

One of the main insights I gained during the past year, and especially during the PhD course which I am taking, is that many of us are held back by fear.
Fear can be the reason why you developed a certain coping mechanism, fear blocks your clear communication abilities and fear makes sure you stay in your comfort zone.

Today, I read this post, from which I am quoting the following:

There was a part of me that assumed life would be easier once i survived the grief – that i'd embrace a new life-is-short credo and let go of all my fears, gliding through life feeling the power of survival under my wings. But that didn't happen. Life still felt as difficult as ever, if not more so.

These words inspire me to actually put some energy into fighting my fear. Whenever fear peeks over my shoulder and whispers in my ear to just stay where I am and not undertake action, I should actually put a double amount of energy to fight the fear. I mention double amount, referring to the energy needed to ignore the fear on one hand and to get into action on the other hand.

Some motivational words

I read a great blog post, titled Don't Quit.

I came across this post through the daily post blog and I thought this is very valuable for anyone who is doing a PhD. Along the way, we encounter ups and downs, and sometimes months of effort turn out not to lead to results.

With only 1year and 4 months into my PhD, I haven't encountered a significant down yet. I've heard a lot about the famous second year dip. I, too, have come to the point were I realized that I won't be able to do everything I was planning to do at the beginning of my project. I initially wanted to take some classes and study a few new topics, but the lab is eating all my hours. However, I have not been feeling down about this, I just realized there are more urgent things that need to be done for my funding organization.

For those interested, a good read about dealing with setbacks can be found here.