PhD Productivity Strategy: Do Deep Work in Less Hours
nextscientist.com
nextscientist.com
So, I inverted that and worked my ass off like I was still an undergrad in the first 18 months, toned it down for the next year and submitted my thesis at 2 years 10 months (the earliest my university would allow a submission) and was viva'd and passed 2 months later with minor corrections.
PhDs taking forever is generally a lack of initial work by the student rather than any external factors. Too many students let their supervisors fob them off rather than getting in their office when needed and forcing their projects forward.
Also, selecting a sensible area with a high likelihood of novelty helps, I worked on energy harvesting for hostile environments (high temp photovoltaics, piezo etc at 300degC) which was a new area for the group and my supervisor, and published 6 papers as basically nobody else was working in the field.
Doing a PhD in the UK helps, in and out before the funding dries up in 3-4 years is expected along with no class requirements and no masters needed (can go in straight from Bachelors).
This varies a lot by program in the US. Some schools want you to take 10 classes in the first two years. You can, of course, do research but your mind will be elsewhere. Others don't care as long as you pass your quals and take the required number of courses by the end of your PhD.
I think this is the key sentence for a US perspective. 2 years of course work + 3 years of research for 5 years total is common in STEM fields.
- I would have to start running the grant treadmill (and indeed, I'm just in the middle of finalizing a training grant that has as one of its requirements...that I must write another grant)
- In the US NIH, there is a 10 year "New Investigator" status that lasts 10 years from the PhD, where you are preferred for certain types of grant awards. So I reasoned it is much better to graduate late and start this clock from a strong position than to rush up the hierarchy and find yourself victim of the Peter Principle.
So for me, delay was a conscious strategy. Only downside was I had to live on a modest stipend. It was worth it for me, though. Another point that I'm making is that "productivity" is not equivalent to "graduating/getting promoted as fast as possible".
As for TFA, I would say that amazing quantities of work can get done by pushing yourself, deadlines, etc, but the creative work that lays groundwork for future growth only occurs during low-stress periods. I try, therefore, to set up alternating periods of both types.
From my department and committee, I started to feel rumblings around mid-year-6 of the "you should get on with it" lines. But they weren't trying to force me out or anything, it was more like concern.
I was spending (and still do) a much bigger percentage of my time on collaborative work than my peers, and they were concerned I wasn't adequately focused on my own career. But that wasn't the case at all -- I was doing what I thought was in my best interests, especially considering my field (bioinformatics) is inherently highly collaborative compared to the wet-lab stuff going on around me.
However, there were some institution-level reasons I cut it off at 7. After that, the institution's policy is that you have to start re-taking some classes you already took (and passed). It was irritating to always have to go to an irrelevant journal club every week (I was in a department that really had nothing to do with my research). Also, I had some appealing opportunities available if I finished when I did. But in no way was I "forced out".
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ujf73cdu4m6p1lj/AAD4vVwpCfgSf7GGo...
ps: sexy title
So I wondered "is there some semi-empirical way to find out what is 'most important' in aging so I can focus my future efforts on that?"
The solution I hit on was to take all the available gene expression data and to build a system to ask "what genes/pathways/systems change most strongly and consistently with age across species, experimental conditions, and tissues"? This would be a "core aging signature", if it exists. Obviously this is only one of many ways to answer my question and neglects epigenetics, proteomics, etc, although we're currently extending the system to DNA methylation. There is not enough high-throughput proteomics data to make it possible to do this with protein yet. We do not use sequencing for now because it is much more of a processing burden and human RNA is behind dbGaP embargo. And at the time I started this, there really wasn't that much of it compared to GEO.
My boss's interests are much more general than aging, so he encouraged me to develop the system to be more generic while still answering my question, which I did. It became a general meta-analysis system for asking "what genes change expression with <arbitrary condition> across the available experiments in GEO?" We found other things we could do with such a huge amount of expression data, and some of them are in Chapter 5.
I would say the system itself is 80-90% done. But sadly I did not get to a really detailed analysis of aging yet, although my findings so far on that are in Chapter 4.
The best aging researcher alive right now IMO though is Jim Kirkland. I've had the good fortune to work a little with him and the man is a living encyclopedia. His brilliance is obvious even in a conference full of PhDs.
From I what I could hear, he has to spend a lot of time managing funding for sub parts of the foundation and other efforts. Maybe this dilluted his claims a bit in time. All of his friends seemed to be pretty high grade researchers, it was a bit of an SF experiment sitting among that crowd.
Thanks for the name, there's another Kirkland studying aged things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kirkland_(paleontologist... but well .. couldn't resist that joke.
The panel I attended was the ICSA 2017 at Paris (Pasteur) http://www.icsa2017-senescence-on-the-seine.org/
Kirkland wasn't there but a nice international bunch
They were supposed to plan for a sequel since a few hundred people attended their surprise talk; we'll see.
1. I had no intention to stay in academia after my PhD, it was the best paying gig I could find in 2008 when the world was ending financially and the project was interesting with very little supervisory oversight as the area was new to him as well. 2. If you are enjoying the work, the funding is there and you feel like you are achieving what you want then taking your time is totally cool - I was more focussing on their other end when people want to finish up and can't get done.
This is a key point. My wife's university in the UK actively tried to get its PhD candidates in and out in 3 years (with an optional 4th year for writing, typically part-time), and more than half of her cohort achieved that. While it's possible to get through a US PhD that fast, the norm is much longer. My wife's PhD is in biomedical materials.
As Xaa mentioned for NIH, there are clocks that start ticking after your PhD. This is true for other funding agencies as well. Also, when it's time to start hiring faculty, the fact that someone took 3 years vs 7 years for their PhD is not as important as their publication record and their plans for future research. We recently brought on a guy with 80+ publications (with a large number of those high impact) during his PhD and one postdoc.
I think "rushing" to finish isn't a worthwhile goal (even though I will admit that when I was a student, the stipend was horribly low, so there was a huge opportunity cost for those who decided to do something else later). Being productive during your time is worthwhile. Asking yourself if you are still being productive or if it's time to move on is productive. Not being a technician during your PhD is worthwhile. In that sense, the article has some good advice about taking time out to think. But, in some fields you sometimes just have to grind it out. Say for example, someone is doing an x-ray experiment at a synchotron, or doing MBE synthesis, there are times you just have to put in the hours to get results.
Not in my experience, especially for pre-tenured professors who are in an existential "publish or perish" scenario that defines their careers. It may sound harsh... but they invest a lot in their early students & lab setup, so their goal is to keep students around, publish as many papers as possible, and win enough grants as possible off their work before letting them graduate. I know plenty of folks who did thesis-level work in their first 2-3 years... but then their advisor made them keep grinding for another 2-3 years before "letting" them submit to committee.
There is just no way around grinding out the experiments. You literally have to will something to work in multi-month long pushes where you iterate again and again until you figure it out.
Deep work is good and nice for the theoretical parts, but all the academic superstars/upcomers I know work super long AND super hard to make conference deadlines all the time.
Of course, if you just want to graduate without stressing all that much or much ambition, this might work.
Or instead of iterating 5 times, you take your time and do it right on the 2nd attempt, figuring it out in 1/3 of the time. Hurrying only leads to mistakes. It makes no more sense than attempting to continue working when you really need to go to the bathroom. You are are a human being and have biological limitations. Ignoring them is of no benefit and usually significant detriment.
John Carmack:
Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.
You're assuming the majority of failures are human-error induced.
Academia is infamous for only rewarding positive results, even when the underlying is exploratory and planning couldn't have saved you. "X does not cause Y" is a legitimate outcome of asking "does X cause Y?", but it's (usually) not an acceptable result for a thesis. It's all too possible to end up needing all of those iterations even when you don't make mistakes.
I'd say not testing your ideas and instead spending forever overthinking/planning them is actually a leading cause of procrastination for PhDs.
In an abstract sense this is true, but there are some fields were you do just have to do it again, and again, and again. I know an exceptionally smart biochemist who routinely has 16 hour days. There's no substitute.
In my own field, someone who would later go on to win a Nobel for the work, was working on something that simply required a huge amount of time and iteration to get right. This is often the case.
This is not true in all fields, of course. I just want to caution against extrapolating from experience in one field to all PhDs, which is the sense I get from a lot of comments in this thread.
The above timeline is common and routine as are claims of having just done a '16 hour day' by those who are on the above schedule.
I'm not saying biochemists couldn't run 16 hours of experimental protocols at their bench per day, but I've never seen it happen.
At the end of the summer it came to light that the chemical supplies they received were not the claimed purity invalidating all of their research.
One of the moments that caused me to nope out of science was when I (as a research assistant) received a work e-mail from a postdoc at a high profile northeastern uni at 11:00 PM on a Saturday night. There's no way in hell that's an appropriate time for work in my book.
For those who are stressed and overwhelmed, I would advise to take a walk. And also for those who want to be creative, take a walk. It's a productivity hack.
> Except for languages, such as English, French and Japanese, the names of academic disciplines, majors, minors, programs and courses of study are not proper nouns and should not be capitalized. Example: She majored in integrated supply management and German.
int fewer;
float less;
(And yes, I do realize that the actual definition is in terms of mass vs. countable nouns.)
Into which bucket do grammar folks place countable infinites?
Fewer people. Fewer zoos. Fewer cigarettes. Less hatred. Less abuse. Less misuse of power.
Flip flopping it around. The last three are now countable. The first three, while maybe verging on nonsensical, are grammatically correct. Less zoo, for example, might be used in the context of closing down part of a zoo. 'I have less cigarette left than Joe', also makes sense, if we are comparing cigarette lengths.
On another note, see how "fewer times" and "less time" means different things (might help clarify the distinction to some.)
(Non native speaker here though.)
If you can't manage to focus on something despite persistent effort, yes it's much better to stop and have fun instead. It makes no sense to have "long hours" as a goal even if you're not sure of what you are going to try to accomplish during that time.
On the other hand, when you are motivated, or making progress on something, or working towards a deadline, then it may be very productive to keep going for many hours. I don't have statistics, but an important part of my PhD output (both research and writing) was done between 11 PM and 3 AM, on weekends, etc. (By the way, I disagree with the advice of going to the lab early in the morning -- personally I worked better from home late at night. But it depends on how you work and whether you can do the work from home or not.) Importantly, you should be in a flow mode, so actually these hours don't feel "long".
The main productivity lesson I got from my PhD is this: either work productively, or relax wholeheartedly. Aka: "Do, or do not; there is no try." :) It's terrible to try to work on something and not succeed -- it's unproductive, unpleasant, it does not put you in a better mood like real fun does, and it makes you completely disgusted with the task so it will be even harder to work on it next time. You have to learn when to keep on working, and when to stop because you won't be productive working longer. (You get better at this productivity prediction with experience.) And you should be fine with stopping very early, maybe skipping the rest of the day if it turns out you're not in the mood; but you should also be fine with stopping late and working crazy hours when inspiration comes.
I'm not sure if that was even an intended message, but that's what I took from it, and I thought back to it during the dark hours of dissertation writing when I was repeatedly thinking "this isn't good enough". I also remembered the lesson that one should be willing to be flexible in the sense that the dissertation doesn't have to be exactly (or at all) what you originally intended it to be.
This is the most important bit in my experience. I had a pretty successful PhD and I loved my time as a PhD student. I'd have days or even weeks when I just didn't feel particularly motivated, and when that happened, I didn't sit at my desk twiddling my thumbs, I took the day off. Maybe read some papers, but almost never forced myself to do hands-on work if I wasn't feeling it. Having an advisor that grants you this kind of flexibility, as well as the flexibility to let you take on projects that make you feel motivated, is pretty important for a successful and non-torturous PhD, IMHO.
(Meanwhile I know of other advisors whose students would come into the lab 7 days a week and try to sell their work-life balance by telling the story of this one time when one guy the afternoon off on a Friday to go skiing. It's bizarre to me that some advisors think that kind of whip-cracking is the right way to make creative endeavors successful.)
But habits die hard, and the management class is more addicted to the manufacturing-driven mindset than junkies are to heroin, so it'll take awhile to change.
The humans on my thesis committee are definitely capable of extended periods of mental exertion. I don't know if it's something you're only born with or if it's something you can train but I bet I'll find out in a few years.
We can quickly get into some no-true-Scotsman territory here by asking "well if they're so smart how many Nobel/Field/Turing awards do they have" or something, but that's not the original question. The original question was, how much can you work at a high level a day? I have a measurement for both the ceiling and the floor and the ceiling seems high.
But that only measures time, not productivity which is at the root of this problem. You think your advisor is doing ten or twelve hours of deep work, but how do you know they couldn't achieve the same in four or five?
By the way, meetings and emails aren't deep work, even in an academic setting.
a) Is simple
b) Works for any tasks.
c) Allows for short burst of activity during which it is easy to refrain from reading random stuff, mails, or explore tangential ideas. Easy because you know you will have 5 minutes to check it out if necessary after your burst.
d) Helps for moving around, go fill a glass of water, look at your surroundings etc.
e) Probably correlates well with average human attention span
I must look pretty special with the amount of notes I take, but it's literally the only way I keep myself honest.
At least when you can fit that work in between all the meetings you are scheduled for in a day.
I think the key is differentiating between creative work (which is better to be done deep with fewer hours) and grunt work which is almost purely time. Both are needed for a sucessful PhD - few are good at both and it is hard to switch between the two.
1. Remove Facebook/Instagram/Twitter from your phone. Using parental controls disable Safari. Remove your email too if you can.
2. Use SelfControl to block these websites for 24 hours at a time. So you only get to check these things once every day. After you've checked it, quickly block again. If 24 is too much, start with 8 or so. But always block again right after checking!
SelfControl: https://selfcontrolapp.com/
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Few more tips:
- Pomodoro technique is nice (I built FocusList - focuslist.co) but in my experience it doesn't help if you keep thinking about how many more minutes you have to stay focused. Instead you have to forget about all that and just think about your task.
- Keep a journal of sticking with this habit. I always print current month, put it up in my kitchen and I cross off days. I'm currently doing that for my diet, but it works for any habit you wanna build.
- If you can't motivate yourself, reading a book like "Deep Work" will give you an initial push.
- Use headphones. This is individual, but speaking for me, they just gave me this feeling of immersion and it just helps me get into the zone. Get a nice pair with noise cancelling, or with those foam tips (if it's comfy), it will make you feel like you entered a different world.
You mean like a calendar? The "string of unbroken crosses technique"? Or do you mean something else?
The point is that you should create a meta-habit of checking your habits. A daily reminder.
It's a fair question. But be warned: You're not going to get a much less diverse set of answers from them, though. I would suggest also listening to scientists who established themselves 30+ years ago. You'll likely hear a different story compared to the current crop.
In the 00's, some of my fellow graduate students did more work for their PhD than many faculty members I know did to get tenure in the 80's and early 90's. The high level of work demanded today is mostly due to inbreeding attitudes in academia. It's entirely an internal problem.
source : http://cra.org/crn/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/05/2016-T...
Is 60% pretty high compared to other fields?
Source (for econ at least; CS is anecdotal): http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/if-you-get-phd-ge...
Looking abstractly at the "market", you are right. Asking a person on a tenure track committee why they're forcing newer hires to do a lot more than they ever had to do to get tenure, and getting that answer, is problematic.
Nothing in the market is forcing the hand of the person on the committee. Nothing. It is the equivalent of "I'm being a nasty jerk because I can." The market helps in him being nasty, but it is his/her choice to be so.
If you look at the daily lives of some of the greatest scientists and creatives in history, you'll find that a surprising number of them have had similarly compressed schedules. Newport's blog discusses many of them.
From personal experience, one needs to stay at the experimental setup until you have publishable data.
For example, I had part of an experiment die when the oxygen tank ran out, rushed back to the lab at 3:00 AM, changed the acquisition mode. I took the final picture and published in a high impact Nature family journal.
My less productive colleges would have called the experiment a failure, and stayed home.
Is it though? Because I've never heard this ever. I've heard over and over again to avoid working long hours. It always annoys me when articles start off on premises like these that I just don't think are true.
As a PhD student the real secret strategy is to ignore academia, work only on very high impact projects ( with potential of becoming startups or revolutionizing the field), intern with production teams (in core areas) at great companies. And enjoy lack of 9 to 5 scheduled life.
The deep work in less hours is meaningless if the work itself is merely publishing "Minimum Publishable Units" couple of times every year. It's just fast track to mediocrity.
Though I agree that not all environments are hospitable to risk taking. But then dropping out is a better deal.
My advice is only good for CS or similar (ECE, Data Science) PhD's.
or revolutionizing the field