by Franziska Boenisch and Adam Dziedzic

Managing your time as a Ph.D. student can be challenging because often you need to be your own manager, executor, and reviewer at the same time. This can be quite challenging. We share a few thoughts on time management during your Ph.D.

One core aspect that we identified as crucial for time planning is to not let the day go by as is but to plan ahead how you would like to spend your time. Probably this suggestion holds true for every job or study, but in research, it is even easier to get carried away, to read from one paper to the other, or to have never-ending brainstorming meetings. We are not saying that it is not worth spending a whole or even multiple days just reading everything that comes across your way, or meeting with your supervisor or lab mates to shape your project. But what we are saying is to do this mindfully and deliberately. This can be done, for example, by assigning tasks to specific hours of the day, like deciding that you would want to read papers for two hours in the morning, meet with your supervisor afterwards to discuss your progress, and then implement some of the ideas.

A difficulty in terms of time management that we observed for Ph.D.s is that there are actually not many structures to support you in your time planning. Most Ph.D. students can, in theory, come to the office and leave whenever they want. But this does not necessarily support good time management where it becomes easy to start (and also to stop in order to have enough time for some activities that you would like to pursue next to your research). Therefore, we recommend that, if your situation allows, to still have a recurring and planned schedule for your days where you have decided when you would like to start your work day, when to arrive in the office, and when to go home.

We also recommend you to be protective of your time. As you advance in your research career, many opportunities for meetings, research talks to attend, presentations to give, etc. will come your way. If you take all of these opportunities, you might not have enough time to advance your research. So, feel free to also say no sometimes. Not every question needs to be a meeting, some things can be discussed much more efficiently offline. Not every research talk will be fruitful, so pick wisely which ones to attend, and not every opportunity to present your research will yield follow-up opportunities, so only pick the ones that seem interesting to you.

Finally, it might make sense for you to find out how to best schedule your meetings. This can be very different for different people. We, for example, observed that it is helpful to put meetings back to back. This avoids going over time, and does not fragment your schedule heavily. After all, in research you might often need large amounts of uninterrupted time to think. But for other people, it might work better to put meetings on separate days to best prepare for them and take notes after them. So find out what works for you and start planning accordingly.