by Franziska Boenisch and Adam Dziedzic

We have talked about day-to-day time management. But how about the bigger picture? How can you hold yourself accountable for your Ph.D. work and how can you set meaningful milestones?

Even if you manage your daily time, show up in the office regularly, and spend time working on your research, sometimes things seem to stagnate and progress seems hard to track. What might help you is to set clear goals (long and short term), and to hold yourself accountable for reaching them.

Over the years, we noticed that conference deadlines are somehow natural milestones to aim for, for example, to finalize one research project. So on a large scale, it might help you to always have a target conference in mind where you would like to submit your work. This gives you a rough estimate of how much time you have until you should have results. However, we recommend that you also set smaller milestones to break down the task of submitting a full paper into something more achievable.

In research, you often don’t know where you will actually be ending up, given that you cannot for sure anticipate which experiments are going to work out, which directions are going to be the most promising ones, and how these will shape a story. Therefore, it might not be helpful to write an end-to-end plan on what exact experiments to run when and when to write about them. Yet, it might help to sketch a rough timeline in terms of until when you would like to have converged on a story line, until when you would like to have your experiment plan finalized, how much time before the conference you would like to have written what sections of the paper, and when do you want to be done with the writing such that you can ask your advisor or a lab mate to review your paper. You can then regularly check your current progress against this timeline.

For people who prefer to track accountability on an even more fine-grained level to feel that they are on the right track, it might make sense to define even smaller goals and plan regular reviews. What can help for this, is for example, a regular meeting with your advisor where you present your progress and define goals for until the next meeting. By having to present what you did, you can check if you reached the goals that you agreed upon with your advisor, and have a fixed time limit to finalize these steps. Of course, you can also have this type of meeting with your collaborators, or even a friend. The important part about them is to formulate goals for the next time interval, and to check if the goals specified the last time were reached.

Finally, we like to break the work down even further and to rely on a daily goal list. The list should be realistic, i.e., the goals should be achievable within the day, and it should be concrete. To make sure all your goals fit into your day, make an estimate ahead of time on how long it will take you to achieve every goal. Since we usually tend to underestimate the time it takes to achieve something, multiply your initial estimate by 2.5 as a rule of thumb. Regarding how concrete the goals should be, we like to be as concrete as possible. This can be something like, 1) read paper XY, and take detailed notes, 2) work on understanding the problem Z, and 3) code the experiment I committed to do.