I like to think that I’m a well-organised person, coming from medical school where I had multiple extracurricular commitments while managing requirements around exams and placements. But when I started my PhD, oh my gosh it took me some time before I felt like I was managing my time effectively. This is what I’ve learnt after spending the past 2+ years of my PhD trying to optimise my time management – some of these tips might’ve come up in some form in my last blog post about my advice for people starting their PhD. These blog posts form a series consisting of advice for PhD students based on my experience adjusting to PhD life coming from medical school which I hope you’ll find useful! 

My first tip for effective time management as a PhD candidate is to establish boundaries around what you include in your schedule. What they are exactly will take time for you to figure out, hence why I recommend that you focus on understanding how you best work in the first year of your PhD. For example, I make it a point to: 1) not go to the lab over the weekend and 2) do some physical activity 3-5 times a week. This helps me recharge so I will be ready to tackle my work, day in and day out. 

I highly recommend the book Deep Work by Cal Newport which is where tip #2 comes from: minimise distractions, especially from email. Research and its associated outputs are a form of deep work that in my opinion, is hindered by a lot of shallow work (email, I am looking at you). Once you start your PhD, you will get added to various mailing lists where you receive emails that may not be relevant to you, or emails that are a repeat of what got sent out before. After reading Deep Work, I turned off the notifications for my university email on my phone. I did that because I would get distracted while in the lab when I got notifications of emails coming through. By doing this, I managed to reduce the amount of distractions so I can actually get the important work done. 

My next tip is to learn to say no and deprioritise things. This isn’t easy for me especially since I have a reputation of being keen to get involved with outreach activities in my own time and all, but over the past year I have been working on letting go of the extracurricular commitments to my time so I can largely focus on my research this year. A more research-specific example that happened to me last year was when I had lots of different experiments I wanted to do, but limited time on my PhD given that I have to return to medical school. In that situation, I needed to decide which experiments to prioritise based on the questions I was trying to answer with my work. 

The next tip is for all the people out there who are like me and like to have everything scheduled – plan plan plan! I mentioned how I like using a calendar to note down all scheduled events and to use Google Keep to create to-do lists where I break down my experiments into specific steps in my last blog post. Doing this allows me to create buffers in my schedule where I can deal with unexpected things that require my time. Similar to how James Clear put it, habits create freedom. The “rigidity” of scheduling as many things as possible gives me the capacity to deal with unexpected requirements for my time e.g. an experiment taking longer than expected. 

Like how I put it in my last blog post, it takes time for you to figure out the most appropriate time management system for yourself. Trial and error will be your best friend! 

Jean