Hi Reader! Whoa, it's been a while! After almost six months of not being able to write for the blog or this newsletter (more on that in the next post), you may have forgotten about A Happy PhD. To kickstart my own newsletter habit (and hopefully, your habit of reading it), here is a short one: a little nugget about how you can use AI to "talk to the blog" (or listen to it) about a certain topic... and a flashback to our classic end-of-year post. Do a yearly review, I'm doing one myself and...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader! The summer has come in full force (heatwaves, I'm looking at you!) here in the Northern hemisphere. Maybe now the teaching and other obligations are slowly receding, and many of you are rushing to finish research studies and papers before a much-needed holiday/break. This week's newsletter brings two simple but powerful tips that may be relevant in such a season: a new post about managing feedback in multi-author paper writing; and a flashback to a post where I describe a pet...
7 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader! After a long hiatus, made of colliding deadlines and a general "falling off the productivity wagon", we're back on track! This week, we ramp up our newsletter activity with a flashback to a post on how to face an addiction to social media, and a new tiny practice that helped me get through some of the difficult episodes in this intervening time without newsletters. Flashback: Facing addiction to social media in the PhD (Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to...
7 months ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader! This week, we touch upon the two largest themes of our blog/newsletter. A new post in the blog continues our series on alternative ways to think about (and do) doctoral productivity. We also flash back to a post on dealing with addiction during the PhD. Oh, and you can see me talking about the actual research we do about these topics, in a recent webinar I did. New Post: Two Hundred Weeks: Productivity for Mortal PhD Students (book extract) Is there a way to be productive in our...
9 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader! As this Spring morphs eerily fast into something of a Summer over here, I can imagine you plowing ahead in your dissertations and research projects, trying to make progress before the holidays come and we take a much-needed break. The everyday struggle to be productive consumes all of our attention and time, Yet, this week's newsletter brings you the idea of also taking an occasional breath and a step back (or two steps back). We bring you a newsletter-exclusive tiny idea that has...
10 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader! This week, we continue our "alternative productivity" series of new blog posts with one about an underdiscussed issue in the (doctoral) productivity literature: the mindset with which we approach tasks, systems and to-do lists in the doctorate. Also, we flash back to a post looking at the origin of many of our ailments, by discussing whether or not one should do a PhD at all (hint: of course, it depends -- but on what?). New Post: Productivity as Avoidance, or How Not to Think...
10 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader! As we race towards Easter (in case you're in a country where that's a thing), we bring you a new post questioning productivity as something to aim for in our PhDs - and what we mean in the blog when we say we try to be "productive". We also bring a short post from the past trying to answer the question: how many doctoral students worldwide suffer from the mental health and dropout problems we often talk about? And I travel to a live event: a scientific conference where I will meet...
11 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader! Lately I have been dismayed at my own productivity (and I don't mean in terms of publications or hustle-busyness productivity, as we discussed in the previous newsletter). A report that would have previously taken a few hours to write now becomes a multi-week project, and writing anything that other people can understand feels like swimming through molasses. It may just be that I'm getting older, but I refuse to fully give in to this downhill march towards inability. Yet... how can...
11 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader! As other obligations eat into the time I normally dedicate to write "A Happy PhD" blog posts and newsletters, I can't help but think more and more about productivity: my own, and of doctoral students (especially those that have to juggle multiple obligations/jobs/priorities). This week, I bring you an early preview of an upcoming post on doctoral productivity (and some arguments against it), as well as a flashback to an strategy that has (counter-intuitively) boosted my own...
11 months ago • 8 min read