Looking for tips, tricks and advice to finish your doctoral thesis on time and with high spirits? Baffled by how little information is out there about how to support PhD students to become independent researchers? As an ex-doctoral student now co-supervising five students, I feel your pain. “A Happy PhD” is a blog (and a series of doctoral/supervisory courses) where I distil what has worked for me, as well as recent research in doctoral education, psychology and many other fields. Join our mailing list and get short doctoral advice in you inbox every week!
[AHappyPhD] A mantra question for daily reviews, New Year reviews, and 400!
Hi Reader!Happy New Year! I know, I know, that was almost a month ago, but these posts and newsletters get out slowly :-$ Yet, I find that late January-early February is a perfect time for a reset. Maybe by now the wishful and vague "New Year resolutions" have dwindled and died away. Maybe we are now changing from the Fall-Winter semester to the Spring-Summer semester (or viceversa, in the Southern Hemisphere) and have a few slower weeks to take stock. In case you are in this kind of "restarting mood", here are a couple of useful resources: a new post on a useful micro-habit I use every day to keep myself positive and productive (prompted by my own yearly review), and a flashback to our classic "yearly reviews process" post. Oh, and a little note on a recent newsletter milestone. Let's get into it! New blog post: A Mantra for Daily ReviewsDo you check your daily to‑do list at the end of the day? If not, you probably should. Yet, this healthy habit can lead to an increasing sense of dissatisfaction and/or shame, as we are prone to plan more tasks than we are realistically able to execute (due to a very human bias). Do we have to choose between productive habits and a positive self‑image? This post introduces a “mantra question” I am using lately to maintain a learning focus during daily reviews. Even more, it is motivating me to be more consistent in doing the review/shutdown ritual altogether! Read the full post for why this is useful, and for a related "bonus mantra". Flashback: Forget New Year's resolutions -- Do a Yearly Review instead(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog) Some call it "personal (or couple) quarterly offsite"; some call it "quarterly plan". Whatever we call it, a key productivity and well-being habit I highly recommend is to take some time every year (or every quarter, or whatever other season length makes sense for you) to reflect back to the previous period, restate or refine our values, and plan the upcoming season. Here's how I do it: Happy New Year! Want to change your behavior or your thesis journey? Forget about vague resolutions that don't stick and do a value-driven yearly review instead. More details at https://ahappyphd.org/posts/yearly-review/ Newsletter milestone: We're now 400!When I started this newsletter as a companion to the "A Happy PhD" blog, I thought that maybe a handful of people would be interested in getting the blog's posts and related goodies in their inbox. Now it's more than 400 of you that get these emails. I just wanted to warmly thank you all for being there, for opening the emails, for reading as much as you find helpful... and for applying these ideas in your doctoral theses or supervision. I hope we cross paths (maybe, in person) sometime in the near future! May you have a great 2026! Did this content help you? Hit reply and send us feedback (I cannot reply to all the emails we get, but I do read all of them), buy us a coffee, or help us spread the word! Forward this email to a friend you think may find this kind of advice useful. If you are reading this and you have not joined the newsletter yet, you can subscribe and get exclusive access to a worksheet to make the strategic plan towards your next dissertation milestone, in the button below:
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A Happy PhD
Looking for tips, tricks and advice to finish your doctoral thesis on time and with high spirits? Baffled by how little information is out there about how to support PhD students to become independent researchers? As an ex-doctoral student now co-supervising five students, I feel your pain. “A Happy PhD” is a blog (and a series of doctoral/supervisory courses) where I distil what has worked for me, as well as recent research in doctoral education, psychology and many other fields. Join our mailing list and get short doctoral advice in you inbox every week!
Hi Reader! Wow, this summer hiatus has gotten long! Between the summer holidays, the new season of school-kid viruses, and a rough start of the academic year (redesigning our research methodologies course to make them AI-ready), it's been two months already. Indeed, I've been thinking a lot lately about generative AI (GenAI) and how "kids these days" (both undergrads and master students) seem to use it for learning. I ended up writing a new post about it: a guide for learning with GenAI, to...
Hi Reader! I hope the summer is treating you kindly—and that you've carved out space for some well-deserved holidays. Before I disappear on mine, I’ve used the slower pace of this season to wrap up our two-part post on advice for cultivating a satisfying research career. In this issue, we also revisit a short piece on a little trick I use frequently to be more effective and efficient at a key practice from that post: brainstorming walks. Enjoy! New blog post: A PhD So Good It Can't Be Ignored...
Hi Reader! As we dive right into the summer, I'm trying to come back to a more regular blog and newsletter posting rhythm. In today's newsletter, we bring you a new blog post extracting lessons for doctoral students (also useful for other researchers!) from a classic career advice book. We also flash back to another post about how to change our ways of working to better execute our PhD activities, overcoming the pressures of our everyday lives. New blog post: A PhD So Good It Can't Be Ignored...