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 tiny feedback idea, and a hypothesis to structure your day
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 theory I have about how to sequence our activities in a workday. Enjoy! New Post: Tiny idea: Feedback options, not checkpointsCo-writing a paper, especially beyond one or two co-authors, can become a protracted process. If, on top of that, you try to have multiple feedback cycles (as we recommend), co-authoring a paper can feel like swimming in molasses. This brief post describes how the most effective PhD students I know handle this kind of feedback situation. (NB: This post may be familiar to long-time newsletter subscribers, as it was featured as a newsletter exclusive last year). Flashback: The Create/Consume Hypothesis: A simple rule for more effective and valuable PhD work(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog) As I prepare for an upcoming blog post on attention, I took the time to revise one of my proto-theories about what is the most effective way to sequence activities in a researcher's workday (in my experience, at least):
Is your workday a series of emails, meetings and social media leaving you drained and unsatisfied? You may be ordering your activities the wrong way: Create first, consume later. Read more at https://ahappyphd.org/posts/create-consume/ May you get to consume timely feedback, on all your creations! 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 goal, 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! We are still trying to come back to some sort of blogging and newsletter regularity over here. This week(s), we bring you two very related posts: a new one about restarting a long-term project (especially, thesis work) after a long stretch of not working on it. We also bring you a classic post that explains a lot of the underlying psychology of how these thesis productivity slumps appear and are perpetuated (or not): the role of avoidance in much of our self-sabotaging during the...
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...
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...