Hi Reader!

I hope you are enjoying some amount of well-deserved (and really disconnected) holidays. As we start 2024, this week's newsletter brings you some essentials to make your start of the year more effective and focused: a classic post about a reflection practice I engage in at this time of the year, plus a new blog post we previewed earlier in this newsletter (where I challenged ChatGPT to give some good doctoral productivity advice). Finally, I share a tiny practice I'm using to avoid writer's block (and procrastination, more generally).

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New Year's Special 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)

The New Year is a great time to look back and reflect. It is also common to leverage the "fresh start effect" to make some improvements in our life. But, how to do this effectively?

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New post: ChatGPT's doctoral productivity advice... and four ideas the algorithm will (probably) not give you​

We know that making progress is a critical motivational factor in finishing a PhD and maintaining good mental health while we do it. In turn, our productivity plays a big role in whether we make progress on our dissertation or not. As the first post in a series on doctoral productivity, I could not help but fall into one of the thèmes du jour: whether ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence (AI) tools can write a good piece about this topic. In this post (which we previewed in a previous newsletter), I go over a couple of iterations of reasonable computationally-generated advice, and finally give you a few ideas that I think are overlooked by the algorithm.

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Tiny practice: Stopping mid-sentence and creating checkpoints

Very often we have trouble finding the mental strength to focus and spend time on hard cognitive tasks for our PhD (be it drafting that journal paper, doing a difficult analysis, or reading some abstruse paper). This is because we fear we may not even know how to start the task (in writing, this is the classic “fear of the blank page”… which often comes again at the start of every section!). This typically leads to a cycle of procrastination and self-blame that many of us are very familiar with.

Lately, I have been avoiding this problem with a small writer trick attributed to Ernest Hemingway: stop working on the hard task not when you run out of ideas, but rather when you are “doing good”. This is especially useful if you work in focused bursts, as in the Pomodoro Technique: whenever the pomodoro bell rings, stop. Just stop there, mid-sentence if necessary. The end of the sentence is probably obvious… which is exactly what you want to see when you start working on the text/analysis/whatever again. The “hard task” will be very easy, almost trivial, to start -- and then you will have enough momentum to continue doing it.

Because some PhD tasks are quite complex and require putting a lot of ideas (or process steps) into your working memory, I sometimes complement this “hard stop” with what some people call “checkpoints”: when the bell rings, write down the next steps or ideas you had in your mind for this task, quickly and roughly, right there where the task was being done (e.g., in a comment, if you’re writing computer code). This will also help you load the task context more quickly and “hit the ground running” next time you start working on this.

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May 2024 be a great year in your PhD!

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