Hi Reader!

January is quickly passing by, and hopefully your New Year resolutions long-term strategy and habits are still holding up. This week, we review a key habit that helps many PhD students (and myself) better notice their daily progress. There is also a new blog post about a tiny practice to beat procrastination, and a newsletter-exclusive tiny idea that is crucial for everyday productivity.

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Flashback: Journaling for the doctorate (I): Types and benefits​

(Tweet-length gists of past posts, so that you don't have to read through the whole blog backlog)

Journaling is one of the practices we recommend to doctoral students in our "A Happy PhD" workshops, and it is one of the practices that has improved my own life in the past decade. This blog post looked at the types and benefits of different journaling practices:

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New post: Tiny practice: Beating procrastination with The Right Now List

One of the top barriers to PhD productivity is procrastination. Have you ever found yourself with a big ugly task getting stale in your to-do list, repeatedly postponed because it is too big, too abstract, or makes you somehow uncomfortable? This tiny practice post (which will be familiar to long-time newsletter readers) gives you an simple trick to beat this sort of procrastination.

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Tiny (but powerful) idea: Context switching and attention residue

See if this scenario sounds familiar: You sit down at your desk at home to work on that difficult journal paper draft. Fifteen minutes into the writing, a notification dings: an email from your supervisor with feedback about your next study design. You open the attachment, and a pang of anxiety spikes when you see that there are 63 comments on it. You remember this is not what you wanted to be doing right now, so you come back to the paper draft – but the inspiration fails to present itself. Two or three interruptions (or self-interruptions) later, you find that two hours have already passed but you have made little headway into the draft.

What is happening here? We are suffering the effects of context switching: interrupting the task we’re doing and moving our attention to another unrelated task that requires a different set of concepts and ideas to be solved. The key realization is that our brains cannot switch attention between tasks cleanly – there is what some researchers call attention residue: the ideas (and emotions!) of the interrupting task stay with us for a while, impeding our ability to complete the interrupted task even after the interruption ends. This is especially disruptive for hard, complex, cognitive tasks that require a lot of context (including most tasks at the center of PhD like writing, analyzing data, reading difficult stuff, etc.), and when the interruptions themselves are emotionally charged and/or contextually complex (like many of our emails and texts). The bottom line: most interruptions have a high cognitive cost, so we should try to minimize them if we want to be productive and make good progress in our dissertation.

Productivity guru Cal Newport has written extensively about this topic, especially in Deep Work, one of his most popular books (and a recommended read for any PhD student). Newport’s take on this is heavily informed by Gloria Mark’s extensive research on attention spans and interruptions (now also summarized in her own wider-public book on the topic, Attention Span).

Once we attune ourselves to this foible of the human mind, we start seeing it everywhere, especially in how we work for our PhD: it supports the need to remove distractions and choosing carefully where you work to prevent “priority leakage”; it aligns with the idea of working on the PhD’s “hard tasks “ in longer blocks of time (90-120 min is my personal minimum), as opposed to a “time confetti” approach; it even suggests what to do when taking a break during these hard work sessions (tl;dr something physical, not email!).

Take this tiny idea for a spin and observe how you work. But don’t make this an opportunity for self-blame and shame: rather than bringing yourself down for not having perfect focus (none of us have it – and many of our environments and technologies are engineered for interruption and distraction!), work on creating adequate habits and conditions for you to do the hard, important cognitive work of your PhD.

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May your attention be where you want it to be!

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PS: I’m experimenting with Amazon affiliate links, so if you click on the book links throughout the newsletter and eventually buy the book there, I may get a small benefit (without any additional cost to you).

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