One of the reasons why it’s so difficult to maintain motivation and momentum in a PhD is that the results of your efforts are so far away. If you have an amazingly productive day, at best you’ve made a tiny dent in the list of all the things you need to do. At the same time, if you do nothing today, there are no real consequences. This makes it very easy to procrastinate and to tell yourself, “it’s OK, I’ll do it tomorrow and it’ll be fine.”
And unless there’s a major deadline today, this is usually true, it will be fine (or at least nothing bad will happen immediately) if you do it tomorrow.
But long term results come from the things you do consistently. And if you get into the habit of putting things off until you have to do them, or avoiding tasks because they’re a little stressful, you might feel slightly better in the short term, but in the long term you’ll be far more stressed and your work will be of far lower quality than it could have been.
The habit of procrastination is very hard to break, because it’s often triggered by anxiety. And when we’re anxious or stressed or tired, it’s very difficult to change your default behaviour. That’s why smokers who are trying to quit often slip up when they’re under stress.
So what can we do?
The first thing is just to recognise that whenever you tell yourself you’ll do it tomorrow, you won’t. As soon as you put something off once, your subconscious brain registers that this is an effective response to the stress or anxiety you feel about the task. It literally hard wires the procrastination response into your brain, and then each time you put something off you’re reinforcing that neural pathway and the associated habit.
So if it’s difficult today, it will be more difficult tomorrow.
Another point to recognise is that putting something off until tomorrow adds that task to the commitments you already had. So you either have to work much harder, or you have to put off the things you initially planned to do, which reinforces the habit of putting things off, and the whole cycle continues… building up more and more unfinished tasks, which you then feel guilty about, which increases your stress, which makes it harder to break the habit…
The basketball coach John Wooden used to say,
“Don’t think you can make up for it by working twice as hard tomorrow. If you have it within your power to work twice as hard, why aren’t you doing it now?1“
And the way to apply this is to flip your thinking, and instead of thinking “I can do this tomorrow”, think about what you have on your to-do list for tomorrow that you can do today. So instead of delegating everything and making life much harder for your future self, think about what you could do now that will make life easier for yourself tomorrow.
Because it’s harder to break a habit when you’re stressed, the way to practice this, initially is with the small things. So instead of thinking about this with your PhD work, start with little things at home.
For example, if you plan to go to the gym tomorrow, pack your bag this evening so it’s ready to go. Or make sure that the kitchen is clean and you’ve washed the dishes before you go to bed, so it’s one less thing to worry about, one less thing that demands mental resources, when you wake up in the morning.
The temptation might be to put it off and say, “it’s OK, I’ll do it tomorrow”, but these are the moments you need to fight through, because if you can’t pack a gym bag or wash the dishes, if you fold under that kind of challenge, how on earth are you going to finish a PhD?
If you’re so anxious that you can’t do those basic tasks, it’s probably better to take a break from the PhD, seek some help and work on getting the basics of your life in order before you come back. It’ll also give you some perspective on whether you actually want to come back, because sometimes the anxiety comes from just being in the wrong place, but feeling like you can’t leave.
So start with the simple things, and if you can make a habit of recognising and overcoming resistance on a small scale, doing things today that will make your life easier tomorrow, you can gradually start applying this to bigger tasks.
And, eventually, you might just find that instead of saying, “it’s OK I’ll do today’s tasks tomorrow”, you start saying, “why wait? I’m going to do some of tomorrow’s tasks, today”
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PhD: an uncommon guide to research, writing & PhD life is your essential guide to the basic principles every PhD student needs to know.
Applicable to virtually any field of study, it covers everything from finding a research topic, getting to grips with the literature, planning and executing research and coping with the inevitable problems that arise, through to writing, submitting and successfully defending your thesis.
All the text on this site (and every word of every video script) is written by me, personally, because I enjoy writing. I enjoy the challenges of thinking deeply and finding the right words to express my ideas. I do not advocate for the use of AI in academic research and writing, except for very limited use cases.
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