Get organized and sail through your Ph.D.

Being organized can help immensely in your Ph.D. journey. Here are 5 ways to do it:

My last two articles focused on things you should do before starting a Ph.D. In this one, I will list a few tips to get you started on your Ph.D. journey. These practices will help you become organized and make your journey much easier. In the end, I have named a few tools to help you get organized.

Tip #1 - Define your long-term goals

One of the biggest changes in Ph.D. compared to any other degree is its lack of structure. During undergrad and master’s, we have a fixed set of lectures and scores to complete. The schedule is laid out for us depending on the courses we take. We have well-defined goals like assignments for each subject and examinations at the end of every semester. So we don't really have to plan or schedule things.

The situation in a Ph.D. program is completely different. The first few years do require you to take up some courses and clear qualifying examinations to register as a Ph.D. student. But from that point, until you submit your thesis, there are no clearly defined goals for you to pursue. So, unless you define some goals for yourself, you will have no way to figure out how far you have come and you’ll be lost very soon.

So, begin by defining your long-term and short-term goals. Try to come up with concrete steps that you have to take to complete your thesis and a tentative timeline. Take help from your supervisor and lab members. We tend to be overly optimistic and underestimate how long experiments typically take. People with experience can help you set up realistic timelines for your goals.

Tip #2 - Consistency is key

Once you have defined your goals, you need a strategy to reach them and that's where consistency will help you. Most of us are deadline driven. We put the most effort right before the day of assignment submission or the last few days leading to an examination. But this won’t work in a Ph.D. You cannot do 5 years’ worth of work in the last year of your Ph.D. Instead, doing a little bit every day will take you farther than anything else.

Having a schedule and sticking to it helps. Go to the lab and end your working day at the same time every day. If an experiment demands you to change your schedule, that is fine. Get back to regular time after it is over. Don’t aim for more than 8 hours of work in a day. Time your breaks- when you take them and how long.

"Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work" – Stephen King

You may be thinking ‘Why should I do this?’. Well, when you start a Ph.D., you are motivated and excitement. You may believe that this motivation will drive you to work hard. That is not true. You will experience ups and downs. There will be plenty of times when things may not work out, you may feel stuck and you will lose motivation. A schedule helps you get through those days.

It is also helpful when you have to do tasks that you don’t like very much but have to. For example, although I like writing in general, I found writing a research article tedious. By defining my working hours and forcing myself to work on the paper and nothing else I slowly got the work done. And a lot of times, once you start doing a task, you realize it is not all that bad!

Tip #3 - Checklists are your best friends!

If I had to name one game changer in my Ph.D.- it would be checklists. No, I am not exaggerating! Checklists have made airplanes safer, hospitals more efficient and organizations more effective. If you want to know how, read Atul Gawande’s ‘Checklist Manifesto’. I highly recommend it!

Early on, you will be bogged down by many things. You will have experiments to run, reagents to purchase, seminars to attend, and emails to reply- all in one day. We have limited attention span and memory. Having checklists takes one burden off your brain, leaving it free to focus on more significant tasks. And there’s a special kind of joy in ticking tasks off the checklist. The Germans even have a name for it- ‘Entlistungsfreude’. It is a simple yet effective way to plan things.

Try planning your week by having a set of tasks assigned for each day. Don’t be disheartened if you can accomplish only a few of them. We tend to overpopulate our lists. Over time you will get a sense of how long a task will take and then you can adjust your list. Keep your checklists flexible, and add more tasks as they come, if you can’t finish one on a given day, move to another day. Many great tools allow you to do this easily (check the list at the end of the article).

When I first started doing experiments, I would write down the protocol in detail in my lab notebook. But sometimes, while going through it, I would miss out on a reagent. So, halfway through the experiment, I would have to rush to the other end of the lab to get the necessary reagent. After that, I made a preparation checklist for each of my experiments. It would include a list of all the reagents I needed, plus any other preparations before starting the experiments; such as preheating the block to 60 degrees Celsius. After that, I would be able to sail through my experiments.

Now I make a checklist of everything- experiments I need to do for my project, documents needed for a grant application, emails I need to send, and chores I need to do at home- you get the point!

Tip #4 - Organize your workspace

With checklists and a schedule, you have organized your thoughts. It is also helpful when this organization is extended to your physical space- your workbench or desk and your data. I don’t think I need to explain how an organized workbench will make you more efficient. You don’t want to waste your time looking around for a reagent every time you plan an experiment.

Having a good system for storing data is also important. You will need to locate data from your first year in your final year when writing a thesis, so a good system will save your future self a lot of trouble. Your lab mates or collaborators might also need the data and a good organization system will save their efforts too. I won’t tell you how you can organize your data as it depends a lot on data type and lab policies.

Organization also extends to literature. Over time, you will accumulate many research papers related to your work. Having a good reference manager will help you retrieve them easily while writing about your work.

Tip #5 - Good tools can help you get started

There are hundreds of tools and software out there to help you make a checklist and plan things.

Here are some that I have used and found useful:

• Keep notes- for checklists, notes, reminders

• Notion- checklists, notes, reminders

• Google calendar- reminders, scheduling

• Zotero- reference manager

• Mendeley- reference manager

• GitHub- a repository for code

I hope I have convinced you of the importance of organization. If you liked these tips and found them useful, spread the word! If you have anything else that helps you, add in the comments below.