PhD tips: How to meet deadlines

so throughout your education you will have faced countless deadlines mostly externally imposed and mostly backed up by some kind of unpleasant consequences if you don't meet them but during your phd a lot of the deadlines that you face will be self-imposed you'll set them yourself there are two major common problems that come up one is that people tend to underestimate how long things will take especially if it's something that you haven't done before or anything that requires any kind of creative problem solving the second major problem is that there are no immediate external consequences if you don't meet these deadlines so it's really easy to let them pass now there may be no external consequences but there are internal consequences if you don't meet your promises to yourself so if you're consistently setting deadlines you're telling yourself you will get something done by a particular time and then you're consistently not achieving that then the inevitable consequence is it will eat away at your confidence which then affects your ability to do the work and you can end up in kind of a spiral which we don't want so what i'm going to attempt to answer in this video is how to set more realistic deadlines and how to meet them so the first advice i would give which may be slightly counter-intuitive is to initially forget about deadlines all together now this goes against what you will be used to because throughout the education system everything is timetabled right you are used to working towards these set deadlines but in those circumstances those deadlines are based on a time-tested curriculum where they know that if we go at this pace and we lay out these steps then this is achievable within this time but in a phd where you're doing something which maybe nobody has done before where there are infinite options to all intents and purposes you know it doesn't really work that way so imposing that kind of rigid structure is not really appropriate at least you know we don't want to do that for every single task so initially forget about deadlines and just engage with the work figure out what is involved play around with different tools different options try out lots of different things and in doing this you get a feel for the practicalities and the challenges of the work and the different options that you have now once you've got a little bit of a feel you've tried out a few things you just kind of explored in a sort of playful way without any pressure then what you can do is you can define one or two really really really specific problems that you want to solve and then put all of your attention into just trying one thing at a time and solving solving that particular problem now when you do this you might find that okay this isn't really practical right this particular problem it's not that important so i'll just ignore that and focus on something on something different but the only way that you can find that out is through the doing you can plan something so you can imagine what might be a practical approach but it's through the doing that you actually actually figure it out it's through experience so you have to simply engage with the work without that pressure to get results straight away or to you know meet a particular deadline so that you can be adaptable so you put all of your attention into one thing you try out a few different approaches and then you adapt you maybe focus on something focus on something else and this way you get that experience in terms of the practicalities of the work but if you keep working in this way constantly trying new things then you will never actually finish and this is where a deadline comes in useful so once you've got that initial feel for the work then you can limit the time available and start to make decisions based on that amount of time so when you've got a reasonable idea of how long things take and the different steps and the practicalities then you could say okay i'm going to give myself three weeks to finish this or a month or six weeks or whatever it is it doesn't really matter but it'll be much more realistic than if you'd started with that deadline and you know set that and set that in stone from the from the start based on zero experience whatsoever so we base that deadline on some practical experience but there may still be adjustments that you need to make okay there are basically three ways that you can meet a deadline the first is that everything goes perfectly according to plan nothing goes wrong at all everything takes the amount of time or less than you expected and it all gets done on time this does happen but it's usually only when it's something you've done many many many times before so you can anticipate based on experience and you've got the skill to you know just repeat the process much more likely is that even with a bit of experience there are some unexpected problems so some things will take a little bit longer than expected and you can adjust for that maybe you work slightly longer hours one day you know maybe you can you can adjust you can still meet the deadline and do everything that you plan to do but sometimes that's not possible and you need to adapt the plan in order to meet the deadline so there may be ideas that you had things that you plan to do which you have to drop so you do less but give yourself enough time to do that do those fewer things much much better rather than rushing and then you can meet the deadline okay so option one is that everything goes to plan option two is that you have to make decisions and adjust based on the deadline to make sure you still hit the target option three when option two isn't possible when there are things that you simply cannot cut you cannot leave out then you have to move the deadline sometimes that's just necessary necessary to do but hopefully it won't be moving it by some huge huge huge amount so to summarize instead of starting with a deadline which is completely arbitrary and then missing it and feeling bad about it we want to start just by engaging with the work playing around with it getting a feel for it and then you can set much more realistic deadlines in order to sharpen your focus and help you make decisions to push towards the final completion so i was going to give some examples of how to apply this this kind of framework or this way of approaching the work but instead what i'd like to do is invite you to put in the comments below some of the situations that you're facing where you're struggling to meet deadlines and i will give examples in the comments of how i would approach it make it a little bit more specific instead of this much more general general approach so please do comment below it'll be a little bit of a challenge for me to see if i can come up with practical examples for all of the different situations that you that you give me but i will do my best if you found this video useful please do give it a thumbs up because that helps other people to find it through youtube's algorithm also don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell so that you know when new videos are published and if you'd like more tips obviously there are more videos on my channel and there are more coming but i also have two websites one is jamesonphd.com where i have hundreds of blog posts on all things phd and also the phd academy i'll put a link to both of these sites in the description below the academy is where we have in-depth courses which go into these topics in much more much more detail step by step i also do weekly zoom calls with members and we have a whole community of phd students so that you don't have to go through the process alone so check out those links in the description below that's it for me and i'll see you next time

Channel: James Hayton PhD

Views: 2,163

Rating: 4.9746838 out of 5

Keywords: PhD tips

Id: VjeuSz6FE3Y

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021