The 3 habits that saved my PhD

so in summer of 2006 i was about three years into my phd and i was in a pretty bad situation so i had no publications and the experiments i was doing were not going well so often i would go into work and i would have negative productivity by the end of the day because i would break something i would mess something up and often it would take two or three days to get back to where i had been that morning so there were days when it would have been better simply not to go in i would have been further ahead had i not gone in that day and the stress that was building as a result of this was affecting me in multiple different ways i wasn't sleeping well i was getting quite short-tempered it was affecting my relationships and it was just basically a bad place to be but cut to just over a year later and i'd finished my phd i had a couple of publications i had written my entire thesis in just three months and i passed my phd viva with zero corrections and more than that i'd actually started to enjoy the process as well and that final year or so was actually the best time of the whole phd so when a lot of people were at the peak of their stress i was actually quite enjoying the process there were three key things that changed that allowed that to happen but it wasn't simply a matter of making these decisions and then suddenly adopting new habits i basically had to hit rock bottom before i was forced to approach things in a different way so what happened is i was in the lab and i was working with these incredibly fragile probes that i would make so it's just one part of kind of a complicated experiment but these things were so fragile that often they would break so i'd make them in batches and basically hope that enough survived to be able to do the experiments that i needed to do and on this particular day i was quite close to the end of that process i was moving these probes from one bench in the lab to another and i dropped them so completely destroyed and i was going to have to go through the whole process again from the start over a couple of days and this wasn't the first time this kind of thing had happened but on this particular occasion something inside me snapped and i swore loudly and stormed out of the lab and just started walking across the campus i just wanted to get as far away from the lab as possible and i didn't really know where i was going to go i just knew that i had to get away and i started to think you know is this worth it i am so stressed i am so miserable what is the point of carrying on i might as well just quit and so i started thinking well if i quit then i'll have to tell people i'll have to explain to my supervisor but you know i think he will understand you know he knows how difficult these experiments are he knows that it's not going particularly well it'll be okay i would obviously also have to tell my family my friends but again i think they would have they would have understood and also of course i would have to find something else to do if i wasn't going to finish my phd but again i thought anything has got to be better than this so all of these things this thought process it kind of took some of the pressure off i didn't have to stay so if i did say it was going to be out of choice rather than simply necessity or because i'd made this commitment a couple of years before so while all of this was going on in my head i just sat down on a bench next to the lake on campus it was quite a nice spot and i just sat with it for a little while and started to think through these these ideas and i thought well there's still one or two things that i could try it's not completely hopeless i'm not completely out of ideas there's still one or two things i could do so if i go back to the lab and just try these two things and if they don't work then i can walk away but if i'm going to determine whether or not i stay on these two experiments that i wanted to do or these two things that i wanted to try i needed to make sure that i gave it my absolute best i wanted to do things as carefully as meticulously as possible and then if i walked away if i quit then i would at least know that i've given it one last good shot and i haven't just you know made a half effort um you know to try and give myself an excuse i wanted to be able to walk away with a little bit of pride so i sat there a little while longer and when i felt ready i went back to the lab and i started again and i did things as slowly and as carefully as i possibly could and things started to work and this taught me that i'd basically been rushing i've basically been undermining myself partly because of the pressure but also because i was kind of lacking in confidence because so many things had gone wrong i didn't expect the experiments to work so i was kind of undermining myself a little bit because what's the point of putting in your full effort if it's not going to work anyway but by slowing down and doing things carefully things started to work obviously there were still problems but it was much much more productive so by slowing down i actually started generating results much much faster so this was the first key habit that helped to change the course of my phd it was simply slowing down and doing things carefully but of course things still went wrong it was still quite a difficult project there were still problems that came up but i changed the way that i responded to those problems because getting out of the lab and taking a walk had been so beneficial during that particular i guess you'd call it a breakdown i started making that part of my routine so whenever when whenever something went wrong in the lab i would simply take a walk and go and think about it my habit before that point was to either just throw myself straight back into the work and put myself under a lot of pressure or more often i would find an excuse to check email because there's always a justification to check email and that kind of acted like an anesthetic it helped me to avoid the stress or the pain of the experiment that was that were going on so that was habit number two habit number three was simply to stop worrying about the end result so while i was doing these experiments much more carefully i wasn't thinking about what the result would be i wasn't thinking about whether or not it would work that was kind of out of my control but what i could control was the effort and the care that i put into each individual step of what i was what i was doing and then i simply applied this to the phd as a whole so i couldn't predict what the examiners would think there was still a chance that everything would go wrong that the examiners would hate my thesis who knows i couldn't really control that and there was no point worrying about it but what i could control was simply trying to get the work done you know doing the best that i could with the time available writing the best thesis that i could with the time available and you know if it all went wrong having that confidence to say i'll be okay i've given it my best shot and obviously it would be a horrible experience to fail of either but i wasn't going to let that define my life and in the meantime i was just going to focus on the work do it as carefully as i could take breaks when i needed to to go and think about the problems that were arising you know take that time slowing down to go faster and these things together made all the difference between being on course for failure or quitting and ultimately being successful in my phd then going on to do two post-doc contracts and then doing the work that i do now in terms of helping phd students so if you like this video please do give it a thumbs up because that helps other people to find it and also hit the subscribe and notification buttons so you know when new videos are published and if you'd like to know more about what i do check out my websites there are two of them there is james hayton phd.com where i have hundreds of blog posts about all things phd and also the phd academy where we go into a little bit more detailed guidance so we've got courses we do weekly zoom calls and there's a whole community of phd students as well but there's links in the description below for those sites so that's it for me best of luck and see you next time

Channel: James Hayton PhD

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Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021