How to Avoid PhD Procrastination by Focusing on the Right Things All the Time
Are you suffering from the dreaded PhD procrastination? You’re not alone!
Productivity expert Tim Ferriss is well-known for their phrase “Are you being productive or just active?” introduced in one of their books as a way of avoiding ‘hidden procrastination’. Every PhD student is well aware of the feeling of sitting for hours and unsuccessfully trying to get down to work. This traditional procrastination is a well-known enemy that we learn to handle throughout our lives. However, its ‘hidden’ form may be much more insidious since it masks itself as productivity. Here’s an example.
You wake up in the morning and start cleaning your house. In the afternoon, you go shopping and find some great deals for your essentials and some non-essentials. In the evening, you continue your productivity spree by writing important emails to support your academic networking activities. Overall, your day seems to be filled with effectiveness and not a single minute wasted binge-watching some TV series or mindlessly browsing social networks on your phone. The problem is, you had to find 10 articles for your Literature Review draft but have none!
The Trap of Busyness
Since our childhood years, we have been continuously taught that being busy equals being productive. A person who commits 100% of their time to Activity A will be ten times more effective than a person investing 10% of their efforts into it. Unfortunately, the cult of busyness rarely takes into account the fact that grown-up people also need to select the kind of work they need to prioritise.
When you’re studying at school, you get your homework and you apply the ‘give it all that you’ve got’ principle to it to gain everyone’s praise. When you grow up, you have dozens of activities on your plate that you must balance in order to achieve success in life. You’re the person responsible for setting priorities and ensuring that you invest your efforts into the areas that have the best return-on-investment (ROI) ratio.
At the same time, such areas usually require conscious effort and exhaustive thinking on your part. Finding 10 high-quality articles is more difficult than cleaning the house or shopping for groceries. As noted by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, work on unique and non-standard tasks requires a lot of energy and mental concentration.
On the contrary, routine and repetitive activities can be performed without thinking too much. This creates a natural tendency to ‘take the easy way’ and stick to convenient patterns of behaviour. We are hard-wired to do so to save energy, even if the more challenging path holds greater strategic potential. As a result, we may be continuously busy but still fail to achieve success since we are simply being active instead of being productive.
Difference Between Activity and Productivity
Let’s imagine two people calling a list of cold contacts. The first one makes several hundred calls over their 8-hour working day but only generates 1-2 leads. The second one makes several dozen calls within 3-4 hours and gets 5-10 leads. Our society tends to praise the first person while ignoring the fact that productivity is the only measure defining the actual value created for the employer. Moreover, some people tend to criticise the workers who manage to complete their assignments within a brief period of time and have a lot of leisure time as a result. Hence, we cannot rely on conventional wisdom here and need to define the difference between activity and productivity.
The answer to this question is directly associated with your strategic goals in life. If you are striving to write your Literature Review draft by next week, this objective is your absolute priority. It supersedes cleaning, shopping, and other activities that can be delayed without sacrificing too much. Similarly, the first caller above needs to achieve superior results in terms of produced leads. Hence, their priority is to identify why their response rate is substantially lower than that of their colleague. While calling new contacts over and over again may look convenient, the scary task of learning new skills and improving their communication capabilities is the true solution to their problems.
We can define activity as actions that do not produce the desired return on investment or produce substantially lower ROI than expected. As a result, we can’t achieve our strategic goals since we are effective in what we do, but not efficient. Therefore, productivity involves the operations producing predicted or superior results in comparison with our earlier assumptions.
In the first scenario, we need to change our actions or improve their efficiency instead of increasing the effectiveness of performing the same actions over and over again with the same outcome. In the second case, we can adopt the convenient ‘do more of the good thing’ mentality and simply invest more effort. The most important thing is to differentiate between the two and ask yourself the question, “am I being productive or just active?” every several hours.
Finding the Right Things to Do to Avoid PhD Procrastination
Avoiding PhD procrastination with enhanced focus requires the identification of your current strategic priorities first. Open a new text document and write down the following:
1. What are the things I need to achieve to ‘progress to the next phase’?
In the case of PhD writing, these will probably include the submission of your finished draft. If you do this tomorrow, you can start on your thesis defence and start your fantastic industry or academic career this year. Usually, the list of such things is a relatively short one. They should inform your schedule of productive activities that make up around 80% of your day. Otherwise, you may be buried under routine ‘things to do’ without progressing towards your strategic goals in life.
2. What single-time actions do I need to take to get closer to these goals?
Many times, some activities only need to be repeated once. Examples include constructing a fantastic conceptual framework that fully satisfies your tutor or finding 20 core articles for your Literature Review. Ticking these single-time activities off your to-do list may be a perfect way to feel the progress towards your strategic goals. Removing them from your schedule can provide a rush of satisfaction as you realise the list is that little bit shorter.
3. If I could choose a single task to complete today, what would it be?
Imagine facing a serious problem but only having 2 spare hours today and suffering from PhD procrastination. What activity should you prioritise to not fail your strategic goals? While this question may look simple at first, you can easily spend several hours looking for an answer. The identified activity must form the core of your schedule. It must be given absolute priority to ensure your progress. Simply put, schedule it for your morning hours and do not switch to other activities until you complete this task.
4. What can you do right now to get closer to your final goal?
A well-designed schedule must be instantly actionable. In other words, your planning allows you to start realising your vision right away. If you cannot find out what actions are required, you need to allocate more time to this analysis. Keep in mind that productive people are fantastic planners since complex and challenging tasks usually require thorough analysis to achieve. On the contrary, being active rarely involves this degree of analysis as you fill your schedule with routine and easy activities and only boost your effectiveness and not efficiency.
5. What three activities do you usually use to imitate effectiveness instead of efficiency during PhD procrastination?
In most cases, we already know what kind of activities we invent to not focusing on the productive actions that are more demanding and less convenient for us. Identify three types of such behaviours and check whether you adhere to them over the course of your day.
This analysis should provide you with ample food for thought regarding your PhD procrastination patterns and your overall approach to strategic planning. Most people find it difficult to identify the actions that lead to their end goal and can be performed right away. This is perfectly normal and explains why few individuals reach their long-term objectives. There are the most common mistakes related to the identification of things you should prioritise:
A. Not enough time spent on planning
When your mind starts suggesting that spending hours on meticulous planning is less productive than engaging in some obvious activities right away, this is a clear sign of ‘fast thinking’. Finding the right things to do takes time. You can’t drive to a far-away location without calculating the amount of fuel you need and selecting the most optimal route. However, you will probably thank yourself in the future for doing this preparation as you swiftly progress towards your destination.
B. Excessive self-criticism
When you start asking yourself the question “Am I productive or just active?” several times a day, this will probably show you how inefficient you presently are. This sense of frustration can be highly detrimental to your progress. Every time you identify new inefficiencies, pat yourself on the back and give yourself a cup of coffee. Think about it as a new source of productivity and optimisation that will make you even more efficient in the future.
C. Lack of revision
Your priorities can change over time. Top-priority things such as the completion of your Literature Review writing can be replaced by other things, which is perfectly normal. If you are already ahead of your submissions schedule, you can easily put your writing lower on your to-do list and prioritise other strategic goals. To do so, you need to find the optimal frequency for revising your objectives. For most PhD students, monthly analyses are a good starting point.
D. Excessive workloads
Focusing on the right things does not mean that you can only pay attention to the tasks with high strategic significance. You can’t possibly work with high degrees of intensity for 8-9 hours every day. Prioritisation means putting important things first. However, you can’t build a beach body in two weeks, even if you work out for 12 hours every day. Some strategic activities need to be integrated as recurrent activities. The ‘crunch’ mentality of workload allocation can only be used for short-term, single-time goals that you really want to get off your to-do list as soon as possible.
E. Insufficient rewards
Despite popular beliefs, doing things right can be much harder than doing things wrong. You increase the intensity of your workloads while also having to monitor your behaviours to stop yourself from returning to convenient paths of effectiveness vs efficiency. These changes do not come cheap for your willpower. Unfortunately, many people choose to criticise themselves for all identified inefficiencies and punish themselves with excessive workloads. This usually leads to further failures and PhD procrastination.
Make sure that you reward yourself for every success when focusing on the top-priority things and doing them first. This way, you will create a positive reinforcement loop and form a habit of being efficient day after day. Breaking convenient behavioural patterns is not an easy feat. It requires an understanding of the idea that you cannot possibly achieve multiple strategic goals simultaneously. Doing the right things means reducing the priority of many areas of your life, which may be difficult to accept for many PhD students.
Now it’s time to implement your strategies
People frequently underestimate the amount of time required to achieve success and put too much on their plates. Prioritising the most strategically important things is a good practice to recognise such delusions and revise your long-term vision accordingly. As opposed to other procrastination-fighting techniques, this one ensures that your top-priority activities will be performed no matter what. Even if you plan too much on a certain day, you will only lose the least relevant elements and will not undermine your strategic progress. Give yourself sufficient time to experiment with this approach and you may be surprised by the reduction of procrastination in your life and the growth of your overall efficiency.