
PhD Productivity Strategy: Do Deep Work in Less Hours - nextscientist
http://www.nextscientist.com/phd-productivity-strategy-deep-work/
======
simonbarker87
The biggest thing I noticed when starting my PhD was all the first and second
years derping around not doing much, all the third years panicking and "just
getting going" and all the 4th and 5th years really grinding.

So, I inverted that and worked my ass off like I was still an undergrad in the
first 18 months, toned it down for the next year and submitted my thesis at 2
years 10 months (the earliest my university would allow a submission) and was
viva'd and passed 2 months later with minor corrections.

PhDs taking forever is generally a lack of initial work by the student rather
than any external factors. Too many students let their supervisors fob them
off rather than getting in their office when needed and forcing their projects
forward.

Also, selecting a sensible area with a high likelihood of novelty helps, I
worked on energy harvesting for hostile environments (high temp photovoltaics,
piezo etc at 300degC) which was a new area for the group and my supervisor,
and published 6 papers as basically nobody else was working in the field.

Doing a PhD in the UK helps, in and out before the funding dries up in 3-4
years is expected along with no class requirements and no masters needed (can
go in straight from Bachelors).

~~~
xaa
Wow. I just defended a few weeks ago, at 7 years. And honestly, until about
year 5, I felt no rush whatsoever to get out. Not that I was derping around --
I finished with 20+ papers -- but I was enjoying it, and I realized that once
I was out, two undesirable things would happen:

\- I would have to start running the grant treadmill (and indeed, I'm just in
the middle of finalizing a training grant that has as one of its
requirements...that I must write another grant)

\- In the US NIH, there is a 10 year "New Investigator" status that lasts 10
years from the PhD, where you are preferred for certain types of grant awards.
So I reasoned it is much better to graduate late and start this clock from a
strong position than to rush up the hierarchy and find yourself victim of the
Peter Principle.

So for me, delay was a conscious strategy. Only downside was I had to live on
a modest stipend. It was worth it for me, though. Another point that I'm
making is that "productivity" is not equivalent to "graduating/getting
promoted as fast as possible".

As for TFA, I would say that amazing _quantities_ of work can get done by
pushing yourself, deadlines, etc, but the creative work that lays groundwork
for future growth only occurs during low-stress periods. I try, therefore, to
set up alternating periods of both types.

~~~
agumonkey
Did you have trouble extending to 7 years ?

~~~
xaa
Not really. My salary was funded by my PI and he was happy to keep someone at
my skill level as long as I wanted (and at a bargain salary to boot).

From my department and committee, I started to feel rumblings around mid-
year-6 of the "you should get on with it" lines. But they weren't trying to
force me out or anything, it was more like concern.

I was spending (and still do) a much bigger percentage of my time on
collaborative work than my peers, and they were concerned I wasn't adequately
focused on my own career. But that wasn't the case at all -- I was doing what
I thought was in my best interests, especially considering my field
(bioinformatics) is inherently highly collaborative compared to the wet-lab
stuff going on around me.

However, there were some institution-level reasons I cut it off at 7. After
that, the institution's policy is that you have to start re-taking some
classes you already took (and passed). It was irritating to always have to go
to an irrelevant journal club every week (I was in a department that really
had nothing to do with my research). Also, I had some appealing opportunities
available if I finished when I did. But in no way was I "forced out".

~~~
agumonkey
Interesting, very interesting. Thanks for the reply. Would you like to share a
link to your thesis ?

~~~
xaa
Oh, God, I'm not sure anyone is _totally_ happy with their dissertation, but I
guess I should get over it. I got about 2/3 of what I wanted to done. I'm
continuing with the project, though.

[https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ujf73cdu4m6p1lj/AAD4vVwpCfgSf7GGo...](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ujf73cdu4m6p1lj/AAD4vVwpCfgSf7GGoQCYrK97a?dl=0)

~~~
agumonkey
Don't worry, I cannot judge anything anyway. I just read you were into aging
research. I went at a few senescence panels a few months ago and am very
curious about the subject. Is your thesis a step into finding applications for
this domain ? or more general ?

ps: sexy title

~~~
xaa
Well the project arose like this. I got interested in aging halfway through
the PhD. I started collaborating heavily with aging people at my institution.
But there are so many papers and so much data to get informed about the area.

So I wondered "is there some semi-empirical way to find out what is 'most
important' in aging so I can focus my future efforts on that?"

The solution I hit on was to take all the available gene expression data and
to build a system to ask "what genes/pathways/systems change most strongly and
consistently with age across species, experimental conditions, and tissues"?
This would be a "core aging signature", if it exists. Obviously this is only
one of many ways to answer my question and neglects epigenetics, proteomics,
etc, although we're currently extending the system to DNA methylation. There
is not enough high-throughput proteomics data to make it possible to do this
with protein yet. We do not use sequencing for now because it is much more of
a processing burden and human RNA is behind dbGaP embargo. And at the time I
started this, there really wasn't that much of it compared to GEO.

My boss's interests are much more general than aging, so he encouraged me to
develop the system to be more generic while still answering my question, which
I did. It became a general meta-analysis system for asking "what genes change
expression with <arbitrary condition> across the available experiments in
GEO?" We found other things we could do with such a huge amount of expression
data, and some of them are in Chapter 5.

I would say the system itself is 80-90% done. But sadly I did not get to a
really detailed analysis of aging yet, although my findings so far on that are
in Chapter 4.

~~~
agumonkey
Aight, wonderful idea. I wish De Grey and his friends get to see this system.

~~~
xaa
Thanks for your interest. I've actually met him once -- a friend of his I was
talking to over beers introduced us -- but at the time, he was seemingly more
interested in his pending date with the blonde he had just picked up than
talking with a lowly graduate student. Can't say I blame him :) His papers are
excellent, though. A more philosophical and broad approach is needed in aging,
I think. He has mellowed a lot from the exaggerated claims he was making in
the early 2000s. Maybe he saw my poster which covered an early version of this
work, but we didn't talk about that.

The best aging researcher alive right now IMO though is Jim Kirkland. I've had
the good fortune to work a little with him and the man is a living
encyclopedia. His brilliance is obvious even in a conference full of PhDs.

~~~
agumonkey
haha so not surprised by your anecdote, I met him only once but it seems very
degrey. Doesn't waste time.

From I what I could hear, he has to spend a lot of time managing funding for
sub parts of the foundation and other efforts. Maybe this dilluted his claims
a bit in time. All of his friends seemed to be pretty high grade researchers,
it was a bit of an SF experiment sitting among that crowd.

Thanks for the name, there's another Kirkland studying aged things
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kirkland_(paleontologist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kirkland_\(paleontologist\))
but well .. couldn't resist that joke.

The panel I attended was the ICSA 2017 at Paris (Pasteur)
[http://www.icsa2017-senescence-on-the-
seine.org/](http://www.icsa2017-senescence-on-the-seine.org/)

Kirkland wasn't there but a nice international bunch

They were supposed to plan for a sequel since a few hundred people attended
their surprise talk; we'll see.

------
naturalgradient
As a current PhD student in a highly competitive program, I wish I could say
this is reasonable advice, but it's wishful thinking in the hyper-competitive
environment at top tier universities (where the goal of a PhD student would be
to graduate as faculty material).

There is just no way around grinding out the experiments. You literally have
to will something to work in multi-month long pushes where you iterate again
and again until you figure it out.

Deep work is good and nice for the theoretical parts, but all the academic
superstars/upcomers I know work super long AND super hard to make conference
deadlines all the time.

Of course, if you just want to graduate without stressing all that much or
much ambition, this might work.

~~~
otakucode
>You literally have to will something to work in multi-month long pushes where
you iterate again and again until you figure it out.

Or instead of iterating 5 times, you take your time and do it right on the 2nd
attempt, figuring it out in 1/3 of the time. Hurrying only leads to mistakes.
It makes no more sense than attempting to continue working when you really
need to go to the bathroom. You are are a human being and have biological
limitations. Ignoring them is of no benefit and usually significant detriment.

~~~
Osmium
> Or instead of iterating 5 times, you take your time and do it right on the
> 2nd attempt, figuring it out in 1/3 of the time. Hurrying only leads to
> mistakes.

In an abstract sense this is true, but there are some fields were you do just
have to do it again, and again, and again. I know an exceptionally smart
biochemist who routinely has 16 hour days. There's no substitute.

In my own field, someone who would later go on to win a Nobel for the work,
was working on something that simply required a huge amount of time and
iteration to get right. This is often the case.

This is not true in all fields, of course. I just want to caution against
extrapolating from experience in one field to all PhDs, which is the sense I
get from a lot of comments in this thread.

~~~
ABCLAW
I don't know a single biochemist that puts in 16 hours of work a day. I know
of plenty of biochemists that routinely start and end their days 16 hours
apart because they have a growth protocol that takes 12 hours to complete
prior to harvesting, so they get to the lab, prep, set up the experiment, then
leave for a large chunk of the day while their flasks are hard at work, then
get in at 8pm to finish the protocol, record results, tidy up and head home
for sleep.

The above timeline is common and routine as are claims of having just done a
'16 hour day' by those who are on the above schedule.

I'm not saying biochemists couldn't run 16 hours of experimental protocols at
their bench per day, but I've never seen it happen.

------
e19293001
I do walking for 30 minutes at the middle of the day while thinking about the
task or problem that I'm facing during that time. It just always amaze me that
good ideas pop up in my mind when I walk.

For those who are stressed and overwhelmed, I would advise to take a walk. And
also for those who want to be creative, take a walk. It's a productivity hack.

------
foobarbecue
Fewer hours. And yeah, I agree -- that's how I got mine done.

~~~
SubiculumCode
I admit I logged in to HN to make the same grammar correction. Fewer/Less
grammar errors bug me badly. I don't know why this particular grammatical
error bugs me so, but every time I encounter it, I have an inner voice that
yells 'fewer.' My family hates me for it.

~~~
a_e_k
Same here. I think the reason it bugs me so much is because my mind views it
as a type error:

    
    
        int fewer;
        float less;
    

is how I tend to remember the distinction. (Fortunately in my family, my wife
is the language nerd who first called me on my misuse many years ago. Now I
notice it everywhere too. It's weirdly viral.)

~~~
magic_beans
Fewer is for things that can be counted in numbers. Less is for non-numbered
things. It's so easy that it really disturbs me when people get it wrong.

Fewer people. Fewer zoos. Fewer cigarettes. Less hatred. Less abuse. Less
misuse of power.

~~~
SubiculumCode
Less person, less zoo, less cigarette, fewer hatreds, fewer abuses, fewer
misuses of power.

Flip flopping it around. The last three are now countable. The first three,
while maybe verging on nonsensical, are grammatically correct. Less zoo, for
example, might be used in the context of closing down part of a zoo. 'I have
less cigarette left than Joe', also makes sense, if we are comparing cigarette
lengths.

------
a3_nm
The problem with saying "less hours" is that the optimal numbers of hours of
effort varies a lot depending on your current productivity.

If you can't manage to focus on something despite persistent effort, yes it's
much better to stop and have fun instead. It makes no sense to have "long
hours" as a goal even if you're not sure of what you are going to try to
accomplish during that time.

On the other hand, when you are motivated, or making progress on something, or
working towards a deadline, then it may be very productive to keep going for
many hours. I don't have statistics, but an important part of my PhD output
(both research and writing) was done between 11 PM and 3 AM, on weekends, etc.
(By the way, I disagree with the advice of going to the lab early in the
morning -- personally I worked better from home late at night. But it depends
on how you work and whether you can do the work from home or not.)
Importantly, you should be in a flow mode, so actually these hours don't feel
"long".

The main productivity lesson I got from my PhD is this: either work
productively, or relax wholeheartedly. Aka: "Do, or do not; there is no try."
:) It's terrible to try to work on something and not succeed -- it's
unproductive, unpleasant, it does not put you in a better mood like real fun
does, and it makes you completely disgusted with the task so it will be even
harder to work on it next time. You have to learn when to keep on working, and
when to stop because you won't be productive working longer. (You get better
at this productivity prediction with experience.) And you should be fine with
stopping very early, maybe skipping the rest of the day if it turns out you're
not in the mood; but you should also be fine with stopping late and working
crazy hours when inspiration comes.

~~~
evincarofautumn
I’ve found the same thing at my job as a software developer, as well as on my
hobby projects—including a programming language, which is very like Ph.D.
territory. Sometimes the time and code flow easily, sometimes not; forcing
myself to work when I’m not in a good state of mind to be productive is
_actively harmful_ to my holistic productivity.

------
Upvoter33
I think it's incredibly hard to give general advice about the Ph.D. process.
Even within the same discipline, the work varies greatly from sub-discipline
to sub-discipline, and from advisor to advisor.

~~~
pgbovine
agreed! i cover this topic here: [http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-26-what-does-
academia-mean.htm](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-26-what-does-academia-mean.htm)

~~~
xaa
I have to thank you for your "Ph.D. Grind" memoir. There were many lessons in
it, but the lesson I took from it, as I recall from reading it several years
ago, was basically that you _have_ to discard perfectionism to get anything
done.

I'm not sure if that was even an intended message, but that's what I took from
it, and I thought back to it during the dark hours of dissertation writing
when I was repeatedly thinking "this isn't good enough". I also remembered the
lesson that one should be willing to be flexible in the sense that the
dissertation doesn't have to be exactly (or at all) what you originally
intended it to be.

------
throwaway287391
> #6 Give yourself a break

This is the most important bit in my experience. I had a pretty successful PhD
and I loved my time as a PhD student. I'd have days or even weeks when I just
didn't feel particularly motivated, and when that happened, I didn't sit at my
desk twiddling my thumbs, I took the day off. Maybe read some papers, but
almost never forced myself to do hands-on work if I wasn't feeling it. Having
an advisor that grants you this kind of flexibility, as well as the
flexibility to let you take on projects that make you feel motivated, is
pretty important for a successful and non-torturous PhD, IMHO.

(Meanwhile I know of other advisors whose students would come into the lab 7
days a week and try to sell their work-life balance by telling the story of
this one time when one guy the afternoon off on a Friday to go skiing. It's
bizarre to me that some advisors think that kind of whip-cracking is the right
way to make creative endeavors successful.)

------
otakucode
Essentially every single aspect of our cultures understanding about how to
accomplish things and do work is a direct outgrowth of assembly-line
manufacturing. Mental work is fundamentally different. But we continue to
treat mental work as if its the same thing as mindless physical rote
repetition. Humans aren't capable of extended periods of mental exertion. 40
hours of work a week was fine when moving sheet metal into a press. For mental
work, it's counter-productive and borders on the cruel. It's certainly harmful
to every effort that pursues it.

But habits die hard, and the management class is more addicted to the
manufacturing-driven mindset than junkies are to heroin, so it'll take awhile
to change.

~~~
munin
> Humans aren't capable of extended periods of mental exertion

The humans on my thesis committee are definitely capable of extended periods
of mental exertion. I don't know if it's something you're only born with or if
it's something you can train but I bet I'll find out in a few years.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
How would you know? It looks difficult, maybe even impossible to measure
academic productivity.

~~~
munin
Well, we could use a crude metric which is, how much of the day do you spend
doing intellectual work? Right now, my advisor spends about ten or twelve
hours. And it is pretty deep intellectual work, most of it is paper reading or
discussion, via e-mail or in person meetings. Between watching when/how they
reply to e-mail, make check-ins, their calendar, and talking to other
collaborators and other students, they genuinely seem to fill 12 hours a day
with work, six days a week, and have for the last fifteen years.

We can quickly get into some no-true-Scotsman territory here by asking "well
if they're so smart how many Nobel/Field/Turing awards do they have" or
something, but that's not the original question. The original question was,
how much can you work at a high level a day? I have a measurement for both the
ceiling and the floor and the ceiling seems high.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
"how much of the day do you spend doing intellectual work?"

But that only measures time, not productivity which is at the root of this
problem. You think your advisor is doing ten or twelve hours of deep work, but
how do you know they couldn't achieve the same in four or five?

By the way, meetings and emails aren't deep work, even in an academic setting.

------
albertTJames
I have tried most productivity hacks. In the end what worked best is the
Pomodoro 25/5.

~~~
fazkan
How has it worked for you I am interested. It has worked for me too, and I too
have tried a lot of things. The reason it has worked for me is because I set
the bar very low. Like one pomodoro on a specific task and then I usually end
up spending more time...

~~~
albertTJames
I believe it helps because it

a) Is simple

b) Works for any tasks.

c) Allows for short burst of activity during which it is easy to refrain from
reading random stuff, mails, or explore tangential ideas. Easy because you
know you will have 5 minutes to check it out if necessary after your burst.

d) Helps for moving around, go fill a glass of water, look at your
surroundings etc.

e) Probably correlates well with average human attention span

------
falcolas
Seems to me like this applies nicely to more than just PhD's; it works well
with programming as well.

At least when you can fit that work in between all the meetings you are
scheduled for in a day.

------
bloaf
It depends on your field. There are some experiments you can't just walk away
from, for safety reasons. You can't just "focus" and make your chemical
reaction go faster.

~~~
graeham
Agreed. A large amount of time also goes into things like making figures,
which is mostly time-consuming grunt work.

I think the key is differentiating between creative work (which is better to
be done deep with fewer hours) and grunt work which is almost purely time.
Both are needed for a sucessful PhD - few are good at both and it is hard to
switch between the two.

------
Void_
Just try this for a week...

1\. Remove Facebook/Instagram/Twitter from your phone. Using parental controls
disable Safari. Remove your email too if you can.

2\. Use SelfControl to block these websites for 24 hours at a time. So you
only get to check these things once every day. After you've checked it,
quickly block again. If 24 is too much, start with 8 or so. But always block
again right after checking!

SelfControl: [https://selfcontrolapp.com/](https://selfcontrolapp.com/)

\--

Few more tips:

\- Pomodoro technique is nice (I built FocusList - focuslist.co) but in my
experience it doesn't help if you keep thinking about how many more minutes
you have to stay focused. Instead you have to forget about all that and just
think about your task.

\- Keep a journal of sticking with this habit. I always print current month,
put it up in my kitchen and I cross off days. I'm currently doing that for my
diet, but it works for any habit you wanna build.

\- If you can't motivate yourself, reading a book like "Deep Work" will give
you an initial push.

\- Use headphones. This is individual, but speaking for me, they just gave me
this feeling of immersion and it just helps me get into the zone. Get a nice
pair with noise cancelling, or with those foam tips (if it's comfy), it will
make you feel like you entered a different world.

~~~
n1000
Just got myself a nice pair of noise-cancelling headphones last week. I had
some extremely productive hours like I've hardly known before.

~~~
magic_beans
Now that I've been using them for a few years now, I can't focus at work
without them.

------
j7ake
I'm a little confused, has this person contributed to science in any
significant way ? If not why should we listen to this person and ignore
scientists who have actually achieved success in their field ?

~~~
BeetleB
>I'm a little confused, has this person contributed to science in any
significant way ? If not why should we listen to this person and ignore
scientists who have actually achieved success in their field ?

It's a fair question. But be warned: You're not going to get a much less
diverse set of answers from them, though. I would suggest also listening to
scientists who established themselves 30+ years ago. You'll likely hear a
different story compared to the current crop.

In the 00's, some of my fellow graduate students did more work for their PhD
than many faculty members I know did to get tenure in the 80's and early 90's.
The high level of work demanded today is mostly due to inbreeding attitudes in
academia. It's entirely an internal problem.

~~~
throwawayaway12
I largely agree with this, but in some fields I also think it is an over
supply of PhD problem as well.

~~~
altotrees
The oversupply problem is one that doesn't seem to be going away ay time soon,
especially in the pure sciences. From my anecdotal evidence, it seems to be
harder and harder to get into academia or cross into industry each year. I
have multiple bio and chemistry PhD friends who have been either stuck in
limbo at a postdoc position or who have left the field in frustration. I
wonder if it will correct over time, or if the glut or PhD's will continue to
grow.

~~~
sage76
Is it the same in CS as far as industry positions are concerned?

~~~
altotrees
Not from what I have read or heard. There still seems to be a need across the
board for those with deep knowledge, especially when it comes to certain
topics. The people I have known who have had trouble, and studies I have read
about the topic point mainly to biology and chemistry as the two hardest
fields to break initially with a PhD. But of course even that could change
depending on specialization, etc.

~~~
sage76
Among those doctoral graduates who went to North American industry and for
whom the type of industry position was known, about 60 percent took research
positions .

source : [http://cra.org/crn/wp-
content/uploads/sites/7/2017/05/2016-T...](http://cra.org/crn/wp-
content/uploads/sites/7/2017/05/2016-Taulbee-Survey.pdf)

Is 60% pretty high compared to other fields?

------
ohdrat
hm, time to eliminate the hacker news bookmark...

~~~
raketenolli
I came back to HN (does it fall under #3 or #5?) just to remark something
along these lines ...

------
cfusting
"deep work"meaning concentrate. Breaks, of course. Innovation does not happen
at the grind. Funny how concentration has gone out of fashion.

~~~
UncleMeat
Innovation isn't the most time consuming part of a PhD. If you are doing
benchwork there is an amount of time that is simply required to get
experiments functioning.

~~~
cfusting
I suppose I am thinking of it from math/coding perspective where the right
idea saves a ton of time.

------
cap3
Fewer

------
frozenport
This is complete bullshit.

From personal experience, one needs to stay at the experimental setup until
you have publishable data.

For example, I had part of an experiment die when the oxygen tank ran out,
rushed back to the lab at 3:00 AM, changed the acquisition mode. I took the
final picture and published in a high impact Nature family journal.

My less productive colleges would have called the experiment a failure, and
stayed home.

------
alphaalpha101
>The worst PhD productivity advice is to work long hours. This advice is
shared by successful people in Academia, so it should be good advice,
shouldn’t it?

Is it though? Because I've never heard this ever. I've heard over and over
again to avoid working long hours. It always annoys me when articles start off
on premises like these that I just don't think are true.

------
aub3bhat
This is stupid advice with sole purpose of keeping students engaged in
publishing incremental research. So that no one questions vanity metrics like
H-index and the ridiculous condition of academic research.

As a PhD student the real secret strategy is to ignore academia, work only on
very high impact projects ( with potential of becoming startups or
revolutionizing the field), intern with production teams (in core areas) at
great companies. And enjoy lack of 9 to 5 scheduled life.

The deep work in less hours is meaningless if the work itself is merely
publishing "Minimum Publishable Units" couple of times every year. It's just
fast track to mediocrity.

Though I agree that not all environments are hospitable to risk taking. But
then dropping out is a better deal.

~~~
pathsjs
Production teams at great companies seems to assume this is a Phd in something
applied. Theorical Phds exists as well (e.g. pure maths)

~~~
aub3bhat
Hedge funds, prop trading etc. do hire from math heavy background. But I
agree.

My advice is only good for CS or similar (ECE, Data Science) PhD's.

