5 time management ideas… from part time

PhD students
Last week @lanceb147 contacted me on Twitter looking for advice on doing a PhD part time. There’s not
much published advice considering there’s a surprising number of students doing their PhD part time. At
RMIT where I used to work 50% of research students were enrolled part time and this institutional
profile is not unusual in Australia. Some are self funded students from the beginning; others have been
forced to take up part time study after their scholarship rans out.

Many academics have the impression that part time students are troublesome and take ages to finish, but a
study by Pearson et al (see reference below) showed that students who study part time for their whole
degree finish sooner and have better results than full time students.

Clearly they are doing something right!

I did my research masters over three years part time and worked for 2 days a week for all but 6 months of
my PhD. So I know a lot about managing study part time – for me. If there’s anything I have learned
about PhD study in all my years of whisperering it’s that everyone is different. So I asked on Twitter if
part time students would share their time management secrets with me – and what a rich treasure trove of
information they gave me!

After reading through upwards of 80 messages, I came to the conclusion that part time students could
teach full time students a thing or two about how to manage a long term research project. I have
enough from my Twitter conversations for about ten posts, but I will confine myself here to five and save
the rest for later.

Brief your stakeholders

Unlike full time students, many part time students have to fight to be recognised as students at all. Many
people on Twitter emphasized the importance of briefing your line manager on the purpose of the PhD
and the nature of your study commitments early on. Part timers should tell their employer that a part
time PhD requires around 20 hours, but that the actual amount of time you have to spend each week
will vary according to what you are working on. Consider telling your co-workers about your PhD too.
Some part timers I spoke to talked about bad feelings developing in teams when you refuse to work extra
hours to help out on deadlines.

What can full timers learn from this? Tell your friends and family what you are working on and why. This
way your PhD is positioned as Important Work, not an indulgence or excuse for not attending social
engagements. I recommend entering the 3 minute thesis competition. It’s an excellent way to work on
explaining the importance of your work to anyone, expert or not.

WIFM?

By appealing to the WIFM (What’s in it for me?) you get buy in from your stakeholders. Try to think of
the possible benefits to your employer, such as enriched skills, knowledge and even the connections you
make with others. Explain to your partner that your PhD will increase your career prospects or give you
more job security. If everyone around you understands why doing a PhD is important to you – and to
them – there is less opportunity for conflict to arise.

Spread yourself around

Experienced part timers recommended always having several things to work on at once – reading, doing
analysis, writing, organising. Try to move the work forward on many fronts simultaneously, rather than
finish one thing and start another. Keep a ‘menu’ of ongoing work from which you can choose a task
which fits the time and energy you have available.

Some tasks, like reading, are easily portable and fit well into odd chunks of time like commuting; some
are not and require quiet spaces or special equipment. Understand the difference between low focus and
high focus activities and make sure you have some of each on your ‘to do’ list. You may not be in the
right frame of mind to do data analysis or write after a hard day of work, so have a TBR (to be read) pile
handy or tidy up your reference data base. Give yourself permission to take time off though, or you will
burn out.

Full time students would do well to adopt this strategy of a time budget, but the other way around. You
should aim to spend no more than 40 hours a week on a fulltime PhD (it’s just like a job my friends). I
suggest budgeting time for all the non academic things you want to do: exercise, relaxing and spending
time with friends then building your work schedule. So long as you are making your 40 hours it doesn’t
matter what time of the day you do things. You can sleep late and have a long coffee date in the morning,
then work in the early hours – if that’s what you prefer. Try to take two whole days off a week though –
even if they don’t fall on the actual weekend.

Build in buffer time

Many part timers I spoke to on Twitter cautioned against setting one whole day a week aside for study. In
fact some questioned whether keeping regular schedules were even possible. Even those that did keep
regular schedules agreed that it can be hard to switch gears mentally between work and study. Some
people used activities like cooking, reading to children or going to the gym ot create a buffer between
work and study. This helped them clear their mind of work related concerns so they could concentrate
better on their study.

Full timers can learn from this strategy of building in buffer time. One technique I learned was to decide
the day before what the first task will be tomorrow – make it something difficult. This is an ‘eat the
vegetables first’ strategy that turns sleeping into proper buffer time.

How (not) to fail in your Ph.D. studies

By Elisabeth PainSep. 8, 2015 , 9:30 AM

Graduate school is hard. It is a drastic change from your university studies, with no clear end point in
sight and a sometimes frightening amount of freedom to decide how to fill your working hours. The
standards are high and unforgiving. And while before you had an entire class of people you could discuss
assignments with, now you are pretty much on your own to master the skills and get the work done.

The pitfalls are many, and being aware of them can be a good first step toward avoiding them. But some
students seem to deliberately and inexorably head toward disaster, Kevin D. Haggerty and Aaron Doyle
write in the Times Higher Education. In a tongue-in-cheek column, Haggerty, a professor in the
Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta in Canada, and Doyle, an associate professor in the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa, offer advice for how to
maximize your chances of failing grad school—or, better yet, to steer well clear of the dangers.

The authors offer 10 pieces of advice, which are broadly applicable for students in a variety of disciplines
and institutions. For one, Haggerty and Doyle warn against choosing “the coolest supervisor,” telling the
story of a Ph.D. student who, having made such a choice, ended up with an adviser who “failed her as a
mentor.” “If you choose a supervisor because of a single overriding factor—such as a desire for someone
who is personable, or is not intimidating, or has a big name—you risk choosing poorly,” they write.
Instead, prospective graduate students should inquire broadly about their potential supervisor, asking
questions such as, “Do her students finish their degrees, and in a reasonable time? … Does she have a
record of getting her students published? Does she equitably co-author articles with her students? Is the
supervisor too overwhelmed with other commitments to give you the attention you need?”

That being said, another pitfall is asking too much of your supervisor. While you should seek guidance
from your adviser, and others, “[y]ou are also personally responsible for developing your own intellectual
path. Do not expect your supervisor, or anyone else, to hold your hand and tell you which books to read,
journals to subscribe to, future research projects to pursue, research collaborations to explore, conferences
to attend or grants to apply for.”

It would also be a mistake to believe that your only job in grad school is to get your thesis done, Haggerty
and Doyle continue. “While your overriding priorities are to publish, to make progress on your thesis and
otherwise to build up your CV, you typically still have enough hours in your day to get involved in other
projects,” such as teaching, mentoring, reviewing manuscripts, and organizing workshops. “Not doing so
means that you are missing opportunities to become a well-rounded academic. And greater exposure to
different activities helps you to distinguish yourself in the job market.”

If you are to make it as an academic, you should also develop a thick skin. Haggerty and Doyle tell the
story of a graduate student who got upset about a journal rejection and almost sent an angry response to
the editor, but his adviser stopped him just in time. “[I]n the more elevated levels of academia … failure
is common. You will be competing with other high-calibre students for scholarships and fellowships, the
majority of which you will not win. … A great deal of work will go into developing articles only to have
many of them rejected. Once you enter the job market, you will put together lengthy job applications to
apply for positions for which there may be dozens of applicants,” they write. “A key part of being an
academic involves learning to persevere in the face of uncertainty, failure and rejection.”