I have noticed that many a times this is an area that most researchers tend to struggle with. When you are doing a full time research, there is this feeling of having all the time for research and therefore the tendency to procrastinate. If you are juggling with a job, there is the difficulty to manage things. If you are in Education, there is a high chance that you are in your late twenties or thirties when you join PhD. This means that there are sure to be added responsibilities of home and family. Whether full time or part time, there are enough reasons to not be able to organise time in an unstructured course like PhD. Thus, the ability to organise time is a great advantage to a PhD scholar.
Here I am giving a few more tips to organise research time.
Set aside time for PhD work on a regular basis.
The trouble with PhD is that if you are not regular with it, you will lose grip soon and wouldn’t know how and where to pick it up again. To prevent this, you must be regular with your work. It is not enough to pick it up once a week, or after you finish all other tasks. PhD work has to go on simultaneously with your otherwise colourful life. You can have a difficult work space, family issues, health concerns or personal concerns, unless it is something that just cannot be put away, you must take out time on an everyday basis. Not monthly, fortnightly, weekly, but daily. Read one page, even if you have to read the same page on three days consecutively to understand it. Ensure you mark what is relevant, make notes in the margins or in separate notebooks. Write one idea, one thought, one new learning. Identify two new resources. Take an appointment. Do whatever little you can. But try to work everyday.
Do one thing at a time, but several things in a day.
I have often heard people say, “I cannot multitask”. This is a myth. Everybody multitasks. When we cook, we don’t cook the whole day. When we teach, we don’t teach the whole day. Yes, some people can watch TV, read a book, and cook simultaneously. Some days there will be more reading, some days there will be more watching TV. But we all do many things everyday. It is important to recognise this ability so that not being able to multitask does not become an excuse to not do any PhD task.
This means that you must set aside time for PhD. If you feel that you will not be able to take out time in the evening, do it for the half an hour in the morning when everyone else is asleep. Do it late in the night if you like to work like that. Yes, there will be days when you will be so tired that you won’t be able to do much more than day dream. Doesn’t matter. If you read for ten minutes out of the thirty that you set aside, you would have done ten minutes of work.
Ensure that you get time to work by yourself.
Do one thing at a time, but several things in a day.
I have often heard people say, “I cannot multitask”. This is a myth. Everybody multitasks. When we cook, we don’t cook the whole day. When we teach, we don’t teach the whole day. Yes, some people can watch TV, read a book, and cook simultaneously. Some days there will be more reading, some days there will be more watching TV. But we all do many things everyday. It is important to recognise this ability so that not being able to multitask does not become an excuse to not do any PhD task.
This means that you must set aside time for PhD. If you feel that you will not be able to take out time in the evening, do it for the half an hour in the morning when everyone else is asleep. Do it late in the night if you like to work like that. Yes, there will be days when you will be so tired that you won’t be able to do much more than day dream. Doesn’t matter. If you read for ten minutes out of the thirty that you set aside, you would have done ten minutes of work.
Ensure that you get time to work by yourself.
It is important that the time you set aside for PhD is the time that you are able to work by yourself. Some work can be done with the constant hustle bustle of everyday life. However, if you are able to work by yourself, you will do twice the amount of work that you would have done in the same time when interrupted with kids, music, television, doorbell, or whatsapp messages. Take half an hour away from everything. Sit quietly for five minutes out of this half an hour and have a date with PhD for the next twenty five minutes. Be cocooned away from the rest of the world.
Set Deadlines
This is a very crucial aspect of doing research work. I will sometime in the future write more about how deadlines need to be set. For now, I would focus on what I have written above. PhD is a largely unstructured course. It is important to learn to live without structures. At the same time, if you set deadlines, you will probably be able to develop a structure for how you want to utilise the half an hour that you have stolen away from the rest of the world. Else you may end up with half an hour everyday where you just end up not being able to decide what to do.
Identify what works best for you.
Now, I have written about the things that worked for me. You may want to work with music. You may not want to finish your PhD yet. So you may revel in fascinating aimless reading endlessly or at least till your supervisor allows you to. You may work like crazy for three months and then do nothing for a year. See what works best for you. Use your metacognitive skills to know how you work. Once you have identified your own strengths and areas of work, you will be able to work better.
When you are doing all this, please remember that like everything else, the responsibility and ownership of PhD is yours and yours alone. However, you are dependent on many others for the work that you are doing. This dependence will mean that while you may have done everything, you may have to take a forced break because others haven’t done their work. A participant will refuse to give you time. Your supervisor will be busy with something else. Do not get exasperated. Use this time to the best advantage.