Speaker 1: The first small change that will revolutionize your research is time boxing research rabbit holes. This is a really simple technique and what you do is you take a time limit for any research activity you're about to undertake and if it is not meeting your expectations, if it's failing, if it's not going the way you want it, you stop. We often have this sunken time fallacy which makes us think that we've got to spend all of this time trying to make something work that won't work. Sometimes I found that things will work one day and not the other and on the days where it's not working you can waste an entire day trying to get it to work when in reality you're better off just kind of like taking a moment, stepping back and not worrying about doing that activity today. I had that with atomic force microscopy. I would go into the lab some days and it would work and some days I would go in and it would not work. I don't know why. Maybe it was me, maybe it was the equipment, maybe it was just luck but sometimes I could waste the entire day trying to get something to work and fighting that instrument and the same thing can apply for whatever research activity you're doing. So a simple way to implement this is to set yourself a time limit. Let's say an hour or a couple of hours to say I'm going to try this

Speaker 2: thing. If it's not going well after that amount of time I am going to stop and do something else

Speaker 1: that's more productive. I may return to that task but right now it is not working for me for whatever reason and it's as simple as setting a little countdown timer on your phone and allowing it to play out. When the timer goes off ask yourself that simple question, is this worth pursuing right now? If not, move on. You can come back to it with a fresh head with a new tact but there's no point fighting something that is not working after a certain amount of time. Sometimes the tasks need an hour, sometimes a couple of hours for you to be able to make that decision. That's up to your research but ultimately time box things and it really does help move you along quicker. I think sometimes we over complicate things and one of the things that really helped me in my research was theming my days. By theming my days I was able to take the thought process out of what I'm doing in the next hour, in the afternoon. I would theme my days and say okay Mondays is writing, Tuesday is planning, Wednesday is active research. Having themes for all of these days meant I was able to prioritize tasks easier. If I had a certain task I'd be like oh that seems like a Wednesday task and I'd sort of like plonk it in there and it just enabled me to kind of compartmentalize the research activities I was doing and stop me from just chasing my tail. A lot of the time we can get lost in the noise of research and activities but importantly if you theme your days it keeps you focused to those kind of like core activities that really get your research moving and really get you to the end of your PhD if you're a PhD student. So consider theming your days. It worked for me super easy. Once every couple weeks when you meet with your supervisor I would have a kill your darlings session. That means taking all of the ideas that you love, that you think will work and analyzing them objectively and saying is this an idea that we need to kill off. There is something in us that gets attracted and attached to certain ideas or our supervisors get attached to a certain idea and they will not let it go. You have to have an honest conversation with your supervisor, with yourself and say you know what these things that we love they're not actually working and I can't see them working in the near future. Killing off those ideas early will mean you can focus on the things that are actually working later on. It's a really important skill. Do not get emotionally attached and importantly try to not let your supervisor get emotionally attached to certain ideas or certain research inquiry paths that you're taking because sometimes they do not work and no matter how much we feel something needs to work it will decide whether or not it will give you that luxury. So ultimately every couple of weeks sit down look at the ideas you're attached to emotionally and kill them off if you need to. It's probably the hardest thing to do in research but with practice it gets a little bit easier but sometimes a great idea will never ever turn into great research. After reading a paper there's only one way that you can really test yourself on whether you've understood what's in it. Sometimes I would just skim read. I would like my eyes would track across the page but I would not be taking in the information or I would skip over large chunks of information that turned out to be very important in the future. So what I like to do is in my research office or if I've got a friend that's also in a similar field I would have sessions with them where we explain papers to each other because I've found that if I try to explain a paper to someone quite often I had huge gaps in my understanding of that paper and what it really meant. Having this conversation with someone about a research paper or you know a group of research papers that you've actually read sometimes allows you to see where you've completely misunderstood or there are huge gaps in your knowledge. A simple conversation from a research friend is a really valuable tool of finding gaps and also just re-embedding that information allowing you to build up that like sixth sense of research. If you don't understand it well enough to be able to explain it to someone else you don't understand it well enough. So sitting down with a friend talking about papers that you've both read asking questions is a really great way and actually quite a fun way. You can do it over coffee, you can do it in the tea room, just talk about research papers, ask each other questions. You'll be amazed just doing this over a few months really builds up that sort of like ingrained knowledge about your field and allows you to fill in those gaps that you didn't even see in the first place. Another really simple change that you can make is changing up your location depending on the task that you're doing. So for example I found it really valuable if I was in a writing mode to go to a library. I would go to the silent study area of a library and just do the writing, do the typing. If I wanted to do research clearly I'd go to the research lab and I found my office was a space where I was not really able to read, I wasn't really able to write and it was kind of just like a distraction place for me. So upon understanding that I found if I wanted to read or write it was the library. I had to head out somewhere to do my research because I was based in a lab. So my office space became this kind of like procrastination area and I found I couldn't work my best in it and you have to work out which areas suit you best. Structured procrastination is a really great way to tick off all those really annoying little tasks in your to-do list. Now I like to keep a little bit of paper on my desk and I just write little tasks as they come up. Little five minute, two minute tasks and then when I find myself completely distracted I go to that task sheet and I just go down. It may be sending an email, it may be reading a certain thing, it may be investigating a certain thing, whatever it is just allows you to actually just sort of like allow your mind a break from those big tasks you're doing like writing or research or doing your presentation and it just redirects your mind into something that's short, sharp and snappy. It can be really hard to sort of like focus long term on a project so interspacing it with these small little sort of like procrastination breaks allows you to be productive. So tick off some simple to-do list things but also stay focused enough that you can sort of like continue the big project. If you like this video remember to go check out this one where I talk about the eight tips that will make you cringe but I found actually worked. Really valuable for PhD students, researchers and anyone that just finds themselves needing a little bit of advice but sometimes gets a little bit cringey doesn't it? So there we have it. There are the changes that you can make in your research life that will have a massive effect on your productivity and your progress throughout your PhD or your research. As always let me know in the comments which ones you would add and also remember there are more ways that you can engage with me. The first way is to sign up to my newsletter. 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