Speaker 1: Remove blockers from your day. Now, what I mean by that is every single PhD student, master's student, even undergraduate researcher that I have met face significant challenges when it comes to just owning their day. And that's because distractions or what I like to call blockers come up. These blockers are just so sort of like insignificant for so many people, but once they jump into your day, they block you from doing anything else for a while. So for example, when I first sat down at a computer during my PhD, I would respond to emails. As soon as emails was open, my mind was going on to email stuff like boring admin things. That was a blocker. It stopped me from getting on with my day. Another one for me was Facebook. In these days, now that I'm an old man, it's probably TikTok or some other social media that's sort of like creeping into your day. Now, I like to make sure that as soon as I sit down at my computer, I am not distracted. Blockers will completely absorb your attention. Now, the thing is is that everyone's blockers is different. Every single person knows what their blockers are, but sometimes they use them as a little bit of an excuse to kind of not do the thing that they should be doing. So for example, when I was just tapping out in academia, when I just had enough, it was my second to last academic position, and I knew that I really didn't want to be here, and I would embrace the blockers as they popped up because they were a perfect excuse for self-sabotage, for not doing what I was meant to be doing. It may be that I was going for tea all the time, tea or coffee, with someone. It's time to kind of like completely engineer these blockers out of your life. It is not good enough for the majority of people to just say you'll use willpower to overcome them. It does not work. So what you've got to do is engineer your day so that you do not actually come into contact with blockers at all. So for example, you do not answer emails until later on in the afternoon. For example, you put yourself on a little blocker on your phone to make sure you're not on social media. There's another thing you can do. If you're finding that you just want to get in, you want to get to the lab, put your laptop in the lab. That's something I did for a while, and then I would go in, I'd be in the lab, I'd start to do the experiments, and then I could get on with the, you know, computer-boring admin laptop stuff. And you're not having to force yourself to do these things. Any moment you find that you need to really force or push or sort of like, you know, really discipline yourself into doing something, there's almost certainly a blocker in your way, and you can engineer your sort of day around that blocker. That's what will make your PhD and your research really so much easier, trust me. For some reason, universities really don't like innovation. Well, they like to come up with the innovation, but they don't like embracing it. And there are so many AI tools that your university, your supervisor probably doesn't know about, and that's why you should subscribe to this channel. Ooh, like what I did there? I have got a series of videos on different AI tools, but here are the ones that I think you should sort of like pay attention to right now that will make your life so much easier. So, over here, what have we got? This is the first place that I reckon you should bookmark, and that is rightfuls, kind of x.rightful.com, and it's got all of these tools. It's got, let's see if we go to the homepage, title generator, abstract generator, paraphraser, academia, academia, academia, academia, whatever that one is, and the chat GPT detector. So, I feel like this is full of really valuable free tools, and importantly, they'll be filling it out with different tools in the future. It started with just title and abstract generator. They've got the paraphraser, the paraphraser, that's it, and they've also got the academic, academia, academia. Oh, change that name. So, for example, you can just sort of like put something in, and it'll give you a more formal version, a more academic version of what you're trying to say, and these tools really do help, and if you're worried about things like where your data's going, whether it's stored with other services, AI services, that can be a little bit confusing. Here, you can see that your data is fully encrypted and never stored, so you don't have to worry about posting your secret new paper into these, unlike maybe some other tools that I know some people in the comments of other videos have been a little bit worried about. So, there's your first one. Second one, Litmaps. I love Litmaps. It's my personal favorite, but there are others like Research Rabbit and Connected Papers that you can use, so this is a great way of searching the literature. Illicit is another great semantic search for finding papers, so here it is. It's just so easy and intuitive to use, and they're my favorite. It's become, really, my personal assistant for everything that I do on a daily basis, and that's ChatGPT. I'm just going to say thanks. Thanks for all your help. You're welcome. I'm always here to help with any questions. There we are. I won't hesitate to ask. Thanks, ChatGPT, and don't be scared by these new academic tools. Some of the dinosaurs in universities won't like them. That's going to be the case with any innovation, but you are now entering a new world with research, and you should be at the forefront of using these tools, so bookmark them, save them for later, and you'll be amazed at how many of them will actually make their way into your daily processing of research information. It's really good. One thing that I do that is absolutely invaluable every single day, and every single PhD and researcher should do it, and that is be clear on your one big goal of the day. Quite often, when we're researching, when we're in academia, we cannot see the forest for the trees, and it's important that we focus on making progress every single day. The way you do that is you make sure you have one big goal a day. If you were to only do that one big thing a day, what would it be? What would make you happy? You know, at the moment, for me, it's like produce a video, produce a bit of content. In a PhD situation, it may be, I need to produce this one graph. I need to do this one experiment. I need to prepare for this experiment. I need to do this thing. Whatever it is, you need to make sure that you are doing that one big thing a day, and you are prioritizing it. You are owning your time and your day. You need to make sure that you're doing something towards your research every single day, one big thing, because that's how you make it easier for yourself to keep going. Once the momentum picks up, it is far easier to keep that momentum going than having to kind of stop and start, stop and start throughout a week. So, what is the one big thing? And then you can have, after you've done that, lots of little things like, you know, maybe cleaning up glassware in the lab in the case of chemistry. It may be responding to emails. It may be doing all of these tiny little things, but importantly, you've done that one important kind of cornerstone activity for your research every single day. That will make your life so much easier, I promise you. It's really important that you de-risk your experiments as you progress through your PhD. This will make your life so much easier when it's crunch time, i.e. at the end of your research project. In the early stages of your PhD or any research project, it is time to fail and try the Hail Mary kind of experiments. Try just all of the things that you really hope would work, but you really have no idea if they will. And by doing that, you're putting all of the risk of your project up front. And then you have two or three years to work out what is actually working, and then you slowly hone in on the things that are working, the things that will give you results that you can put in your thesis, that you can put in your papers, whatever it is. So importantly, manage risk. And it's not something that I see many people talk about in terms of PhD projects. And that is, the riskier the experiment, the earlier you should do it in your PhD. Do the risky stuff that you're almost certainly sure will fail or be difficult, but you'll be amazed that the universe is so noisy that it will throw you a bone. It will be like, oh, there we are. You didn't think that would work, but now it works. And all of a sudden, you've now got this weird little kind of thing that you can focus in on. And then as you progress through your PhD, you're just doing the stuff that works. You're refining the things that work. You're understanding more about the things that work. So by the time it comes to writing up, you have done all of the risky stuff. You've got good amount of data. And importantly, you're reporting on things that are working. So managing risk and thinking about risk as a sort of primary decision maker throughout your PhD will make your research so much easier for you. Trust me, I know so many people that don't think about risk and sort of managing that risk. And then, ugh, at the end of their PhD, they are panicked. They're panicked because they need results. And that means that it's stressful, that it's almost certainly not going to work out the way they want, and it ends up extending their research. So manage risk. Did I say that enough? Think about risk throughout your entire project. Do risky stuff the first thing you do. Make it risky. Make it hardcore. Make it the Hail Mary project you wish it would be. And then eventually, the things will work out. And then at the end, ugh, it's just nice cruising into the finish line knowing that things are working. Trust me on this. So there we have it. There are all of the things I think will make your PhD instantly easier. Let me know in the comments what you would add. And also, there's more ways to engage with me. The first way is to head over to and sign up for my newsletter. It's at andrewstapeton.com.au forward slash newsletter. The link is in the description. And when you sign up, you'll get five emails over about two weeks. Everything from the tools I use, the podcast I've been on, how to write the perfect abstract, my TEDx talk, and more. It's exclusive content, only available for free. So go sign up now. And also, go check out academiainsider.com. That's where I've got my e-books, the Ultimate Academic Writing Toolkit, as well as the PhD Survival Guide. Also, we've got the Insider Forum, a blog that's growing out really sort of rapidly over there at the moment. It's all there to make sure that academia works for you. All right then, I'll see you in the next video. Bye-bye.