Tiny goal works well for Ph.D. students in quarantine
It is not easy to keep our motivation high for a long-term goal. It can be more difficult when we are talking about a Ph.D. student. There are different books and blog posts talk about how to keep our motivation high. We listen to speeches that advise different practical methods. There are different videos on Youtube present how to build a bullet journal and we can find various ideas on making bullet journals on Pinterest. But the problem is some people can stick to those methods only for a few days or weeks. I am one of those. I tried different methods to organize my Ph.D. daily life, specifically during the quarantine. But I lost the track after a couple of weeks. All these ups and downs make me more demotivated. I got more and more confused about how to manage 4 years of works in Ph.D. program. Ph.D. program needs high self-management and long-term goals like the deadline of conferences or journals did not keep me on the right path. Till I found my own way inspired by the amazing book “Atomic Habits” written by James Clear.
I want to directly jump to the method that I call it “tiny goals”. So instead of predefining long-term goals like finishing my Ph.D. or even small granular targets like deadlines, I define a list of daily tasks right before starting my day and right after opening my laptop.
No matter what time is it, do I wake up early morning or at 12:00 PM in the afternoon. Is it a weekday or a weekend? Instead of blaming myself for why I did not stick to a predetermined plan, I start my day (or night) with defining tiny tasks from the time I open my laptop till going to bed again (It is normal in Ph.D. life if we sometimes replace day and night 😊). I do not need to carry a bullet notebook or design a table for scheduling each task. I just open a text file and list whatever I have plan to do in the coming hours. Sometimes I create a note on my mobile when I just wake up in bed. At the end of the day, before closing my laptop or after checking Instagram for the last time before going to sleep, I open the text file and I check each task. For all completed tasks, I write down “done”. It can relieve my stress before going to sleep that at least I have done something today. Then for all those tasks that I didn’t touch or finish, I write a tiny reason (without blaming myself). For example, reading article x takes more time than I was expected, or I have no more energy to focus on my experiment, or I was not in a mood of touching the code.
At the beginning of using this method, I wrote down all tasks from reading an article to cook the dinner. But after a while, I found it useless to add non-PhD tasks. As a student who searches to recognize patterns in data, I guaranty that after a while you will find some patterns on those tasks that you did or didn’t complete.
This method helps me a lot to know my habits better, improve my weaknesses, and monitor my progress specifically in a quarantine situation. When I pre-planned a week or a month and I couldn’t stick to the plan, I had a bad feeling of non-completed tasks and it increased my stress because I felt out of plan. But with this “tiny goal” method not only I earn a lot of useful information regarding my habits in studying but also I have a better feeling about daily life in the Ph.D. program when I count completed tasks at the end of the day.
