GoKawiilCredit: Jakub Zerdzicki/Alamy
In May 2024, four years into my postgraduate career, I decided that I wanted to finish my PhD by the end of 2025. The problem was that, despite working on many ongoing projects, I had not yet published a paper discussing my PhD work. My days were full and I was spending my weekends working, but I was making little meaningful progress. I was producing data but not finishing anything.
From conversations with my peers, this was a common experience. There is a pervasive attitude in academia that graduate students in the laboratory should always be busy, always saying yes and always starting the next task. I see it in myself and in others: working at a frenetic pace on too many things at once and not giving any of them enough focus. It feels productive, but when too many responsibilities pile up, it often isn’t. If anything, these behaviours are sophisticated forms of procrastination. Fresh ideas and new projects are more enticing than finishing a difficult task or pushing a manuscript through its painful final stages.
At the time, I was a PhD student studying human genetics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. I was investigating the genetic causes of chronic kidney disease. One afternoon, I sat in a café trying to plan the year ahead. I found that stepping away from the lab allowed me to think more clearly about the big picture. I looked back at my plans and realized that they were fantasies: too many papers, too many ideas for ambitious projects and not enough time. I decided to write down every project and commitment on my plate and everything I intended to finish.
14 things our PhD supervisors got right and why it mattered
There were unfinished case reports (short papers describing unusual clinical cases), a review article that I had promised but never started, collaborations that I was helping with, side analyses that I had volunteered for, obligations for several student committees, a clinical cohort analysis and a large gene-discovery project that was supposed to be a substantial component of my PhD. The list had 20 items.
Clearly, I had taken on too much. The problem was that when I gave all of my projects equal weight, I drifted towards the easier tasks instead of the harder, more important ones. I kept taking the path of least resistance.
Staring at the list, I knew that finishing everything was impossible. I forced myself to answer a hard question: which of these 20 things do I need to complete to finish my PhD and graduate on time?
I circled three: a clinical case report that I was revising, a manuscript describing a previously unknown genetic cause of kidney disease that I hoped to get published by the end of 2024 and a clinical cohort study on which I planned to base one of my thesis chapters.
Letting go
... continue reading