A PhD Examined : Logistical Aspects

Using Productivity Tools to Make Bigger Things

11 min readSep 1, 2024

A significant challenge of grad school, besides the obvious technical one, is the need to manage a lot of complexity. You are constantly getting new inputs. Your advisor assigns you tasks, you get homework assignments in different classes, you need to manage paperwork requirements and keep up with deadlines,… Meanwhile, you need to remember to clean your apartment, prepare your meals, do your laundry, pay your taxes, and figure out your transportation. It would also be nice if you could pop out several creative ideas that you can publish for your dissertation when you have some time.

In a word, it was overwhelming. And it doesn’t stop at grad school: hopefully there’s a job waiting for you at the other end with requirements just as complex if not more. I had to find ways to manage all this and keep my head above water. This article details how I navigated these day-to-day issues.

Managing Tasks

My relationship with task management has been shaky and my pogress non-linear. Since my college days, I had the impulse to organize my time and manage my tasks effectively. I tried many different things. I started out with a rudimentary form of (first on paper and in my calendar app when smartphones became a thing). I also dabbled with sticky notes (virtual and physical). I tried listing my tasks and their estimated completion times in a spreadsheet and ticking them off one by one. I also tried the occasional task management app.

The story was always the same. I would have a period of boosted productivity (a week or two if I was lucky) and then, as the novelty of my system wore off or as the overhead of using it got too much, I would revert to keeping a mental list of tasks and working on them haphazardly. This “system” worked until it didn’t. Things always seemed to fall through the cracks.

Through a fortuitous chance, I came to learn about . This is the task management system I have been using for the past 5 years. In my journey towards finding a solid task management system, I have learned that there’s no single system that works for everyone. That being said, using GTD has taught me a couple of important principles that I think should be applied by anyone regardless of the way they manage their tasks.

It is important to have a system, whatever it is, that you stick
with and keep up-to-date.
It is vital to store any new inputs into your system (and not in your head) in an organized and consistent manner. This helped me deal with the overwhelming complexity I mentioned above while making sure nothing was forgotten.
The system should be easy to use so that the overhead of using it is not a deterrent.

As I mentioned above, there’s no magical magical solution that works for everyone all the time. The GTD method has been , by at least 1 person. I have seen others successfully use different methods like the or the . These days, focusing too much on personal productivity techniques is becoming a trap for me: it is easy to “work” on optimizing the way I work then find that I spent a lot of time not doing much in terms of actually important things. So I guess the takeaway is to not get too hung up on the system and do actual work!

Backing Up Work

I briefly touched on the topic of backing up work in the previous article. The main things I looked for in my backup system were:

Redundancy
Security
Ease of use

I achieved redundancy by keeping multiple backups: one on my personal laptop, one on my university workstation and one in the cloud on my Google Drive. It was important to me that the backups be on multiple media (local and online) in case of an unforeseen disaster that would lead to me losing my local copies.

I ensured the security of my local copies by remembering to always lock my screen when I stepped away from my laptop or workstation. For my online copy, I used to create an encrypted copy of my work that would be synced to my Google Drive.

The ease of use of my system was all thanks to git (the revision control software I mentioned in the previous article) which even allowed me to roll back my work to a previous version and leave helpful messages to myself every time I created a backup point. It also made it easy to keep multiple copies of my data as it kept track of what changed where and only copied the files that were changed instead of copying all my data (about 8GB by the time I graduated!) every time.

The ease of syncing can also be achieved with programs like
(Unix systems only) and there are of specialized backup programs (paid and free) that can be used for the same purpose on other platforms.

Having these backups was a great asset for my peace of mind. Through the years, I have come across people whose work was set back months (if not years) due to stolen laptops and malfunctioning hard drives.

Documenting Work

This is another thing that took me too long to learn. Documenting your work may be tedious but it’s very important and very useful in the long run. When I started writing a few lines at the end of every day detailing what I worked on and what the next steps were, I noticed a marked improvement in the quality of my work. You might think that you won’t forget much about yesterday’s work and don’t need to write down any reminders. That’s what I thought for a long time. I started running into trouble when I had to stop work on a project for something more urgent required by my advisor. After I took care of the more urgent task (which could last days or weeks, depending on what it was), I had to revisit the previous project and spend considerable time reminding myself about what I was doing that many weeks back.

Keeping a work journal freed me from this problem. Not only did I start the next day with a clearer plan in mind, I could also relax better on the weekends or on vacation. I knew that going back to work would be smooth as I’d have a reminder of what I had been working on and what I needed to do next. I still use this approach in my current job and it’s paying off wonderfully in terms of my work-life balance. Note how it meshes with the second principle of managing tasks: keep them in a trusted place consistently instead of in your head.

Managing Email

Over the course of my PhD program, I had two big breakthroughs that made managing my e-mail much better and far less stressful.

First, another student introduced me to the idea of turning off my phone’s e-mail notifications. It might sound silly but this was a revelation to me. I thought that I needed to stay on top of every e-mail in case there was an important communication about research that I was missing. Now, here was this fellow doctoral student telling me that I didn’t. Considering that we all (easily) receive over 50 messages a day, e-mail notifications are very distracting and tend to disrupt one’s focus and flow of work. My stress dropped and my focus improved drastically after I did this. For my peace of mind, I added a Gmail filter that based upon certain criteria in the message (e.g. from my advisor to me only) would forward it to my phone number .

Setting up a Gmail filter (screenshots by author)

The second big breakthrough came after I had implemented the above change for a while. Since I didn’t need to be on top of every incoming message, I didn’t need to check my inbox every five seconds. I started dedicating only certain times of the day to look at my e-mail. Typically, I would only check my e-mail at the start of the day, right after lunch and at the end of the day before leaving campus. I made sure to process all new messages so that my inbox had zero unread items every time I was done checking it. I still follow this approach at work and I find that it makes it much easier to manage the deluge of daily e-mails I receive.

Working on Research

I wish I had a magical way of producing creative work on cue. Failing that, I can describe what worked best for me. When I was brainstorming or working on a hard problem that needed creative thinking I stepped away from the shared office space in my building, found a nice and quiet place on campus, and took my work there. Sometimes I would go to the library and book one of their individual focus rooms, other times I would seek out the lobby of a building that had lots of natural sunlight and comfortable seating. I never took a laptop with me. I would either take a paper notebook or my tablet and stylus. I would use this quality time to tackle the problem at hand and then, when my ideas had crystallized I would go back and type them up neatly into my note-taking software.

What about times when I wasn’t feeling very creative? I was not very good at handling those. I tried to use such “down-time” to engage with my busywork and routine tasks. A far better approach I only later learned by observing my friends and colleagues is to build a habit of reading recent articles in one’s field. Constantly talking to others about their work and how it relates to one’s own is a big help too. I tried (and still do) to practice these with varying degrees of success but I know people who go very far in their creative work that way.

Later on, when I was writing my dissertation, I committed to writing a set amount of time (say 2 hours) every day and made sure to stick to that so I can get consistent progress on my writing. This approach also worked well when I was writing an article or working on a big seminar talk or lecture I had to give.

Transportation

Transportation logistics vary a lot depending on the state you live in. In Texas, where I did my PhD, most cities aren’t very walkable and public transportation options tend to be limited. Having a car in Texas is almost a necessity. Other states have big cities with subway systems or a solid bus system, in which case transportation options are much better and one only has to figure out the best option from a financial standpoint.

In my case, I applied for my driver’s license as soon as possible and leased a car as soon as I was able. Before that, I relied on sharing rides with friends (Uber hadn’t really become available yet and when it finally had it was expensive) to do my weekly groceries. I also used the university’s bus system quite extensively but that was only practical for getting to and from campus.

My recommendation to any prospective grad student sis to figure out the transportation options in the city they’d be living in and plan for the logistics of getting a car if needed.

Finances

I realize that this is an area where people’s experiences and circumstances will vary widely. In my case, I was fortunate to have worked at a startup alongside my master’s degree so I had a bit of money saved up that I brought with me when I started my PhD program. This helped me a lot with finances and I got a second big boost when I went on a summer internship that paid quite well.

I still had to monitor my finances closely and regularly pay off my credit card debt. This is important especially for newly incoming international students who need to build a good credit history by paying their credit card debts consistently and on time.

Whatever your particular situation, I recommend that you plan a budget based on your source of funding. More specifically, research cost of living in your destination city and plan /ahead of time/ how you will be budgeting your money. This is an area where it’s also good to rely on the experience of more senior students as they’re likely to know many expense-cutting tricks. One very useful resource that I obtained in such a way was , a website for healthy recipes that are easy and cheap. Another good place to start for a principled approach to finances is . This is the approach I’m currently exploring for myself.

Concluding Thoughts

It’s important to have systems in place to handle the day-to-day workings of your life in grad school. In almost all cases, it’s better to have these systems in place ahead of time so you’re already familiar with them before you start using them under “battle conditions”. Many of these systems are very useful for managing professional life after grad school as well and I can confirm from experience that they not only make work easier, but also let you advance in your career more smoothly.