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A PhD Examined: Taking Good Habits to Work

Maintaining Good Habits for Life

Joe Riad
6 min readJan 26, 2025

With grad school being as hard as it is, you might think that your life will get considerably easier when you graduate. Let me quickly disabuse you of that notion: it won’t. Sure some aspects may become less stressful depending on your job, but things get more complicated as well. You have more responsibilities at work and you need to maintain a certain level of excellence there. With more free time on your hand, your personal life also grows more involved and makes more demands on your attention. You no longer have the safety net of being “just a student”. Life rarely gets easier.

This is a lesson I keep re-learning all the time and it’s the reason I have realized the importance of maintaining good sustainable habits in my life that carry me through the myriad complexities of the day-to-day. In my case I have found my PhD program to be the perfect time in my life to experiment and find what works best for me. The next important step was to maintain these habits and translate them to my work life as well.

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My Experience

For me, the number one priority was keeping my life organized. For this reason, my GTD workflow and my personal wiki were non-negotiables that I needed to bring into the workplace; good digital hygiene was a close third.

Due to my company’s policy, I found that I couldn’t maintain one GTD system and one personal wiki for both my personal and professional lives. I was forced to split my system into two systems, thereby keeping all data related to my work on company hardware. At first I balked at this and thought it will be a headache to maintain two systems instead of one. Later on I came to see this as a great advantage. It keeps a very hard boundary between my work and personal life and allows me to automatically “leave work at the office”. The extra upkeep overhead turned out to be way smaller than I feared.

I still strive to be intentional at work and focus on the big picture at all times. This helps me rise above the day-to-day, short-term job responsibilities and think about things that are likely to have more impact on my long-term career.

Another habit I carried with me is journaling about work. I can’t count the many times this journal has saved me. It’s a great record of my work and serves as a reminder of what I was working on before a long holiday so I can come back and hit the ground running.

I have also tried to keep up with new research in my field by checking new journal articles in the two most famous journals in my field every month. It keeps my theoretical knowledge fresh and can even help me with innovation.

I credit these habits at least partially with my promotion and general success in my current position and have no intention of dropping them any time soon.

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Grad School Habits to Keep

Here are some habits from grad school you should consider carrying over into your own job as well (be that corporate or academic):

  • Journaling about your work and documenting everything in your personal wiki. Keeping things documented can save you the headache of looking everywhere for a solution to a problem that you have already solved in the past.
  • Prioritizing work tasks based on impact. If you have a solid task management workflow, you’ll have a bird’s-eye view of all your tasks and will be able to pick the most impactful ones to work on. Also, make sure to give priority to tasks that are holding back someone else’s progress.
  • Maintaining a healthy relationship with email. As I detailed in a previous article, I restricted the times I check my e-mail inbox to three or four times every day so that I don’t get distracted by every incoming e-mail. This is even more important in a corporate environment where the volume of emails one receives is quite large.
  • Capturing everything somewhere that you review regularly. This is one of the most important habits I learned from GTD. Following it ensures that you never let anything slip through the cracks, whether it’s a task someone asks you to do, some paperwork you have to finish or a new idea you want to try. I have consistently been praised for my organizational skills because of this one habit alone.
  • Ensuring good regular communication with your direct manager. Following the example of holding regular lab meetings, it is good to keep your supervisor updated with your status to make sure you’re on the right track with your different responsibilities.
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Crucial Habits for Work

In addition to the above habits, there are habits whose importance grows quite strongly with the nature of corporate work, which is why I have chosen to highlight them in their own section.

  • Maintaining , which means processing e-mails and not leaving any messages in your inbox by the end of the day. This becomes crucial in a corporate environment where you may be flooded with dozens to hundreds of emails a day, most of which are not directly relevant to you. As unread messages pile up in your inbox, they become a source of stress. You’ll also grow desensitized to your inbox: if you’re used to there being 1000 unread emails in it, you may easily miss a new message that is very important. If you want to avoid the above scenario, you’ll likely have to check your inbox very frequently, which is an unwanted distraction. Inbox zero is the answer.
  • Networking and collaboration. This becomes arguably even more important after you get a job. You should benefit from the experience (technical or social) of your more senior colleagues who know “how things work” in every sense of the word. This is also a great driver for innovation and lets your contributions become more visible more quickly.
  • Keeping a focus on innovation. You should strive for innovation in all aspects of your work in order to add value to your team beyond your regular job duties. If you want to grow professionally, this is the way to go, so it’s important to always keep this mindset and look for new ways of connecting old ideas.
  • Continuous learning. Ideally, you should be curious and driven to learn in all areas of your life, not just work. It’s especially important at work so you can keep up with all the technical developments in your field and keep improving yourself. Growing your knowledge and skills demonstrates that you’re ready for the expanded job scope of a more senior role and puts you on track for promotion. Be aware that, unlike a university, your company may not push you to learn new things everyday. You have to be self-motivated on that front and keep pushing for it whenever you’re able.
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Concluding Thoughts

Grad school is the perfect testing ground for new ways to organize your personal and professional lives. It’s important to take a moment to reflect on these habits and recognize which of them were helpful to your success and maintain those ones after graduation. Be flexible and adapt these habits to your changing life situation to maintain the same level of success throughout all of your endeavors.

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