Productivity Practices for Postgraduate Students: How to Hit the Ground Running

If you’re starting a PhD this September, you may be a little daunted by the prospect of making an independent contribution to your field, alongside completing an extended thesis, all within the next three to four years.

Maintaining a healthy work/ life balance, as well as ensuring you make the most of your time spent studying, will be critical to achieving this goal!

To help you stave off procrastination and get more done in less time, we’ve put together a list of productivity practices for postgraduate students.

#1 Set realistic goals

Let’s rip the plaster off right now – it’s not going to happen. You’re not going to be in the library at 6am every morning after an early-hours gym session and a protein smoothie, before knuckling down for twelve solid hours of research. You’re not going to bang out 2,000 words every day before breakfast.

Over-ambition is a one-way ticket to burnout. The more back-to-back hours you spend pouring over a textbook without so much as a coffee break, the less you’ll get out of the time you put in.

They say that success is the best motivator, so setting goals that you can actually achieve is what will keep you on track. Suppose you block out a manageable two hours to read that one paper you’ve been meaning to get to. Once you’ve got this done, you can have the satisfaction of ticking an item off your to-do list, before returning (after a short break!) all the more motivated to tackle the next one.

#2 Utilise ‘in-between’ time

Most days are full of little pockets of ‘in-between’ time that can be put to use. Whether you’re on the bus to campus, chopping vegetables for dinner, or tidying your room, the availability of audio content makes it easy to engage with your study material on the go. Podcasts, panel discussions, audiobooks or even readings of academic papers made using AI text-to-speech software are good examples.

This doesn’t mean you have to cram extra research into every spare second of your day. It’s also important to turn off from work, and if some relaxing tunes on your morning commute or during a particularly meditative washing-up session help you do this, all the better! But audio content can provide a relatively low-effort way to learn something new, if and when you feel like it.

PhD students tend to have very few contact hours (if any) and most of your time will be dedicated to independent research. This means that you’ll be entirely responsible for implementing a schedule to keep you on track.

Different levels of planning work for different people – so this might not necessarily mean blocking out every hour of the day. You could just commit to working between certain hours or write out a list of daily tasks each week. And as we emphasised earlier, make sure your schedule is one you can actually stick to, with plenty of time set aside for rest!

#4 Have a separate workspace

Separating where you relax and where you work can make you more effective at both. This might mean that you head to a library or coffee shop to study, and avoid working at home altogether, or that you make a commitment to always sit at your desk.

The cardinal rule, however, is to not work in bed. We know it’s tempting, but there’s a pretty strong body of evidence suggesting it’s bad for your physical and mental health. Plus, what will there be to crawl into after a long day’s work if you’ve been there since breakfast?

Hopefully this blog has inspired you to boost your productivity this academic year! We wish you the best of luck on your postgraduate journey.

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