5 Goal-Setting Techniques for Turbulent PhD Environments

Juggling dissertation writing, work and social commitments can be difficult for many PhD students. We have some of our top tips to manage your workload and achieve your PhD writing goals.

Many productivity experts promote various goal-setting techniques. Claiming that achieving the things you want in life without them simply isn't possible. Long-term planning is seen as the only viable method of realising consistent progress and allocating your resources wisely. While this approach was generally effective in the past, the previous several years have exposed all of us to unprecedented levels of uncertainty.

As a PhD student, you will probably be exposed to many of these risks due to skyrocketing costs of living and the increasing challenge of finding well-paid jobs to match your postdoctoral expertise. Even in 2019, 62% of Nature’s survey respondents from this group were not satisfied with their university programmes. As these figures have substantially increased, we are all facing the question of how to actually plan our future in a turbulent environment that continuously disrupts our dreams and expectations.

With that being said, the complete absence of planning can be seen as an equally problematic decision. You need to find the fine balance between viewing the world as utter chaos and developing detailed long-term expectations that can be easily disrupted. In this article, we will analyse 5 goal-setting techniques that are applicable to turbulent PhD environments.

1. Focus on the Overall Vision

If you are trying to get fit, your personal trainer can introduce regular changes to your gym workout programme. While this may be disorienting to some athletes, the overall long-term goal does not change. You still want to get fit. The things changing are the short-term methods you are using to get closer to this goal.

This is similar to mountain climbing. Despite your efforts, you can discover that one planned path does not allow you to reach the summit. So what now? You take two steps backwards, move to the left or to the right, and try another path. You still need to get to the summit even if this takes more attempts than originally expected. Your overall plan does not change, while your tactical steps may vary to accommodate situational hindrances.

If you think about it, this strategy is applicable to most spheres in which long-term planning is limited by uncertainty factors. When you buy a gym subscription, no personal trainer can tell you how fast you are going to progress. While consistent efforts will guarantee good results in the long-term, your short-term growth will be limited by your past habits, your state of physical health, and your genetics. This doesn't mean that you will not progress. This simply means that you may need to try multiple approaches to training to find the workout routine that works best for you.

Similarly, your first PhD year is the time of experimentation when you have to identify the optimal focus of your work and develop a practical routine ensuring your future success. External uncertainty may simply extend this period of ambiguity and force you to test new strategies. However, your final goal will remain the same.

This approach allows you to stay focused on your long-term motivation for doing your PhD. However, the sheer number of uncertainty factors may adversely affect your self-confidence. Can you really manage the stress that seems unbearable? More on this in the following section.

 

 

2. Measure Your Risks of Failure

The impact of uncertainty is associated with an increased cognitive load and high stress levels. You might the inkling that something that will affect your life in ways you cannot even imagine. Or can you? When we sit down to define how our complete and utter failure would look, we can suddenly view these threats as usual risks and apply conventional risk management techniques to them.

Let's take a look at the following example:

 

Risk Name	Risk Magnitude	Risk Probability	Risk Value
Economic crisis affecting your funding	7	5	35
Health problems	8	5	40
Family problems	7	4	28

 

When we calculate individual risk magnitude and risk probability on a 1-10 scale and multiply them to obtain corresponding risk values, we come to some interesting conclusions:

• Your health problems, such as chronic back pain, can be more dangerous to your success than economic crises.
• Despite their high magnitude, some risks have low probability and cannot be controlled directly.
• Some risks are so minor in terms of their magnitude that they can be incurred in the case of their emergence.

As soon as you run out of risks to appraise, you can apply the four risk management techniques to:

• Accept minor risks.
• Avoid major risks.
• Transfer major risks (e.g. insurance).
• Reduce major risks (magnitude, probability or both).

If you find that some risks will ‘kill’ your long-term PhD goals in any scenario, you should see them as your ‘failure points’. This way, you will be able to distinguish some normal fear associated with impostor syndrome or anxiety from real threats that require instant response and may force you to reconsider your strategic plans.

3. Set a Routine

Most things in our lives are a marathon. If you want to get fit, you have to perform exercises every 3-4 days. If you want to get a doctoral degree, you have to work on your thesis for several hours every day. This is something that leads to success and does not change, no matter what.

If things get really turbulent, some of these strategies may need to be adjusted. However, they will not be cancelled completely unless you encounter the aforementioned ‘failure point’ that you cannot manage with the resources that you have. This is something stable that you can define to reduce the amount of uncertainty in your plans. You will do morning exercises. You will spend at least 1-2 hours working on your thesis. You will meet your supervisor in accordance with a schedule.

By defining these points with maximum clarity, you create a structural framework of your lifestyle that you will adhere to despite the circumstances. While this may seem like a simple strategy, it can substantially reduce the amount of anxiety in your daily life. You simply do what has to be done instead of thinking about potential ‘black swans’ that may emerge. If they do, you already have a risk management strategy in place or a plan B for the worst-case scenario. This clarity really leaves no place for guesswork. You simply start realising one of the earlier defined strategies and proceed until you succeed or encounter the need for adjustment.

4. Embed Short-Term Wins

Let's imagine a popular situation. You have been working really hard on revising your draft. However, your supervisor criticised some of its parts and asked you to rewrite them. Would you feel frustrated in this situation? Should you still reward yourself for your hard work on these discarded parts?

Many PhD students provide a negative answer to this question. If their supervisor is not satisfied with their work, they are unworthy of a reward. They feel inherently bad for working hard all this time. They should have predicted this development of events in advance, even though they could not possibly have expected this outcome. Then, they apply the same mindset to any macro-environmental problems they encounter in the turbulent environment of today.

This self-inflicted punishment becomes a lifestyle that surely leads to increased productivity and motivation over time. Or not. The problem is, turbulent environments imply that you may not receive your hard-earned rewards even if you fully invest in a well-designed plan. The students starting their lab projects in 2020 could not haved prediced large-scale lockdowns in most areas and the extremely ineffective response of universities to the pandemic. This ‘black swan’ factor disrupted their academic journeys and rendered the results of their hard labour null and void. With problems of this magnitude emerging in many areas, the idea of rewarding oneself by self-inflicted punishment for the outcomes you are not responsible for looks like laying the blame at the wrong door.

The more realistic strategy for the brave new world implies embedding short-term wins in all your plans. Even if some of them fail due to external circumstances, you still deserve your reward. This way, you boost your ‘marathon motivation’ that is driving you towards your long-term goals no matter what. With success being defined as a number of consistent attempts, stimulating new efforts is the only way to cross the finish line sooner or later. This approach is in line with many productivity concepts, including ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear, who argues that small daily habits are more important than large-scale plans.

If you embed short-term wins for consistently working on your thesis 1-2 hours six days per week, this will definitely ‘get you there’ sooner or later. On the contrary, a long-term goal that can be easily disrupted can leave you ‘rewardless’ in the end if you choose to blame yourself for this failure.

5. Mix Academic and Personal Goals

In an ideally stable environment, you could get away with having two ‘to-do’ lists for your thesis-related activities and your personal life. Unfortunately, macro-environmental turbulence affects both spheres that become interdependent. If you lose your funding, this can stop you from completing your thesis on time. However, financial problems within your family or pandemic-related health complications had the same effect on the performance of thousands of PhD students in the recent past.

If you are serious about achieving your goals, you need to develop solid risk management strategies and regularly appraise your ‘risk profile’. This is a challenging feat for most people. It becomes even more daunting when you have to develop several risk management strategies for different areas of your life with multiple interdependencies and monitor this complexity afterwards.

The best approach here is to mix your academic and personal goals when planning your near future. You will not be writing your PhD in full isolation from your family, your friends, and your aspirations and values. Embedding these elements into your planning will help you see the ‘bigger picture’ and plan your resource allocation more effectively. This strategy also means that you will see the risks stemming from your costs of living, personal obligations or health issues. If these spheres contribute to the overall turbulence, you may have to discuss them with your supervisor and negotiate some ‘Plan B’ options for any adverse scenarios. Keep in mind that you should be the main risk manager responsible for the success of your project. Most stakeholders involved in it may be willing to listen to your suggestions and negotiate compromise plans. Hence, you need to run holistic risk analyses and make sure that you account for all possible threats.

The combination of academic and personal goals also helps you find a better work-life balance that can be transferable to your lifestyle beyond your PhD. Regardless of external circumstances, some basic things form your daily habits. This includes performing some academic or job-related tasks, working out or developing specialised skills over a long-term period. As suggested earlier, this should be the ‘core’ of your routine, giving you much-needed stability amidst the external turbulence. You can also ‘rank’ specific goals on this shared list to set priorities in the worst-case scenario. This way, you will clearly understand which of your objectives must be completed in the short-term perspective and which can be delayed if things go awry.

Planning your future actions in high-turbulence situations is a daunting task. The development of effective plans for addressing new challenges and mitigating possible risks may take a lot of time and thoughtful experimentation. Make sure that you do not expect a perfect strategy to develop overnight. Give yourself several months to experiment with the aforementioned techniques and do not be afraid of changing your plan from time to time. Good luck!