Why You Should Be “Task Snacking” Instead of Feasting
"...with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees...I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again..." - F. Scott Fitzgerald There is something about the return of the spring light and the sudden appearance of green that...
Spring Cleaning Your Workspace: A Simple Way to Boost Dissertation Productivity
Last weekend, I decided it was time for some spring cleaning. Not the overly ambitious “empty every closet in the house” kind of cleaning. Just a broad-stroke reset after a long winter. I cleared a stack of papers that had been quietly growing on my desk and organized...
The Energy Paradox: Solving the Mid-Life Ph.D. Crisis
“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” - Vincent van Gogh Energy changes as you get older. It simply does. Do you remember when you used to start your night at 9:00 PM? You’d head to a café, order an espresso and pull a focused six-hour...
Valentine’s Day: A Way to Find the Heart of Your Thesis
Valentine’s Day tends to evoke roses, prix fixe menus in crowded restaurants and the quiet pressure to create romance. But that framing might be more limiting than we realize. If we’re honest, the things that make our hearts beat faster are rarely based in...
Your Phone Is Holding Part of Your Dissertation (And You Don’t Even Know It)
I have 23 voice memos on my phone right now. Some are untranscribed, unlistened-to, slowly accumulating like particles of digital dust. There's one from last October where I'm apparently making a to-do list while walking to the cafe down my street. Another from last...
From Avoidance Loops to Flow States: Re-Training Your Academic Mind
I'd like to tell you I wrote this piece in one glorious sitting, fingers tip-tapping away, ideas cascading onto the page like energetic espresso shots. In reality, I wrote a few sentences, checked the weather in New York (no, I am not in NYC), made chai tea and then...
December Can Be Your Secret Weapon
The other day, a client told me she was "waiting until after the holidays" to get back to her dissertation. I paused briefly. After the holidays? January, when everyone returns exhausted, broke and facing three months of dark and cold weather? That January...? Here's...
Choosing a Dissertation Topic That Leads to Career Options Outside of Academia
Let me tell you about a former client of mine—let’s call him Brad. Brad was kind, well-read and simply hell-bent on writing his dissertation on the use of punctuation in 14th-century French legal manuscripts. Yes, I’m sure someone out there finds that topic riveting....
The Mental Health Landscape of Dissertations
As a Ph.D. student, are you concerned about your mental health? The journey of a dissertation can often feel astonishingly solitary, a terrain where the weight of stress, anxiety and daily worries can create a profound sense of isolation. The modern world carries its...
The Myth of Constant Productivity
We live inside an exhausting mythology: that the most successful among us are always in the process of doing, creating, producing. Certainly, this mindset thrives in dissertation culture in most academic programs. “You’re so lucky to be here in this Ph.D. program,”...