Category: Productivity

According to Parkinson’s Law, work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Let us try to understand this with the help of a story. One of my friends was working on a research paper and she was almost done with the paper. Her supervisor had advised her to make some corrections and send it again to her for the final check. My friend said that it would take around 2 hours to finish and then she will be working on her second paper. Suddenly, her supervisor called again and said she would be busy with some other work and cannot check the paper in the weekend. Now, my friend has two days extra with her for finishing the work.

On Monday morning, I saw her working on the same paper. She said now that she had more time to finish; she thought of making it more perfect. However, she feels if she would analyze the amount of work devoted, she has not even done more than 1 hour work on that paper. This is exactly what Parkinson’s law means.

The solution here is to give half the time that have been allocated to finish the work and should be followed strictly. It may happen some work would take more than the allocated time. But you will see most of the time you would be completing the work before the deadline and would have free time for other things to do.

Thank You.

 

Hofstadter’s law states that it usually takes longer to accomplish the task than expected even if you consider the time allowance before. It discusses about the difficulty in estimating the time to finish a complex or a lengthy task. Sometimes, what we do is prepare a long to-do list for the day and expect it to finish by the end of the day or in the allocated time that we have earlier decided. Most of the time, we are not able to finish even half of the work that we have mentioned in the list. The root cause of the problem here is we focus more on the to do list or what we want to do rather than what we are currently doing. Firstly, it is better to analyze exactly how we are spending our time with. Then we can try to reduce the time in those not so important things and even can ignore certain things. We can add up those extra time to the plan that we have prepared for completing the task.

Have a good day!

Today, I want to write about something called Imposter syndrome, which is quite common among new PhD students. The students tend to believe that they are not smart enough or too stupid to do a PhD. All the previous degrees that are bestowed upon them, are some kind of mistake, or they are just wrongly admitted to the institution for the degree. They live in an internalized fear that someone will find out the same and they will be identified as fraud. Even though the students have accomplished a lot, they find it very difficult to acknowledge that thing.
How does it affect? The students tend to struggle with their basic course work or concepts: the things they had good grasp and excellency in the past. It often results in more anxiety, low self-esteem, over preparation or procrastination of work.

To deal with the problem, these are some tips that I found on the internet:
• It is better to take a break from social media, or some websites, where people are constantly bragging about their achievements.
• Talking with friends/colleagues those who might be undergoing with the same kind of notions.
• Its better to stop thinking about what others might think. As of human tendency, we tend to believe that we are in the lime light. But, in reality everyone is busy with their own life. Nobody is going to think about what others have achieved or not all the time.
Hope you find this article helpful.
Thank You.

My first blog post was on 17th September, 2021. Before starting the blog, I had few conflicts in my mind, and many of you who wants to start a blog can relate to this as well. I would like to share those dilemmas that I had before starting a blog, with you:

1. Why would somebody like to be in my audience?

There are millions of eminent writers and highly knowledgeable persons in the internet. It will be quite hard for me to raise the bar.

2. Am I yelling into the void?

The first thing I was thinking of is maybe I would continue to write and nobody’s going to read the posts.

3. What am I going to contribute?

Anything I can think of is already there on the internet. There will be no originality in my content.

4. Is it worth to start a blog in 2021?

In each day, millions of blog posts are published. Competitions has increased significantly in the blogging world. Also, the attention of internet users has shifted considerably towards Youtube and podcasts. It would be quite difficult for me to generate revenue out of it.

5. And finally, the hurdle in every PhD student’s path: the time, how much time I can spend on blogging?

Probably, I am not a blogging expert in advising solution to the above listed problems. But after doing a bit of research, I have came across few things that helped me in getting started. I would like to share those stuffs that I found helpful:

1. The Curse of Knowledge

Sometimes when an expert try to communicate or teach about certain thing, they tend to assume that the audience have certain prior background of that area or they no longer remember what are the difficulties they were facing when they were just the beginners. So, instead of trying to think that we do not have enough expertise for writing the stuffs, it is better to document it from an amateur point of view.

2. Consistency is the Key

What I have observed in the internet for some bloggers or youtubers, in the blogs or in their youtube channels, the number of views in the initial posts are quite low as compared to their recent one. Some posts are huge success and some are not. If they would have stopped posting new content for low view count, probably the internet would not have not got some amazing post that it has now. The feel of “screaming into the void” is kind of part of the process.

3. Exactly like discussed in point 1, in the beginning documenting an experience of learning would be great.

4.“There is no such thing as enough”. At the time of starting a blog we think that we do not have something extraordinary or innovative to contribute or things that will make us stand out. Actually, we are terrible judges of ourselves. The reader should decide is it worth it or not. Possibly at the beginning, it will be difficult to make money out of it. But with patience and consistency, things will work out slowly.

5. The idea of perfectionism

Often, we indulge in the notion of making our content perfect. We spend too much time in wordings, grammar or editing the font size and style etc. rather than in the content. The solution here is to instead of saying I don’t have time for this, just to put the content in a raw format. Apart from that after 8 hours of sleep we still have 16 hours left. Even, if we leave 10 hours for working, we still have 6 hours left for doing rest of the things. Its good to track the schedule again and find the slot for writing.

These are the few things that motivated me for starting a blog.

Hope you found it worth reading.

Cheers!