Surviving Grad School: Time Management Skills That Actually Work

By Yining Malloch, PhD

Is it possible to maintain a balanced and happy life in academia? How can you combat procrastination? How can you be an accomplished graduate student? How can you graduate on time? Can you multitask without getting mentally fatigued? This book will provide you with answers to all of the questions above. This quick 1-hour read teaches hands-on techniques to manage time and help you succeed in academia. You will learn the Reversed Planning method and the Parallel Rule that will allow you to unlock a more efficient workstyle. You will learn to build a Paper Pipeline to publish numerous papers quickly. The Peanut Rule will be the ultimate method to combat procrastination. Ph.D., Master's, prospective students and other academics can all benefit from this helpful guide. Yining Malloch Ph.D. obtained her doctorate at the University of California, Davis. She's a published and cited scholar. She currently works for a Silicon Valley company.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yining Malloch, PhD
• Release date: Jul 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201721404

Yining Malloch, PhD

Contact me: [e-mail]

Book preview

Surviving Grad School

Time Management Skills that Actually Work

Yining Malloch, Ph.D.

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Motivation: Why You Are Here Decides Your Future 7

Reversed Planning: How to Graduate on Time 10

Reversed Planning 10

Managing Advisors 14

The Parallel Rule: How to Multitask Effortlessly 16

The Parallel Rule 16

A New Way of Prioritization 19

The Paper Pipeline: How to Publish Many Papers Before Graduation21

The Paper Pipeline 21

Free Rides 25

No Work Weekends: How to Maintain Work-life Balance and Have Weekends like Normal People  27

Rules are Rules 27

Training Collaborators 30

The Peanut Rule: An Ultimate Guide to Combat Procrastination 32

The End 35

Introduction

You got into grad school. Great. Congrats. Now let’s get down to business. No chit chat.

Graduate school is hard and many people outside of academia do not believe that. At face value you don’t have the typical nine-to-five work hours or spend your days sitting in the office. Every time my friends outside of academia tell me they believe being a professor is an amazingly easy job where you just teach a few classes and have months of vacation I get a little upset. Academic life is like an iceberg where most of the workload and stress happens underneath the water. Graduate students have to do an enormous amount of work. Taking classes, teaching classes, writing papers, looking for jobs, taking care of oneself and family. It also doesn’t help that graduate programs are structured to be completed in only a couple years. In the US, PhD programs are ideally completed in four years and Master’s programs in two years. The challenge then is to finish that enormous amount of work in such a limited amount of time. Things don’t stop there either. On top of all that, research is not something that can provide you a consistent sense of achievement. Sometimes an experiment can take months or years of hard work but turns out to have no findings at all. Other times, after years of hard work, your paper finally gets published in a distinguished peer-reviewed journal and you’re rewarded with a few days of euphoria.

When I was in my PhD program, I witnessed how my peers struggled with managing time. I knew people who wished they could accomplish more but just never seemed to have enough time. I knew people who ended up staying in the program for six or seven years even when they absolutely did not want to. Others experienced serious mental or physical conditions because of the high stress and anxiety in graduate school. I experimented with many different time management strategies myself and found a handful that worked well for me. This is what motivated me to write this book.

I did my PhD in social science at the University of California, Davis. I’m not a genius or one of those legendary graduates if that’s what you are looking for. I was fairly ordinary, leaning towards the slightly