Discipline-driven PhD, inspired by the book “The 12 week year” -Brian P.Moran & Michael Lennington

We, humankind, are full of good motivation, but it never lasts forever. Procrastination is a way of not turning dreams into goals neither actions. In life, especially in a long-term project as going on a PhD journey, you absolutely need a PLAN.

In this article, I am inspired by the 12 week year written by Brian P.Moran & Michael Lennington. The aim of this book is to reevaluate our performance checkpoints; People often take a step back at the end of the year, to reassess their annual performances. But a year is a long time, and our goals change with seasons until you lose sight of them. So what about having several ends of the year? What if our year is 12 weeks rather than 12 months? What if your week is a month? And your day a week?

To stand on this new time referential, you will need to quantify your efforts by three measures :

• Satisfaction criterion :
• Progress bar
• Time allocation

In the following, we will proceed with a gradual decomplexification; we will go from the vision to its implementation over 12 weeks, 1 month, 1 week, and 1 day.

The 1 Year Vision, Goals oriented

In this part, you will have to center all your goals around a vision, which you will not hesitate to name: commitment, curiosity, marathon…

You define then the major axes that bring your vision to fulfillment, also allowing to have a fair balance: research, transversal, personal, health…

Research can be all related to : the number of research questions, paper writing, scientific article submission, conferences attending, projects involvement, collaborations…

Transversal can be defined by any new knowledge indirectly beneficial to the pursuit of research activity: programming, mathematics, communication, analytics, teaching…

Health is non-negligible factor: physical health, mental health, social health…

Personal represents all your desired achievements on a personal level: travels, savings, entrepreneurship project…

Every improvement area could be refined to a detailed level, and here we introduce our first measure “Satisfaction criterion”:

• Research → Paper writing → Satisfaction criterion = 2 (stands for 2 papers)
• Transversal → Programming → Python learning → Satisfaction criterion = 2 intermediate certifications + 1 advanced certification.
• Health → physical health →Regular weekly training → Satisfaction criterion = 3 times / week
• Personal → travels → Satisfaction criterion = 1 new destination / 12 weeks

The 1 Year Vision, 12 weeks oriented

Now that the goal-oriented vision is defined and measured, it is time to distribute the workload on an equity basis. We introduce first our second measure “ Progress bar”.

The progress bar will allow you to define the degree of involvement you expect to engage in your vision within 12 weeks.

You will choose you proper configuration leading to a 100 % achievement. Let’s consider as an example the following configurations :

Month 1- Month 3, Month 4- Month 6 , Month 7- Month 9, Month 10- Month 12: 25%

Month 1- Month 3 , Month 7- Month 9, Month 10- Month 12: 20% and , Month 4- Month 6 : 40%

Now you can split your one-year vision goals-oriented to your chosen configuration, let’s consider an equal involvement within every 12 weeks (first proposed configuration above), you will simply have to split every sub-goal into a 12 weeks panel :

• Research → Paper writing → Satisfaction criterion = 2 (stands for 2 papers)

— Month 1- Month 3: 0, Month 4- Month 6: 1 , Month 7- Month 9: 0, Month 10- Month 12: 1

• Transversal → Programming → Python learning → Satisfaction criterion = 2 intermediate certifications + 1 advanced certification.

— Month 1- Month 3: 1 intermediate , Month 4- Month 6: 1 intermediate , Month 7- Month 9: 0, Month 10- Month 12: 1 advanced

• Health → physical health →Regular weekly training → Satisfaction criterion = 3 times / week

— Month 1- Month 3: 36times , Month 4- Month 6: 36times, Month 7- Month 9: 36 times , Month 10- Month 12: 36 times

• Personal → travels → Satisfaction criterion = 1 new destination / 12 weeks

— Month 1- Month 3: 1 destination , Month 4- Month 6: 1 destination, Month 7- Month 9: 1 destination , Month 10- Month 12: 1 destination

12 weeks plan , 4 weeks oriented

Now that we have a more measurable expectation within 12 weeks basis, we apply the same approach explained above to split the workload in monthly basis.

Assume the Month 1- Month 3 period :

• Research → Paper writing → Satisfaction criterion = 2 (stands for 2 papers)

— Month 1- Month 3: 0

• Transversal → Programming → Python learning → Satisfaction criterion = 2 intermediate certifications + 1 advanced certification.

— Month 1- Month 3: 1 intermediate

— — Week 1- Week 4: 30% certification program, Week 5- Week 8: 40% certification program , Week 9- Week 12: 30% certification program

• Health → physical health →Regular weekly training → Satisfaction criterion = 3 times / week

— Month 1- Month 3: 36 times

— — Week 1- Week 4: 12 times, Week 5- Week 8: 12 times, Week 9- Week 12: 12 times.

• Personal → travels → Satisfaction criterion = 1 new destination / 12 weeks

— Month 1- Month 3: 1 destination

— — Week 1- Week 4: 0, Week 5- Week 8: 1 travel , Week 9- Week 12: 0.

What will my day look like ?

At this point, the vision is far from simple desired goals but more likely close to an achievable plan. To present our last unit of measure, we need to stop and think about what our day would look like.

Let’s assume having a 12 hours day. One way to configure your day is to define sallow work units , deep work units and free time.

shallow work: requiring low concentration ability as writing emails, meetings…

deep work: requiring high concentration ability as paper reading, paper writing..

We can associate transversal to shallow work units, research to deep work units and health/personal to free time units. This leads us to introduce our last unit of measure “Time allocation”. You will have to define the value of your unit, here we consider a 2 hours unit.

1 Month Plan , week oriented

In what follows, time allocation is strongly emphasized. It concretely measure what will be, more or less, the time allocated to the realization of what we can say: a main task.

1 Week Plan , day oriented

As above, it is a matter of dividing the weekly time allocation on a daily basis for the various main tasks into daily tasks.

The day plan

If you get to this part, you have already chosen your path, you just have to take it. Your daily plan could take many configurations, we propose two :

— Health (2h), Research (2h), Transversal (2h), Research (2h),Transversal (2h), Personal (2h)

— Health (1h), Research (1h), Transversal (2h), Research (1h), Transversal (2h), Research (2h), Personal (2h)

To summarize, this approach allows the objectives to be broken down into sub-objectives until the daily granularity of the task is reached. It allows you to position yourself on a new temporal frame where what you will have been able to accomplish in one year is accomplished in 12 weeks, the efforts provided in 1 month are those provided in 1 week, and the week remains a day.

This approach does not exclude hazard. This is why it would be necessary to implement specific mechanisms according to each person to manage unforeseen : one mechanism would be to free up time in anticipation of hazards, another one would rather be reprioritizing tasks and make the choice to take / leave some.

We must keep in mind an undeniable principle of efficiency: We cannot control what we cannot measure. And don’t forget to reward yourself on every accomplishment !