I'm a fan of many of these books! Readers of Atomic Habits and The Power of Habit should also read Hard to Break: Why Our Brains Make Habits Stick by Russell Poldrack. This helps temper the optimistic expectations that habits are easy to form, and helps explain why habits are so hard to break when established.
Some great insights here; thank you for sharing! I'm actually developing a piece of software which will help maintain focused productivity; I'm quite excited about it. Once I get it working, I might share more about it here.
Michael that sounds like a fantastic project! Maintaining focused productivity is such a challenge and having the right tools can make a huge difference... I’d love to hear more about how your software works once you’re ready to share. Keep us posted!
I remember when I was younger I woke up at 5 to run, but I lost the habit, and to be honest, lately I'm´a little chaotic in every aspect of my life. I´ve never heard of the Eisenhower Matrix...
Sometimes, all it takes is one key habit to bring order to every other aspect of life! Waking up early to run is truly impressive...you have my full admiration!
Life-coaching for the doctoral student? I'm quietly horrified that there's a market for this.
Could we be realistic for a minute, please? If you matriculate at age 17, then you might reasonably commence a PhD by age 21 as I did.
Your brain's own neurology won't have finished developing for four years and by then you may have completed your doctorate. Your metabolism is all over the place. You haven't the first clue of what's going to work for you for the rest of your life or how it's going to change, and you can't even rely on your own evaluation criteria because your risk/reward recognition is out of whack -- typically until at least your thirties if not later.
And *this* is the mind you want to flood with prescriptive habits?
Can I respectfully suggest that the most useful things for a young, full-time doctoral student to do are:
1. Ensure financial stability for the duration;
2. Get good, active, engaged, competent supervision and have a backup in case that becomes unavailble;
3. Develop basic time-management, risk-management and project management skills;
4. Establish what a successful product should look like, and what it must contain at minimum for your chosen project;
5. Spend the first third of your time working forwards to build capability in your field, and the remaining time working backwards from the target product to ensure progress and quality;
6. Find healthy ways to keep the stress down (there are vast numbers of these), and
7. Aim to deliver an acceptable product as soon as possible so that you can move on to something else.
All of these remain much the same for part-time and mature study, except that the resources are different and there may be more to balance.
But for pity's stake, please stop telling 21 year-olds when to sleep, LoA. They're in a research degree and not a cult.
Thank you, Ruv, for sharing your thoughts here 😊
I’d like to clarify a few things:
1) This is not a marketplace—no one is paying or being paid, and no one is required to do so.
2) There is no life coaching happening here. I’m simply sharing my own experiences, and everyone is free to take what resonates with them—or nothing at all, if that’s the case.
3) A PhD can be started at any age, as long as one has the appropriate degree. Not everyone begins at 21, and even if they do, there’s nothing wrong with that. Every experience contributes to neural plasticity—spoken from a neuroscientist’s perspective.
4) Most of your suggestions have already been discussed extensively in previous posts.
5) I’ve never told anyone when they should sleep—quite the opposite. I always emphasize that everyone should adapt their habits to their own rhythm, without forcing anything.
I kindly ask you to be more mindful of the topics we discuss here. And if you’re not interested, please feel free to unsubscribe—no one is, or ever will be, obligated to follow a Substack profile. Thank you for your understanding 😊
LoA, thank you for considering my objections and responding. Regarding your specific points:
1. Commercial remuneration for life-coaching — wasn’t stated nor implied in my objection, however you did refer life-coach references for doctoral students. This rebuttal is therefore a straw-man.
2. No life-coaching. Incorrect. You advocated for it when you endorsed life-coaching texts.
3. Varying age of candidates — a representative age of commencement makes a reasonable exception to general advice if the advice is likely to be inappropriate for that age. To argue that there are also other ages of commencement is irrelevant since I also mentioned the same, and the point does not invalidate the exception. This clarification is also a straw-man.
4. Prior suggestions previously discussed — I should hope so! They’re critical success factors. Yet the reason to highlight them is that you talked often about 'success' in your article without mentioning the importance of these factors, or referencing any other article in which similar factors might have appeared.
5. Sleep times — your article endorsed a billionaire-authored text advocating a 5am start (was that a 21 year-old self-made billionaire doing a PhD?) These books were never written for your target audience, and your target audience may have literally no idea what works for them. While I’m personally fond of a 5am start, it’s not advice that I could offer twentysomethings even as an aspiration, without considering how sleep actually works for the age range. Your uncritical endorsement risks negligence through inadequate research and poorly-phrased advice. Noting the costs, stresses and risks already associated with doctoral research, I respectfully refer you to the Substack content policy against doing harm. How do you know that the advice you cited actually makes a doctoral life any better? Without seeking to insult, you haven't completed your own course successfully yet. Why are you already advising on success, instead of exploring what it means? Surely the earliest time to give informed strategic advice is when you're eventually supervising.
Moving now to context and potential lessons learned:
It’s understandable for a research student to aspire to become an intellectual leader, LoA. Many have already demonstrated significant academic accomplishments before commencing a course of doctoral study, and I realise that might be true for you. Regardless, I admire your pro-active community focus, and celebrate your development of scientific and academic communication. If that's the future you want, then I too wish it for you and I have already offered support for detailed discussion.
Yet I regret that I must also remind you that appeals to popular authority have literally nothing to do with the sciences. The oldest surviving scientific organisation is the Royal Society, whose motto is Nullius in Verba — take nobody’s word for it. That advice is highly applicable here.
The ‘authorities’ that you appealed to in your article were not tested for their applicability to doctoral study including the age and context of the audience. Further, the fact that the life-coaching segment has low (virtually no) barrier to entry, and is full of fraud, woo, unscrupulous advice, and sometimes ludicrous admonitions seems unknown to you.
If you had only reported that you're experimenting with these ideas then I'd have complimented you, asked you what you expected to find, and just warned you about life-coaching books and the risk of lost focus and burnout. But you pitched this advice like you already knew the answers. (Really? Then where's the data?) Absent testing, that's effectively TikTok-style cult influence targeting a vulnerable group. Yet you claim to be a doctoral student in the medical sciences and should already have had drummed into you the ethic of primum non nocere: first do no harm. Why would anyone serious about practicing in the sciences promote untested advice on the career-critical projects of stressed-out young strangers, and when challenged, go on to defend having done so?
Contrary to your complaint about topic focus, I trust that you might now see that my objections were very much on topic — in fact I felt that some of my concerns were urgent and I hope that you now may better understand them.
I also understand that my comments were unexpected and disagreeable to you, but I’d respectfully ask: so what? If you mean to research in the sciences, then the unexpectedly disagreeable is a daily consequence of experiment and peer review. Further, if you publish openly rather than to restricted circulation, then in exchange for broader circulation you’ll also get the comments that you get.
Having considered your clarifications I stand by my earlier response and unless you have questions, I shall consider this matter ended. I hope that this response may become useful to you, and you have my best wishes for your future posts.
I'm a fan of many of these books! Readers of Atomic Habits and The Power of Habit should also read Hard to Break: Why Our Brains Make Habits Stick by Russell Poldrack. This helps temper the optimistic expectations that habits are easy to form, and helps explain why habits are so hard to break when established.
Matt thanks for your suggestion, I'll definitely do that!
Great! Let me know what you think of Hard to Break
Some great insights here; thank you for sharing! I'm actually developing a piece of software which will help maintain focused productivity; I'm quite excited about it. Once I get it working, I might share more about it here.
Michael that sounds like a fantastic project! Maintaining focused productivity is such a challenge and having the right tools can make a huge difference... I’d love to hear more about how your software works once you’re ready to share. Keep us posted!
I remember when I was younger I woke up at 5 to run, but I lost the habit, and to be honest, lately I'm´a little chaotic in every aspect of my life. I´ve never heard of the Eisenhower Matrix...
Sometimes, all it takes is one key habit to bring order to every other aspect of life! Waking up early to run is truly impressive...you have my full admiration!
Life-coaching for the doctoral student? I'm quietly horrified that there's a market for this.
Could we be realistic for a minute, please? If you matriculate at age 17, then you might reasonably commence a PhD by age 21 as I did.
Your brain's own neurology won't have finished developing for four years and by then you may have completed your doctorate. Your metabolism is all over the place. You haven't the first clue of what's going to work for you for the rest of your life or how it's going to change, and you can't even rely on your own evaluation criteria because your risk/reward recognition is out of whack -- typically until at least your thirties if not later.
And *this* is the mind you want to flood with prescriptive habits?
Can I respectfully suggest that the most useful things for a young, full-time doctoral student to do are:
1. Ensure financial stability for the duration;
2. Get good, active, engaged, competent supervision and have a backup in case that becomes unavailble;
3. Develop basic time-management, risk-management and project management skills;
4. Establish what a successful product should look like, and what it must contain at minimum for your chosen project;
5. Spend the first third of your time working forwards to build capability in your field, and the remaining time working backwards from the target product to ensure progress and quality;
6. Find healthy ways to keep the stress down (there are vast numbers of these), and
7. Aim to deliver an acceptable product as soon as possible so that you can move on to something else.
All of these remain much the same for part-time and mature study, except that the resources are different and there may be more to balance.
But for pity's stake, please stop telling 21 year-olds when to sleep, LoA. They're in a research degree and not a cult.
Thank you, Ruv, for sharing your thoughts here 😊
I’d like to clarify a few things:
1) This is not a marketplace—no one is paying or being paid, and no one is required to do so.
2) There is no life coaching happening here. I’m simply sharing my own experiences, and everyone is free to take what resonates with them—or nothing at all, if that’s the case.
3) A PhD can be started at any age, as long as one has the appropriate degree. Not everyone begins at 21, and even if they do, there’s nothing wrong with that. Every experience contributes to neural plasticity—spoken from a neuroscientist’s perspective.
4) Most of your suggestions have already been discussed extensively in previous posts.
5) I’ve never told anyone when they should sleep—quite the opposite. I always emphasize that everyone should adapt their habits to their own rhythm, without forcing anything.
I kindly ask you to be more mindful of the topics we discuss here. And if you’re not interested, please feel free to unsubscribe—no one is, or ever will be, obligated to follow a Substack profile. Thank you for your understanding 😊
LoA, thank you for considering my objections and responding. Regarding your specific points:
1. Commercial remuneration for life-coaching — wasn’t stated nor implied in my objection, however you did refer life-coach references for doctoral students. This rebuttal is therefore a straw-man.
2. No life-coaching. Incorrect. You advocated for it when you endorsed life-coaching texts.
3. Varying age of candidates — a representative age of commencement makes a reasonable exception to general advice if the advice is likely to be inappropriate for that age. To argue that there are also other ages of commencement is irrelevant since I also mentioned the same, and the point does not invalidate the exception. This clarification is also a straw-man.
4. Prior suggestions previously discussed — I should hope so! They’re critical success factors. Yet the reason to highlight them is that you talked often about 'success' in your article without mentioning the importance of these factors, or referencing any other article in which similar factors might have appeared.
5. Sleep times — your article endorsed a billionaire-authored text advocating a 5am start (was that a 21 year-old self-made billionaire doing a PhD?) These books were never written for your target audience, and your target audience may have literally no idea what works for them. While I’m personally fond of a 5am start, it’s not advice that I could offer twentysomethings even as an aspiration, without considering how sleep actually works for the age range. Your uncritical endorsement risks negligence through inadequate research and poorly-phrased advice. Noting the costs, stresses and risks already associated with doctoral research, I respectfully refer you to the Substack content policy against doing harm. How do you know that the advice you cited actually makes a doctoral life any better? Without seeking to insult, you haven't completed your own course successfully yet. Why are you already advising on success, instead of exploring what it means? Surely the earliest time to give informed strategic advice is when you're eventually supervising.
Moving now to context and potential lessons learned:
It’s understandable for a research student to aspire to become an intellectual leader, LoA. Many have already demonstrated significant academic accomplishments before commencing a course of doctoral study, and I realise that might be true for you. Regardless, I admire your pro-active community focus, and celebrate your development of scientific and academic communication. If that's the future you want, then I too wish it for you and I have already offered support for detailed discussion.
Yet I regret that I must also remind you that appeals to popular authority have literally nothing to do with the sciences. The oldest surviving scientific organisation is the Royal Society, whose motto is Nullius in Verba — take nobody’s word for it. That advice is highly applicable here.
The ‘authorities’ that you appealed to in your article were not tested for their applicability to doctoral study including the age and context of the audience. Further, the fact that the life-coaching segment has low (virtually no) barrier to entry, and is full of fraud, woo, unscrupulous advice, and sometimes ludicrous admonitions seems unknown to you.
If you had only reported that you're experimenting with these ideas then I'd have complimented you, asked you what you expected to find, and just warned you about life-coaching books and the risk of lost focus and burnout. But you pitched this advice like you already knew the answers. (Really? Then where's the data?) Absent testing, that's effectively TikTok-style cult influence targeting a vulnerable group. Yet you claim to be a doctoral student in the medical sciences and should already have had drummed into you the ethic of primum non nocere: first do no harm. Why would anyone serious about practicing in the sciences promote untested advice on the career-critical projects of stressed-out young strangers, and when challenged, go on to defend having done so?
Contrary to your complaint about topic focus, I trust that you might now see that my objections were very much on topic — in fact I felt that some of my concerns were urgent and I hope that you now may better understand them.
I also understand that my comments were unexpected and disagreeable to you, but I’d respectfully ask: so what? If you mean to research in the sciences, then the unexpectedly disagreeable is a daily consequence of experiment and peer review. Further, if you publish openly rather than to restricted circulation, then in exchange for broader circulation you’ll also get the comments that you get.
Having considered your clarifications I stand by my earlier response and unless you have questions, I shall consider this matter ended. I hope that this response may become useful to you, and you have my best wishes for your future posts.