Hey wonderful humans, welcome back to my channel my name is Lucy and
I’m a PhD student at the University of Birmingham
and today I want to talk to you all about how to get and stay motivated during your PhD.
One phrase I like to say a lot and I talk about this a lot with my friends who are
also doing PhDs is a PhD is a marathon, not a sprint. It's a mental marathon,
it's going to take you a long period of time. No one does it
quickly, no one does it in a rush, it's not physically possible. It's going to take you
at least three/four years and that's a long time to stay motivated on a single project.
So that's why I think today's video could help some of you out there who may be wanting that
little extra dash of motivation, or just some techniques that you can take to keep motivated.
So the first thing I think that really helps me with my motivation is setting goals, and you might
be sitting there thinking isn't the whole getting a PhD the goal? It is, but I would argue it's too
big in this instance. What I mean is you want to set a goal that is closer to what you're doing in
that particular moment. I try and set goals in roughly three months sprints, as I call them,
and basically what you want to do here is you want to say to yourself, to your supervisor to, whoever
you want to kind of be held accountable to for the next three months is ‘I’m going to focus on
blank’. For example I could say okay from now until March I’m gonna focus on my first chapter
on the queer body and I’m gonna make sure I kind of really get into that. Now that is a goal, it's
a little wishy-washy. So what we then want to do is we want to say - okay how can I make this goal
measurable? How can I make it so that when it gets to March I know whether I’ve completed it or not?
And the way we do that is you either set a word count, or you say you want to be on
this round of edits, or you want to have closely read this many books. Set a goal
that is big enough that it's something to achieve but to it's not too big that you're just going to
be overwhelmed and it's also something that you can measure and hold yourself accountable
for and I find that doing this really helps with my motivation because it gives me a clear focus to
aim for during that three month period, or however long you want to set the goal for.
So the second thing you can do to help you stay motivated
is look for the enjoyment and the positives within your goals. Now doing a PhD there are always going
to be aspects of it that you don't like and you don't enjoy and that is completely normal. There
are aspects of doing a PhD that I really dislike and I put off for a long time, so you want to set
goals that interest you and I realize this isn't always possible because there are always elements
of a PhD that you can't do but in general what I mean by this is set goals that you want to set.
Focus on things that you want to focus on right now, don't be persuaded by what other people
you know who are doing a PhD are doing, what your supervisor thinks you should be doing. Look inside
yourself, look at your research and really figure out ‘okay what do I think I need to focus on for
the next few months?’ And obviously then you want to talk to your supervisors about it. You want to
make sure you're not going completely off piece and doing something that just isn't relevant,
but ultimately you're the one who's going to be doing the work so you need to be the one who's
passionate and motivated and inspired to do this goal. So don't let anybody else set this goal for
you, it really does have to come from you and that will help you so much to stay motivated
to achieve it. Now on a similar note to that, you can't always set goals that you're 100% keen on.
Sometimes with a PhD you just have to get in and do the nitty-gritty and it's not necessarily fun
and it won't necessarily be your favourite area of research but it has to be done. There might be
a chapter, for example, that you're just not as passionate about or potentially there's an area
of research that you know is important but you've been putting it off or maybe there's a critic that
is super big in your field but you just don't get why and you don't understand them but you
know you need to get your head around it if you want to contribute and make good mature analyzed
contributions to your field. So this is what I mean when sometimes - even though I’ve just told
you set goals you want to set - sometimes that means setting goals that you might not want to do
but you know you need to do and I think in this case what really helps me when I have to set
goals that I’m not really looking forward to or I’m having to focus on aspects of my research
that maybe I don't enjoy as much as others is I have to look for the positives or the fun things
within that. So for example my data became really overwhelming in the summer, there was just so many
entries and so much to do and I couldn't see a way forward and it just felt never ending but I’d
set myself this goal of I’m going to get all my data done by September. I’m going to have all my
publishing data done, I just want it done, I don't want to think about it and then I had a meeting
with my supervisors and I- I basically told them like ‘I’m really struggling, I’m finding it very
difficult to stay focused and I just feel like I’m not doing anything or not doing enough but I’m
doing stuff every day and it just doesn't seem to be getting me anywhere’. And they basically turned
around and said you're doing great things but remember this isn't the only aspect of your data.
You have your surveys, you have your interviews coming up, maybe you can look at your data in a
different way so as a result of that I was started focusing much more on my surveys and my interviews
and I got really excited about my data again. I was like yeah I remember why I really wanted to
do this it's giving me really interesting stuff and then even in in my publishing data, which was
just a bunch of excel spreadsheets and numbers and categorizing things I started to see the results
and the graphs and that was really interesting to me and really kept me enthusiastic to keep doing
data entries because I wanted to see the outcomes so sometimes if you're struggling with a goal you
set yourself or you've had to set yourself a goal that again you're not as keen on focus on
the positives within that. Focus on the things you like within that to help keep you motivated.
Now one thing I think that's super important to stay motivated is you need to hold yourself
accountable and this is why I said set measurable goals, but another way you can
hold yourself accountable is write your goal down. Put it somewhere public, tweet about it,
tell all your friends this is what I’m focusing on and hopefully they will also hold you accountable,
find another PhD student and team up and set goals together and check in with each other
like ‘oh what have you done towards your goal this week?’ You don't want it to become like a pressure
cooker and overwhelming stuff but holding yourself accountable and making your goal something that
other people know about or even something written down in like a notebook is a really great way to
stay motivated because it's that commitment and you made that commitment on paper you've made that
commitment on the internet or to a friend and I find that's a really great way to stay motivated.
Now another key thing about staying motivated while doing a PhD and setting these goals is even
if you set a smaller goal like ‘I want to write this chapter’, which by the way is still a very
big goal by the way, break that up. Once you've kind of got into a little bit, you'll start to see
within your goal there will be different aspects you need to focus on. For example with writing a
chapter you will probably realize okay ‘I need to research these sort of two or three areas and I
need to close read these three books and I want to write roughly this amount of words on this topic
and this on this topic and then I need to bring it all together’. Write down those smaller goals
within your larger goals because they're the ways that you're going to stay motivated and feel like
you're still achieving something during that three month process, because three months is a long time
to go without checking anything off on a to-do list! So break everything down. Now what I do
is I break things down monthly and then weekly, so although my overall main goal at the moment
might be my data every time I have a supervision meeting I come out with actions to do
and I use those actions to inform what I’m going to do on a daily basis. So my monthly actions,
which are fed into my goal, inform my daily actions and I find that's a way
to keep me motivated because I’m still ticking stuff off. I can still see I’m doing something
every single day, but I can also then see how it's contributing both to my monthly workload
and also then to my larger three-month goal. So I find breaking down tasks and setting clear goals
and celebrating the small wins is a really great way to keep me motivated. And I’ve talked about
this before in my dyslexia video because I love lists and to-do lists and I think it's partly
because my dyslexia because it really helps me stay motivated and gives me clear instructions
of what I need to do. Whereas sometimes I get overwhelmed if I have large things I need to do.
I think another important thing, both just in general as a PhD student, but also for staying
motivated is you need to realize you're not doing this alone and as a humanities PhD student and I’m
sure other PhD students as well but particularly as a humanities student you can feel like you're
alone a lot of the time. You're the only one really doing your research: you'll spend a lot of
time in the library researching, or at your desk writing, or in my case at your desk doing surveys
but the point is you will spend a lot of it alone. So it can be really easy to feel isolated
and that isolation can really affect your motivation because you kind of end up feeling like
what's the point. I’m the only one doing this, no one's going to care if I don't work today and it's
really easy to slip into that mindset and end up not doing stuff and procrastinating a lot and I’ve
definitely been there I’ve had whole weeks where I’m like uh if I don't work this week who's really
gonna know? I’ll catch up next week. But that's why it's so important as a PhD student and as
someone in general is to realize we're never alone and especially if you want to stay motivated with
things reach out to people, join workshops! I know some people at the University of Birmingham who
are part of writing workshops, so every evening they will all be on zoom together and they will
write together and they'll check in with each other and they'll have set goals and they’ll say
‘okay we'll check in an hour's time and see how we're all doing’. Or even more informally set up,
like a research group, with your flatmates if you live with other PhD students. It doesn't matter
if you're not researching the same thing but it's about having those people around you to work with
you and also of course don't forget you've got your supervisors. Your supervisor team is so
important and if you're ever feeling like you can't do this or you're feeling alone or you're
feeling isolated reach out to your supervisors because they will be able to support you in
probably ways that a lot of other people won't because they know about your research. Outside
of yourself, they're probably the ones who know it best so if you're struggling if you feel like
you reach this block and it's stopping you from progressing reach out to them send them an email.
That's what they're there for. So a key part of staying motivated is realizing you're not alone
and even more importantly if you are feeling overwhelmed and you just feel like okay I can't
do it today that's okay. Take a break! Go see your friends, have a day off, let your brain
relax and recharge. You don't need to be working on something 100% of the time to still be making
progress towards it and it's about getting that balance between rewarding yourself with time off
and small treats. And you know let's say ‘okay I’m gonna write 500 words this week and if I get to
the end I’m going to let myself go for a walk in the park’, I would argue you should let yourself
go for a walk in the park anyway, but what I mean is give yourself a treat, work towards something,
reward yourself! Be that seeing friends, watching a movie, baking a cake, eating chocolate.
I don't mind what you do! But set something so that you don't feel so alone and so that actually
you have an incentive and a positive incentive to get the work done apart from just getting it done.
So those are things I do to help me stay motivated as a PhD student and I realized some of these are
really simple and you've probably heard them other places but I find them super
useful and they've really helped me progress and stay on track and not feel as helpless
over the last few months as I think it would have been easy to do given everything that's going on
and as always if you have any questions or comments,
or just want to reach out to me and chat about anything PhD related I can always be
found on my Instagram (@PhDLifeWithLucy) or in the comments down below, and I’ll see you next Sunday!
Byyyeee