Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PhD Productivity Strategy: Do Deep Work in Less Hours

nextscientist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–117 of 117 posts

Re: PhD Productivity Strategy: Do Deep Work in Less Hours

#111

Post by aub3bhat »

alphaalpha101 wrote: post #108
aub3bhat wrote: post #3

This is stupid advice with sole purpose of keeping students engaged in publishing incremental research. So that no one questions vanity metrics like H-index and the ridiculous condition of academic research. As a PhD student the real secret strategy is to ignore academia, work only on very high impact projects ( with potential of becoming startups or revolutionizing the field), intern with production teams (in core a…

And if you don't think being an entrepreneur/startup founder/businessman is the pinnacle of human achievement? What then?

    or revolutionizing the field

Re: PhD Productivity Strategy: Do Deep Work in Less Hours

#112

Post by neuromantik8086 »

naturalgradient wrote: post #24

As a current PhD student in a highly competitive program, I wish I could say this is reasonable advice, but it's wishful thinking in the hyper-competitive environment at top tier universities (where the goal of a PhD student would be to graduate as faculty material). There is just no way around grinding out the experiments. You literally have to will something to work in multi-month long pushes where you iterate agai…

In my experience, if you want your PhD to be enjoyable you probably shouldn't do it at a top-tier university. Top-tier universities are pressure-cookers. On the other hand, the job market favors folks with Ivy League (or Ivy equivalent) degrees...

One of the moments that caused me to nope out of science was when I (as a research assistant) received a work e-mail from a postdoc at a high profile northeastern uni at 11:00 PM on a Saturday night. There's no way in hell that's an appropriate time for work in my book.

Re: PhD Productivity Strategy: Do Deep Work in Less Hours

#113

Post by simonbarker87 »

xaa wrote: post #54
simonbarker87 wrote: post #27

The biggest thing I noticed when starting my PhD was all the first and second years derping around not doing much, all the third years panicking and "just getting going" and all the 4th and 5th years really grinding. So, I inverted that and worked my ass off like I was still an undergrad in the first 18 months, toned it down for the next year and submitted my thesis at 2 years 10 months (the earliest my university wo…

Wow. I just defended a few weeks ago, at 7 years. And honestly, until about year 5, I felt no rush whatsoever to get out. Not that I was derping around -- I finished with 20+ papers -- but I was enjoying it, and I realized that once I was out, two undesirable things would happen: - I would have to start running the grant treadmill (and indeed, I'm just in the middle of finalizing a training grant that has as one of i…

Congratulations! I should have clarified in my initial post that:

1. I had no intention to stay in academia after my PhD, it was the best paying gig I could find in 2008 when the world was ending financially and the project was interesting with very little supervisory oversight as the area was new to him as well. 2. If you are enjoying the work, the funding is there and you feel like you are achieving what you want then taking your time is totally cool - I was more focussing on their other end when people want to finish up and can't get done.

Re: PhD Productivity Strategy: Do Deep Work in Less Hours

#114

Post by RhysU »

a_e_k wrote: post #79
throwaway287391 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's quite right. For example, hours can be non-integer-valued (as in "three and a half hours"). The distinction is that "less" is used only for mass nouns (e.g., "less water").

True, but as a heuristic I it is safe to say that if you'd use integer units to represent a quantity then you should use "fewer" rather than "less". That tends to capture the majority of cases for using "fewer". Admittedly, the discrete but non-integer-valued cases are a bit more nuanced. (And yes, I do realize that the actual definition is in terms of mass vs. countable nouns.)

> mass vs. countable nouns

Into which bucket do grammar folks place countable infinites?

Re: PhD Productivity Strategy: Do Deep Work in Less Hours

#115

Post by sage76 »

altotrees wrote: post #106
sage76 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it the same in CS as far as industry positions are concerned?

Not from what I have read or heard. There still seems to be a need across the board for those with deep knowledge, especially when it comes to certain topics. The people I have known who have had trouble, and studies I have read about the topic point mainly to biology and chemistry as the two hardest fields to break initially with a PhD. But of course even that could change depending on specialization, etc.

Among those doctoral graduates who went to North American industry and for whom the type of industry position was known, about 60 percent took research positions .

source : http://cra.org/crn/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/05/2016-T...

Is 60% pretty high compared to other fields?

Re: PhD Productivity Strategy: Do Deep Work in Less Hours

#116

Post by sn9 »

j7ake wrote: post #19

I'm a little confused, has this person contributed to science in any significant way ? If not why should we listen to this person and ignore scientists who have actually achieved success in their field ?

She's just summarizing the work of Cal Newport, who used it to get through an MIT PhD in Computer Science while writing a couple of books and managed to get an assistant professorship at a major university shortly after graduating. She mentioned this in her article.

If you look at the daily lives of some of the greatest scientists and creatives in history, you'll find that a surprising number of them have had similarly compressed schedules. Newport's blog discusses many of them.

Re: PhD Productivity Strategy: Do Deep Work in Less Hours

#117

Post by tonyedgecombe »

munin wrote: post #69
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you know? It looks difficult, maybe even impossible to measure academic productivity.

Well, we could use a crude metric which is, how much of the day do you spend doing intellectual work? Right now, my advisor spends about ten or twelve hours. And it is pretty deep intellectual work, most of it is paper reading or discussion, via e-mail or in person meetings. Between watching when/how they reply to e-mail, make check-ins, their calendar, and talking to other collaborators and other students, they genu…

"how much of the day do you spend doing intellectual work?"

But that only measures time, not productivity which is at the root of this problem. You think your advisor is doing ten or twelve hours of deep work, but how do you know they couldn't achieve the same in four or five?

By the way, meetings and emails aren't deep work, even in an academic setting.

Post reply on HN