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The topic sentence idea is particularly valuable, and it's something I try to pass on to students. I also use latex macros to turn this on and off (and to put in margin notes, also). All of this advice was so similar to that I give my students that I went to the author's homepage here on HN, to see if it was somebody I had taught. (Nope, wrong field.)
I'll add something else I have realised:
Your Gantt chart is not for you.
I hate Gantt charts - they're out of date the second they're created; they take too long to update; there's very little decent free software for them that everyone uses; etc etc.
But your supervisor will probably want to see one. Or your funder, or examiners, and so on.
That's the point: sometimes you just gotta transform information into the format that's expected. From your perspective it may be easier to say "I've completed task X but task Y will drag on for another two weeks" than it is to update a spreadsheet and render a Gantt chart, attach it to an email and stick it in a shared drive. But from the supervisor/funder/examiner perspective, they need a way to very rapidly assimilate complex detail and spot problems.
A lot of academia is about clear communication of complex material. Your supervisor probably has several students, as well multiple projects of their own, teaching duties, management duties, and so on. Your Gantt chart is for them, not for you!
Simple and obvious in hindsight, but it really helps me put aside the grinding resentment I feel whenever it comes to updating a Gantt chart :)
A professor in undergrad gave me the tip to get excited or even feign interest when reading dense written material in order to retain more.
After trying it throughout a difficult class I was amazed at how well it worked. I applied it to every other academic thing I didn’t want to do and noticed immediately how much easier and enjoyable school was. I still use the “fake excitement” trick for my work all the time.
Also, it’s kind of like a Trojan excitement because after I fake the intense interest I do genuinely become interested more often than not.
I didn't, and simply tried to power ahead on the assumption I'd pull it out of the fire: this was absolutely the wrong conclusion. You already have a university degree, and you'll get paid more in industry: the right answer is to abandon ship it you're not looking at a clear path ahead by then.
In my experience, this fact was the #1 reason why some peers dropped out of PhD programs. They joined expecting a continuation of undergraduate education, which consists largely of recapitulating what appears in the secondary literature. Instead, what they got in graduate school was the expectation that they would be producing the primary literature. That's a very different game.
It was a game these peers discovered they hated playing. Nothing in college can prepare you for the isolation of spending your time becoming the world's expert on a narrow technical topic. Your usual reinforcement mechanisms of approval from family and friends gives way to slight comprehension at best. Then there is all of the alone time doing research requires. But I suspect the hardest part of all is the seemingly endless lineup of dead ends and false hope. Not only is success not assured, you often have no idea whether the result will have any utility even if you succeed.
Then, just when you've gotten the hang of this finding answers game you discover that the real expectation is to be the one who formulates good questions. The kinds of questions that, although they will certainly involve dead ends, will ultimately pay off in some meaningful way. Very little in a bachelor's prepares you for doing this. It's a hard-won skill that comes from a round or two (or three or four) of months (or years) spent answering questions that nobody cares about. A lot hinges on your relationship with your advisor on this one.
The PhD isn't just a bachelors degree but harder. It's a completely different animal. The skills in this article are very useful toward that end. But there's a lot more to the story when it comes to skills for finding answers to those unanswered questions, and formulating worthwhile questions without answers.
The benefit of all of this work and discomfort is that you come away with the ability to answer worthwhile questions that haven't yet been answered. And that's a highly transferrable and applicable skill.
I also did a PhD and this is all true. I realized many of these things years later. I think many of these points come down to confidence. When you are in the trenches, you really, really do know a lot, and you know it in incredible detail. In fact, in your career, if you leave academia you will probably never know a unique small "thing" in such detail ever again simply because you will have to make something as oppos…
My lesson from my failed Ph.D (graduated with a Master's in Chemistry after far too long) is that after the first year take a long critical look at what you're planning to accomplish and whether you really made the progress you needed too. I didn't, and simply tried to power ahead on the assumption I'd pull it out of the fire: this was absolutely the wrong conclusion. You already have a university degree, and you'll…
Two things I would add to this that I learned early on in my PhD: 1. Presentations aren’t really about conveying information. I sat though so many dull presentations, they were very informative but I can read a paper quicker than they can badly present the same information. The best presentations were the ones that covered the whys of the work, the applications, the next steps, the specific problem areas - often thes…
There was just a Reddit post saying that 54% of US adults have a reading level equal to or below a sixth-grade level according to the US Department of Education. Many communication problems can be attributed to differences in prose, document, and numeracy literacy.
"If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and statistical thinking." – H. G. Wells