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PhD Productivity Strategy: Do Deep Work in Less Hours

nextscientist.com

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

#91

Post by iaw »

otakucode wrote: post #43
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…

>You literally have to will something to work in multi-month long pushes where you iterate again and again until you figure it out. Or instead of iterating 5 times, you take your time and do it right on the 2nd attempt, figuring it out in 1/3 of the time. Hurrying only leads to mistakes. It makes no more sense than attempting to continue working when you really need to go to the bathroom. You are are a human being an…

In undergraduate a classmate of mine spent 3 months doing electrical engineering research on the properties of various chemical doping regimes.

At the end of the summer it came to light that the chemical supplies they received were not the claimed purity invalidating all of their research.

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

#92

Post by xaa »

agumonkey wrote: post #90
xaa wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. My salary was funded by my PI and he was happy to keep someone at my skill level as long as I wanted (and at a bargain salary to boot). From my department and committee, I started to feel rumblings around mid-year-6 of the "you should get on with it" lines. But they weren't trying to force me out or anything, it was more like concern. I was spending (and still do) a much bigger percentage of my time on co…

Interesting, very interesting. Thanks for the reply. Would you like to share a link to your thesis ?

Oh, God, I'm not sure anyone is totally happy with their dissertation, but I guess I should get over it. I got about 2/3 of what I wanted to done. I'm continuing with the project, though.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ujf73cdu4m6p1lj/AAD4vVwpCfgSf7GGo...

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

#93

Post by ABCLAW »

Osmium wrote: post #77
otakucode wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You literally have to will something to work in multi-month long pushes where you iterate again and again until you figure it out. Or instead of iterating 5 times, you take your time and do it right on the 2nd attempt, figuring it out in 1/3 of the time. Hurrying only leads to mistakes. It makes no more sense than attempting to continue working when you really need to go to the bathroom. You are are a human being an…

> Or instead of iterating 5 times, you take your time and do it right on the 2nd attempt, figuring it out in 1/3 of the time. Hurrying only leads to mistakes. In an abstract sense this is true, but there are some fields were you do just have to do it again, and again, and again. I know an exceptionally smart biochemist who routinely has 16 hour days. There's no substitute. In my own field, someone who would later go…

I don't know a single biochemist that puts in 16 hours of work a day. I know of plenty of biochemists that routinely start and end their days 16 hours apart because they have a growth protocol that takes 12 hours to complete prior to harvesting, so they get to the lab, prep, set up the experiment, then leave for a large chunk of the day while their flasks are hard at work, then get in at 8pm to finish the protocol, record results, tidy up and head home for sleep.

The above timeline is common and routine as are claims of having just done a '16 hour day' by those who are on the above schedule.

I'm not saying biochemists couldn't run 16 hours of experimental protocols at their bench per day, but I've never seen it happen.

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

#94

Post by evincarofautumn »

a_e_k wrote: post #56
SubiculumCode wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit I logged in to HN to make the same grammar correction. Fewer/Less grammar errors bug me badly. I don't know why this particular grammatical error bugs me so, but every time I encounter it, I have an inner voice that yells 'fewer.' My family hates me for it.

Same here. I think the reason it bugs me so much is because my mind views it as a type error: int fewer; float less; is how I tend to remember the distinction. (Fortunately in my family, my wife is the language nerd who first called me on my misuse many years ago. Now I notice it everywhere too. It's weirdly viral.)

I feel the same about it, but to be fair, this is one of those (many) rules that was essentially invented in the 18th century by prescriptive grammarians who took a guideline of style and turned it into a rule of grammar. “Less” has a long history of use with count nouns—originally as a counter, with the genitive, like “less of men” (cf. “shelves of books”).

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

#95

Post by agumonkey »

xaa wrote: post #92
agumonkey wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, very interesting. Thanks for the reply. Would you like to share a link to your thesis ?

Oh, God, I'm not sure anyone is totally happy with their dissertation, but I guess I should get over it. I got about 2/3 of what I wanted to done. I'm continuing with the project, though. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ujf73cdu4m6p1lj/AAD4vVwpCfgSf7GGo...

Don't worry, I cannot judge anything anyway. I just read you were into aging research. I went at a few senescence panels a few months ago and am very curious about the subject. Is your thesis a step into finding applications for this domain ? or more general ?

ps: sexy title

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

#96

Post by evincarofautumn »

a3_nm wrote: post #87

The problem with saying "less hours" is that the optimal numbers of hours of effort varies a lot depending on your current productivity. If you can't manage to focus on something despite persistent effort, yes it's much better to stop and have fun instead. It makes no sense to have "long hours" as a goal even if you're not sure of what you are going to try to accomplish during that time. On the other hand, when you a…

I’ve found the same thing at my job as a software developer, as well as on my hobby projects—including a programming language, which is very like Ph.D. territory. Sometimes the time and code flow easily, sometimes not; forcing myself to work when I’m not in a good state of mind to be productive is actively harmful to my holistic productivity.

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

#97

Post by xaa »

agumonkey wrote: post #95
xaa wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, God, I'm not sure anyone is totally happy with their dissertation, but I guess I should get over it. I got about 2/3 of what I wanted to done. I'm continuing with the project, though. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ujf73cdu4m6p1lj/AAD4vVwpCfgSf7GGo...

Don't worry, I cannot judge anything anyway. I just read you were into aging research. I went at a few senescence panels a few months ago and am very curious about the subject. Is your thesis a step into finding applications for this domain ? or more general ? ps: sexy title

Well the project arose like this. I got interested in aging halfway through the PhD. I started collaborating heavily with aging people at my institution. But there are so many papers and so much data to get informed about the area.

So I wondered "is there some semi-empirical way to find out what is 'most important' in aging so I can focus my future efforts on that?"

The solution I hit on was to take all the available gene expression data and to build a system to ask "what genes/pathways/systems change most strongly and consistently with age across species, experimental conditions, and tissues"? This would be a "core aging signature", if it exists. Obviously this is only one of many ways to answer my question and neglects epigenetics, proteomics, etc, although we're currently extending the system to DNA methylation. There is not enough high-throughput proteomics data to make it possible to do this with protein yet. We do not use sequencing for now because it is much more of a processing burden and human RNA is behind dbGaP embargo. And at the time I started this, there really wasn't that much of it compared to GEO.

My boss's interests are much more general than aging, so he encouraged me to develop the system to be more generic while still answering my question, which I did. It became a general meta-analysis system for asking "what genes change expression with across the available experiments in GEO?" We found other things we could do with such a huge amount of expression data, and some of them are in Chapter 5.

I would say the system itself is 80-90% done. But sadly I did not get to a really detailed analysis of aging yet, although my findings so far on that are in Chapter 4.

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

#98

Post by agumonkey »

xaa wrote: post #97
agumonkey wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, I cannot judge anything anyway. I just read you were into aging research. I went at a few senescence panels a few months ago and am very curious about the subject. Is your thesis a step into finding applications for this domain ? or more general ? ps: sexy title

Well the project arose like this. I got interested in aging halfway through the PhD. I started collaborating heavily with aging people at my institution. But there are so many papers and so much data to get informed about the area. So I wondered "is there some semi-empirical way to find out what is 'most important' in aging so I can focus my future efforts on that?" The solution I hit on was to take all the available…

Aight, wonderful idea. I wish De Grey and his friends get to see this system.

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

#99

Post by eanzenberg »

nolite wrote: post #66
eanzenberg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, unless you are at Cambridge or Oxford, getting a PhD in Europe about equates to a masters in the US.

Have you done PhD level research in either continent? This is utter horseshit...

Yes!

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

#100

Post by xaa »

agumonkey wrote: post #98
xaa wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the project arose like this. I got interested in aging halfway through the PhD. I started collaborating heavily with aging people at my institution. But there are so many papers and so much data to get informed about the area. So I wondered "is there some semi-empirical way to find out what is 'most important' in aging so I can focus my future efforts on that?" The solution I hit on was to take all the available…

Aight, wonderful idea. I wish De Grey and his friends get to see this system.

Thanks for your interest. I've actually met him once -- a friend of his I was talking to over beers introduced us -- but at the time, he was seemingly more interested in his pending date with the blonde he had just picked up than talking with a lowly graduate student. Can't say I blame him :) His papers are excellent, though. A more philosophical and broad approach is needed in aging, I think. He has mellowed a lot from the exaggerated claims he was making in the early 2000s. Maybe he saw my poster which covered an early version of this work, but we didn't talk about that.

The best aging researcher alive right now IMO though is Jim Kirkland. I've had the good fortune to work a little with him and the man is a living encyclopedia. His brilliance is obvious even in a conference full of PhDs.

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