Complete Your PhD on Time with Joy

1. Course introduction: Do you know the PhD success rate in the UK? According to the data published by the UK Research and Innovation, seventy-three percent of students who registered for a PhD successfully complete their degree within seven years. If we extend from seven years to 25 years. And that's another 8% of students became a doctor. So 19% of students didn't get their doctoral degree. I'm very careful here, not to say one in five PhD students in the UK failed or may fail their degree. Before we jump into a conclusion. Let's have a closer look at these 19% of students. In this pie chart, we can see 19% of students who registered for PhD didn't get their degree. However, this 19% can be further divided. Most of them, 16% of all the students left their studies early, for a range of reasons. It can be problems out of control, such as financial or family issues, or running out of motivation, or deciding that a PhD degree is no longer a stepping stone for their future development. This small portion here in yellow is all the students who submitted their thesis but failed their oral examination, also known as a viva. It's three per cent. However, within this 3%, most students got awarded an MPhil, and only one in a thousand student ended up without a degree. I know you are not entering into a PhD program to get an MPhil or no degree. But failing a PhD doesn't happen often. If you stay on, work with your supervisors and go through your university training and reviews, prepare for your viva. However, there are so many challenges you could face when trying to do a PhD. And theses challenges are recognized by my PhD students and hundreds of PhD students who attended my PhD planning and writing workshop at university. Have a look and think about which of these resonate with you. From time management, motivation, confidence to planning, writing, and handling pressure, and many more. It's important to know you're not alone and there are helps you can get. You don't need to figure everything out by yourself. I created this deep dive course for all the PHD researchers who would like to learn how to plan and write their PhD thesis and how to complete their PhD on time with joy. No matter which stage you're at for your PhD, you can join this course. Of course, you'll be super motivated and feel more confident to complete your thesis before the official deadline. More importantly, you have a range of powerful tools and practices you can directly use in your daily research that delivers good results. Each lesson is. about ten minutes. For each lesson, you will learn. What are the essential chapters your thesis should include. How can you write up your thesis draft in 14 weeks? How long do you need to complete each chapter of your thesis? How to work on your research like a pro? What is the most effective strategy you can use to conduct your research? How to make the best use of technologies rather than let them steal your precious time? How to get unstuck when encountering a research problem or writer's block? How to make the best decisions during your PhD? And finally, how to keep motivated on a daily basis and what's behind the closed the door when a viva is in progress? Come and join me. I'm looking forward to share all the practices and tools to help you complete your PhD on time. Bye now. 2. Lesson 1: Thesis structure: Welcome to the first module to complete your PhD course. The focus of this module is the structure of the Big Book thesis. In this module, you'll learn how to structure your thesis. We will cover how many chapters to have in your thesis and how they are related. Then for each chapter, what it is about and what you should include. Let's start. First, I have a question for you. Who do you think is the main reader for your thesis? Or more precisely, who do you write your thesis for? Any idea? Examiners. Examiners will read your thesis and decide whether your research skills are up to the required standard, and whether you are qualified as an independent researcher. Examiners make their decision based on their evaluation of your written work in relation to a set of rules or standards. I'll show you in detail in the coming modules. In order to make sure your thesis meet these requirements, know you are on the right track during your daily research and feel confident, you need to know the rules and standards. It's like packing a cabin suitcase. If you know the size at the beginning, you can get the right size suitcase that you know for sure will fit in the measuring box; rather than getting everything packed in a random suitcase and waiting nervously at the boarding gate to see whether you need to pay a fee or allowed to get on the flight. So it's a super useful to know what your examiners are expecting. First, your thesis isn't a diary or a journal you kept during your four or five-year research. Meaning, you don't structure your thesis as how you conducted your research. Why? Too much information without a clear structure. It may make perfect sense to you, but not to your examiners. So you need to take a step back and present your research in a typical structure that your examiners are familiar with. You ask a question, you do some research, and you find the answer, like a circle. Now, let me show you the typical structure for a PhD thesis. If your thesis is not quite fit in this structure, start with it, then tailor it to suit your research. In the most simplified version, you need six components for your thesis. Starting from the top and going clockwise. An introduction, literature review, research methodology, research results, discussion, and conclusion. The main body of your written work. You need to have at least six chapters, one for each component. And of course, you can use two chapters to cover one component. For example, if your session of research results has 60 pages, it would be a good idea to split it up to two chapters. Now, let's have a look at the purpose of each component and what you should include in the associated chapter. First, introduction. You need to cover what topic you're going to research, why it's important. In order to explain to our examiner what you're going to do and why, you need to include the importance of the topic, your research questions, your research aim and objectives. You also need to set your research scope to ensure your study is laser-focused and can be completed within the available time. Your research outcomes and contribution and your thesis structure. Most of students find this component is straightforward. Just bear in mind, you may need to come back to update it once you've completed your research. Your research aim, objectives. method or outcomes may have changed or being updated. So it's important to make sure the introduction is updated accordingly. One more note for introduction: when you start writing the introduction at the beginning of your PhD, it's common to write it in the future tense. Something like, this study will explore this, or that method will be used in this research. However, your whole thesis should present your completed research. So, you can use the past tense throughout your thesis; or use the past tense in the research methodology chapter and the present tense in the other chapters. Next, literature review. This is a chapter to show your understanding of what other researchers have achieved in this topic and how your research fits in. So it's more than just reviewing literature. You need to include important authors, theories, concepts, debates, findings in your research field, what the research gap is, and how your study fills that gap. Most students find this chapter challenging. Do you know what the number one mistake is in literature review is? It's to fill your chapter with she says, or he says, but you don't say anything. In order to avoid this mistake, let me explain it in a couple of good analogies when I learned literature review to give you some inspiration. The first one is to think it's a dinner party. And you are the host. You decide who to invite, to speak their ideas and who not to invite. You decide the agenda, who will speak first or as a group. And you engage with the speakers, expressing your own ideas, whether you agree or disagree with them, or elaborate on their ideas. Another analogy is you are building a chair. In this case, you are the carpenter. You need to find the existing bits scattered around available to use and figure out what's missing. Produce the missing part is your research work. I hope you find these two analogies are helpful and you've got a better idea about how to write your literature review. Next research methodology. This chapter tells your examiners what other people did to explore similar questions and what you did to achieve your research aim and objectives. You need to include which method you choose and why, how this approach is related to the research objectives. You need to explain in details what tool you chose and why, how you collected, analyzed, and validated that data. The next part is ethical considerations if applicable. And finally, any limitations. Pay attention to the balance. You need to provide the key information for other researchers to replicate your study, but not describe the whole progress with each single detail. Now, research results. You need to present to your examiners what you've found through the survey, experiment, simulation or any other method you used. So the result chapter should include findings such as graphs, charts, and associated descriptions. First, make sure your results make sense. You don't compare them to other studies in this chapter, but you need to be sure there are no errors in your experiment or analysis. Next, it's easy to produce a lot of results, but you don't include all the results you generated; only the important ones, the ones that you can discuss and link to your research contribution. Were there any recognizable themes or patterns of your results? Were there anything that didn't turn out as planned? Now, let's move on to the discussion. This is a place where you show your examiners your understanding of your research results. So, you need to interpret what your results mean. In this chapter, you include: how your findings related to the literature; Do they agree or disagree with the existing work? Does it fill the gap and how? Also, the implications of your findings for both your research questions, aim, objectives, and existing knowledge. You are not alone if you find this chapter is challenging. This is what every PhD candidate needs to learn. So, it's an opportunity to improve your research skills. Don't shut yourself in your room for months to craft your perfect discussion chapter. You won't be able to do it. Time isn't all you need to write a good discussion chapter. You need to learn about it. Work closely with your supervisors. Learn by doing, get feedback and guidance. Now, the last one, the conclusion. In conclusion, you are closing the researcher circle. You need to present to your examiners the summary of what you did, what you found, and the implications. So, the conclusion chapter needs to include answers to your research questions, responses to our research, aim and objectives, significance and the contribution of your study, their limitations and future study. Here you go: the six components of a typical PhD thesis, structure for the main body of your written work. Just to repeat, the tense to be used in your thesis. The common practice is to use past tense throughout your thesis. Or use past tense in research methodology and the present tense for the rest. Now, let's talk about another important element for your thesis: references and bibliography. Do you know the difference between references and bibliography? References are the collection of work you cited in your thesis, while bibliography is a broader collection of works you referred to during your research, but not necessarily cited. In most of the cases, your thesis need to include references. So you need to make sure all the works cited in your thesis are listed in the references. You need to figure out the style your university uses. Keeping in mind your university sometimes update the style. What software package you can use to help you manage your references. And always have one session for all your references at the back of your thesis in alphabetical order; not a reference session at the end of each chapter. Last, but not least, a standalone abstract or summary. of your research is required for your submission. This has always been a challenging task. Don't wait until the last minute to write it. Think about it now. It's the written draft of your elevator pitch. It helps you communicate your research with other people and get crystal clear about the main components of your study. Usually, the word limit is 300 to 500 words. You need to explain the reasons to conduct this research. Restate the research questions. Provide a summary of the answers to research questions and how this was produced, and the related limitations. Show how the research related to the literature and discuss the research contribution and future research. You've done it. These are the primary written work for your PhD submission. We talked about the main body of your thesis with six components. We had a close look at what the purpose of each component and what it should include. Then we move on to the references and abstract or summary. I hope you've got a better idea of how to structure your thesis. Now, Homework. If you just started your PhD, take some time to develop a thesis structure. If you've already developed your thesis structure in your introduction, Compare your structure to the typical structure we discussed today. Is there anything you can learn from the typical structure? Also, go to the next level: Reflect on the content you need to add to your existing structure. Well done! You've done great work here and showed up for yourself. I'm looking forward to seeing you in module two. Bye now. 3. Lesson 2: Thesis planning: Welcome to the second module of the complete your PhD course. This module's focus is, how do you plan to make sure you can complete your PhD on time? We'll start with asking you four questions. Then I'll answer two most frequently asked questions by all the PhD students. Are you ready? The first question to you, what is the official deadline for your thesis submission? This should be easy. If you can't remember, It should be four or five years after your starting date. If you started on the first of September 2021 as a full-time PhD candidate, your official submission deadline is the last day in August 2025. The second question to you, what is your ideal thesis submission deadline? You've become aware of the additional time required after officially submitting your thesis, six to 12 weeks to wait for your viva, 12 weeks for minor corrections, time to wait for your certificate and graduation ceremony. You may want to keep your original submission date. That's okay. Or, you may prefer to submit your thesis six months earlier to make sure you can complete your pgraduation without the need to extend your visa, if you are an international student. Once you've figured out your ideal submission deadline, write this date down on a sticky note and put it somewhere you can see frequently. Or, you can set it up as a reminder on your phone. Write a message to yourself, something like congratulations on completing your thesis on this date, and let it pop up a couple of times every day. The idea is to keep reminding yourself, you are committed to submit your thesis on this date. The third question, how much time have you got left? This is simple. If you just started last month and plan to use 3.5 years to complete your thesis. You have three years and five months. You may only have six months left, or any amount of time in-between. Last question to you: what tasks you need to complete before your submission? Some tasks are quite oblivious: conducting experiments, simulations, surveys, writing all the chapters, and so on. But some tasks are not very obvious: from rewriting, restructuring your thesis, waiting for your supervisor's feedback on your thesis, proofread, and so on. You need to contact your proofreader one month or two in advance to book her or his time. Also, you need to write a good acknowledgment, complete many forms before the submission and get your thesis printed out and bind. Write down all the tasks you can think of. If you end up with a long list, is a good thing. Now, I'll answer the most frequently asked question by all the PhD students. How long does it take to complete a literature review? Research methodology, results, discussion, or conclusion chapter? This is a tricky question. My answer is, it depends. It depends on how much time you've got and how many tasks you need to complete within this time. Let me introduce the concept of reverse engineering. In this context. It means that you begin with the end in order to complete your thesis by your ideal submission date, how to allocate time to complete all the tasks that lead to your thesis submission. If a builder needs to build a house in six months, he has a six main tasks to complete, from layering a foundation to installing the equipment, and bringing in all the furniture. Assuming it's January now, to make sure the house can be completed by the deadline, the end of June this year. He needs to work out a time required for each task, backwards. To complete the house by the end of June, he needs to start working on all the equipment and furniture from the beginning of June. He needs to get the internal space with all the plumbing and electrical work done by the end of May. So he needs to work on the interior space from the beginning of May. Then he works out the time to work on the roof, windows, doors, and walls. At last, he works out the foundation needs to be ready by the end of January. Then, he starts doing the first task, working hard to make sure that the foundation to be completed on time. So keep your ideal submission date in mind. Allocate your time to each task backward from printing, getting a green light from your supervisors, deciding examiners, to writing your conclusion, to writing your introduction. In this way, you know you have taken into account the time needed for each task. At the same time, the total amount of time is limited to the time available. Once you allocate your time, you can make some adjustments according to your progress. Now, the second most frequently asked questions by PhD candidates. I know this is the question in your mind right now as well: whether you can complete the task within the assigned time? This is a good question, and the answer is yes. You can. Let me introduce Parkinson's law to you as an explanation. Parkinson's law states work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. There are more observations regarding the applications of Parkinson's law, mainly in two scenarios. First, you can complete a task within very little time. If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do. But the quality of the work is jeopardized. Second, you can use too much time to complete a task like a data in our computer expand to fill the space available for storage, but your time is not used effectively or efficiently. So you are wasting your precious time. I believe we all experienced both of these two scenarios. However, if you want to hit the sweet spot where you can achieve high-quality work without wasting your time. You need to use Parkinson's Law proactively. Here is a third scenario: just the right amount of time. Let me give you an example. It's Monday today, and you'll have two weeks to complete a piece of writing for your supervisor's feedback. Set an urgent deadline before the actual deadline, say this Friday. Block out your time on Friday to work intensely to complete the draft. Relaxed during the weekend. Reveal and update the draft the following Monday. Revisit the second draft, the next Tuesday. You are ready for your supervisor's comments. In this way, you allow yourself to super concentrated and work in the flow. At the same time, you give yourself opportunities to improve your work. The time you leave between the working sessions and the relaxation helps you gain new perspectives to enhance your work. Here are the six questions to help you plan your thesis. The official deadline, your ideal submission deadline. How much time have you got? What tasks do you need to complete? How long does it take to complete your thesis? And whether you can complete a task within the assigned time. We discussed how to use the concept of reverse engineering to ensure you allocate time for all the remaining tasks within the time available to you. Also, you learned about Parkinson's law and how to be super productive without wasting your time. Homework for today's session, review and update your research plan and your research Gant chart. You've already got this. It's a tool your school and the supervisors used to evaluate your progress and make sure you're on track. More importantly, you should use it to keep yourself on track to complete your thesis. If you didn't update it recently, it's a good time to revisit it with a better idea of your ideal submission date, tasks to be completed and knowledge of reverse engineering. I've been encouraging you to submit your thesis a bit earlier than the official deadline. Three to six months earlier than the official submission date is reasonable. However, completing your thesis in less than 3.5 years can be challenging. Universities have rules on the minimum time spent to pursue a doctoral degree. Usually it's 2.5 years. It's the minimum time for a PhD candidate to learn the skills and knowledge and become an independent professional researcher. Once you updated your research plan and your research Gant chart, set an intention to look at it every day or at least every week, to make sure you're on track. Your research plan is helping you to complete your thesis by the ideal submission date. You've made it. This is the end of module two. I hope you've gained insight into how to plan your thesis. I'm looking forward to seeing you in module three, thesis writing. Bye now. 4. Lesson 3: Thesis writing: Welcome to the third module of the complete your PhD course, it's all about writing thesis. First, we'll discuss what's thesis writing. Next, quiz about your thesis. Then we'll learn about how to write and structure each chapter, subsection and the paragraph. Let's dive in today's module. First of all, writing is research. Writing up is misleading. We cannot separate writing from research. I know you've heard to conduct your research in three years and write it up in one year. Please don't take it at face value. It doesn't mean only start writing in the last year. It means rewriting and editing your draft thesis in the last year. It takes a long time to rewrite, in most of the cases, you need to restructure your thesis as well as edit it. Let some of these ideas sink in. Writing is thinking. Start writing at the beginning of your PhD journey. If you haven't started, start today, You need to write, write, write, edit, proofread your thesis. Writing is different from editing. Writing is to get an idea out. Editing is to make your idea accessible. Also, presentation errors aren't acceptable. So, proofreading is important, especially you are an international student. Writing is to select what to be included and not included in your thesis. Your thesis presents a flow of logic. Remember the research circle? It isn't reflecting the sequence that you've conducted a research. We've touched on this in module one. Writing is hard, and that's why you are avoiding it or afraid of it. You possibly are not good at academic writing yet. But you can learn academic writing by reading others' dissertations and books on how to write a thesis. Continue to write, getting feedback and you'll get better. Now, a quiz about your thesis. Do you know how many words do you need to write? How many pages roughly your thesis will have? And how many chapters do you need to write. Do you have the answers? Let's have a look at these questions one by one. The maximum number of words for a PhD thesis can be eighty thousand to a hundred thousand. Check your universities' postgraduate research student handbook. In some cases, you can exceed the limit by 10%, but you need to justify it. It's pretty easy for some subjects to go over the word limit. So, make sure you leave enough space for discussion and conclusion chapter. On the other hand, you might find 80 thousand is a lot of words. There is no way to exceed the limit. That's okay. But be aware of the lower limit. Sometimes the lower limit isn't as clearly stated as the higher limit. The maximum number of words for MPhil should be the lowest word count for your PhD thesis. Usually, that's 50 or 60 thousand words. In many universities, the word count of your thesis is required by the submission form. Now, do you know what should be included in the word count? The main body of your thesis. Yes. The six components of your research, including introduction, literature review, research methodology, research results, discussion, and conclusion. However, that table of content, references, appendices, obstract, acknowledgment isn't counted. The numbers I mentioned here of are current university requirement in the UK. It can be different from university to university, and universities constantly update their rules. So check your university standard and note them down. You need to know this to keep yourself away from stress, anxiety and from rumers. When I was a PhD student, I was told I need to make my thesis as thick as possible to impress the examiners. While I spent a lot of time making it appear thick, I'm still not sure whether it was enough. A lot of time was wasted because I didn't know the rule to follow. Once, you know the number of words, you can quickly work out the number of pages. Before we come to the page number, one thing is vital to know. You want your examiners to read through the thesis effortless. Why? They're busy. You want to make their work easy rather than challenging. That's a good first impression. The easiest to read font is Times New Roman. But of course you can choose others that are easy to read. Don't spend too much time to decide, and don't choose the ones that are hard to read. Remember, you want your thesis easy to read. Size 12 is easy to read, and 1.5 or double line spacing with normal margin is good. Sometimes your university has these guidelines, find them and follow them. Now, do you know how many words can be printed on an A4 page with size 12 Times New Roman font with 1.5 line spacing and normal margin? About 400 words. So, for a thesis with 80 thousand words, the main body will be around 200 pages without any image or graphs. For the third question, the number of chapters. There are no strict rules on how many chapters you can have. Thesis with six to nine chapters is common. When I was a PhD candidate, I heard about having an odd or even number of chapters. Till now, I couldn't find any references related to this claim. Okay. It's time to break down the total word count. Say you aim to have 70 thousand words in your thesis. And you have seven chapters. Introduction, literature review, methodology, results part one, results part two, discussion and the conclusion. How do you distribute the 70 thousand words to these seven chapters? Keep it simple. 10 thousand words for each chapter. The benefit is you will have a balanced structure and 10 thousand words equal to 25 pages per chapter. Often, students who don't have this simple concept in mind, tend to deliver a thesis either like a strawberry or a pear. What do I mean? Some theses have more than 100 pages or introduction and literature. There is a little space left for the research results, discussion, and conclusion. Like a strawberry with a big top. The other extreme is to have very little on the introduction and literature review to set the scene and have a lot of pages of raw results, like a pear with a big bottom. Well, neither of these two shapes is suitable for thesis. You need to keep in mind to have a balanced structure from the beginning or now, rather than wait for the feedback from your supervisors on your first draft. By then, it will require a lot of rewriting to rebalance your thesis. Let's move to the structure of a chapter. 10 thousand words for one chapter can help the reader read it in one go and make sense of the content. Also, don't break a chapter into too many subsessions. Three to five subsections are good. So it's 2 to 3 thousand words for each subsection. And it's helpful for your reader if each chapter in your thesis has a chapter opening that signposts the chapter structure and a chapter conclusion that summarizes across the sessions and pointing to the next chapter. For each subsection, you need an opening paragraph, main text and a closing paragraph. And no more than two level of sub-headings. Your reader won't be able to follow three or more levels. Now, paragraph, each paragraph is a unit of thought. Each paragraph includes 100 to 200 words. Too short, you won't be able to establish an idea of thought fully. And your writing becomes too fragmented. Too long, your reader will find is hard to follow. An easy way to help you monitor the lines of your paragraphs is to fit it in half a page. Or make sure you can see a whole paragraph within your screen. And for each of your paragraphs, you should have a topic sentence, the main body of the paragraph, and a message sentence to help your reader understand what you want to say. I hope you've got a better idea of thesis writing by now. Also, I hope this module provides you with a different perspective when writing your thesis. We've discussed writing is research. Also, we explored the number of words, pages, and chapters for your thesis. If you write 2.5 pages a day, it'll take you 14 weeks to complete a draft! Then, we discussed how to distribute the words to your chapters to have a balanced thesis; how to structure your chapters; and how to write a paragraph. Today's homework is to reflect on what you've learned in this module. Then, look at your written work for your thesis, think about what the one or two things you've learned in this module will help you enhance your thesis. Write them down in your notebook, and start applying them in your thesis writing. You've done it. Trust yourself. You are on your way to complete your PhD on time with each. I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next module. Bye now. 5. Lesson 4: Weekly plan and daily ritual: Welcome to the fourth module of complete your PhD course. And today we will talk about weekly plan and daily ritual. How many stars can you see here? 1461 stars represent how many days you have to complete your thesis. Each star represents a day, and each color block represents a year. If we zoom in one of these days, it may look like this: at eight o'clock in the morning, start your research; at nine am, meet with their supervisors; at 10:00 am, after the meeting, make some notes for future work; then attend a talk on a relevant topic. Lunch break at 1 pm, followed by a PhD cafe meeting, then deliver a short tutorial for undergraduate students. Return to the office at 4 pm and stay till 6pm. It's a busy day. However, in total, you only have two to three hours quality research time. It would be similar if you have young children to look after. Your day is shaped by the school runs. And you may be more cautious about saving time for your research. In total, you may also have three solid hours to focus on your research. You can see here, a day is a very short and some days can be even shorter. So it's challenging to set a to-do list or a goal to complete a piece of work on a daily basis. We always underestimate how much time needed to complete a task. Therefore, a better way to plan is to plan on a weekly basis. In total, you have 208 weeks to complete your thesis. Somehow, these numbers seem so small. Anyway. How many weeks do you still have for your PhD? And for each week, you'll have 168 hours in total. If you look at your weekly calendar, you'll find some days your time for research is limited. While other days you'll have the whole day for your research. Roughly, you'll have 20 to 30 hours for research, which is a good chunk of time to complete a draft chapter or one part of your simulation, survey or experiment. How to plan your week? Plan your week ahead. Sunday afternoon or Monday morning is good. I don't plan on Fridays because I tend to forget what I planned the next Monday morning. Remember your updated research plan and Gantt chart? If you haven't got a chance to update yours, you can catch up today. Work it out after today's session, and entre milestones and their deadlines in your calendar. Now, you should be able to work out the tasks you need to do next week. Open your next week's calendar. enter the must attended events, such as meetings with their supervisors, university training sessions, and so on. These are non-negotiables. Allocate the remaining big chunks of time to research. I mean reading, writing, and carrying out the experiment, survey or simulation. The last point is to protect your work and research calendar. This 40 hours in a week is for your research only. When you say yes to other tasks that are not working directly on your dissertation, you say no to completing your PhD on time. It's good to attend a PhD social events once a while, but maybe not every week. Now, let's move on to every day. How do you spend your working days for your PhD? Are you experiencing procrastination or having a working routine; when you work work hard, when you are done, be done? Or, somewhere in the middle. Work 24/7 with a low-grade of dissatisfaction. If you're around the middle, it's important to develop a good working routine and it'll help you become a professional researcher. Let me share with you a simple exercise that can help you. It has two steps. First, figure out your current routine. Think about your normal research day. Or, yesterday. From getting up to going to sleep, write down your answers to these questions. What time do you get up? Do you always get up at this time? What time do you start working on your PhD? Where do you work? How do you work once you start working? Such as, what do you do the first thing? Are you focusing on one task or switching between tasks? For how long do you work before you take a break? And how long is your break? What do you normally do during a break or do you take a formal break at all? When do you complete your work and go home? Do you continue working after you're back home or to your room? What time do you go to sleep and do you work during weekend? Use these questions as a guide, and write down some details reflecting your working routine. Be honest. We're not after a perfect routine here. We want to learn about how your work now and identify any area can be tweaked to help you be more productive. Also, recognize the part of your routine you can't control. So you can release the tension and stop blaming yourself. Start to think about how you would like your day to unfold with consideration of your situation. If you are a mum who need to send your little ones to school, schedule it in your daily routine. Cherish the time you're with your kids getting ready. You have the rest of day to work on your thesis. From getting up to going to sleep. Get up at the same time every day. Have a starting up routine. Start at 9 am sharp every day. Review your weekly plan and the plan out the day. Eat that frog. It's the idea from Brian Tracy's book. The main concept is to do the most important task the first, when you are full of cognitive energy and there are less distractions. Of course, your most important task is to work on your thesis. Mono task. Work with one task at hand for sessions of 40 to 50 minutes. Before you start your session, think about what you want to achieve within this time. The reason for 40 to 50 minutes per session is that we can't keep our focus for longer. So take regular breaks to recharge your brain. 15 minutes break, push away from your desk, walk around, take a couple of deep breaths. Checking emails or social media feeds is not a form of break. You should have scheduled time to do them. We'll cover it in the next module. Next, stay hydrated to maximize your brain's function. You know that eight by eight rule is eight glasses of water and each class is about eight ounces. Or, you can calculate using your weight with this formula. It's your weight in kilograms divided by 2.3. The unit is liter. If you do some exercise, for every 30 minutes add another 0.3 liter. Have a shutting down habit, finish at the same time every day, say at 6 pm. Well, some of you may need to finish at 3 pm for the school runs. But before you shut down your computer, evaluating your day, note down what to continue the next day. Once everything is switched off, tell yourself you've done for the day. It'll help you transit and fully engage in the next part of your day. Relax and have some fun. I understand it's so easy to fall into the trap: working on your PhD whenever you have a bit of time; especially when you are a mum with little ones or have other commitments. But it is so inefficient. You may be experiencing frustration right now and wondering why you worked so hard on your research; but the progress is disappointing. Then you work even harder, take away all the fun time and relaxation time from your day to day life. Stop! You need downtime and fun to recharge. And also your brain is working on research in the background when you are relaxing and doing other things. When it's time to work, you'll have new ideas to continue and progress your research and writing. Next. What to do during weekend? You are entitled to take a break and enjoy your weekend. Maybe take a walk in nature or exercise. As we just mentioned, that downtime you have is helping your brain consolidate the work you've done during the weekdays, and helping you develop new perspectives and ideas. It also enables you to concentrate better from Monday to Friday. Don't feel guilty. The last note here is make sure your new routine is reasonable and flexible with buffers. Well done. This is the end of module four. We first talked about weekly plan. Weekly plan is most suitable for your PhD research. And we discussed how to make a weekly plan in relation to your research plan and a Gantt chart. Also, we talked about daily ritual to understand your current daily routine and design your perfect daily routine. Homework for today is either to reflect how to use weekly plan in your PhD, or figure out your daily routine and have a go on your perfect, ideal routine. Well done. Trust yourself. You're on your way to complete your PhD on time. with joy. I'm looking forward to seeing you in module five. Bye now. 6. Lesson 5: Distractions: Welcome to the fifth module of complete your PhD course. And today we will talk about how to remove distractions. We'll cover distractions in two categories. The first group, they are easy to spot, but hard to get rid of. Digital technologies, including emails, social media, YouTube, Netflix, DisneyPlus, games, web surfing. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't spend any time on these digital technologies. You shouldn't let them steal your time without your awareness. Do you know how much time you spend in this category? From a couple of hours to four or five hours. As I mentioned, I don't mean you shouldn't spend any time on them. They are developed to help everyone's life. However, you need to be alert and prevent these technologies become distractions and excuses for avoiding your research. If you are complaining about no time for research, this is the first place to check and claim your research time back. Here are some practices that can help you. First switch to 'Do Not Disturb' mode when you sit down to do your PhD. This prevents you from constantly switching tasks from research to checking your social media feeds. It will help you get into the flow of your research. Next, use apps to help you block specific sites, such as freedom. If I remember correctly, it's the outcome of a PhD research. It'll track the real-time spend. You can use Screen Time or Rescue Time. Sometimes, knowing how much time you spend facing your mobile phone is enough to stop you reaching out for it. Third, deal with your emails efficiently and effectively. Allocate reasonable and suit or time to check your inbox. Email is one of the main communication methods. We can't ignore it. A good practice is to schedule your email checking, say, three or four times a day. You can check your inbox one time in the morning, one time before lunchtime, and once or twice in the afternoon. Each time, ten to 15 minutes maximum, to allow you to deal with emails properly. I have a playlist, three or four songs for my email checking. It helps me be aware of the time I spent in my inbox. Also, you can deal with the email straightaway if it requires less than two minutes. If you need to work on that task, schedule the task in your calendar and reply the email with a proposed time. Other practice you can try is to have digital free time. For example, one hour after getting up and one hour before going to sleep. Also, try to stay away from the screen for one day during the weekend. Let your brain recover from all the distractions and information explosion. Now, the hard part, remove this digital distractions. First of all, if you decide to use willpower to get rid of these distractions, it won't work. The key is to know what cues lead you to them and re-establish the following actions. What do I mean? For example, every morning when you sit down at your desk and switch on your computer, the first thing you do is to check the emails. You've noticed this habit is a huge distraction. You spend more than an hour on your emails in the morning. By the time you finish with your inbox, you had a new to-do list for the day: other people's demands from you. Automatically, you started to work on those tasks. By lunchtime. You haven't even had a chance to open the working documents of your draft thesis. A lot of PhD researchers resonate with this situation and are determined to change. If all you do is decide to stop checking your emails the first thing in the morning, you will end up doing exactly the same thing the following day when you sit down at your desk: checking your emails. In this case, the cue is you sitting down at your desk and switching on your computer. To stop you from checking your emails the first thing you do in the morning, you need to recognize the cue leading to it and decide a different action to follow. The key is you sit down and switch on your computer. Okay. So next time you sit down and switch on your computer, what will you do instead? Open the Word document of your draft thesis and work on it. Leave a note on your desk the previous day to remind you what to do after switching on your computer. Also, create a shortcut of the Word document on your laptop to make the task easier. If you're waiting for a reply from your supervisors, quickly open your inbox, search for the emails from your supervisors. If it isn't there, email your supervisors a reminder. Don't open other emails. You will be able to check them once you've got two hour research or writing done, Be patient. Getting rid of an old habit or establishing a new practice takes time. So tackle these distractions one by one. Once you've got a good email checking routine, move on to the next one until you are in general happy with your habits around digital technologies. Second category of distractions: negativity. It's easier to get rid of once you recognize them. Let me introduce some of these distractions to you. First, they can be advice on your PhD from non-academic on naysayers. Oh, yes. There are a lot of people are there to advise without the experience. If you want to learn how to swim, you are not asking for advice from people who cannot swim. So why would you listen to someone who doesn't have a PhD? The same logic applies to naysayers. If you want to learn how to swim, you shouldn't go to people keeping on telling you that you can't swim or why you shouldn't learn. Remember, everything is possible. Compared to sending robots to Mars, completing a PhD thesis in 3.5 or four years is definitely achievable. Next, rumors. There are many rumors about PhD that are not true. From one in five PhD students will fail their PhDs; to you can only have even number or odd number chapters. Don't tune in. In order to be able to deflect rumours, it's essential you know, the official rules and the guidelines. The last one is random negative information. This can be anything related to your PhD or daily life. A typical example is bad news. If you realize after consuming the information, you feel down and discouraged, it's time to stay away from it. Remove these distractions. As you can see that these fractions in this category are negative. The key is to recognize them and intentionally stay away from them. You can use this table to figure out what the negative distractions are currently around you. And think about how to stay away from them. I'm not saying to cut people off from your life if they've ever given you bad advice or discouraged you. The first step is to be aware. Then, figure out the most suitable way to deal with these distractions, gracefully. Being straightforward, maybe your style and suits you the best. But if it isn't, try other strategies. Great. You've reached the end of this module. We talked about recognising two types of distractions and how to eliminate them from your PhD. For digital technologies, recognize the cue and re-establish the following action. For the negativities. Stay away with grace. The homework for today is to reflect on today's module. Recognise your distractions and come up with a plan to remove them one-by-one. Be patient. Every time you try something new, your existing system is temporarily broken down a bit. If you are trying too much, too fast, your system can collapse and you will return to the old way of doing things. So, be patient and celebrate your progress. You've done excellent work today. I'm looking forward to meeting you in the next module. Bye now. 7. Lesson 6: Effectiveness and Efficiency: Welcome to module six of complete your PhD course. And today you will learn about how to conduct your research effectively and efficiently. We're going to learn about the most important rule of time management, secret of the vital few. This rule is called the Pareto Principle, is also known as the 80/20 rule. It's an observation from Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. He discovered approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. If we look around the world, we will find this rule applied to a lot of situations. For many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. The wealthest 20% of the world's population controlling 80% of the world's income. 20% of activities having 80% of the results. 20% of customers leading to 80% of the sales. 20% of products and services accounting for 80% of the profits. 20% of the causes is the vital few, and the other 80% of the causes is the trivial many. What does it mean to your research? 80% of your research outcome or thesis writing comes from 20% of your research time and efforts. Translation: 80% of your time and efforts for your research doesn't make their way to your thesis. Of course, the split isn't always 20/80. It can be 10/90, or 30/70 or even 40/60. It will be a good idea to focus your energy and time on the activities that contribute to your thesis and eliminate those has no impact on your research completion. The question is, do you know what the vital activities are that can help you complete your research? There are two types. First, what you do for your PhD. What are the activities that lead to the outcome? It's about effectiveness. Second, how to do a task. It's about efficiency. Let me give you some example practices to help you reflect and figure out the ones that will work for you. First, when conducting a literature review, use classic textbook, latest peer-reviewed journal paper published within the last five years, and the papers and work from potential examiners and their students. If you review all the publications, you can find it in your topic, you will end up reading twice or even three times more papers, getting more confused and having a lower quality review. Also, you would need make a significant revision to your literature review when you complete your research. Next, write every day, and collect your writing every time you write. Writing everyday is not only help you organising the ideas, but also help you get better academic writing. You'll be able to write more quickly and smoothly. And when you write a piece, don't save it as a random file and forgot about it. Otherwise, the time you spend on writing it just got wasted. You won't remember what you've written in about a week's time. The forgetting curve is in operation. Next, ask the people with the experience in the research methodologies you are going to use for guidance before jumping into the survey experiment, or simulation. You're grateful for their help and do your homework, read their work before the meeting or chat with them. This will give you an overview of what you are going to do and help you avoid any pitfalls. Also, remember the distractions we discussed in module five. Make sure the people you ask is an expert. Get feedback. before moving on. There is no formal teaching for your PhD. Feedback is a way to learn and improve and it will prevent you from going to the wrong direction; provide you with resources and save you a lot of time. So ask for feedback. The only catch is to ask the right person. Next, use reference software at the very beginning of your PhD. This is vital. Your university has support to one or a range of packages. Choose one you can easily get help with and start using it. It can feel like using a reference tool takes much more time than typing in manually when you just started. This won't be the case after only one week. It can save you tons of time, especially at the end of your PhD, when you try to pull everything together and get your draft ready. If your university support the package you're using, it would be easier for you to get support. For example, one of my students has a problem to manage her references when combining different Word files into a big file. She spent a lot of time to solve the issue until she asked the library staff the problem of solved immediately. You want to use a tool that many people know how to use; and also, offer to support new PhD students when you can. Next, work with intensity. Shorter deadline. This is all about activating Parkinson's law. Set yourself shorter deadline to allow you to get super focused and complete a draft, then relax and then leave it for a couple of days. Next, come back to your draft to improve it. Another practice you can use is to use a dictating app to write. This is a practice used by many writers. Instead of sitting down in front of the desk and type, go for a walk and talk, using a dictating app to record and transcript what you've said. You can also just record your voice on your phone and find a service to transcript recordings. Keep in mind some of the apps and services aren't free. Next, work alone versus with peers who are working hard. Some people prefer working alone. That's okay. At the same time, research shows that the mirror neurons in your brain will find out and motivate you to work hard when you are around people who are working hard. I have a student who preferred to walk in a group where they discuss their research and what to do first, then work on their individual work. Also, you can try work in silence versus work with background noise. or 60 beats per minute music. I know people who need to wear noise canceling headphones to work; also people who love to work with background noise. And recent studies show that listening to music that has approximately 60 beats per minute can help your brain enter a relaxed state and synchronise with the beat; generate Alpha brainwaves and be more creative. You can Google search for the 60 beats per minute music. There is no one way is better than another, just to try them out and see whether you enjoy them or whether your productivity is improved. The last example is to stop overworking. We can only concentrate on our work for three or four hours a day. The idea is to work as effectively and efficiently as possible. During this time. Of course, you have meetings, training, or teaching to attend during your working days, which will take some time. But there is no need to attempt to squeeze in more research work after working hours. The return of this work is very limited and become inactive. Remember, you can only focus on research for three to four hours. If you did some work the night before, the next morning, you won't be productive in the office. Once you're back home, you may feel guilty and work again in the night. Before you realise you have long and unproductive days, feels like you are working all the time, but you don't progress much. This is a negative loop you need to avoid. So relax and recharge during your downtime. Of course, be intentional about what you do when you are not doing your research. Taking care of yourself, and having fun during the non-working time and being productive during the working hours will help you enter a positive loop where you can enjoy your PhD research and the alive. These are just some examples or some of my PhD students and I find helpful for PhD research and academic work. Try them out to see how they can help you. Also think about the time when you did a good work on a paper or an assignment, what did you do to get the job done? Is there any strategy you can use in your PhD. Good work. You've reached the end of this module. A quick recap. We learned about the 80/20 rule, the secret of the vital few. 80% of your research output or thesis writing comes from 20% of your time and effort. So it's worth exploring and using practices that can help you improve your productivity and enjoy your research. I shared with you ten practices that can help you conduct your PhD more effectively and efficiently. From choose the right materials for your literature review; write every day and collect your writing every time; ask people with experience in the research methodologies you are going to use for guidance; get feedback before moving on; use reference software at the very beginning of your PhD; work with Parkinson's Law; use a dictating app to write; work alone or with peers; work in silence, or with background noise, or 60 BPM music; the last one is stop overworking. And today's homework is to choose one strategy you've learned in today's module and use it in your research to improve your research effectiveness and efficiency. Please make sure you do it. Spend five to ten minutes and reflect on today's module, and choose one strategy to use in your daily research straight away. Knowing the 80/20 rule won't bring any change to a PhD, applying it will. You've done excellent work today. I'm looking forward to meet you in module seven. Bye now. 8. Lesson 7: How to make good decisions for your PhD: Welcome to the seventh module to complete your PhD course. And today's focus is how to make a decision. During your PhD, In your daily life, you need to make many decisions. Some of them are directly related to your PhD, or have an indirect impact on it. So it's useful to have a couple of tools to help you out, since we've never learned how to make decisions. In this module, I'll share with you two tools that can help you make good decisions. Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats and the TERMS formula. The decisions you need to make can be should you publish a couple of journal papers during your PhD, when you are not required to publish for your PhD. Should you take this part-time job? If you are facing these situations, how do you decide what to do? Are you just saying yes to both of them? Thinking that these are opportunities and go along with them without considering the impact of writing a journal paper or a part-time job on your PhD? Oh, are you saying no to both of them, because you think them as extra work? Different students have different preferred perspectives to view each situation. However, a good decision requires you to view a situation from a range of perspectives. So let me introduce Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats. Each hat represents one perspective to view the situation. So what are the six different perspectives to make a good decision? First, positive view, like the sun. Look any issues in the most favorable light possible. You focus on the benefits and added values. Let's use publishing a paper as a example to view this opportunity in the most positive light. Imagine yourself wearing a yellow hat, the color of the sun. It can validate your research, make your viva easier, and you'll learn about the process. Have an attractive CV, and find a job faster after you graduate. Other academics can see your work and reach out for collaboration and so on. You see all the good stuff coming from the journal paper publishing. Second, judgment. Like a judge, be cautious and assess risks. Consider the reasons why something may not work, why it may go wrong, or why it isn't worth doing. But the reasons must be logical. Imagine yourself wearing a black hat, the colour of a judges robe. Well, writing and publishing a journal paper can take a lot of time, and it can take a long time to get it published. And it might get rejected after a lot of work. Employers are not expecting any journal paper publication from new postdocs anyway. You'll see everything goes wrong. Third, emotion, it's your heart feeling. Put forward your instinct and hunches without needing to justify them. Imagine you are wearing a red hat, the color of a heart. This can be, I really wanted to publish. Or, I need to work really hard on that. I'm not sure. Just listen to your body. Close your eyes. Take a couple of deep breaths and think about the task. How do you feel? You feel excited or dreaded? You don't need any reason or logic. Just your gut feeling about it. Next, facts, like a whiteboard. Imagine you are wearing a white hat, the color of a whiteboard. Be clear on what information or insights you have, still need and where to find them. You need to question whether you have enough content for the paper, which journal you want to publish your paper. Do you know the process? How long it'll take, where you can find help, and so on. You need to ask as many questions as you can and try to find the answers to these questions to get clearer on what you are committing to. The fifth one is creativity, like a tree. You are wearing a green hat. Explore a range of ideas and possible ways to move forward. What are the alternatives? Publish a couple of conference papers, or collaborate with other students to write the journal paper. Or, maybe apply for a small founding to organize a student conference. Think about other options. The last one is management, is like a clear sky, blue hat. Pick an overview of all the information from the five perspectives above. Summarize all the information and reach a conclusion. The order of the top five perspectives is not essential, but the management perspective, the blue hat, should be used last. You need all the information to reach a conclusion. This is the Six Thinking Hats method. Before you making a decision. You've seen it from six perspectives: positive view, judgment, emotion, facts, creativity, and management. Of course, you can use this method to make a more informative decision in any area of your life. Not only related to know PhD. Next, let's have a look at the other technique to make good decisions based on your situation. It's on your TERMS. Let's have a look at what the terms are. T stands for time. If you decide to do this task, will you have more or less time on your PhD. Assuming your PhD is your priority at this time, your current working hour is nine to six, Monday to Friday. You'll have about 30 hours a week focusing on your research. If you take on this new task, or make this change, how many hours it will take away from your PhD? E. E stands for energy. How much extra energy this new task will take from you focusing on your PhD? Do you have extra energy to spare? If you've already been spread thin, be cautious! Taking on this task can make you miserable. R is for relationships. If you take on this new task, how will it influence your relationship with your supervisors, families, and so on? You are never alone in your PhD. All your relationships have an impact on your research. M is for money. What's the impact on your finance? When you look at these four criteria, focus on your current condition. Then, move to the last one. S stands for a significant impact on your future. Evaluate an opportunity for the long-term benefits and losses. You can easily see the immediate impact. However, you don't want to cause unwanted consequences in the future. For example, a part-time job seems getting more money. But in the long run, if it delays your submission, you may lose more money. However, taking a part-time teaching job can give you the experience you need for your future career. If you have little ones to look after when you are doing a PhD, pay a bit more for childcare. It will cost you some money now. But if you can complete your PhD faster, you'll get your investment back, and more. This is the TERMS formula to consider the impact on your current time, energy, relationship, money, and on your future. You can use both techniques to help you make good decisions. You've done it. Today, we learned two methods that can help you make good decisions to help you complete your PhD on time with ease. The Six Thinking Hats technique and your own TERMS formula. Your homework for today is to reflect on these two strategies of making decisions and try to use them when opportunities arrive. Well done. Trust yourself. You are on your way to complete your PhD on time with ease. I'm looking forward to meeting you in Module eight. Bye now. 9. Lesson 8: Two practices to get you unstuck: Welcome to the eighth module to complete your PhD course. And today we're going to talk about how to get unstuck. We all have these experiences. We just avoid doing the hard work and constantly procrastinate. I'll simply encounter a wall that stops us from moving forward. It's pretty common when you're doing your PhD. Don't panic. You are not alone. And more importantly, you can get through and complete your PhD. I will share with you two strategies to free yourself, if you are stuck. Change in environment and use focused and diffuse mode. Let's start with the first strategy, Change environment. When you find yourself procrastinating, cannot focus and get your research work done, change the environment. What do I mean? I mean, literately change your working or study space. Instead of the office or library, go to a fancy or far away cafe; like JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book in the elephant house. There are studies on why people can be more productive, creative when working or studying in a cafe. You may have a similar experience. The main contributors to the boost your productivity and creativity are the ambient noise, changing scene, visual variety, and the people sitting in a corner desk working hard. They trigger your mirror neurons to work hard yourself. However, I find it helpful when I have a clear plan before going into a cafe. I arrive early in the morning before 08:00 AM when the cafe is quiet and I can sit in my favourite seat. I tend to stay for three hours. Anytime after that, I can't concentrate. I know what I'm going to work on and have all the materials with me. Once I get my coffee, I'm fully absorbed by my work. Another thing you can do to change your work and study environment is to take a return trip and work on the train or plane. I once heard a story of somebody who needed to write an article and he would get paid £4k to do it. But he couldn't focus and write. So just before the deadline, he bought a return flight ticket, boarded on a return trip, flying ten hours each way to a random destination to complete his article on the plane. The flight ticket cost him £2k, but his pay easily covered the cost. I know at this moment you probably don't have thousands of pounds toward a long flight journey. But you can use the idea and customize it. Maybe you can take a return train ride, avoiding popular destinations and peak hours. You may be able to have a day return trip in 10 pounds with a coffee at the station. I know you're not getting paid immediately to cover your investment. So don't feel obliged to use this practice when you're not feeling the alignment. Also, remember, this is not a daily practice. Instead, this practice is to help you push through when you cannot stop yourself procrastinating. Another example of changing your environment is to stay in a hotel. Jk Rowling also stayed in the Balmoral hotel when she wrote the last Harry Potter book. Same idea. There is no need to stay in a hotel in order to complete your thesis. But one or two nights, once in a while can be helpful to keep you focused, speed up your progress. Of course, don't do it if you don't resonate with idea. Why does changing the environment work? Cal Newport explained it excellently in his book, Deep Work, 'By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort, money dedicated towards supporting deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your minds' instinct to procrastinate, and it delivers an injection of motivation and energy.' I've used all of these strategies myself to create and record this course. The key for me to maximize the effect is to stay focused. Go into a cafe, working on a train, sounds fun and holiday like. But it's important to know it's for work, I'm not on a holiday. I get excited to do a recording in a hotel room or work with my favorite coffee at hand. But at the same time, I get prepared to make sure I have everything I need for the task that I'm determined to complete. Okay, Let's have a look at a second practice. Use both focused and diffuse mode. What do I mean? Let me explain these two fascinating modes in which our brains operate. First, focused mode. We are using focused mode when we are focused. For example, we are concentrating on the task at hand. Studying knowledge intensive subjects. Trying to solve a research problem consciously. This is the time our conscious mind is in charge. And diffused mode is when we are in a relaxed state, such as taking a break from study, letting your mind wander freely, like daydreaming. This is the time when our subconscious mind makes connections. The image on the right shows the neurons making connections. When your conscious mind is relaxed, your subconscious mind is working hard to connect the dots. If you want to learn more about the focused and diffuse mode, you can check out the free online course on Coursera: Learn how to learn by Dr. Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski. You may ask which mode is better for thinking, research or problem-solving. A good question. You need both. If you are stuck on a research problem, focus intensely on the problem and try to find a solution, for some time, say an hour. If it hasn't been solved, look away from the problem. Take a break, go for a jog or walk, or take a shower without thinking about the issue. Sometimes you will have an aha moment when you are on your break. If not, come back and refocus on the problem. New ideas or solutions will show up. Of course, it doesn't mean all your problems will be solved after you take a break, but you can move forward and make progress. You need to refocus on your original problem with a new insight, and use your conscious mind to study the problem. To a certain extent. You need to get yourself familiar with the problem as much as possible. Then, allow your subconscious mind to integrate all the information you have in your conscious mind and work it out. Great. You've made it. You've reached the end of this module. A quick recap. We've discussed two practices to help you unstuck. If you find yourself procrastinating or getting distracted, use the first practice. Change your environment. From working in a cafe, on a train or plane, to in a hotel. The idea is to combine a radical change to your normal environment with a significant investment of effort or money to increase the perceived importance of the research task to stop procrastination and delay. Of course, these are examples of people at a range of situations used to promote their creativity and productivity. You don't have to do all of them to complete your thesis. Get inspired and find the ones suitable for you and your purse. Next, if you can't solve a problem, try the second practice. Use both focused and diffuse mode. Focus on the problem intensity for some time. Then take a break to allow your subconscious mind to take over and connect all the information you've got. The homework for today is to reflect on these two practices and try them out when you are stuck. Good work. You did it. Trusting yourself. You are on your way to complete your PhD on time with ease. I'm looking forward to meeting you in the last module. Bye now. 10. Lesson 9: PhD motivation and the viva: Welcome to the last module, of complete your PhD course. And today we're going to talk about motivation. And I love the quote from Robert Collier, 'Success in a sum of, small efforts, repeated day in and day out'. It's very true to the case of achieving a PhD degree. You need to complete hundreds of tasks. You've got 1461 days. So it's an accumulative process. Many students find it isn't easy to keep themselves motivated throughout the whole journey. I find the journey is like a roller coaster filled with ups and downs. Some days the sun is shining. Some other days I feel hopeless. So, let me share with you one practice to keep you motivated through these 200 weeks. Here is a question: What do you want to do after completing your PhD? If you haven't thought about it, start today. You don't need a final answer, just to start thinking about it. Here are some examples. Take a break or trip. Where do you want to go? Find a couple of places you really want to go, or when you meet up with friends, talk about exciting places to visit. Give yourself a reward. What do you want? Get your thesis published. There are services that can help you put your thesis on shelves in bookstores. Start your research career at an Institute you admire. Start your professional life. Live in a posh apartment and drive to work every day. Take some time when you are relaxing to dream about your future after completing your PhD. No matter which stage you're at now for your PhD, This is important to keep you motivated. When you start having clear ideas on what you want to be, do, and half after your PhD, turn your ideas into images and create a PhD success image board. You can cut out pictures from magazines, use photos, drawings. Once you've completed your PhD success image board, hung it up above your desk, or take a photo of it and use it as your screensaver. This images will motivate you day-in and day-out to work on your Ph.D. Now, let's have a look at the viva. Viva Voce is a Latin term that means the live voice. It's a formal oral examination after your submission of your PhD thesis. I believe you've seen this sign before. How did you feel when you saw it, and knew one of your peers was having her or his viva? When I was a PhD student, I was curious and I felt a bit nervous, not knowing what would happen for my viva. After I became a supervisor and examiner, my advice for students is to get prepared and relax. No one is looking for evidence to fail you. Examiners are looking for evidence to let you pass. Of course, it's common to feel a bit nervous or less confident about your viva since it's something new for you. And we all feel a bit worried when doing something new. An easy way to boost your confidence is to get familiar with the place. Check out the viral room before your viva. If you need to give a presentation, book the room and rehearse it in the room. What's happening during your viva? The panel for your viva consists of a chair, two examiners, you and your supervisor. Your supervisor cannot answer any questions for you. Your job is to answer the questions for your best ability and make sure to bring an annotated copy of your thesis. There is no need to take notes. Your examiners have read thesis thoroughly. Despite the rumor going around that examiners only read the introduction and conclusion. That's not the case. Remember, they have six or eight weeks with your thesis. And they are highly successful academics who are experts in your field and PhD examination. It won't take long for them to read and evaluate your work. A viva can last two or three hours. Time passes really fast. Just to make sure you arrive at the room early. If your viva starts at 10 am, be there at 9.30. The panel will be there already to have a brief chat and do some paperwork. You won't be invited into the room. But it's a good gesture to say hello when they arrive and wait outside. Sometimes the panel finishes what they need to do earlier and they may invite you to start early. Don't let the panel wait for you. If you need to give a presentation, make sure you save your presentation on the computer in the room in advance. Now, the questions. There are five types of questions. Random questions at beginning to get to know each other. Questions like: Where are you from? What's your plan after your PhD? Examiners are trying to help you relax. Then the big questions: why you're interested in the topic. Specific questions, go through your thesis chapter by chapter, ask questions for each chapter. Difficult questions. It can be a mistake your examiners have spotted in your thesis; or they don't agree with your choice of research methodology. Answer the question as much as you can. If it's a small mistake, for example, your interpretation of a chart doesn't match the chart, admitted and agreed to check later. At the same time, stand by your research, including the research aim, questions. methods, conclusion. You've spend four years on this. And you are the expert in your research. Don't get into an argument with your examiners. But politely agreeing with a disagreement with respect is okay. The last point is, even there are questions you think you didn't answer very well; it doesn't mean you failed. So, move on, ready yourself for the next question. The last set of questions are admin questions. After all the academic questions, your supervisor will be asked to leave the room. Then, the panel will ask you questions about your satisfaction with the school support and supervision you received. It's a matter of routine. Just answer them truthfully. Trust yourself. You know the answers. Next, how is your PhD evaluated? First, your examiners have evaluated the thesis before the viva. They've already decided whether your research have reached the standard. They've completed a report on your thesis focusing on three aspects. How the thesis matches the criteria for the reward. The strengths and weaknesses of the thesis. Whether the summary accurately reflects the findings of the thesis. Pay attention to this one. In many cases, students write the summary in a rush and assume nobody will pay attention. It's not the case. That's why in module one we discussed on how to write an abstract or summary. Also, examiners will evaluate your viva: Whether they are satisfied that the work is your own work. Whether the candidate was able to relate to the work to the broader subject. Whether they are satisfied that you understand the research that you carried out and what you've written in the thesis. A list of recommendations will be provided to you after your viva. So, you don't need to take notes during your viva. And you need to address these recommendations and update your thesis accordingly. Some other advice might be given to you during your viva. But, if they are not in the formal recommendation list, you don't have to address them. If you are given 12 weeks for minor corrections, one of your examiners will reveal the revision and report the final satisfaction of the corrections. What are the potential outcomes of a viva? There are seven of them from pass to not approved. By now, you've already known 96.7% of students who reached the oral examination passed a viva. And within the candidates who passed their viva, four out of five came out of the room with minor corrections. 16% needed major corrections, and 5% went through directly. No corrections were needed. And 3.3% of students failed their viva. Of course, it doesn't mean every school needs to fail. 3.3% of the PhD students every year. Failing a viva doesn't happen very often. You've done that. The whole journey of your PhD from planning to the viva. The last note I want to mention is if you decide to become an academic, at some point, you will come across this piece of information. If you are a phd holder, you have a 0.3% chance to become a professor. I heard about it during one workshop when I was a PhD student. The presenter's purpose is to help us realize that becoming a professor requires hard work. And there are other opportunities for a PhD. But this very statement has discouraged so many early career researchers. It gives them a false idea that most of them who want to become a professor won't make it, no matter how hard they try. However, the truth is that not 100% of the PhD holders want to make an effort to become a professor. It might be only 0.5% of the PhD holders want to make an effort to become a professor and more than half of them succeeded. So please don't let this statement or any other similar information discourage you. In most cases, you can become a professor or anyone if you want to become one and make an effort to learn how to become one. This is the end of module nine. A quick recap. We discussed how to use an image board to keep you motivated. We also mystified the viva. And the last point is if you want to become a professor and make effort to learn about how to become one, you will be a professor. Homework for today: Create your success PhD image board. With these all said, congratulations!! You've completed this PhD course, and I believe you are ready to complete your PhD on time with ease. I'm so honored to have you in this course and hope some of the practices I shared with you are helpful for you. All the best to your PhD journey. Bye now.