working on your PhD in the shadow of coronavirus

Dear all (co-supervisors cc-ed),

Albert Camus in The Plague (that famous novel about an Arab town with no Arabs in it ☺), gets one of his characters to note that, as the virus is transforming all aspects of people’s lives, while not everyone ends up carrying the virus physiologically, everyone ends up carrying it in their heart and soul.

I am not sure about you but that is certainly the case with me. So, if like me you are having trouble concentrating and spending a whole day reading and writing on your research project, here are a couple of tips.

As I have always suggested, it is really important that you divide up your day into time slots that work for you as a standard working day. I think of my working day as 8.30-10.30, 11.00-1.00, 2.00- 4.00, 4.30-6.30. Do I religiously follow this, of course not. Do I religiously think of it as the norm to return to, yes. Even if I don’t follow it for a whole week I still think of it as the norm to return to.
But I am more fidgety than usual at the moment. So I’ve shortened the duration of my time slots. I found it useful because along with the idea of having time slots is the idea of having a very definite task to finish during that time slot.

As you know, getting up in the morning and saying ‘I’ll read this article this morning’ is not usually a good work strategy. Dividing the article into sections and ensuring you read and take quotes and notes etc… from that section during a specific time slot is good.
So, I’ve shortened my working day time slots to one and a half hour: 8.30-10.00, 10.30- 12.00, 1.00-2.30, 3.00-4.30, 5.00-6.30. and I am thinking of each one and half hour as having three half hour tasks to finish. This has helped me a lot actually. half hour tasks are really working well at beating the attention seeking Corona.

I am not suggesting you follow my mode of slotting the day. But I definitely think you should slot your day depending on what you know about yourself and create shorter ones with shorter tasks that suit the current moment. You might be more of a night worker than a morning worker etc… you might work more on the week end etc… but you should strive, as much as it is humanly possible, to create a proletarian routine with small specific tasks to finish and try to stick to them. Otherwise coronavirus will eat up your whole reality without you even being sick.

I have asked some of you to do this before. I think it is even more imperative to do this now: keep a diary of your days and time slots. Something like this:

Monday:
8.30-10.00: read page 1 to page 10 of this article. Took lots of notes.
10.30-12.00: read page 10 to page 30. Article finished. More notes
1..00-2.30: wrote some notes and re-arranged my thesis’ conceptual framework.
3.00-4.30: didn’t work as planned. Was feeling sleepy and just lazed around
5.00-7.00: read from

Tuesday:
8.30 – 10.00: Etc…
10.30- 12.00 went to do some essential shopping so didn’t work
etc…

Wednesday:
8.30-12.00: did paid work…

It is crucial not to lie to yourself about procrastrinations, looking at a blank page like a zombie for an hour, and all that.

The purpose of this diary should never be to make yourself be guilty (or maybe a little bit of guilt is ok and productive, but neoliberal education works on the propagation of guilt so that’s the last thing we want to contribute to). So, no to guilt, but yes to construct a tool which allows you to reflect and get a realistic sense of what you achieve in a week’s work. Week after week. Send me your diary every fortnight and we can talk about it.

All the best and hope to see you on skype sooner or later.
Ghassan