This post previously appeared in the Mayo Clinic Diversity in Education Blog on Feb. 13th, 2014.
75% of graduate students in a recent survey have reported dealing with stress in the past year.
The main source of stress is the pressure to produce. And why not? With
deadlines, classes, experiments, and presentations, graduate students
are under a lot of pressure to produce. There are three ideas for
increasing productivity that I use regularly and maybe they can help you
as well. I didn't come up with these ideas, I learned them (see the
embedded links in the text), and below I will provide an example of
their utility in a scientific research environment. But before I do,
there are two things you should already have:
1. FOCUS (a goal, a thesis, a dream)
2. A documentation system (i.e. a pencil, a laptop, a smart phone, or a stone tablet).
You can't produce anything without a
focus and you can't achieve results without a system to measure
progress. Now that you have a thesis and a pencil, let’s get going.