Do you struggle to get things done and stay motivated in your research career? Learn how to efficiently set goals and reflect on your work!
Staying motivated and productive while working in the research environment can be quite challenging.
This is mostly because as researchers and academics, we’re trusted with a broad range of responsibilities, from doing research and securing funding, through teaching, developing course material to mentoring others.
And on the top of this, we’ve got to share our research with the world to ensure it reaches beneficiaries that can potentially use it.
This is a lot! It’s extremely easy to get overwhelmed, especially if you don’t have a specific plan on how you can get things done.
As a result, you may lose motivation and your drive to pursue your innovative research. Or even worse, you may burn out, as I explained in my previous article on maintaining sustainable motivation.
As academics and researchers, we’ve to deal with rejection and uncertainty. Even if we give our best, things may not always go exactly as we want.
So how you can ensure you’ll get things done and stay motivated?
Well, we need a good plan!
At the beginning of my PhD, I had prepared had a plan for my PhD project. At that time, I considered the main areas and activities I wanted to explore in my PhD programme. This took a very generic form of the aim and objectives for the project. These were fairly flexible, but I thought it was OK given the exploratory nature of my work.
However, I neither really make daily or weekly goals nor used to-do lists that would give me a way to measure my progress.
All that mattered for me was to meet the aim and objectives of my project – as you can expect, I got overwhelmed from time to time.
Looking at it from the perspective of a couple of years spent in academia, I believe I could’ve achieved much more in my PhD had I set, at the very least, weekly goals.
I say this with high confidence, as since I started setting daily and weekly goals a couple of years back, I’ve seen a dramatic increase in my productivity.
Such weekly and daily goals enable me to really focus on what I’ve got to achieve in a given timeframe. I noticed that I don’t get distracted so much as well.
Want to know how exactly I do it?
In this article, I’m going to tell you about how I stay motivated and get things done, regardless of the variety of responsibilities you may carry.
Table of Contents
Set your daily, weekly and monthly goals
This may seem obvious, but you really need to take a pen and write down your goals.
Why should you write them down by hand? Well, the study led by Dr Gail Matthews showed that you’re 42% more likely to achieve your goal.
That’s right, 42%!
So write down your goals now, as you read this article!
Take a piece of paper and just write 3 main goals for next month. These should focus on what you want to achieve and by when you need to achieve this.
From there, you can derive weekly and daily goals.
It’s important you set goals and targets. Otherwise, you’re just working towards the massive goal of completing your project that may seem as something unachievable. You may feel that you haven’t actually made any progress over the past week or month.
If you don’t see progress in your work, you may get demotivated pretty quicky. We all need small wins to keep us going!
Ask yourself a question – what is important for you now?
What are the activities that you really need to focus on that will enable you to progress in your career and completing your PhD/postdoc project?
In my case, for example, I focus on:
– building relationship with stakeholders for my research and course;
– writing proposals for new research projects;
– developing the MSc course that I lead;
– disseminating my research via publications and other communication channels; and
– leading and developing my research team.
This seems a lot, right? But it’s possible to manage it with clearly defined monthly, weekly and daily goals.
I encourage you to use SMART goals framework when setting your goals!
Create a to-do list
Once you set up your goals, it’s actually very easy to list the tasks that you’ve got to achieve on a monthly, weekly or daily basis on a piece of paper or specific