Five Mini-Habit Ideas for Ph.D. Students

Simple suggestions for mini-habits that bring you on the right track day-to-day.

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

If you are unsure what “mini-habits” are, I recommend reading Stephen Guise block or his book. To me, this was the best introduction to mini-habits. Well-researched, without annoying stories that seem squeezed in like in many American books, funny, and most of all: Informative and easy to apply to my day-to-day life.

How I understand Mini-habits after reading this book and applying them for a while:

1. They need to be ridiculously small. You can do them when you’re tired, when your sad, angry, lonely, running out of time. And most of all: They do not generate an inner resistance. It’s not: “Run for a mile every day”. It’s “take your shoes out of the shelf”. That’s all.
2. They need to put you on the right track. A good mini-habit paves the path for a successful day. It makes you turn into the right street and increases the chance to do what’s required. It’s not: Don’t browse Instagram (don’t, in general, is not a good term for a habit), it’s: Put away your phone and plan for proper breaks.
3. The mental setting is: When the mini-habit is done, I can make that tick on my list! Even if it feels ridiculously small (which is the goal of such a mini-habit!). The idea is that it gives you that little momentum in the right direction. If you feel like doing more, do more. But it is ok to only do that mini task!

Today, I want to give you a few ideas to get started with mini-habits — specially picked and proved for grad-school, researchers, Ph.D. students, i.e. everyone that works in a quite unstructured, yet stressful (in both time and emotion), environment where outcomes are unclear, that involve many hours of working alone — without deadlines until suddenly they come, where we have to motivate and navigate ourselves day in day out.

The habits I present don’t focus on a major outcome (like two written pages a day). They are meant to put you on the right track. From there, it’s much easier to make the right decisions. It’s like leaving this chocolate at the supermarket to not even be tempted later at home. They reduce distraction and get you going. The goal is not to have many, crazy, long habits. The goal is to have the right ones.

1. When entering the office in the morning / sitting down at your home office desk, without doing anything else, start the computer and re-read for five minutes what you wrote yesterday. Afterward, it’s enough time for coffee, water, organizing the rest of the day, talk with fellow Ph.D. students. To me, this habit was magical when I had to finish a paper I hated (not because of the content but because of the history behind it), was all by myself on it, had the impression I’d never finish, all in all: Was scared to even look at it! Just re-reading what I wrote usually ended up in 45–50 minutes of reading, editing, collecting new ideas and thoughts until it was finally time for the first coffee. And by then, the work was a little less scary, my emotions calmed down, and I was in the middle of the topic. And I had already achieved something before it was even 9.
2. Set your phone on Do not disturb and put it out of sight. Simple, yet effective. As long as you want to focus, this will help. It makes sure no random message distracts you from your focus. As soon as you want to procrastinate, it won’t fully prevent you but reduce the risk.
3. Write a list with three specific to-does for the day. Not two, not five. Three. And they are specific. For example, “receive messages on the Raspberry Pi from your MacBook via Kafka”, not: “Set up the infrastructure”. It forces you to get focus. It forces you to become concrete about your tasks. Three concrete items are less scary than a whole long list, thus they reduce procrastination, which likes to say hello when we look at an undoable huge amount of fuzzy to-do lists. And it stops you from getting used to not finishing these endless lists anyways. Trust me, it works like a charm!
4. Pick one term from your field and spend a few minutes to research it a little further. Make sure you fully understand it, can distinguish it from other terms, know how to apply it. Solid background knowledge is the backbone of our work. It builds up slowly. But you can’t build your house on sand. If this task is too huge, start with a list of these terms and pick one per week, then do 5 minutes per day research on it. This is the daily doses of “consumption” and knowledge-building. While knowledge is the backbone, the last habit, is even more important:
5. Produce! Every day. This is the most important habit. Produce three lines of code, one sentence, half a slide. Eventually, there has to be a thesis. Before the thesis, there might be a few publications, evaluations, teaching, … We tend to read a lot, think a lot, take lots of notes. Make sure once a day, for three minutes, you produce. It has to be a mini-habit, so don’t set this goal to two hours. If you happen to produce for to hours, that’s perfectly fine. But the benchmark has to be three minutes. And you produce so that an audience understands! Not for the shelf. But for the publication. Be aware that what you need to produce might vary. Sometimes you need to program or conduct an experiment. But then it’s the program you need to write this publication, not some “I want to try this technology”. Sometimes you need to write. Then it’s writing in the real paper. A paragraph that is, from your perspective, the final version. That has all the necessary research done, all words looked up, all references included. All figures finished. Just make it a habit to produce something “for real” every day. This will help you communicate fast and early, get early feedback, make daily progress, and most of all: Become concrete and clear in your intentions.

If you have more ideas for empowering mini-habits that help you day to day, please share them in the comments! Who knows, maybe someone out there needed exactly your idea. And let me know how it went trying out one of the above.