How to Grad & Beyond with Betul

It is easy to lose work-life balance in grad school because there are no set work hours. That sounds like an advantage, since you can set your schedule for yourself. But often, you end up thinking of your research or your classes at all times, even when you are sleeping. That is the exact opposite of work-life balance.

No set work hours can mean that you get e-mails you need to respond to urgently regardless of the time of the day. It means having to stay in the lab or in the office until late into the night. It means losing sleep and nightmares. It stripes your ability to relax, building tension in your body.

I noticed how bad that tension had gotten for me when I started a 9-5 job, where the work actually had a starting and ending time.

But grad school doesn’t have to be that way. There are changes you can make that will help you keep that balance. One challenging yet life-changing change I made during my PhD was to explicitly restrict my study hours to about 3-4 hours. I gave myself time only between 10 am and 2 pm everyday to do all the work I needed to do that day for my dissertation. After about 2 pm, I would stop completely, meaning no writing or reading (and thinking!) about my dissertation for the day. This way, I wrote my first draft in two months, something I hadn’t been able to achieve for months at the time. This worked because I created an emergency signal in my mind: if this work doesn’t get done until 2 pm, it will not be until tomorrow. This helped me focus much better. This method left all the rest of my afternoon and evening for resting and other activities.

Making this change was not easy in the slightest. I was so used to constantly be thinking about my dissertation. Yet, in time, it became second nature. So, I know work-life balance is hard to achieve in grad school. But I also know that it is not impossible.