Should you choose an EASY or a HARD PhD Research Project?

[@BigOURS-cl8mr]

Very clear and concise explanations which really help

[@MLNewPapers-xo5vm]

Thank you very much for your nice comment!

[@SarahPark-g1l]

Congrats for hitting +1K subscribers!!

[@MLNewPapers-xo5vm]

Thank you so much!!

[@sebastianjost]

When you work on multiple projects at a time, do all/ several of them have deadlines when you need to finish them? I find multiple deadlines often create too much stress. With multiple projects, you also have to spend mental energy planning/ deciding when you work on which ones. Switching between different complex projects can also be very exhausting as you forget how things worked or what you were working on. So doing them one after the other can be faster than doing both simultaneously. That may depend on your person though.

[@MLNewPapers-xo5vm]

Thank you for your comment and very good point you have here! The projects I work on often have no specific deadline, but when I work with senior colleagues, we set together a (rough) deadline to finish the work to keep the productivity up. If I engage in several projects, I make sure the deadlines do not overlap, with (in my case) at least 1-2 months between 2 deadlines. And usually, I spend most of the time on the project which has the closest deadline. For example, if I work on 3 projects, I would spend 3 days on the project which has the earliest deadline, and 1 day on each of the others. Working at least half of the time on the project with the earliest deadline keeps the number of hours large, while working on several projects also keeps my productivity high. And as you pointed out, I always make sure to work on each project at least half a day per week in order not to forget what I did. In my case at least, what really helped me is to have a fixed schedule of what to do, so I never ask myself what to do. Besides increasing my productivity, it helps me not to spend time thinking about what to do and when to do it, which decreased my productivity and was one of the main sources of my stress. Hope that helps!

[@HolmesElla-n4g]

Vladimir Lock