How Do You Manage Long Research Projects While Reducing Anxiety?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:03.360 | All right, we have a question from Sophie.

00:00:08.000 | Sophie asks, how do you manage long research projects

00:00:12.800 | while reducing anxiety?

00:00:16.400 | Sophie has some elaboration.

00:00:18.720 | She says, I'm a PhD researcher in economics.

00:00:21.280 | From the start of a research project,

00:00:22.840 | a publishing the paper usually takes three to four years.

00:00:25.760 | Wow.

00:00:27.360 | How do I manage this type of long and drag

00:00:29.120 | your research project perhaps intertwined

00:00:31.160 | with other concurrent projects?

00:00:34.120 | All right, well, that's long.

00:00:35.800 | Three to four years is quite long.

00:00:38.560 | I'm assuming at that duration what happens

00:00:41.560 | is three to four years of work and then a bunch of papers

00:00:43.880 | you produce at the end of it.

00:00:45.240 | If not, make that the case?

00:00:48.160 | I don't know economics well, but I

00:00:49.520 | do remember Adam Grant explained this to me at some point.

00:00:52.600 | I was talking to the author, Adam Grant, who's

00:00:54.440 | also a professor at Wharton.

00:00:57.600 | And he talked about this, that in their work, which

00:00:59.880 | is very data analysis oriented, he's very economics oriented,

00:01:03.240 | even though he's a business professor,

00:01:05.480 | there's a long period of trying to get access

00:01:07.720 | to data sets that are good.

00:01:10.240 | And then once you have those data sets

00:01:11.840 | and you've really learned them, you

00:01:14.040 | pluck a lot of fruit from them, paper, paper, paper, paper.

00:01:16.480 | So that might help, by the way.

00:01:17.780 | You might amortize here.

00:01:19.040 | When you're doing these long projects,

00:01:20.600 | think about getting lots of papers out of the project.

00:01:23.920 | The other things I'll suggest--

00:01:25.600 | this was sort of an approach I've seen a lot in academia--

00:01:29.920 | the two plus one rule.

00:01:32.240 | So have two big projects you're working on at one time,

00:01:35.160 | but in different stages.

00:01:36.520 | So you have a project that's really in the hardcore,

00:01:39.480 | we're analyzing the data, we're starting to write stage.

00:01:44.160 | Have another one that's in the very early stage.

00:01:46.200 | I'm negotiating with the French Census Bureau

00:01:50.440 | to try to get the data I'm going to need

00:01:53.200 | to do my big Thomas Piketty style economic growth

00:01:57.040 | analysis or something.

00:01:58.040 | So different stages.

00:01:59.960 | So the early stage project where it requires sporadic attention

00:02:04.040 | and you can put it on hold for a couple of weeks at a time

00:02:06.440 | is OK.

00:02:07.120 | You feel better about that because your second project

00:02:09.560 | is much closer to completion.

00:02:11.760 | And once that's done, your first project

00:02:13.560 | gets closer to completion, you can add in another early stage.

00:02:16.200 | So that's the two of the two plus one rule.

00:02:18.600 | The plus one is do something small

00:02:22.520 | that ships at least once every four to six months.

00:02:26.560 | So you feel like there's some progress happening.

00:02:28.640 | So hey, every semester I'm going to write,

00:02:31.080 | I'm going to publish a book review,

00:02:32.520 | I'm going to do a short paper.

00:02:33.800 | I'm going to go back to this data set I really analyzed

00:02:36.360 | and wrote some epic papers about, let me take a month

00:02:39.280 | and put half of my research time onto extracting

00:02:42.400 | an additional cool little insight that's

00:02:44.120 | going to be a short note or a conference talk

00:02:45.960 | or something like that.

00:02:46.920 | So there's some wheel of public production

00:02:50.800 | that spins at a faster rate.

00:02:52.080 | So two plus one is a good rule for these type of research

00:02:54.640 | fields.

00:02:56.200 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:02:59.560 | (upbeat music)

How Do You Manage Long Research Projects While Reducing Anxiety?

Chapters