All right, we have a question from Sophie. Sophie asks, how do you manage long research projects while reducing anxiety? Sophie has some elaboration. She says, I'm a PhD researcher in economics. From the start of a research project, a publishing the paper usually takes three to four years. Wow. How do I manage this type of long and drag your research project perhaps intertwined with other concurrent projects?

All right, well, that's long. Three to four years is quite long. I'm assuming at that duration what happens is three to four years of work and then a bunch of papers you produce at the end of it. If not, make that the case? I don't know economics well, but I do remember Adam Grant explained this to me at some point.

I was talking to the author, Adam Grant, who's also a professor at Wharton. And he talked about this, that in their work, which is very data analysis oriented, he's very economics oriented, even though he's a business professor, there's a long period of trying to get access to data sets that are good.

And then once you have those data sets and you've really learned them, you pluck a lot of fruit from them, paper, paper, paper, paper. So that might help, by the way. You might amortize here. When you're doing these long projects, think about getting lots of papers out of the project.

The other things I'll suggest-- this was sort of an approach I've seen a lot in academia-- the two plus one rule. So have two big projects you're working on at one time, but in different stages. So you have a project that's really in the hardcore, we're analyzing the data, we're starting to write stage.

Have another one that's in the very early stage. I'm negotiating with the French Census Bureau to try to get the data I'm going to need to do my big Thomas Piketty style economic growth analysis or something. So different stages. So the early stage project where it requires sporadic attention and you can put it on hold for a couple of weeks at a time is OK.

You feel better about that because your second project is much closer to completion. And once that's done, your first project gets closer to completion, you can add in another early stage. So that's the two of the two plus one rule. The plus one is do something small that ships at least once every four to six months.

So you feel like there's some progress happening. So hey, every semester I'm going to write, I'm going to publish a book review, I'm going to do a short paper. I'm going to go back to this data set I really analyzed and wrote some epic papers about, let me take a month and put half of my research time onto extracting an additional cool little insight that's going to be a short note or a conference talk or something like that.

So there's some wheel of public production that spins at a faster rate. So two plus one is a good rule for these type of research fields. (upbeat music)