In May 2024, four years into my postgraduate career, I decided that I wanted to finish my PhD by the end of 2025. The problem was that, despite working on many ongoing projects, I had not yet published a paper discussing my PhD work. My days were full and I was spending my weekends working, but I was making little meaningful progress. I was producing data but not finishing anything.

From conversations with my peers, this was a common experience. There is a pervasive attitude in academia that graduate students in the laboratory should always be busy, always saying yes and always starting the next task. I see it in myself and in others: working at a frenetic pace on too many things at once and not giving any of them enough focus. It feels productive, but when too many responsibilities pile up, it often isn’t. If anything, these behaviours are sophisticated forms of procrastination. Fresh ideas and new projects are more enticing than finishing a difficult task or pushing a manuscript through its painful final stages.

At the time, I was a PhD student studying human genetics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. I was investigating the genetic causes of chronic kidney disease. One afternoon, I sat in a café trying to plan the year ahead. I found that stepping away from the lab allowed me to think more clearly about the big picture. I looked back at my plans and realized that they were fantasies: too many papers, too many ideas for ambitious projects and not enough time. I decided to write down every project and commitment on my plate and everything I intended to finish.

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There were unfinished case reports (short papers describing unusual clinical cases), a review article that I had promised but never started, collaborations that I was helping with, side analyses that I had volunteered for, obligations for several student committees, a clinical cohort analysis and a large gene-discovery project that was supposed to be a substantial component of my PhD. The list had 20 items.

Clearly, I had taken on too much. The problem was that when I gave all of my projects equal weight, I drifted towards the easier tasks instead of the harder, more important ones. I kept taking the path of least resistance.

Staring at the list, I knew that finishing everything was impossible. I forced myself to answer a hard question: which of these 20 things do I need to complete to finish my PhD and graduate on time?

I circled three: a clinical case report that I was revising, a manuscript describing a previously unknown genetic cause of kidney disease that I hoped to get published by the end of 2024 and a clinical cohort study on which I planned to base one of my thesis chapters.

Letting go

One of the hardest things to let go was a gene-discovery project: I found the work intellectually exciting and had already invested months in it, but the project had a long way to go. Keeping it would mean that I’d still be running experiments well beyond a reasonable PhD completion date, and it was not essential to finishing my thesis. To let it go, I had to have difficult conversations with my supervisor and collaborators — I had agreed to take on the work, so backing out of the project felt awkward — but I had to be honest about what was realistic.

My supervisor was supportive. He encouraged me to focus on completing the most important work rather than juggling too many projects. In general, before discussing my workload and goals with my colleagues, I would prepare a rationale, a plan and a timeline, especially when I had to ask to put something on hold. I learnt that going to meetings with solutions rather than problems made discussions much more constructive. My supervisor and I did not always agree immediately, but we found ways to move forwards by having honest conversations. I was fortunate to have a supervisor who trusted me to manage my time.

Narrowing focus

After deciding to work on my three circled projects, I asked a second question: right now, which one matters most? I identified the single highest-value item and made it my sole focus. All of my attention went to one crucial project. I got more done by doing less.

This became a weekly habit. Every Monday morning, before checking my e-mails, I sat down and asked myself what my three most important goals were and what the next essential step was for each of them. Then, I asked the question that mattered the most: what is the one thing that I can do this week to clear the path for everything else? That question changed how I approached my PhD. More often than not, the answer was not something that I should start, but something that I could stop, freeing up time for the work that mattered. For example, was there an experiment that I could forgo or an exploratory analysis that I could resist starting? Most weeks, this approach meant that I ended up working on manuscript writing and figure preparation every morning, until the tasks that I’d singled out were done.

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