work life balance during phd

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PhD Work-Life Balance: 5 Tips to Help Students Manage the PhD Workload

The journey toward acquiring a doctoral degree is extremely rewarding, yet, it is perhaps one of the most challenging of all academic journeys. Every young PhD student begins this journey with a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity, harboring a dream of contributing to science and society through a dedicated work plan for PhD. However, on this long journey as a student pursues their PhD, work-life balance goes haywire.

On striving to achieve a PhD work-life balance , students often find themselves perplexed. Eventually the stressors of the PhD workload may create a dent in their dreams as the rough edges of the journey become apparent. Many students take a long time to acknowledge these ‘expectation v/s reality’ issues, and this in turn leads to anxiety, affecting their productivity as well as well-being.

Despite having a work plan for PhD research, it is hard for students, at least in the initial stages, to reconcile with the fact that their work plan for PhD is never as fool proof as the one they envisioned on paper. Experiments may fail, results aren’t always ‘perfect’, and timelines can go haywire if standardization protocols get prolonged. Even after acknowledging these issues, there is the constant pressure of meeting mentor expectations, which can hamper the students’ lifestyle and overall PhD work-life balance. It may lead to long work hours, including night shifts and working over weekends.

For students  living away from their home country , maintaining a PhD work-life balance comes with an added challenge of acclimatizing to new cultures. At times, these challenges even adversely affect their mental health giving rise to anxiety issues, burnout, or even imposter syndrome, all of which can hamper their work plan for PhD research and, in turn, their productivity. Although mental health issues are undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges faced by PhD students during their doctoral journey, the impact of poor mental health is unfortunately a largely overlooked topic in academia. 1

While the need of striking a PhD work-life balance is understood by most students, implementing it can be tough, largely due to the limited availability of resources that can guide students toward creating and maintaining an effective work plan for PhD research.

The work plan for PhD varies for each student as it’s tailored to their needs. So, creating a standard schedule sample to manage PhD workload is not advisable. However, here are some tips and advice for PhD students to make this process of creating an optimal PhD student lifestyle for themselves easier and more enjoyable. 2,3

Table of Contents

1. Manage time effectively

To understand how to achieve a PhD work-life balance, students need to consciously identify the time and energy leakages occurring throughout the day . This will help them in identifying the patterns in which they are spending time. Tasks requiring similar mental capabilities can be grouped together during the day, thereby minimizing decision fatigue. Similarly, initiating collaborations and rejecting additional responsibilities can save a considerable amount of time leading to an improved execution of the PhD work plan.

2. Establish a routine

The doctoral journey is a bumpy ride with unpredictable twists and turns. This is the main cause of anxiety in many students since, as human beings, we are wired to function optimally within a regulated and controlled system. While factors such as the PhD workload and work hours cannot be optimized beyond a certain point, the time outside the lab can be managed with more ease. By dedicating sufficient time toward household chores and unwinding activities, and creating a PhD work-life balance, students can develop a sense of security through a sustainable and predictable daily routine. Having a work plan for PhD is good but having a leisure plan is better to help you maintain a healthy PhD student lifestyle that can, in turn, boost productivity at work.

3. Invest in mental and physical well-being

To get the right work plan for PhD, research, identify, acknowledge, and then tackle the stressors that hamper physical and mental well-being. Engaging in physical exercises, thought-journaling, and (if needed) seeking advice from a therapist, preferably someone experienced in advising PhD students, can be some ways to achieve a lifestyle based on PhD work-life balance.

4. Indulge in a hobby

The  anxiety of managing the PhD workload can be balanced by pursuing a hobby where the mind is free to explore without any limitations. This can, in turn, lead to enhanced creativity and innovation in ideas at work and help achieve a sustainable PhD work-life balance. An improved PhD student lifestyle can help one flourish.

5. Connect regularly with friends and family

It is impossible for friends and family members to empathize completely with the problems faced during the doctoral journey, especially if they do not share the same love for research. But it is essential to connect with them regularly, as they can provide an objective and impartial lens to work-related problems. This can help in resolving the problems altogether or make the problems seem totally insignificant. Either way, it can help tackle the anxiety associated with failures in executing the work plan for PhD research.

By now it may be clear that in the journey of attaining the right PhD work-life balance, students should make a series of conscious choices and lifestyle changes that need to be made every single day. Exercising these choices is not an easy task, but can be extremely rewarding in terms of reducing anxiety and burnout-related issues, as well as to improve productivity and well-being in the long run.

• Mental health of graduate students sorely overlooked. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01751-z.
• Bartlett, M. J., Arslan, F. N., Bankston, A. & Sarabipour, S. Ten simple rules to improve academic work–life balance.  PLOS Comput. Biol.   17 , e1009124 (2021).
• Self-care for the scientist.  https://www.apa.org  https://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2015/09/matters.

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Being a PhD student can be tough at times. One of the main reasons for this is the pressure in academia to ‘publish or perish’. But it doesn’t have to be this way. I think that by pushing back on the culture of overwork in academia, we can do great research while maintaining our mental wellbeing.

Making space for rest

It’s taken me a few years to fully appreciate how important it is to set clear work boundaries. This has of course been more challenging given the impact of the pandemic and the fact we are working from home more. I find it much easier to ‘switch off’ from work when I’ve had to do my commute home.

I recently made a change to start working in a room that isn’t my bedroom and it’s made such a difference. I now have a much clearer workspace at home which helps me transition into rest time at the end of the day and at the weekends. This means that there’s only one room in the house that I associate with work now which allows me to get ‘in the zone’ and to make that work-life division a bit clearer—work happens in the home office and nowhere else at home.

Communicating boundaries

Communication with your supervisor is one of the key aspects of a successful PhD and work boundaries are something that comes into this too. You may sometimes have to work on the weekends if you have an experiment to do and equipment booked, but I always try to keep my weekends as work-free as I can.

One of the best ways to keep this time as rest time is to not look at or respond to work emails. I use a website blocking app to prevent me from being able to access my emails over the weekend as it’s hard for me to resist the urge to ‘just check it’ in my downtime. My supervisor knows that unless I’m booked in for lab time, I’m not available over the weekend. This helps me truly disconnect for those two days so I can come to my work the next week fully refreshed and ready to go.

Make time for yourself

At the end of the day, the key output of a PhD is the researcher that you become. It may seem like your publications and thesis are the most important thing but to me, it’s all about training to be a good researcher so that I can go on to have a research-focused career. So, it makes no sense to me to complete my PhD but at the expense of my mental wellbeing. I suffer from a few mental illnesses and have done since my teenage years, so I was aware going into my PhD that this was something I needed to be careful about managing. There have been a couple of blips, but on the whole, my mental health is currently better than it has been in many, many years.

Resting when I need to and not overworking is a significant factor in maintaining this. Over the years, it’s become clear that I can’t work to a high standard when I’m in a mental health ‘slump’ and that making time for myself can prevent that. I try to make sure that I use my weekends and evenings to talk to friends and family as well as indulging in my hobbies. My hobbies tend to be fairly relaxing which helps me recharge after a long day of research.

Getting the right balance

Balance is what it all comes down to. I think there is something to the saying ‘work hard, play hard’—by giving it my all during the workday and allowing space for rest outside of that, I’ve been able to cultivate a productive PhD work pattern. This will vary depending on the individual, so I’d encourage you to experiment with what work patterns work best for you. For me, it’s a 9-5ish workday but you may find that working later in the day maximises your productivity. By finding your own work methods, you can thrive as a PGR.

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Professors share 5 myths students believe about college, anxiety among students: what do teachers think about it, dorm overbooking and transitional housing: problems colleges are trying to solve, phd work-life balance: tips and successful stories.

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Many PhD studetns are curious how to ease their life when writing their thesis and research papers. Today, we are exploring ways of setting successful work-life boundaries during a PhD program . It brings into focus the challenges and triumphs of individuals who have prioritized personal well-being over an accelerated academic pace, advocating for a balanced lifestyle even amidst rigorous research commitments.

Key Takeaways:

• PhD students are establishing work hours to balance study and leisure time.
• Academic success is more about productivity and creativity than long hours.
• The myth of the 24/7 PhD student is being debunked, emphasizing researchers’ well-being.

Work-Life Harmony in the Pursuit of a PhD

In the realm of academia, striving for a work-life balance while pursuing a PhD is a common challenge. Achieving this equilibrium often means setting strict boundaries on work hours, an approach that many students adopt. Yet, the pivotal question remains: can a successful PhD journey be achieved within a “9-5” workday structure?

Many students resonate with the philosophy of treating their PhD like a traditional job . They establish clear working hours—often adhering to a typical Monday to Friday, 8 AM to 4 PM schedule—and maintain this routine, barring a few exceptions when large experiments or looming deadlines require additional hours. During off-hours, they embrace activities that rejuvenate their spirits, such as reading for pleasure, exercising, spending time outdoors, or being with friends.

Some scholars, however, have the flexibility to align their working hours to their optimal productivity periods. They work when they feel most productive, whether it’s over the weekend or on a typical workday. Others meticulously plan their schedules, integrating breaks and personal activities during work hours to maintain their well-being.

A common thread running through these narratives is the significance of maintaining a strict boundary between work and personal time. In fact, many successful PhD students refrain from extending their work hours or weekends, unless driven by sheer personal interest or unavoidable circumstances. They guard their leisure time fiercely, allowing themselves to unplug from their research activities completely.

At the heart of this debate lies a shared belief: the need for a healthy work-life balance in academia. As one student shared:

“Academia is a job. Nothing less and most certainly nothing more.”

This viewpoint counters the widely held notion that academic success necessitates long, grueling hours. According to these scholars, the real key to triumph in academia is not merely the hours put in but the productivity and creativity exhibited during those hours.

One student remarked:

“I am not even sure a PhD would be shorter if you didn’t establish these work-life boundaries, because you’d get burnt out quickly, make stupid mistakes, lose creativity, and potentially need months to recover.”

However, the feasibility of adhering to strict work-life boundaries often depends on the nature of the PhD work and the culture of the institution. In labs with extensive experiments or fields where work cannot be compartmentalized into regular workdays, longer hours are sometimes inevitable.

Nevertheless, the general consensus among these scholars points towards the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance during their PhD journey. They utilize various tools, like the Focus To-Do app, to monitor and control their working hours effectively. By observing these boundaries, they have been successful in their academic pursuits without compromising their mental well-being or personal lives.

As one student summarized:

“It’s half luck and half a choice, but I would really encourage you to make that choice if you can! I’m five years into academia…and I’m not burnt out, and have been able to sustain lots of lovely meaningful relationships which remind me there’s life outside of academia!”

Debunking the “Always-on” Culture in Academia

The notion of the 24/7 PhD student, ceaselessly working at their research in a constant state of academic toil, has for a long time been perceived as the ideal within academia. However, this “always-on” culture is increasingly being challenged as not only unrealistic but potentially harmful.

Let’s take the example of a typical PhD student, who might occasionally pull 16-hour workdays to manage experimental work. While this sometimes becomes a necessity, it is far from being a regular or sustainable practice. Instead, sustainable work habits emphasize the importance of balance and the risks associated with burnout.

More and more academics are adopting a results-oriented approach that adjusts to the task demands rather than adhering rigidly to a conventional 9-to-5 structure. The idea of balance isn’t limited to academia. Even entrepreneurs in demanding fields ensure they take time off for vacations and holidays, knowing that a rested mind is often the best dissertation help .

This gradual shift in academic culture reflects a broader trend towards work-life balance across all sectors. Instead of glorifying long hours and weekend work, there’s a growing recognition of the benefits of rest, flexibility, and mental health. The myth of the 24/7 PhD student is slowly eroding, paving the way for a more balanced, humanistic view of academic life that values researchers not just for their intellectual contributions, but also their wellbeing.

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Open Access

Ten simple rules to improve academic work–life balance

Contributed equally to this work with: Michael John Bartlett, Feyza Nur Arslan, Adriana Bankston, Sarvenaz Sarabipour

* E-mail: [email protected] (MJB); [email protected] (SS)

Affiliation Scion, Rotorua, New Zealand

Affiliation Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Klosterneuburg, Austria

Affiliation Future of Research, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, United States of America

Affiliation Institute for Computational Medicine and Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

• Michael John Bartlett, 
• Feyza Nur Arslan, 
• Adriana Bankston, 
• Sarvenaz Sarabipour

Published: July 15, 2021

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009124
• Reader Comments

Citation: Bartlett MJ, Arslan FN, Bankston A, Sarabipour S (2021) Ten simple rules to improve academic work–life balance. PLoS Comput Biol 17(7): e1009124. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009124

Editor: Scott Markel, Dassault Systemes BIOVIA, UNITED STATES

Copyright: © 2021 Bartlett et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: This work was the product of volunteer time and the authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The ability to strike a perceived sense of balance between work and life represents a challenge for many in academic and research sectors around the world. Before major shifts in the nature of academic work occurred, academia was historically seen as a rewarding and comparatively low-stress working environment [ 1 ]. Academics today need to manage many tasks during a workweek. The current academic working environment often prioritizes productivity over well-being, with researchers working long days, on weekends, on and off campus, and largely alone, potentially on tasks that may not be impactful. Academics report less time for research due to increasing administrative burden and teaching loads [ 1 – 3 ]. This is further strained by competition for job and funding opportunities [ 4 , 5 ], leading to many researchers spending significant time on applications, which takes away time from other duties such as performing research and mentorship [ 1 , 2 ]. The current hypercompetitive culture is particularly impactful on early career researchers (ECRs) employed on short-term contracts and is a major driver behind the unsustainable working hours reported in research labs around the world, increases in burnout, and decline in satisfaction with work–life balance [ 6 – 10 ]. ECRs may also find themselves constrained by the culture and management style of their laboratory and principal investigator (PI) [ 11 – 12 ]. Work–life balance can be defined as an individual’s appraisal of how well they manage work- and nonwork-related obligations in ways that the individual is satisfied with both, while simultaneously maintaining their health and well-being [ 13 ]. Increasing hours at work can conflict with obligations outside of work, including but not limited to family care commitments, time with friends, time for self-care, and volunteering and community work. The increasing prevalence of technology that allows work to be out of the office can also exacerbate this conflict [ 14 , 15 ].

The academic system’s focus on publications and securing grant funding and academic positions instead of training, mentoring, and mental health has skewed the system negatively against prioritizing “The whole scientist” [ 5 , 16 ]. Research focused on the higher education sector has revealed that poor work–life balance can result in lower productivity and impact, stifled academic entrepreneurship, lower career satisfaction and success, lower organizational commitment, intention to leave academia, greater levels of burnout, fatigue and decreased social interactions, and poor physical and mental health, which has become increasingly prevalent among graduate students [ 1 , 17 – 22 ]. For instance, a recent international survey of over 2,000 university staff views on work–life balance found that many academics feel stressed and underpaid and struggle to fit in time for personal relationships and family around their ever-growing workloads [ 20 ]. These systemic issues are making it increasingly difficult to maintain an efficient, productive, and healthy research enterprise [ 23 ].

In the academic context, work–life balance needs to be examined with regard to spatial and temporal flexibility, employment practices, and employee habits. The need to improve work–life balance is recognized for researchers at all career stages [ 7 , 22 , 24 , 25 ]. While there is a growing literature providing specific strategies to cope with busy academic life [ 26 – 28 ], collating these disparate advice pieces into a coherent framework is a daunting task and few capture multifaceted advice by ECRs for ECRs. Departments and institutes need to contribute to improving research practices for academics at all levels on the career ladder [ 29 , 30 ]. PIs and mentors can promote healthier environments in their laboratories by respecting boundaries and providing individuals with greater autonomy over their own working schedule [ 11 , 12 , 31 – 33 ]. However, institutions do not typically prioritize work–life balance, leading to the loss of valuable talent in the research pipeline. The power dynamics within academia are evident now more than ever, with ECRs lacking agency at multiple time points and in controlling many aspects of their training. This may be especially true for trainees from underrepresented backgrounds, who face additional hurdles to their professional advancement in the current academic environment while attempting to maintain work–life balance. Furthermore, academia, in general, does not always value the aspects of a researcher’s job that the researcher finds important such as teaching, mentoring, and service. Thus, the experience of individual researchers regarding work–life balance will vary depending on multiple factors [ 34 – 39 ], including personal circumstances and satisfaction with aspects of life outside of work [ 40 ]. It is therefore unlikely that there is a “one size fits all” approach to effectively address work–life balance issues.

In order to support ECRs in maintaining work–life balance, institutions should support individualized strategies that are continually refined during their training. Here, drawing from our discussion as part of the 2019–2020 eLife Community Ambassador program and our experiences as ECRs, we examine the strategies individuals can adapt to strike a healthier balance between the demands of personal life and a career in research.

While many of the challenges junior academics face are systemic problems and will take a while to fix, some level of individual adjustment and planning may help ECRs more immediately and on an individual level. The rules presented here seek to empower ECRs to take action in improving their own well-being, while also providing a call to action for institutions to increase mechanisms of support for their trainees so they can thrive and move forward in their careers.

Rule 1: Long hours do not equal productive hours

One common reason for work–life imbalance is the feeling of lagging behind as a result of the present-day competitive nature of academia. This has led to incorrectly normalized practice of overwork, due to a sense of pressure from colleagues or ourselves, contributing to increasing mental health problems in academia [ 3 , 7 , 9 ]. On the other hand, keeping a balance sets one for higher productivity and creativity [ 41 ] and long-term satisfaction with work [ 17 , 18 ]. It is important to focus on the benefits of work–life balance on overall well-being and to accept that performing research and building a career in academia is a long process. Taking time off should not be associated with a feeling of guilt for not working at that moment. On the contrary, it should be seen as a necessity to have good health, energy, and motivation for the next return to work. A break can result in a boost to your productivity (rate of output) [ 42 ]. Studies show output of working hours to not increase linearly after a threshold and absence of a rest day to decrease output, as long hours result in errors and accidents, as well as fatigue, stress, and sickness [ 43 , 44 ]. It can be challenging to cut down on work hours when you feel that there is so much to get done. We also acknowledge that there are times when putting in long hours may be needed, for example, to meet a deadline; however, keeping this behavior constant might have more disadvantages than advantages in the long term.

Having flexibility in when and where you work can help you manage tasks and feel more balanced. It is important to discuss your needs with people at work and at home, in order to establish expectations and fit your lifestyle.

Rule 2: Examine your options for flexible work practices

Examine your relationship with your work, and try alternative schedules. Review your expected obligations, employer work hour rules, and offered benefits. Where possible, make use of modernization of work tools (such as remote work methods using digital technologies); working time is no longer exclusively based on in-person presence at the workplace, but rather the accomplishment of tasks [ 45 , 46 ]. The virtual office aspect can offer extensive flexibility in terms of time and location of work, reduce time spent traveling and commuting, and allow easier management of schedules and lives. Attending conferences online and giving invited talks, seminars, and interviews virtually can reduce fatigue and increase the time available for activities essential for your well-being [ 47 , 48 ]. Working remotely may not work for all or on many days of a week, but an overall reduction in travel is possible. In some instances, it may be difficult to know beforehand how much time you will be allocating to particular tasks in your new job, also some tasks such as fieldwork or labwork cannot be done remotely. Factor in workplace flexibility policies when looking at employment options and negotiating contracts. At the interview stage, ask your employer and prospective supervisor about flexible hours, options such as compressed workweeks, job sharing, telecommuting, or other scheduling flexibility to work in a way that best fits your efficiency and productivity. The more control you have over where and when you work, the less stressed you are likely to be. Once you know the options available to you, agree on a schedule based on your expectations and needs. Clear agreements on how and when to work are necessary to avoid conflict between work and nonwork obligations [ 45 ], so it is important to effectively communicate agreements with your managers, mentors [ 31 ], supervisors, colleagues, and also with your family. Having said this, in reality, ECRs may not always be able to negotiate salaries and benefits as conditions might be predetermined by an institution, a fellowship, or a PI’s strict expectations. Weigh the pros and cons of nonnegotiable job offers carefully. Remember that some constraints might be relaxed over time as your new employers build trust in you; therefore, continue the communication to find the best arrangements for your work.

As you try to reduce overworking and be more flexible with working arrangements, you will need to be very focused within the time frame that you have available. This is especially important as work–life balance boundaries become blurred if working from home. Setting boundaries is critical to success, as detailed below.

Rule 3: Set boundaries to establish your workplace and time

Setting spatial and temporal boundaries around your work is important for focusing on the task in hand and preventing work from taking over other parts of your life. When you are in the office and need to focus, make sure you can work in a quiet place where colleagues are unlikely to distract you. If you work in a shared office space, communicate with those around you to let them know your needs, or if you need complete silence, then consider working in a designated space for focused work. While working from home, some may struggle to disconnect from work, step away from screens, and set clear boundaries between digital and physical settings. Screen time needs to be managed so that remote workers do not blur the lines of work and life, as that can result in discouragement and burnout. Ask your coworkers to not demand your attention toward work after a certain time in the evening. Turn off email notifications outside of working hours. By setting boundaries, you will also set an example for your coworkers and mentees. When working at home, separating your workspaces from relaxation spaces can be helpful. This way, less clutter can decrease your stress levels, and a separated space can help you to draw a line between work and family. Even carving an area on a table dedicated to your work time can help with calm and work–life balance.

In order for your resulting work to be of high quality, diligence is key. In addition to being focused on your task, you should also establish a routine and prioritize your tasks, being able to then gain more control over your time. Learning to say no is also critical. Below we expand on these issues in the context of efficiency and productivity.

Rule 4: Commit to strategies that increase your efficiency and productivity

Many people use to-do lists and outline daily/weekly tasks, defining both work- and nonwork-related obligations that need to be accomplished. For nonwork responsibilities, devise a strategy with your family or those you live with to delegate tasks. Make sure responsibilities at home are clearly outlined and evenly distributed.

• Manage your time. Learning how to effectively manage your time and focus while at work is critical. Set a schedule to help in managing time, and do not forget to include buffer times between your plans, such as a coffee break with colleagues and a walk away from the bench or computer screen, to socialize and rest. Outside of busy periods, try to keep routines of work hours. Try time blocking, for example, check email and other social media (e.g., Slack) messages at specific times of the workday, and, if possible, arrange meetings at concentrated times during the day. This will maximize the amount of deep work that can be done during work hours. Sometimes, multitasking, for instance, running a few experiments at the same time or trying to work in between several meetings, may not result in great outcomes; have realistic plans and monotask if you find it better.
• Minimize decision fatigue. Decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision-making. Decision fatigue depletes self-control, which results in emotional stress, underachievement, lack of persistence, and even failures of task performance [ 49 ]. To reduce this, make the most important decisions first in your workday, and limit and simplify your choices.
• Collaborate. Workplace and home collaborations can take some of the load off and help in managing stress. Adjusting to teamwork or training a student may seem like extra commitments at the beginning, but, in the long run, they can help delegate some of the tasks on your calendar and help maintain a better work–life balance.
• Do not overcommit. Learn to say “no” [ 46 ]. Consider that accepting extra, low-impact tasks will sacrifice your nonwork time and may also take attention off your other important work appointments. Try to drop activities that drain your energy, such as nonessential meetings that do not enhance your life or career, and be efficient within this limited time with set goals.
• Discover your own strategies. Try to figure out what strategies work for you, and apply these to your life. Individuals respond differently to time of the day, physical conditions, and stress. Productivity may come with creative arrangements, and a high degree of organization may not work for everyone. Sometimes, improvisation and flexible schedules might be what you need.

As you begin to make decisions about the best way to manage your time, being strategic is key to prioritizing. You should aim to review your strategy and ability to stick to it often.

Rule 5: Have a long-term strategy to help with prioritization, and review it regularly

Having a long-term strategy that considers what you want to achieve and the timelines needed to get there can help with prioritization and deciding what to take on and what to say no to. This not only includes goals linked to your research career but also what is important to you outside of work, whatever this may be. When managing your work and nonwork tasks, see how well they align with your short- and long-term goals when you are deciding on the time and energy you need to allocate to attain them. With daily tasks, starting each day with the most important task, allocating the most productive hours to important tasks, as well as grouping similar tasks might help increase productivity and efficiency. A long-term look can help justify time spent on particular tasks, such as learning new skills, which might be taking extra time now but would help reduce stress in the long term. It is important to review your strategic goals and how well you are doing regularly, updating your strategy as needed. Consider using weekly time management charts to assess your task delegation retrospectively ( Fig 1 ). Have you been able to reach the goals you set? Did your time get taken up by other tasks? Did you use additional time to meet work goals at the expense of priorities outside of work? Are the goals you have set realistic and achievable, or do you need to make adjustments? If this appears overwhelming remember that your plans do not necessarily need to be detailed, simply keeping track of the hours spent working can be useful [ 26 ]. It is normal for priorities to change over time. Choose mentors that can help you achieve your short- and long-term goals, and consult with them regularly on your work–life balance strategies [ 31 ].

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Dynamic, prospective, or retrospective weekly or monthly time management assessment charts can help researchers with improving their work–life balance by determining exactly how they spend their time. There are 164 hours in a week. Example hour allocation is shown here for academics across career stages [ 50 ]. Hours allocated will vary depending on the researcher’s disciplines (for instance, humanities versus life sciences or engineering) and circumstances such as end or beginning of semester, when approaching a deadline, or when a committee is busiest. Teaching responsibilities include course instruction and administration, including grading and evaluation. Family time includes interacting, dining, and performing housekeeping chores with family members. Research activities include performing research and literature review time. External service may include manuscript or grant reviewing and editorial tasks. Meetings may include lab/group meetings, departmental faculty meetings, or other council meetings. Self-care activities may include attending to one’s hobbies. Internal service includes department and university service. Weekends and public holidays are included in the weeks. Other tasks not included in this chart may be professional development, writing letters of recommendation, advising undergraduate students, faculty and student hiring/recruitment, marketing/public relations, fundraising, phone calls, reception/dinner, commute/travel, scheduling/planning, and reporting. ECR, early career researcher; MLCR, mid- to later career researcher; PI, principal investigator. Figure created using ggplot library in R [ 51 ].

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009124.g001

In order to do your best in life and work, you need to put yourself first. You can do that by paying attention to your eating and sleeping schedule and engaging in activities that will keep you physically healthy and stimulate your mind.

Rule 6: Make your health a priority

You are not only defined by your work. Spending time on self-care and relaxation is a necessity in life to maintain a healthy body and mind, leading to a fulfilling lifestyle. This, in turn, will enable you to achieve peak performance and productivity in the workspace.

• Eat a healthy diet. A balanced diet with emphasis on fresh fruits, vegetables, and lean protein enhances the ability to retain knowledge as well as stamina and well-being. An option could be keeping fruit baskets in your office with your colleagues.
• Get enough sleep. Lack of sleep increases stress, and associated fatigue is linked to poor work–life balance [ 52 ]. One potential way to improve sleep quality is to avoid using personal electronic devices, such as smartphones and tablets, during your personal and other nonwork times, particularly right before going to sleep as screen time is associated with less and poorer quality rest [ 53 , 54 ].
• Prioritize your physical and mental health. Set time aside for individual or group physical activities of your choice. Schedule specific times for social activities and exercise to unwind, by arranging ahead of time with others or signing up to regular classes, making the plans harder to cancel. Using the gym at your workplace during a break can freshen you. Or you can bike or jog to work if safe to have some daily exercise. Equally important is dedicated time for your mental health. Reading a book, listening to music, gardening, many other activities, or if you prefer, regularly talking to a therapist could help you disengage from work, enjoy other aspects of life, rest, process, and recharge.
• Try meditation or mindfulness exercises. Meditation can reduce stress and increase productivity [ 29 ]; it will help you focus your thoughts and develop more self-awareness. If you are aware of when and why you are stressed or exhausted, these feelings become a trigger for you to lean into a boundary such as taking a screen break, going for a walk, or simply resting your eyes for 15 minutes before jumping back into a task or meeting. You can do meditation or yoga at home for short intervals. Do what is realistic for your life at the time and what helps you along.
• Make time for your hobbies and relaxation. Set aside time each day for an activity that you enjoy [ 28 , 55 , 56 ]. Discover activities you can do with your partner, family, or friends—such as hiking, dancing, or taking cooking classes. Listen to your favorite music at work to foster concentration, reduce stress and anxiety, and stimulate creativity [ 57 ].

While your work is important, you will be much happier if you schedule some social time into your week. This is a simple need, and methods vary from person to person, but the common goal is to increase your sense of connection and belonging, satisfaction with life, and/or energy.

Rule 7: Regularly interact with family and friends

Your work schedule does not need to lead to loss of your personal relationships. Scheduling time off to meet in-person or interact online with your loved ones in advance will make it harder to cancel plans in favor of working longer. As an example of good practice, most parents, even in academia, need to schedule their time around family responsibilities, which actually obliges them to maintain a work–life balance; they typically do not overstay at work every day, take the weekends off, and use annual leave. Meeting with friends and family will provide a chance to reconnect with them and your shared values. If you live in a country different from your family and friends, it is important to keep in touch using online audiovisual call and chat technologies. Other ways to relax include taking walks with loved ones, being out in nature, or playing board games. Social downtime can help replenish a person’s attention and motivation, encourages productivity and creativity, and is essential to both achieve our highest levels of performance and form stable memories in everyday life [ 58 ].

In addition to spending time for yourself and with family and friends, engaging in activities that are important to you, even when these activities are demanding, can bring a needed sense of achievement and satisfaction.

Rule 8: Make time for volunteer work or similar commitments that are important and meaningful to you

Many find additional engagements outside of their day to day jobs both important and rewarding. These activities would not be considered hobbies or relaxation, examples may include volunteering for the local community (e.g., at pet shelters, food banks, and environmental efforts), regional and online communities (e.g., student advocacy groups), time on boards or committees outside of work (e.g., acting as treasurer or secretary of a club), and learning a new language when you have moved to a new place. Many ECRs enjoy taking their work one step forward to volunteer with organizations focused on the societal value or impact of their work. This can help expand your perspective as an ECR working on a particular research topic, by understanding the broader picture of what you are working on and why and giving it a human impact dimension. Others may opt to volunteer in activities that are entirely independent of their research, which can provide opportunities to clear your mind for a good period of time and boost your mood. Although these activities add extra work to your schedule, if they are important to you, then you might find it difficult to find balance without the sense of achievement and reward they bring. However, when under pressure from work and home, finding time for these activities can be challenging—remember that work–life balance needs to be continually reassessed; consider taking a break if you need to and revisiting these extra commitments at a better time.

In addition to advisors and departments, institutions can take measures to support ECRs and provide them with necessary resources to thrive. They should also create a culture where asking for help is encouraged, and support for the well-being of researchers exists at their institution.

Rule 9: Seek out or help create peer and institutional support systems

Support systems are also critical to your success, and building more than one will increase your chances of success and balance overall [ 59 ]. At work, join forces with coworkers who can cover for you—and vice versa—when family conflicts arise. At home, enlist trusted friends and loved ones to pitch in with childcare or household responsibilities when you need to work overtime or travel. Seek support in academic communities and organizations who are working on mental health and well-being. For instance, PhD balance is a community space for academics to learn from shared experiences, to openly discuss and receive help for difficult situations, and to create resources and connect with others [ 60 ]. Dragonfly Mental Health, a nonprofit organization, strives to improve mental health care access and address the unhealthy culture pervading academia [ 61 ]. Everyone may need help from time to time. If life feels too chaotic to manage and you feel overwhelmed, talk with a professional, such as a counselor or other mental health provider. If your employer offers an employee assistance program, take advantage of available services. Joining a support and peer mentorship group, such as graduate, postdoctoral or faculty Slack communities [ 31 ], or working parents seeking and sharing work–life balance strategies, provides at least two key advantages: an opportunity to vent to people who truly understand your experiences and the ability to strategize with a group about how to improve your situation. A combination of these steps will help researchers to improve their work–life balance.

Finally, if your ability to effectively implement the advice in Rules 1 to 8 is constrained by the culture in your lab or pressure from the academic system, seek support from mentors, and advocate for yourself and for the change you would like to see.

Rule 10: Open a dialogue about the importance of work–life balance and advocate for systemic change

Spreading awareness and promoting good practice for managing work–life balance are essential toward shifting the prevailing culture away from current excellence at any cost practices. While major change is only likely to come about with a coordinated shift in the way that research laboratories, institutions, publishers, funders, and governments assess research endeavors at a broadscale, there is much that can be done at smaller scales to improve the culture at institutions and within labs [ 62 ]. Leverage the support of communities that empower ECRs to participate in advocating for the importance of mental well-being in academia through research and programs (see Rule 9). Discussions on work–life balance can also be initiated through seminars and courses. You can ask for, or if you plan to get more involved, organize workshops and training in your institute for ECRs. Another way to encourage collective work–life balance could be to host activities such as family and employee sports, outdoor movies, or picnic events encouraging family-friendly time and team building. Advocate for policies in your workplace that can help reduce conflict between work and other responsibilities, for example, childcare services or pet-friendly workspaces. To advocate at larger scales, you can join graduate/postdoctoral researcher associations, unions, or work councils to actively pursue work–life balance–friendly policies and employment contracts at institutes and through funding agencies. For instance, institutions and funding agencies that do not encourage the traditional gender roles allowing both men and women to take family leave, see better work–life balance, and reduced work–life conflict [ 63 , 64 ]. If the culture in your research lab constrains your ability to manage your work–life balance in a way you find satisfactory, shifting departmental and institutional attitudes and policies can put pressure on PIs to build a more supportive work culture via steps outlined elsewhere [ 11 , 12 , 31 – 33 ]. Although organizational culture cannot be changed overnight, changes in policy can go a long way in creating a culture that aids work–life balance in the academic workplace [ 62 – 64 ].

Conclusions

Most academic jobs come with flexible working hours, which can be advantageous when researchers attempt to balance the competing obligations in their lives. Yet, ECRs typically work significantly longer than the normal working hours of academic employment contracts [ 65 ]. How researchers spend their time has major impacts on their well-being, productivity, and professional scale of impact and those of their mentees, family, colleagues, and institutions in the short and long term. Academic culture has normalized and ignored overworking often at the expense of a social life, or of even greater concern, at the expense of researchers’ health and well-being. It is important for all academic researchers, institutions, and funding agencies to credit service and administrative activities, to acknowledge difficulties in satisfying work- and nonwork-related obligations in academic careers, and support diverse strategies to attain work–life balance [ 29 , 30 ]. It is imperative to examine work–life balance practices by ECRs, suggest improvements, and integrate these into employment and promotion offers. Here, we provided recommendations for ECRs to improve management of the balance between their professional and personal lives, but striking a healthy work–life balance is not a one-shot deal. Managing work–life balance is a continuous process as your family, interests, and work life change. Working long hours does not equate to working better. Regularly examine your priorities—and, if necessary, make changes—to ensure you stay on track. Ultimately, for the benefit of researchers and the important work that they do, both individuals and institutions need to make health and well-being a priority.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Inez Lam of Johns Hopkins University for valuable comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. We also thank the facilitators of the 2019–2020 eLife Community Ambassador program.

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Maintaining Work-Life Balance During a PhD

• Katie Baker
• July 31, 2024

After the painstaking process of drafting your research proposal, finding the best university to suit your research needs and enduring the anxiety of the application process, you’re finally a doctoral student staring down the barrel of a multi-year academic marathon.  

Many new PhD students make the mistake of treating it as more of a sprint when they embark on their PhD journey, which can last up to four years for full-time students or seven years for part-time students and become overwhelmed, which highlights the importance of keeping a healthy pace, not jumping the gun, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

This article will highlight the necessity of ensuring you’re not burning the candle at both ends, provide actionable tips to avoid burnout and offer support suggestions if you feel you can’t cope with the pressures of your academic life. It is important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all answer on how you should approach your daily, weekly, or even annual schedule. You may find that in the beginning, it is a process of trial and error as you figure out the most effective and productive routine to make the process less of a chore and more of a gratifying pursuit.

The Importance of Maintaining Work-Life Balance During a PhD

Many PhD students struggle to find the balance between academic success and overall well-being, as PhD programs offer degrees of flexibility which are scarcely seen in other walks of academic life.

Unlike taught degrees, with PhDs, there are no lectures, seminars, exams, or essays to plan academic life around; this relative freedom can often lead to blurred lines between work and life and students feeling as though they’re not progressing at the pace they should be as there is still mountains of work to be done by the time you submit your thesis. 

Though it is hard to strike an optimal balance between life’s demands, it isn’t impossible to achieve and maintain a healthy work-life balance by setting boundaries, finding effective ways to manage stress and prioritising.

How to Maintain a Work-Life Balance During a PhD

How to Set Work-Life Boundaries 

Even if your PhD is your number one priority, it is crucial to set boundaries between your academic and your personal life. Your weekly schedule should always make time for friends and family, engaging in hobbies and taking regular breaks. To set clear boundaries and ensure your time as a PhD student is rewarding, set aside time to focus on your well-being between your study and writing sessions.

Discover Why Prioritisation Is Key 

Maintaining a work-life balance during a PhD is more than time management; it is also about managing energy and nurturing the mind as your knowledge advances. You can’t pour from an empty intellectual cup; even if grabbing a coffee with your friends, heading to the gym, or practising mindfulness meditation doesn’t get more words on a page or help you to make a breakthrough with your research, it can be beneficial in the long run. When creating a prioritised schedule, allocate specific blocks of time to your academic tasks and personal activities.

Set Aside Time for Stress Management 

During your time as a PhD student, it is crucial to remind yourself that self-care isn’t a luxury; it is a necessity which keeps you orientated towards laying a foundation of good mental and physical health. Whichever stress management technique works for you and provides you with the most respite, always make time for it within your weekly routine. Whether it is venting to your friends, going for a walk, or taking the time to listen to your body and mind before responding with kindness during mindfulness meditation, ensure you have enough stress-eliminating activities in your diary. Never skip on the self-care fundamentals by ensuring you get enough sleep and exercise, and that you follow a diet which gives you the mental energy to tackle your academic workload.

Change Your Perception of Productivity

If you solely measure productivity in terms of work output, you may want to rethink how you perceive productivity, as it is so much more than a measure of hours at the helm; it is about navigating your tasks and schedule with maximum efficiency. A great way to ensure optimal efficiency is by using techniques, such as the Pomodoro Technique, which recommends following 25-minute stints of work with a five-minute break. You might also want to try setting realistic goals and coming up with rewarding ways to celebrate reaching them. This will boost your morale and anchor a sense of achievement. 

Know the Signs of Burnout and How to Counteract Them 

The most common signs of burnout include feelings of reduced accomplishment, cynicism, irritability, exhaustion, detachment, feeling overwhelmed or fuelled with self-doubt and being more prone to procrastination. In minor cases of burnout, providing enough time for replenishing leisure activities is usually enough to counter the warning signs. In more severe cases of burnout, which leaves you feeling you can’t cope with the stress, communicate this with your PhD supervisor or seek mental health support. 

How and When to Seek Help

In 2021, Nature Journal announced anxiety and depression are ‘the norm’ for UK PhD students. In the same year, a band of UK universities, including the University of Sussex, revealed that 42% of PhD students surveyed self-reported mental health issues . Rather than accepting poor mental health as par for the course, it is crucial for students to seek support. Whether that be from a UK counselling service or one of the numerous helplines and organisations dedicated to supporting students.

If you need help cultivating a lifestyle which facilitates academic success without compromising your health or happiness, reach out to your university’s support services, such as wellness programmes or student counselling. Additionally, the charity Student Minds and The National Union of Students (NUS) offer guidance and advice, which is tailor-made for postgraduate students. The British Psychological Society also provides avenues for support for students looking to maintain their mental health during their doctoral studies.

Final Thoughts

By valuing self-care, knowing your limits when it comes to staying productive without overexerting yourself and ensuring there is enough time for rest, relaxation, socialising, and other enjoyable pursuits which leave you energised and academically inspired, it is entirely possible to negate the PhD process with your well-being intact. Always remember that researching and writing your PhD is a journey, it is not just about the destination, as much as your eye wants to remain on the doctoral title prize.

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Finding the work-life balance of a PhD

When constant studying started taking a toll on phd student vijay victor’s physical health, he realised he needed to create a better work-life balance.

Vijay Victor

When I decided to do my PhD abroad in Hungary I had a clear idea in mind about my research plan. I started publishing papers even before getting into doctoral school, laying the foundations for my research topic. I published papers in well-indexed journals, exceeding the requirements of our doctoral school in the first four semesters of my PhD – after all, they say hard work pays off.

But sometimes too much hard work can be damaging. Somewhere in this journey, I lost myself in my research.

Being an introvert it was instinctive to me to make excuses to avoid social events, and my hectic workload helped me avoid socialising without any guilt. The graduate life abroad is confined mostly to one’s own room, despite what all the Instagrammed parties and glamorous nights out would have you think.

Occasionally I went swimming with a few close friends, which was the only active exercise I did, and I also loved going for a long walk in the countryside.

But when I had deadlines, I did nothing other than study for days. I think on average I spent 10-12 hours a day studying, reading and writing without even realising it. 

There were even times when I felt a sneaky happiness on Friday evenings as I was faced with two whole days to work on my papers without disturbances. 

I only realised that I was overworking myself when my body started to respond. My fitness tracker warned me that my average sleeping time of 5 hours 30 minutes was not good enough. 

I started getting migraines and they became more frequent. And then I started to have gut problems. This was when I knew I needed to take a break.

I went home after seeking permission from my supervisor (she was very kind and helpful) and got myself thoroughly checked by a physician. After an endoscopy and some blood tests I was told that I had developed a functional gastrointestinal disorder. Fortunately it was at the beginning stage and there was nothing much to worry about. 

Some of my friends doing PhDs shared similar stories of health problems. It was bittersweet to know I wasn’t the only one. I had already read about the anxiety and depression issues which graduate students experience, however this was a new revelation to me. To my surprise, in a random Google search at least 10 research studies appeared confirming the relationship between academic stress and gut problems.

Tips for writing a convincing thesis

Research life is entirely different to undergraduate life. My research area is in the field of economics, so I only need my laptop and a quiet space to work and so I do not get the chance to meet colleagues on a daily basis. When the deadlines are so close, stocking fridges and spending days in your room is a story which is familiar to many in grad schools. And often, when you work on more than one paper simultaneously, you have no time for a proper break.

Even after you submit you will have to deal with reviewers comments and corrections. So you have to revise your piece numerous times in order to either get it accepted – which further increases the motivation to write new papers – or it’s rejected, which is upsetting and followed by desperate attempts of trying again. Either way, you are back to square one with a new paper.

Writing research papers is often a tedious, bleak and time consuming process. Sometimes despite the best efforts, you might only have typed two or three paragraphs by the end of the day. This at times could also create a delusion that you are not putting in enough effort.

Some scholars seem to be unable to identify the fine line between a normal and an overwhelming work schedule.

Often we realise too late that it is important to strive for balance first, before aiming for perfection. As my supervisor always says, “there is no finished work in research”. Being a researcher is a lifetime contract and only by making it a part of a healthy lifestyle can one sustain and excel in it.

Read more:  What is a PhD? Advice for PhD students

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Adding pauses in your PhD

As with anything, the key to a healthy PhD is an effective work-life balance. It is important to take pauses and breaks during your PhD to avoid burnout and so that you can enjoy what you do rather than viewing it as a liability. Manpreet Kaur discusses how she sprinkles breaks in her weeks and months.

First published on June 23rd, 2021.

I have seen a lot of things on social media about research culture and what does and does not count as good and healthy work-life balance. I definitely imagined myself as one of those PhD students who would completely immerse themselves in their projects. However, I’m slowly realising there is quite a steep learning curve, especially considering that I switched from polymer chemistry to electrochemistry.

Therefore, perhaps my love for my project is looking less like the ‘love at first sight’ of Snow White and more like the slowly developing one of Belle. As I slowly get to grips with the project, I find I enjoy it all the more. But six months into my PhD, I have learnt that there is no set formula to acing the work-life balance. It is all about doing what works for you. So I’ll list some of my strategies here on how to add pauses in your PhD.

Role models

My two big research role models will be the PhD student I worked with during my masters and my current PhD supervisor. Both are very much focussed on doing science because it is fun and exciting to find out new things and both are driven by that enthusiasm rather than by targets of spending 10 hours in the lab every day. I think it is so helpful to find such mentors/role models early on who can help you understand where you are and how you’re doing.

Task-based learning

I keep a notebook to write all my tasks I need to do. For every day, I’ll plan in the morning what I want to achieve that day (realistically) and work towards that rather than aiming to come in at 10 and not leaving before 6pm etc. Whether it be experiments I need to run, plan or literature searches, I have all those listed as tasks and try to work to finish them. Sometimes, other things come up during the day that I add to the list after completing them just so I can experience the satisfaction of ticking off another task, but also it means that if I fail to do everything on my list, I know why. That way, I don’t beat myself up about it as I keep track of it all.

Is research 9 to 5?

This is interesting. I wanted to keep it 9 to 5. In the evenings I like reading or painting vignettes or watching comedy on the iPlayer. But I think research is not 9 to 5. Sometimes the book I pick up in the evenings is called ‘Electrode potentials’ and I read it because it is fun. Sometimes, there are papers I read on weekends because I want to. Sometimes, I finish my day at 4pm, wrap up, go home and make a nice curry. I plan my tasks but not my time. I like to keep it a bit spontaneous and make sure I do things not out of a sense of necessity but because I want to and then it means I enjoy it. So, be driven by mood rather than a feeling of ‘I have to’. The best time to take a break is when you think you need to.

Taking time off

My first week of holidays I took off was around Easter, immediately after the Easter shutdown. My siblings had end of term holidays so I had a good two weeks with them to enjoy. We were working on a book chapter in the group at the time, and while the brain said to take time off after the book chapter was sent off (at the end of May), the heart wanted time off in April. I spoke to my supervisor and she had no problem with me taking time off, so off I went home for a fortnight in the middle of a task leaving it all there, signing out of Teams and Outlook and painting and watching Shaun the Sheep episodes with my siblings. It felt radical, but it was pure joy. When I came back, it was a refreshing start and it meant that I once again I felt like I had the energy to read about the material we were writing on. So, there is no ‘right’ time to take time off, in my honest opinion, or you shouldn’t feel the need to wait for a ‘chapter’ or task to end before you take a break. Sometimes, moving away from something and then returning to it can mean we are more productive.

These are some of my strategies. Overall, do what makes you happy and hopefully your research project makes it somewhere on your happy list and then it’s all good. Side note, I’m reading My Kind of Happy by Cathy Bramley. Picked up this book from the supermarket and am absolutely loving it. It is also about a happy list so maybe treat yourself if you want to explore this more?

How do you like to plan breaks in your research? What works best for you? Tweet us at  @ResearchEx , email us at [email protected], or leave a comment below.

by Manpreet

Manpreet Kaur  is a first year PhD student in the Department of Chemistry. She has been at Warwick since 2016, and did her BSc and MRes here. Her research project focuses on the design of photoelectrocatalytic systems for the synthesis of nitrogen containing compounds. You can follow her on Twitter  here  and further details about her project and background can be found  here .

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As a PhD student, I want to limit myself to 40 hrs/week. How to maintain this boundary?

So I am considering a PhD position as it appears one opened up and I was contacted about it by a professor. I'm not desperate to get a PhD. I think it's a nice goal and I am interested in the subject but its completion is not something I am dead set on.

I have read some horror stories about hours worked which I refuse to fall into. I plan on documenting my hours worked and limit it to about 9-5, mon-fri, basically view it as a very poorly paying industry job while maintaining time for personal projects/startup ideas.

So my question is if my advisor starts to get pushy and demand I spend more time working, what's the best way to respectfully maintain my boundaries?

I figure the worst that could happen is my advisor cuts my funding at which point I would terminate. Practically speaking my MS is complete so besides giving me a bad reference there's not a ton that could be done to me.

• work-life-balance

• 6 Many people draw conclusions out of your post like "I am not dedicated to research", "I will under no circumstances work longer then 8 hours", "as soon as I find something better, I will go". Can you comment on them how true or false they are? Also, which country do you want to do the phd in? –  user111388 Commented Jul 12, 2020 at 11:23
• 2 My interest in completing the PhD is dependent with how much benefit I gain from it vs doing something else which depends on opportunities available at the given time. Again I think it's a nice goal, probably worth trying but I will continue to also spend time on other things. I live in the US. –  FourierFlux Commented Jul 12, 2020 at 15:50
• 6 The best weeks of grad school were the ones where I worked 80 hours because I couldn't stop thinking about the fascinating problem I was solving. I'd wake up in the night with a new idea and start working on it then. Of course, not every week can be that way. –  David Ketcheson Commented Jul 13, 2020 at 12:34
• 7 A PhD is an exercise in personal development. If you treat it like a job you can leave at the office, you're only really cheating yourself. You're right that the pay is poor - because the dividends are paid in experience. People work hard at a PhD because you have a limited window of opportunity to make the most of your time there. If you're planning to just treat this like a job, I'd seriously consider just getting a normal job. The pay is better and you don't seem terribly interested in taking advantage of the non-financial incentives that make the PhD worthwhile. –  J... Commented Jul 13, 2020 at 12:54
• 3 I strongly disagree that wanting to keep regular hours is missing the point of a PhD. I would actually say the opposite: failing to set boundaries around work during your PhD is a great way to ruin your mental and physical health, can make you susceptible to workplace abuse, and, ironically, will probably make you less productive. I would recommend that OP look into Cal Newport's blog posts on "fixed-schedule productivity" which address this exact issue in the context of graduate school. –  Patrick B. Commented Aug 10, 2020 at 19:33

13 Answers 13

First of all, I know many PhD students (also myself) who did exactly that and finished their phd: They worked 40 hours a week (or less), had a "normal life" , knew they would go to industry afterwards and wanted to learn/do research before (and stay connected to the system "university") because they loved uni/studying. It helps that in my country, studying and also titles are traditionally seen as something valuable (so there is no feeling of "only study if this aids you in your future job" in my country). Some students also saw it as a fun experience to live abroad before returning home. For me, it was similar: I didn't want to become a researcher because for me the postdoc life seems horrible -- but one can do a phd realtively risk-free. (Now I teach at university).

It is certainly not possible to work only 40h with all profs/in all subjects. Maybe also not in all countries (in which one do you want to study?) Probably it is also not possible with the most famous universities/professors.

I do recommend you to do good research on your prof what kind of person they are. Is it possible to do this kind of work with them or not?

I do think your attitude "I am not dead set on completing" is great. If the prof makes unreasonable demands (or other things like misconduct), just go. When they suggest longer working hours, tell them you don't want to do this unless absolutely necessary, if they keep insisting, just go. Do keep your eyes open while doing the phd for skills you need in industry.

Note that there are even (incredible) people who finish a PhD and have little kids (and some of them, no partner!)

(Of course, you might have two fewer papers afterwards for a good university career, but as this doesn't seem to be your goal..)

• 32 +1, though I would strengthen "do good research on your prof" to "explicitly discuss expectations and goals with the prof before accepting the position." –  cag51 ♦ Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 17:54
• Bear in mind that this "just go" ultimatum is equally likely to be wielded against you. PIs are used to being able to hold completion (and future career / network) over their PhDs, so you will need to mean it when you say this won't work on you –  benxyzzy Commented Jul 11, 2020 at 11:38
• 4 @benxyzzy: Yes. But if the professor says "do this bad thing or I kick you out" it is better not work with them. –  user111388 Commented Jul 11, 2020 at 13:23
• 5 This is almost word for word what I intended to reply. I was in that exact situation, had great fun with my PhD, had great fun with my friends partying hard, had great fun with my girlfriend to the point of marrying her and had a great time working for a company by the end of my PhD (which lengthened it by a year or so). I left academia after that (a mixture of not wanting to work in a feudal system, attraction to industry and willingness to quit at the top of the fun and to have only great, fondling memories of that extraordinary time in my life) –  WoJ Commented Jul 11, 2020 at 14:39
• 1 +1 across the board. I'd also advise you to contact some students who have worked with your prospective mentor to get a feel for what that person's expectations are like in practice. –  Patrick B. Commented Aug 10, 2020 at 19:41

One of the nice things about working at a university is that the working hours tend to be very flexible. In my experience, this is the main reason why PhD students (and faculty) don't have a 9 to 5 workday. Some work late, but many of those start late. Some work in burst, working long hours for some weeks (before a deadline), and taking it easy in other weeks. This flexibility is realy nice, but it does make it easier for advisors to demand unreasonable working hours from PhD students. We have all heard horror stories, but none of this happened to me or anyone I know directly. Most advisors are just normal humans who don't want to exploit others. Also, the topic of the power imbalance between advisors and PhD students is very well known in universities, and in all universities I have been at there are many faculty who may not be actively searching for signs of abuse, but do keep an eye open. None of this guarantees that no abuse happens, but it does put the horror stories in perspective (that does not help if you find yourself in such a horror story)

I have known one PhD student who maintained a Monday to Friday 9-5 workweek. This requires a lot of discipline, as you cannot rely on the institution to impose those hours on you (that is the flip-side of flexibility). She could do that by being very efficient while at work. By doing so, she got more work done than most PhD students who worked long hours. People, including her advisor, knew that, and respected her for that.

However, given the way you describe your "interest" in the position (not interested in completing, very poorly paid industry job), it does not seems you have the right motivation for this job. So I would recommend you think again whether this is really what you want to do.

• 28 I don't see the OP is not interested in completing the PhD. They mention they are not dead set on completing. I think that means "I want to finish, but if my advisor demands unreasonable things like abandoing the rest of my life I would rather give up". This is a good attitude, not a bad one. Remember that on this site, there is usually the advice "walk, don't run" and not "finish the phd no matter how much your health suffers". –  user111388 Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 10:53
• 17 The complete sentence is "I think it's a nice goal and I am interested in the subject but its completion is not something I am dead set on." That does not sound very motived to me... –  Maarten Buis Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 11:34
• 29 It does exactly sound very motivated to me. OP wants to do research but not at the cost of their personal life. This is totally reasonable. (If everyone would do this, conditions for phd students would be much better) –  user111388 Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 11:36
• 19 @user111388 There's commonly a point in the middle of your PhD where you'll inevitably feel like giving up (which is an ok thing to do obviously, if need be, but may have an adverse impact on you in the short term). The thing that gets you through that is generally determination. The OP sounds half-hearted about finishing the PhD before even starting it. As a result, the chances that they'll end up giving up half-way through seem quite high. That won't be good for the OP. Few sensible PIs would accept someone with this attitude going into a PhD. –  Stuart Golodetz Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 11:53
• 18 Note also the comment "I want some side hustles though and if they get funded or we're successful I would put the PhD on hold" - i.e. "I'm only doing the PhD as a 'faute de mieux' thing while I try and make other things work, and if they do, then 'c'ya!'." That just means taking up a PhD slot that the PI could have given to somebody else who actually intended to finish the PhD. –  Stuart Golodetz Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 11:57

"basically view [the PhD] as a very poorly paying industry job while maintaining time for personal projects/startup ideas"

Only that a PhD is not an industry job. In fact it is not even a job , at least not in most cases, or the successful cases.

How does the following sound like? "I want to star in films by Quarantine Tarantino or Martin Scorsese and become a Hollywood star. But I'm afraid they will push me to work beyond 40 hours per week for each film I'm starring in! "

Like any other highly creative and competitive work (e.g., film starring), doing research is not a job (again, in the successful cases). It is a dedication that one usually is passionate about. Viewing research and being an academic as a job is flawed in my opinion. Although it is possible to reduce it merely to "a job", it is logically flawed. If it is merely a job then it is not a good one: you can work less, be under much less pressure, and earn more and faster in other jobs.

Hence, my answer is that the premise of your question is dubious, and thus there seems not to be an appropriate answer to your question in the first place.

• 9 (Not the downvoter). I see no flaw: The user is motivated enough to work for less pay because of passion. But they don't want to work crazy hours. With "a job", IMO OP means "work job-like hours", not "doing something without motivation and passion". –  user111388 Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 11:52
• 8 Research is not highly competitive work, except for those aiming for a tenured position in a research university, or something similar. As most PhD graduates end up with jobs outside the academia, we should not assume that PhD students are even trying to become academics. –  Jouni Sirén Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 18:52
• 9 "except for those aiming for a tenured position in a research university, or something similar." ---which is basically the vast majority of PhD students. So the fact that they don't end up with academic jobs just proves the extreme level of competition. –  Dilworth Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 20:10
• 9 @Dilworth: do you have a source for your claim that this is true for the "vast majority of PhD students"? Among the math/computer science PhDs in my social circle, as well as among the psychology PhD students my wife supervises (and I work with on their statistics), I would say 10-20% of the students aim at a professorship. The vast majority I know just want to stay in academia for a few more years, go into more depth in a particular subject, and then leave. (As did I.) –  Stephan Kolassa Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 20:44
• 11 There's quite a bit of research that shows working more than 40 hours a week makes your work quality worse and lowers your total work output. You haven't made a very good argument for working more than 40 hours a week on a PhD -- the gist of your argument is pretty much survivorship bias. –  Kathy Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 22:37

I do think it is possible to do a PhD and only work 40 hrs a week on a normal week, if you are head down, supper efficient and committed with in that time. I'm not sure how possible it is if you are absolutely ridged about that, never working more than 9-5 irrespective of the circumstances. There will be times when experiments take longer, or deadlines are approaching when more is needed. The better organised you and the supervisor are, the less common such time will be, but I don't think they can ever be completely eliminated. For what its worth, I think this is also true of any profession job, academic or not.

In terms of commitment, I think its healthy to feel that you could walk away if it doesn't work out. But do have to want it to work out. The way you word things makes me feel like it working out and you finishing are not even your best case scenario (which would be your side hussle to pay off). If you are taking a PhD, the supervisor (at least a good one) if investing a lot of their personal capital and work into you. A student who leaves is a black mark against a supervisor. For a young supervisor in a competitive field it can be career-ending. For a poor or abusive supervisor this is deserved. And if the PhD is making somebody unhappy, hopefully a good supervisor would be able to take it on the chin. But to go in with this being your preferred outcome is not a good sign. This is what I meant when I talked about taking a PhD "in good faith" on your previous question .

If what you want is a poorly paying industry job, get a poorly paid industry job. A PhD is not an equivalent experience.

If you want to maintain this boundary, I would say it's quite simple. You tell the professor now, before starting the PhD: "I will not work beyond 5pm or on the weekends. I do want to keep side hustles going. Do you still want to offer me the PhD position?"

If they say yes, awesome, start the job. If they ask for more time from you, remind them of the boundaries you told them about before starting. As you say, there is not a whole lot that can be done to you, if getting the PhD or the recommendation is not important to you. However, do not be surprised if under these conditions, they do not want to offer it to you: I know of multiple professors who refused to take students who wanted to keep their own company going during the PhD. Precisely for the reason you mention: if the company takes off, the student will usually want to focus on that and not their PhD. And do be honest about this: pretending the PhD is your ultimate goal to the professor, while it's not, is not ok.

That said, even if the professor says yes, I would think really hard about whether you want to do this. There is nothing wrong with protecting your time off, and I actually think that on average I did not work much more than 40 hours per week during my PhD (I did some 80-hour work weeks before conference deadlines, but there was probably also enough slacking to offset the extremely busy weeks).

But this attitude of really not wanting to work a minute more and not caring (a whole lot) whether you finish is not often found in PhD students. It is also an attitude that may limit what you get from the PhD in terms of opportunities. If you're also happy to walk away after two years with no papers and no new opportunities (and possibly some burnt bridges) - then you have nothing to lose. If you would not be happy with that outcome, then consider it some more.

• 2 "It's quite simple" -- if and only if you have good social skills to formulate this well. "I don't want to work more than 40 hours on average" might sound bad to say in an interview, even if the prof was okay with it. –  user111388 Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 18:59
• I would try to publish at least one paper, making it somewhat worth while even if I didn't complete it. –  FourierFlux Commented Jul 10, 2020 at 19:27
• 1 @FourierFlux If a professor still says yes after you say to them what you described here, here's something to think about (although it's less of an issue with PhD positions than "postdoctoral" ones): Is there a chance that this professor was just looking for more manpower for their lab? Someone to get mechanical work done? Do the programming, do the experiment, move the big project forward (their project, not yours): these are things you can do Mon-Fri 9-5 and treat as a normal job. –  Szabolcs Commented Jul 12, 2020 at 11:37
• @FourierFlux If this is what that professor expects of you, you'd also be denied any independence, the chance to set your own course, the opportunity for creative work, all of those things that are worth getting out of a PhD. If you present yourself as just wanting to be a worker, with strict separation between work and personal time, you risk being treated as a mere worker. Except you'd get much lower pay than if they hired a programmer or a technician. So what would you be gaining from the PhD? –  Szabolcs Commented Jul 12, 2020 at 11:40

basically view it as a very poorly paying industry job while maintaining time for personal projects/startup ideas.

That is a bad way to start a PHD. There are a lot of "poorly paid industry jobs" in which the misalignment between you and your supervisors expectations will be smaller.

Yes, you can do a PHD 9 to 5, yes you may even get the title, and yes, maybe your supervisor is ok with the 9 to 5 part. What they definitely will be not ok with is that getting the phd for you is a low priority.

Maybe they would be happy to hire you as a lab technician (yes, bright people are needed there too, even if they don't want to get professor). But the continued mismatch between your goals and what you signed up for can not be a persistent thing. What I could imagine what works is: you check for 6 months, maybe you opinion changes. If it doesn't, you talk to you prof an tell him you are willing to work in the lab, but that a scientific career may not be for you (that is a discussion they will have had more often in their life).

Same as with a related question , there is an issue of the field.

You might not be able to, if your field does not permit

• Are you basically doing an office job in a low-competitive field? Probably, yes.
• Are you literary working in a field? Probably, no.
• Are you working with animals or cell cultures? Probably, no. And also forget about holidays and weekends for the duration of your PhD.
• Is it easier / cheaper to get machine / instrument time during non-working hours and you really need those 1000000 cores / 100000 MWh / 1E14 MeV / 7 meter dishes for your research? Probably, no.
• Do the experiments take a lot of time and typically finish in the middle of the night? Probably, no.
• Do you need to perform observations at night, because Sun is evil? You guess it!
• It is well accepted in your field that a person cannot maintain top intellectual performance for the full 8 hours and you really need that to get your research done? Probably, yes. (However, my impression is that mathematicians use quite every single moment of time for their research, they just interweb highly demanding parts with routine.)
• Are there too many aspiring PhD candidates and too few positions? Probably, no. Because, why get someone, who works 40 hours/week, if you can get someone willing to work 80 hours/week for the same money? Sorry, this is cynical and probably against the law.
• Again, are there too many aspiring PhD candidates and too few positions? Then it would be possible to hire someone for 20 hours/week and to coerce them to work 40+ hours and also on a weekend. Again, labor laws might have a different opinion on that. But, probably, no.

What are your goals?

People here mentioned a lot about PhD studies not being a job, research passion, and so on. If some anecdotical evidence helps you, most people I know, who have remained in academia, do not work 9-to-5.

So, if your goal is to stay at the university after your PhD: probably, no.

You might ask, why are we doing all this? Why are many of us sacrificing a lot of non-working time to do work-related things? Very simple. Research, and, by extension, academia, is not a job. It's a passion, which, coincidently, gets the bills payed.

• I think the problem is more the funding than the field itself. It is completely thinkable that people in biology etc. have holidays, get properly compensated for working at night - the problem is only that their is too less money and too many people are willing to take the little money. –  user111388 Commented Jul 13, 2020 at 17:37
• Funding is a problem, too. But the thing I've head through a grapevine, almost verbatim: "If you work with cell cultures, you don't have weekends, because you need to feed your cells every day". It might be insufficient funding for technical personnel, yes. Or it might be just how some labs roll. –  Oleg Lobachev Commented Jul 14, 2020 at 22:59
• But that's not the cell cultures, but funding or a sadistic professor. In the so-called "real life", there are also jobs where 24/7 someone has to work (eg prison or public transportation), yet people alternate on weekends and get paid a bonus for working on weekends and get the time they worked off during the week. –  user111388 Commented Jul 15, 2020 at 7:19
• @user111388 No, it's the cell cultures, or the animals, or so forth. There are similar jobs in industry where you know going into it that you might need to work a weird shift or late nights here an there since someone has to be there to do the work. Ideally you work in a big enough group where you coordinate the bad shifts (academia) or you are compensated for it (industry), but sometimes it just is what it is. –  anonymous Commented Apr 20, 2021 at 21:59

I like your question. I don't think so what you propose is possible. Time limits would only be enforceable in jobs which are well defined for example cutting the grass, fielding sales calls, etc. PhD is an open-ended job, quite unlike conventional ones. It is done with a fixed goal in mind. The goal may be to publish a certain amount of papers, do sufficient research, etc. Basically do some amount of work which would satisfy your supervisor. When the works are ill-defined they are less enforceable in the amount of time they take. This problem is surely going to torpedo your working hour limits. Hence it would either cause you to leave within a month or so or you would continue to solder on having completely betrayed yourself.

Of-course all this is assuming you can get an advisor to agree with your terms of working hour limits. You should count yourself to be very lucky indeed to get hold of such an advisor in the first place.

You state clearly that you wish to have finite commitment because you want to reserve time for other projects. What you are describing is de facto part-time studies.

If you are serious about your PhD, it will require as much time as needed to complete it, with little to no time for start-ups. If you are serious about a start-up, this will also require as much time as needed, leaving no time for a PhD. [Famous quote: you do not own a start-up, the start-up owns you.]

In a PhD or in the start-up world, there will be moments when 40hrs/week will be vastly insufficient because of deadlines, i.e. exams, presentations, prototyping etc to prepare. If you are working on an experiment or doing field work, you need to do as much as possible when the apparatus works or when you are in the field: one does not stop at 5pm after spending all day correctly tuning some piece of equipment. If you have an investor meeting on a Monday morning, expect to spend the weekend working on your product, or the sales pitch, or whatever is required by your boss on Monday morning or before.

Finally, if you want your supervisor to commit time and resources towards your success, you better first show that you yourself are willing commit all the time needed.

It is an interesting question. What you did not mention is what discipline you want to do a PhD in and in what country.

For instance, in the UK, PhD costs a lot of money (about £9000 per year for at least 3 years for home students and at least twice that for internationals). So, if you are paying and have done 2 years already (and spent £18000 only on fees and about the same on living costs) you are unlikely to do out.

Saying that, most people do not pay for themselves though. There are a lot of funded positions (and you will even get reasonable bursary), but they have a catch. If you are funded by the department or university, you will have to do teaching (usually, 500 hours per year, lab sessions, marking, etc). Alternatively, your position can be funded through the project grant which your supervisor has. In that case you will have to work on the project besides your PhD topic. In any case, you will effectively have two jobs.

Also, discipline do matter. I cannot say for Humanities (probably reading enormous amount of literature), but on physics, chemistry, biology you will have at least some experimental work. Some experiments are very-very long and/or require attendance over several days (including weekends). You may have some resources they require regular maintenance, e.g. mice or mosquitoes which need to be fed and cared for 7 days a week. So, in this case keeping it to 40 hours a week is virtually impossible.

In disciplines like maths, computer science, data science etc it is a bit easier. You can choose when and where you are working, but these disciplines usually involve a lot of coding, which again usually requires about 10 times more time than planned (due to code debugging).

I have done PhD in applied math, I was definitely working much less than 40 hours a week (except about 2 months during writing thesis) and still did it in less than 3 years. Yes, I was also teaching and doing actually much more than 500 hours a year (getting very generous pay for the extra hours).

In general, I would not say that normal prof will demand you to work any specific number of hours. Academia is about flexibility. Nobody cares whether you are working 1 hour a day or 20 hours a day. All people care is the results you get.

The biggest issue here is that I am afraid, you have a bit wrong attitude towards academic work in general and PhD in particular. Even if you do not actively working on something, you usually keep thinking about something ("where is the mistake?", "How to make this work?", "How to improve this?", etc). Academia is not an industrial job, it is a way of life. And PhD is not different. And you should enjoy this way of life. At the same time I should admit that I can spend a lot of time with family and maintain healthy work-life balance.

So, if you are not sure, I would suggest going to industry for several years and then decide whether you need a PhD or not. Actually, many large companies would happily fund your PhD course if you will make a compelling case that you need it to fulfill your duties better.

• It does not change much, but fees for home students are less than half of that (£4,327 for 2019-20) –  fqq Commented Jul 12, 2020 at 8:41
• 1 "Alternatively, your position can be funded through the project grant which your supervisor has. In that case you will have to work on the project besides your PhD topic." In most cases the PhD topic is part of the bigger grant project, not a separate one. –  fqq Commented Jul 12, 2020 at 8:44
• Thank you very much for correcting regarding fees. You are right, PhD fees are a bit lower than UG and taught PG degrees. Yet, it is still a lot. –  Vitaly Commented Jul 13, 2020 at 9:46
• Regarding the project funding, PhD topic is usually related to larger project, but in most cases not exactly the in line with the project. So, whereas learning part can be combined, actual research is actually separated. That is from my experience working in several research groups with PhDs... –  Vitaly Commented Jul 13, 2020 at 9:49

Talk about this in your interview. If you aren’t having an interview, you need to make sure there is one - you need to hear the professors expectations, and share yours. If you aren’t on the same page with the professor about hours and other factors, you’ll have a challenge staying in the limits you want to set yourself, or it will lead to conflict.

A 40-hour per week doctorate is possible, if you are not expected to teach or pick up other duties besides those purely related to your research.

• But, as I said somewhere else, formulate your statemwnt well! Most supervisors I know who have no problem with someone working "only" 40h would be turned off if someone says at the interview "I only want to work 40h on avarage". First impressions are important! –  user111388 Commented Jul 13, 2020 at 17:32

The first thing would be to make sure the professor you would be working with does not expect anything else. That would mean speaking to people who know them, have worked with them, or even email some of their past PhD students to see what they are like as a supervisor. Even better if there is someone in the department you know well that you can ask about them (via unofficial channels as any bad habits are more likely to be glossed over via email ect). And when speaking to them about it, it is worth raising this as a concern and ask about it. If they try to emotionally manipulate you (e.g. 'you should do this because you love it' or something to similar effect) then you can just safely ignore the offer.

A practical point if you do start is to organise regular meetings with your supervisor (which you can also ask them about) and keep track of what you accomplished in the last week and what you aim to do in the next week and in the next month to help keep you on track. This may help you be more productive, but you are going to have to work smart during those 9-5 hours. You may also have to be flexible and expect to work longer some weeks and less other weeks, or working a non-standard work week (particularly if you have international collaborators or experiments to run).

But the most important question is why are you considering doing this PhD? You said that you would be happy not to complete. Is this a field that you are interested in and want to learn more about? Is this a field you want to work in at some point in the future or are open to an academic career? Are the skills you would pick up important for future work or would you like to do a start-up in this field? Is this a placeholder that you aren't against doing but really is just there to fill time?

If this is not important for your goal career or not something that you really want to learn more about (and are willing to dedicate a number of years of your life to) then you might want to ask yourself what other options could you take that would help you towards that goal. If you are interested in start-ups you could try to get employed at a start up to see how people run them, as well as potentially getting some connections that are important for initial funding. But also keep in mind that if you are interested in start ups in this field you have been working on then the skills you would gain in a PhD would be useful, particularly there are some similarities between a start-up's lean development, and the hypothesis design/testing of research (I'm particularly thinking in the sciences).

It is actually very difficult to maintain any boundaries while doing PhD. Up to degree that in some universities PhD students employed 50 % are expected to work somewhat 120 %, and whose who do not are quickly dismissed by professor simply saying "I think you are not the right person type for a scientist".

Researchers are, you see, mad a little bit, just like a pop culture pictures them. If you want to "balance life and work" or something the like, just do not join them.

Similarly, students are often expected to work hard and not to "balance life and work" instead. PhD is still considered an education.

I do not know, maybe somebody see this answer as disrespect to something but I would like bystanders to know how the knowledge and technology we all later enjoy is built. Regardless if you search for a new planet or a new algorithm of computing, it is always a real hell of work and uncertainty.

• 1 As someone who is about to finish his PhD soon, the fact that you consider this "normal" is the problem itself. If what you're suggesting is true then it means that Academia is toxic to a healthy lifestyle on principal. –  Aventinus Commented Jul 16, 2020 at 14:17
• 1 I do not know exactly the recent situation, but at the time I was doing PhD it was not uncommon to employ PhD students in some branches (notably biology) 50 %. This does not mean that these students were expected to work 50 % only, and I know the case when a person who assumed have been dismissed as I describe. This was happening inside a highly reputable university on the center of Europe. I know laboratories where professor called a meeting on Saturday, expecting all to be present. As a researcher, I see unethical to adjust the truth regardless if it looks toxic to somebody or not. –  algorithmic_fungus Commented Jul 16, 2020 at 14:35
• 2 I agree with h22 that this thread is giving prospective PhD candidates a false impression, which is unethical. The current publish or perish working culture is more often than not toxic to a healthy lifestyle (look up mental health surveys of PhDs, almost all of them excelled as undergraduate students), and we should not hide that, putting all responsibility on the individual with statements like "but if you are very disciplined you can do it in 9-5" or "you don't belong to us if you are not passionate enough to be in work mode 24/7". –  kapibarasama Commented Jul 16, 2020 at 21:16
• The overworking culture may not be worth it, and we need to think something about that. The overworking culture exists. –  algorithmic_fungus Commented Jul 17, 2020 at 7:10

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Work-life balance during a PhD

Doing a PhD is one of the most rewarding experiences in life. You get to conduct your own research, develop your skills, and ultimately become a doctor! Think back to when you were told that your application was accepted, and you were going to start the PhD position. I bet you were excited and nervous; I know I was!

However, after starting your PhD, the excitement may fade and stress can start to accumulate. It definitely did for me. I found myself working late into the night trying to figure out why my numerical models weren’t behaving as they were supposed to (I hope I wasn’t the only one). We all want to put the hours in and do great research – or even get your model working as it is supposed to – but those extra hours can be detrimental if sustained for long periods. A key aspect of any early career researcher (or any researcher in fact) is maintaining that work-life balance. Although this may be different for everyone, in this blog post I will mention some pointers and some personal anecdotes for what has worked for me. Hopefully, these will help to improve your work-life balance during your PhD and beyond!

A key factor in maintaining the work-life balance is a schedule. Sure, some things come up that may disrupt your schedule (e.g., checking an experiment, presenting online at a conference), however this should be the exception rather than the rule. Everyone is different and the hours during which you are productive may vary from your peers. For me, my productivity peeks in the morning, usually accompanied by a coffee. This is when I will get most of my writing done, whilst the afternoon is usually for other tasks that do not usually require as much thinking.

Being a PhD researcher offers some freedom as to when you work, so you can make the most of your productive hours, no matter when they are. If you are unsure when you’re most productive, you can write a journal to note your productivity throughout the day. Repeat this for a week and you can determine when you’re most productive. Once you’ve determined when you’re most productive, you can start to schedule your day. A schedule really helps to maintain that work-life balance, as you’re maximising your productivity time on research and unproductive time on other activities. If you know how much of your day you want to spend on research, you can break down tasks into smaller chunks to help reach your goals. This will help to get that presentation, manuscript, or thesis ready!

Studies have shown that when engaging in an easy task (e.g. exercise, reading) or relaxing (e.g. in the shower, daydreaming, sleeping), away from a problem, the chances of solving that problem increases significantly (Baird et al., 2012; Kudesia et al., 2015) . In these studies, the key aspect to this phenomenon is mind wondering, which helps to link pieces of information that were already known. Although you won’t solve the problem you’re facing every time, these extra-curricular activities will also help with your mental health by reducing stress, so it’s a win-win! Next time you’re facing a problem, it could be beneficial to do another task or relax.

You’ll be happy to discover I realised the error in my code to get my models working whilst out on the bike, I then was making notes on my phone before returning home. I have also had a breakthrough whilst trying to have a nap, so now I always have something to make notes close to hand as you never know when or where these breakthroughs can occur.

Being a PhD researcher offers some freedom as to when you work, so you can make the most of your productive hours, no matter when they are

For me, the key point to these breakthroughs whilst also maintaining my work-life balance is trying to switch off from research. Similarly to how switching off your phone and hiding other distractions can help with productivity, switching off your email/slack/zoom notifications if you have them on your phone or computer and close the word document, excel spreadsheet or jupyter notebook can help to switch off from work. Planning activities throughout the week and the weekend (e.g., exercise, meeting up with friends, camping, sports) really helps to maintain that work-life balance and disconnect, temporarily, from research. Switching off from research can really help improve your mental health and reduce academic fatigue (who knew that was actually a thing?), whilst it also helps to process the information you gather from your research throughout the working day and helps to make breakthroughs.

What helps me switch off from work is football, playing socially in a futsal team as well as for a men’s team which has three sessions a week. Football was something I neglected during my undergraduate but a sport I always wanted to get back into. Maybe there’s an activity, sport, or hobby you’ve also neglected or always wanted to try that can help to re-equilibrate your work-life balance. When I’m not playing football, you can either find me cycling around Melbourne, on a walk, or doing a bit of yoga to help my body recover. This is great for my well-being and also enhances my research, with many breakthroughs made whilst out on a bike ride, walk, or in the middle of a yoga flow. So, make sure you’re making the most of your time, not only on your research for yourself too!

The way I re-charge my science battery: playing football with friends at the Monash University Soccer Club. Here is the team after winning the Victorian State League 4 championship.

Switching off from research can really help improve your mental health and reduce academic fatigue

After a summer break, The PhD Chronicles is back! On each first Monday of the month, The PhD Chronicles blog series gives a special place for PhD researchers to share their successes, challenges, and failures. Would you like to share your story? Contact us   here .

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Balancing PhD and family life – tips for balancing a busy life

With the increasing demands of academic life, balancing a PhD while also juggling family responsibilities and obligations can be a daunting task.

From the never-ending workloads to constant research, it is easy for PhD candidates to feel like they are unable to maintain a work-life balance.

However, it is not impossible to balance a busy life whilst pursuing a doctoral degree. Some simple tips and strategies can go a long way to balancing family life and academic work.

In this article, we explore some effective techniques that can help PhD candidates balance their workload and still have time for their family, friends, and personal aspirations.

Balancing Family Life, Work and School: Top Tips

Here are the top 10 tips from PhD students balancing their studies and their life.

If you want to know more about PhDs as a mature age student or with kids, check out my other articles:

• What is the PhD student average age? Too late for your doctorate?
• Older PhDs student experiences – should you pursue a PhD later in life?

How to balance PhD study and home life – tips for balancing

Balancing PhD study and home life can be challenging, but with proper planning, support, and time management, it is possible to achieve a harmonious balance. Here are some tips and examples to help maintain equilibrium between your academic and personal life:

• Prioritize and create a schedule : Set priorities for your academic and personal responsibilities, and create a schedule that accommodates both. Allocate specific time blocks for studying, research, and writing, as well as for personal activities such as exercise, hobbies, and socializing. A well-structured routine will ensure you stay productive and maintain a healthy work-life balance.
• Plan and prepare ahead: When it comes to household tasks, planning and preparation can make a significant difference. For instance, cooking large batches of food during the weekend can save you time and energy during the weekdays. Similarly, preparing your children’s snacks and school materials in advance can help streamline your mornings.
• Establish a support system: Having a strong support system is crucial for balancing PhD study and home life. This can include family members, friends, or even colleagues who can help with childcare, household chores, or simply lend a listening ear during stressful times. For example, one PhD student mentioned having help from her mother and mother-in-law during the first months of her child’s life, which allowed her to focus on her studies.
• Utilize on-campus resources: Many universities offer resources to support graduate students, such as writing centers, childcare facilities, and mental health services. Take advantage of these resources to help you manage your academic and personal responsibilities more effectively.
• Communicate with your supervisor: Keep an open line of communication with your PhD supervisor, informing them about your personal circumstances and discussing any potential challenges that may arise. This will enable them to better understand and support you throughout your PhD journey.
• Set boundaries: Establish clear boundaries between your academic and personal life to avoid burnout. This might include setting aside specific times of the day or week when you disconnect from your studies and focus on your personal well-being.

By implementing these strategies and drawing upon the experiences of others who have successfully balanced PhD study and home life, you can create a more manageable and fulfilling experience as you pursue your academic goals.

What Is Work/Life Balance for PhD Students?

Work/life balance for PhD students is a delicate equilibrium between academic responsibilities and personal life, essential for overall well-being. First-hand experiences highlight the importance of time management, planning, and self-care in maintaining this balance.

PhD students often face immense pressure in their PhD program to meet academic expectations, which can lead to neglecting personal relationships and self-care.

One student shared the importance of setting a structured daily routine, allocating specific hours for research, writing, and personal responsibilities.

This allowed them to effectively manage their time and achieve their academic and personal goals.

Another PhD student emphasized the benefits of planning and preparing for the week ahead.

Cooking in bulk, organizing childcare, or planning social activities in advance can alleviate daily stress and free up time for both academic and personal pursuits.

Forming a support system, such as involving relatives or friends, can provide much-needed assistance and encouragement.

Engaging in hobbies, exercise, and relaxation is also crucial for maintaining work/life balance. Some PhD students shared the importance of setting boundaries, ensuring they allocate time for non-academic activities that help them recharge and maintain their emotional and mental well-being.

Work/life balance for PhD students involves a combination of effective time management, planning, and self-care strategies, fostering an equilibrium that allows them to excel academically while maintaining a fulfilling personal life.

How PhD Students Can Maintain Work/Life Balance

Maintaining work-life balance is essential for PhD students, as it promotes academic success and overall well-being. PhD students can achieve this balance through prioritization, boundary setting, and stress management.

Dr. James Smith, a recent PhD graduate, shares his insight:

“Setting boundaries between work and personal life helped me manage stress and maintain focus during my PhD journey. I made sure to schedule regular breaks, engage in hobbies, and spend time with friends and family.”

Another PhD candidate, Laura Johnson, highlights the importance of time management:

“I started using a planner to organize my tasks and allocate time for both academic and personal pursuits. This helped me feel more in control and prevented me from becoming overwhelmed.”

In addition to setting boundaries and managing time effectively, it’s essential for PhD students to be mindful of their emotional and mental well-being. Dr. Alice Brown, a psychologist specializing in graduate student mental health, states:

“Taking breaks, practicing mindfulness, and seeking support from peers or mental health professionals can greatly benefit PhD students in maintaining work-life balance.”

Part-time work or reducing course loads can also provide PhD students with more flexibility, allowing them to focus on research or dissertations at a sustainable pace.

Maintaining work-life balance for PhD students involves prioritization, boundary setting, and self-awareness. By adopting these practices, students can achieve academic success while maintaining a fulfilling personal life.

 Wrapping up – Recap 

Balancing work, school, and family can be a daunting task, especially for PhD students. Pursuing a PhD requires dedication, time, and energy, which can often leave little room for other aspects of life. However, with proper planning, prioritization, and self-care, PhD students can maintain a healthy work-life balance – even when writing up their thesis.

This blog has explored different tips and first-hand experiences to help PhD students achieve this balance. From effective time management and setting boundaries to forming a support system and utilizing on-campus resources, there are many strategies that students can use to balance their academic and personal responsibilities.

By incorporating these tips and drawing upon the experiences of others who have successfully balanced PhD study and home life, students can create a more manageable and fulfilling experience as they pursue their academic goals.

Achieving a balance between work, school, and family requires discipline, self-awareness, and perseverance, but the results can be well worth it: increased productivity, academic success, and overall feelings of well-being.

Dr Andrew Stapleton has a Masters and PhD in Chemistry from the UK and Australia. He has many years of research experience and has worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate at a number of Universities. Although having secured funding for his own research, he left academia to help others with his YouTube channel all about the inner workings of academia and how to make it work for you.

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Achieving a healthy work–life balance as a graduate student

This article is the third in a series of essays written by Black physicists and co-published with  Physics Today  as part of  #BlackInPhysics week , an event dedicated to celebrating Black physicists and their contributions to the scientific community, and to revealing a more complete picture of what a physicist looks like.

As a PhD student in physics, I’ve learned that the work–life balance during your graduate career can look different from how it did in your undergraduate life. Graduate school in physics is hard, and it’s extremely important to make sure that you’re giving yourself time to enjoy things outside of work to recharge yourself.

During the first few years this might be a little difficult with all the classes and, depending on your programme, research and service work. I definitely struggled to balance everything. But finding a balance is critical because the stress of doing work all the time can start to have negative effects on you. Sometimes they’re tangible and sometimes they’re not.

Since stress affects people in different ways, it’s important to recognize what happens to you. For me, during my first few years as a postgraduate student, I mostly felt like I was going through the motions. I was extremely busy with classes and qualifying exams, and the workload started to take its toll on me. I started to sleep extremely poorly. I would get eight hours of sleep and feel like I got four.

Luckily, my fellowship at West Virginia University in the US required service work, and I found a volunteer opportunity coaching soccer (football), which I really enjoy. Growing up I had watched my brothers play soccer and had eventually started playing too. I played throughout high school and into university until suffering an injury. Through the network I created by coaching, I also began playing soccer again, something I hadn’t done in years.

Carving out time for yourself

Even if classes and research seem to take up all of your time, sometimes you have to  make  time. During my first few years of graduate school, I made a point of taking one day off a week when I didn’t do anything except what I wanted to, be it video games, hanging out with my family, or reading. I also started asking my friends for help on homework if I was stuck. When I struggled through problems alone, I would start to doubt myself and feel like I didn’t belong in the field. I found that I could better understand the material if I laid out the steps of the problems with my friends, which reduced my stress.

It’s astounding to look back at my work–life balance during my undergraduate career, when for a period of time I wasn’t sleeping or eating well. Since then I’ve learned how my body reacts under too much stress and when I need to better balance my work and life. I realized what brought me peace and allowed me to re-centre myself, and that occurred because I started to understand who I was as a person. Now I know that I’m balancing my work and life well when on my days off I’m not worrying about what I have to do during the week.

If I have to work on weekends (for conferences, research and the like), then I take an equivalent amount of time off during the week. This is a valuable bit of advice I learned from one of my mentors. Although this is easier to do once you’ve finished classes and have a little bit more flexibility with your schedule, it’s always an important strategy for preventing burnout. It also makes me more productive, not less. When I start to burn out, sometimes it feels like I am giving 100%, but it’s only about 50% of what I can do when I’m not burned out.

When to take a break

Today my schedule is built around what works for me. I treat graduate school more like a 9-to-5 job, where I work only during specific hours. I make time to work out every day, because it allows me to focus on myself. My family is extremely important to me, and we are very close, so I try to talk with them almost every day, and once a week we play Dungeons and Dragons together remotely. We grew up playing that together in person, so it’s great to continue the tradition. After working, I try to spend part of my time every night reading, and I’ve recently found a lot of joy in cooking. Pursuing the things that bring you joy outside of work will help you maintain your mental health.

Measures of success: how to thrive as a student in physics

Sometimes, though, even with a good work–life balance, you may find that you’re struggling to stay motivated. At that point, it might be a good idea to take a break and step back from research, classes, and work things, kind of like a holiday. You can discuss this with your adviser and find out how it will affect your progress in your programme. This happened to me about a year ago. I went through something traumatic, and at the time I thought I was handling it fine. But after conversations with my mentors, I realized I needed to take a total break. Afterward it was like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders, and I felt at peace and motivated to start up research again. The trauma that I went through didn’t just disappear; it was something I dealt with even after my break, and it was the reason I ended up transferring from West Virginia to Syracuse University. I struggled a lot with making the decision to transfer, but I realized it was ultimately the best decision for me. Sometimes things just don’t work out in one area, and that’s okay.

Recognizing when I needed to take a break came hand in hand with evaluating my mental health. There are certain signs for me – getting nauseous while eating or not being able to determine what my emotions are – that mean I am in dire need of a break. If I can recognize the signs before I get to the point where I need a long break of a month or more, I can combat them by taking off just a few days to a week. Taking a break might make you feel like you’re going to fall behind and not be able to catch up, but I promise that won’t happen. You’ll feel revitalized and be more motivated to keep going.

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Amber Lenon is a PhD student at Syracuse University in the US, where she studies gravitational waves from eccentric binaries

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Columns phd cafe, work-life balance during a phd: reframing the narrative, karishma kaushik.

In this PhD café article, Karishma S Kaushik , IndiaBioscience, reflects on her unique journey as a ​ ‘ non-traditional’ PhD candidate who juggled personal and professional commitments, including motherhood. Karishma explores the dynamic nature of work-life balance, and discusses the challenges of applying one-size-fits-all solutions for achieving balance across different phases of personal and professional growth.

“ We would like to invite you for a talk at the EMBO Lecture Course on Functional Nucleic Acids at the Regional Centre for Biotechnology, Faridabad ,” said the email from the organisers in August 2022.

Confused, I replied, ​ “ I do not work on functional nucleic acids !”

“ It is expected to be a talk on ​ ‘ Work-life balance in academic science ,’” said the email in response.

Having never been asked to talk on this subject before, I gathered myself and chuckled, ​ “ I am not sure I am doing a good job with that either .” As I reflected on the invitation, I realised, ​ “ Maybe I do have something to talk about?”

I started my PhD at 29, after 5.5 years of a medical degree and a 3‑year residency in Clinical Microbiology. In addition to being a medical doctor and an older PhD candidate, I was also married, having moved to the United States with my partner. Being a ​ ‘ non-traditional’ PhD candidate meant that my PhD was characterised by large commitments on both professional and personal fronts. In the second year of the PhD, I chose to become a mother, and as I often say in a lighter vein, that there is no better situation to ensure work-life balance than becoming a parent during your PhD .

My days started with dropping my son off to daycare, and reaching the laboratory at 9 am. I structured my day to ensure that time was well-utilised. I learnt to run experiments in parallel (fortunately, bacteria do not need too much cajoling to grow!), ordered reagents while waiting for time-points, and had quick lunches. At 4:30 pm, I wrapped up my work day in the lab, and headed home to relieve the afternoon nanny. The evenings were spent with my son; towards the end of my PhD, I used late evenings to analyse data and write my thesis. I graduated in five years with five research publications.

Interestingly, while I built an efficient system to incorporate work and personal choices during my PhD, I struggled with ensuring this balance as an independent investigator. This was likely due to the fact that a well-defined goal (complete the PhD) was now replaced by a range of professional responsibilities and aspirations.

Building and maintaining a work-life structure is a dynamic entity that varies across people and phases in life. Therefore, while actionable steps towards work-life balance are thought-provoking, they notably, fail to account for individual situations. Along these lines, a Twitter discussion on ​ ‘ Is research 9 to 5?’, presents an interesting example, with responses that range from ​ ‘ It’s a job!’ to ​ ‘ It’s a way of life’. 

An exercise in finding underlying principles behind work-life balance

Recognising the insufficiencies and challenges of ​ ‘ templates’ for work-life balance, I decided to deliver my talk as an exercise with the audience, a large majority of who were PhD researchers. Using a series of four exercises, we approached the subject as ​ ‘ Could we find the underlying principles behind work-life balance?’, with prompts, audience responses and take-home messages.

The four sets of exercises and examples of responses were as follows:

Exercise 1: What does work-life balance on a daily or weekly basis (short-term) look like for you?

Examples of audience responses:

• engaged in formal work during the bulk of the day time
• clear start and end times to work (no digital availability at other times)
• single communication channel (email, for example)
• daily practices related to healthy living, weekends with family

Take-home message: Our work-life balance is unique to us. 

Exercise 2: How is your work-life structure different from say, 5 weeks ago, 5 months ago, 5 years ago?

Examples of audience responses: 

• I need to work more on finding that balance (from 5 years ago)
• the structure changes with work travel, conferences, online meetings, deadlines (from 5 weeks ago)
• varies children’s’ sick days, family visiting, home repairs (from 5 days ago)

Take-home message: Work-life balance is ever changing and dynamic.

Exercise 3: How would you think about ​ ‘ success’ at work and how would you think about personal ​ ‘ success’?

Examples of audience responses (‘success’ at work): 

• success at work is being excited about the science, about the Qs and As
• building a happy and productive team
• contributing to the wider science ecosystem in India 

Examples of audience responses (personal ​ ‘ success’):

• enjoying my role as a friend / partner 
• getting regular exercise 
• eating healthy meals 
• reading non-science materials 
• spending substantial time spent with family and social groups

Take-home message: Building our own metrics for professional and personal ​ ‘ success’ can help enforce work-life balance 

Exercise 4: How does your work-life balance change in the face of peer pressure/​expectations?

• I spent longer hours at work, but not productive hours 
• I neglect sleep, exercise and social interactions 
• I started to believe that I needed to fit into the culture of ​ ‘ overwork’

Take-home message: Believing in our choice of a way of work and life is a continuous process. On an individual level, this may require making thoughtful choices of jobs, organisations, and work portfolios. On a larger level, this can mean advocating for systemic change.

Reframing work-life balance with underlying principles 

Taken together, the set of interactive exercises brought forth a framework that highlighted work-life balance as being a unique and dynamic entity, and presented a reflexive structure that could be leveraged towards building, maintaining and revisiting work-life balance across phases and stages of professional and personal growth.

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• Published: 22 December 2022

Doctoral researchers’ mental health and PhD training satisfaction during the German COVID-19 lockdown: results from an international research sample

• Sandra Naumann   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8992-2930 1 , 2   na1 ,
• Magdalena Matyjek   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4546-6480 1 , 2   na1 ,
• Katharina Bögl 1 , 2   na1 &
• Isabel Dziobek 1 , 2  

Scientific Reports volume  12 , Article number:  22176 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Academia has been facing a mental health crisis particularly affecting early career researchers (ECRs). Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic posed an unprecedented burden on the mental health of many individuals. Therefore, we cross-sectionally investigated how doctoral researchers (N = 222) evaluate their mental health status and satisfaction with their PhD training before and during the pandemic. As compared to self-reported, retrospective evaluations about the pre-pandemic state, we found decreased satisfaction with PhD training and overall well-being. The whole sample exhibited high levels of personal and work-related burnout, a fifth indicated clinically meaningful levels of depressive symptoms and almost 25% experienced severe loneliness. When exploring predictors of depression, anxiety, and burnout, we identified low satisfaction with PhD training as the most prominent predictor for poor mental health, suggesting a link between the doctoral work and their mental health status. Females vs. males and doctoral researchers in individual doctorate vs. structured PhD programs reported higher symptoms of burnout. Our study replicates previous findings of poor mental health in doctoral researchers and indicates further decreases of mental wellbeing under the influence of the pandemic. Systematic adjustments in academia are required to improve the mental health of ECRs.

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Although many academics indicate to love research and to experience fulfilment from various tasks which belong to their profession 1 , mounting evidence suggests that working in academia might contribute to mental health problems 2 , 3 . Early career researchers (ECRs), i.e., doctoral and early postdoctoral researchers, have been found to be at risk for mental disorders with prevalence rates up to 24% for depression and 17% for anxiety 4 . These levels are up to three times higher as compared to the prevalences in the general population 5 , 6 . Consequently, it has been suggested that academia faces a “mental health crisis” 2 , sparking a discussion of its causes and possible remedies.

Among the main stressors for ECRs are the unpredictable length of the PhD training, financial instability, and high competitiveness for subsequent academic jobs 4 . Further, the prevailing ‘publish or perish’ culture pressures academics to put quantity over quality in their scientific work 7 , increasing stress and work dissatisfaction. Poorer work-life balance and higher conflict between work responsibilities are also linked to higher burnout rates in ECRs 8 . Other, not directly work-related, factors such as feelings of loneliness 5 also have been shown to negatively affect their mental health.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health worsened in the general population with elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and feelings of loneliness 9 , 10 . First studies indicate that ECRs' mental health was also negatively affected 10 . Pandemic-related changes imposed additional major stressors on ECRs 11 : Empirical work, which involved interactions with participants, had to be terminated for longer periods of time causing unforeseeable delays in PhD projects 12 . Social distancing forced researchers to stay at home, isolated from their support networks of colleagues. This might have been especially challenging for first year doctoral researchers and international doctoral researchers, who were disconnected from previous social networks and had limited chances to establish new ones after their relocation. For ECRs with children and family care duties, personal responsibilities increased as kindergarten and eldercare facilities closed, which had a disproportionate impact on female scientists 13 .

Taken together, the pandemic accumulated many additional problems on ECRs 11 who were shown to be already at high risk for developing mental health problems due to the pressure and working conditions in the academic system 2 , 3 , 4 . So far, specific research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on ECRs’ mental health is scarce, however, and mostly limited to anecdotal evidence 14 . Therefore, we assessed the mental health status of a defined group of ECRs, particularly doctoral researchers, under the consideration of pandemic influences. Data were collected in Berlin, a central German research hub with numerous international research institutions. Given the international science context, we assumed that our results would be informative beyond national borders.

Firstly, we sought to assess the current mental health of doctoral researchers including existing clinical diagnoses of mental disorders, acute symptoms of common mental problems (i.e., depression, anxiety, burnout, loneliness), and support structures (e.g., strength of social network, individual coping strategies). In accordance with the literature 3 , 4 , we expected to find elevated rates for depression and anxiety symptoms in our sample. Secondly, we aimed to examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on doctoral researchers’ mental health and satisfaction with the PhD training. During data collection (January and February 2021), the pandemic status had been officially declared for almost a year in Germany (starting in March 2020). By then, two waves of infection had been observed and a strict lockdown had been imposed on the public for almost two months, with restrictions on public life still effective at the time of data collection. We assumed that, given the additional stressors implied on research by the pandemic, satisfaction would decrease for various PhD-related aspects when comparing ratings of pre-pandemic times with the current, in-pandemic, situation. Further, we expected that many aspects related to the PhD training would contribute more to mental health problems in the pandemic, compared to how much they did before its onset. Thirdly, in an exploratory analysis, we investigated potential predictors of doctoral researchers’ depression, anxiety, and burnout symptoms. Given the exploratory nature of this procedure, hypotheses were more tentative: We assumed that higher PhD training satisfaction and integration into a structured graduate program would be associated with lower symptom scores.

Mental health status

Standardized questionnaires concerning mental health.

Table 1 includes an overview of the results for BSI, CBI, and De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale scores. Regarding the BSI, 21% of the sample exceeded the threshold for depression and 4% for anxiety. Means of the CBI subscales for personal burnout and work-related burnout were 49 and 47, the mean score in the CBI total scale was 48 (including only the personal and work-related burnout subscales). Both subscale scores were substantially higher than the means in the validation sample 15 . Regarding loneliness, 24% of the sample indicated to be severely or very severely lonely (scores 9 or higher).

Mental disorder manifestation, mental health problems, and expectations related to the PhD training

Participants were asked whether they had been diagnosed with a mental disorder before or after the start of their PhD training. As depicted in Fig.  1 , 16% of the respondents indicated that they received a mental disorder diagnosis before they started their PhD training. From this group, 49% stated that they were diagnosed with an additional mental disorder after the start of their doctorate. A majority of 84% indicated that they were not diagnosed with a mental disorder before. From this group, 13% indicated that they got diagnosed with a mental disorder after they started their PhD training. In total, 27% of doctoral researchers reported at least one clinically diagnosed mental disorder before or after the start of their PhD training.

Diagnosis of a mental disorder. The top chart shows proportions of participants diagnosed with a mental disorder or not prior to the beginning of the PhD training (1 person preferred not to answer this question; in grey). Separately for those who answered yes and no, bottom charts show proportions of participants further diagnosed and not diagnosed with a mental disorder during their PhD training. Please note: One person preferred not to answer.

As shown in Fig.  2 , the majority of doctoral researchers stated that their current mental health problems were at least partially related to their PhD training (51%), whereas only 17% reported to have no mental health problems. 62% of the responders indicated that their PhD training is a little or much worse than they imagined before they started it (see Fig.  3 ).

Mental health problems in relation to the PhD training. Participants were asked whether they think that their current mental health problems are related to their PhD training.

Expectations of the PhD training. Participants were asked whether their PhD training is how they had imagined it, better, or worse. Answers including “slightly” and “much” for both “worse” and “better” were collapsed.

Support structures

Only 16% of respondents expressed no interest in receiving psychological support. In contrast, 40% of doctoral researchers endorsed the answer “Yes, I would like it (or I am receiving some)” and 39% “Yes, I would like it, but I don’t need it now”. The forms of support rated as of most interest were psychotherapy in person (62%), psychological counselling (52%), and psychotherapy online (40%). Further, respondents stated that the coping strategies they use the most comprise social engagements (indicated by 85%) and recreational activities (78%; multiple answers were possible). To further delineate the role of social engagements, we asked participants to rate the strength of their overall social network ( M  = 73; SD  = 23) and the strength of their social network in Berlin ( M  = 53; SD  = 31). Further information on the forms of support as well as coping strategies are provided in the supplementary material (see the HTML file on the OSF page).

Changes in PhD training satisfaction and mental health during the pandemic

As shown in Fig.  4 , 43% of the respondents indicated that they were satisfied with their PhD training before the pandemic started, whereas only 32% stated that they were satisfied with it currently, in pandemic times. Evaluating the pre-pandemic situation, 38% of the sample indicated that they were dissatisfied, which increased to 46% after the start of the pandemic. Regarding the perceived change in wellbeing before and in the pandemic (see Fig.  5 ), 76% indicated that their mental wellbeing worsened during the pandemic.

Overall satisfaction with the PhD training before and during the pandemic. Answers including “very” and “somewhat” for both “satisfied” and “dissatisfied” were collapsed.

Mental wellbeing in the pandemic relative to pre-pandemic. Answers including “significantly” and “slightly” for both “worse” and “better” were collapsed.

As shown in Fig.  6 A, respondents evaluated their satisfaction with PhD-related aspects generally lower after than before the onset of the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, doctoral researchers were descriptively most satisfied with their research topic, working conditions, and holidays (all items rated at around 75%). We found the lowest satisfaction ratings for career perspectives, work-life balance, and academic results (the lowest at 50%). In pandemic times, research topic, salary, and holidays were rated highest (highest averaged rating at 68%); work-life balance, career perspectives, and work environment were rated the lowest (the lowest at 43%). We found significant decreases in the pandemic in self-rated satisfaction from workload, work environment, working conditions, work-life balance, supervision, research topic, career perspectives, and holidays, (all ps  < 0.01). The satisfaction from academic results and salary did not change significantly during the pandemic.

Average ratings of satisfaction with PhD-related aspects and of aspects contributing to mental health problems pre- and post-pandemic onset. The asterisks mark items for which t-tests reached statistical significance ( p  < 0.05, uncorrected).

Participants also rated how these aforementioned aspects contributed to their mental health problems before and after the beginning of the pandemic (see Fig.  6 B). Descriptively, the aspects that contributed most to mental health issues pre-pandemic were academic results, supervision, work-life balance, and workload. In pandemic times, the major contributor was work-life balance, followed by workload, supervision, and career perspectives. We observed significant increases for the ratings of career perspectives ( p  = 0.002), work-life balance ( p  < 0.001), relationships outside of work ( p  = 0.003), and holidays ( p  = 0.043), indicating that in the pandemic these factors played a larger negative role for the mental health of doctoral researchers. Other aspects did not change during the pandemic (See OSF page for exact t-values).

Predictive value of PhD training variables for mental health problems

Figure  7 shows the effect sizes (Cohen’s partial f ) for the terms selected in the stepwise selection process for models predicting the depression, anxiety, and (work-related) burnout scores. Table 2 summarizes the models’ statistics and directions of the effects. Gender was significant in all models: While males tended to show higher values for anxiety and depression, being female was predictive of higher burnout scores. Years into PhD training was not significantly related to any outcome variable. PhD type (individual doctorate vs. structured program) was only predictive of burnout scores, with higher levels of burnout for the PhD researchers pursuing an individual doctorate compared to being in a structured program. Years spent in Germany, although showing significant main effects in all models, did not survive corrections for multiple comparisons. The diagnosis of a mental disorder (acquired before or during the PhD) was consistently predictive of all three mental health problems (i.e., higher scores of depression, anxiety, and burnout). Lower scores of depression and anxiety were predicted by strength of the overall social network, while higher self-efficacy was linked to lower burnout scores. The overall current satisfaction with the PhD training predicted lower scores for mental health problems in all models. In terms of PhD-related aspects, those of the ratings which reached significance were all linked to lower scores of mental health problems. In burnout, these predictors were: supervision, work-life balance, and holidays; in anxiety: work-life balance and career perspectives; in depression: work-life balance, career perspectives, and holidays.

Effect sizes (Cohen’s partial f ) in the exploratory models of depression, anxiety, and burnout. The asterisks mark predictors for which the main effects reached statistical significance ( p  < 0.05).

We examined different self-report measures capturing the mental health status of doctoral researchers of the wider Berlin area. Self-report ratings implied increased levels of depression, burnout, and loneliness, which further exacerbated under the pandemic influence. Critically, these problems were linked to the PhD training.

Under the magnifying glass: doctoral researchers’ mental health status

Firstly, we investigated the mental health status of doctoral researchers regarding pre-existing clinical and subclinical manifestations. In line with previous research 2 , 3 , 4 , our participants displayed severe mental health problems. One quarter of the sample indicated to have at least one diagnosed mental disorder. Doctoral researchers with a pre-existing diagnosis more often developed an additional mental disorder during the years of their PhD training and the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus our data suggests that negative mental health impacts seem to be magnified particularly for ECRs with pre-existing vulnerabilities. Comparable to previous findings, one fifth crossed the cut-off for clinically relevant depressive symptoms 16 . These numbers are higher than the depression prevalence in the general German population before (7.7% 6 ) and during the pandemic (14.3% 17 ). However, some studies which were conducted outside of Germany reported similarly elevated levels of depression in the general population within this time period 18 . Therefore, the increased depression levels in our sample might not just be attributable to the academic training but to the high mental burden caused by the pandemic itself. We also detected higher scores of burnout as compared to the general population 15 , paralleling recent findings presenting a three-fold increase of burnout in ECRs 11 . Alarmingly, the majority of the sample reporting mental health problems indicated that they were related to their PhD training. Moreover, most of our sample reported their PhD training experience to be worse than expected and that they would be interested in receiving psychological support.

Various PhD training-related aspects may underlie the reported mental health problems: Firstly, pursuing a doctorate constitutes a time of professional and personal growth 19 . ECRs need to master complex theoretical frameworks, develop expertise in research methodologies and make an original contribution to their field 20 . Additionally, establishing boundaries between work and other areas of life is challenging: Academics assume that pervasive commitment and profound concentration on the research subject are expected 21 . Increased workload may cause a neglect of physical health or personal relationships, leading to work-life imbalances 22 . Lastly, research facility structures which do not buffer the psychological and emotional costs of the PhD training may contribute to a deterioration of ECRs’ mental health 23 .

Changes in satisfaction with the PhD training during the COVID-19 pandemic

Secondly, we aimed to unravel potential changes in satisfaction with the PhD training under the influence of the pandemic (which started about a year before this survey). We compared respondents' retrospective evaluation of their satisfaction before the pandemic with their current satisfaction. Almost all ratings significantly dropped during the pandemic with the largest decreases for working conditions and work environment. The German government introduced regulations to enforce social distancing to contain the COVID-19 virus, which also led to the closing of research facilities. Thus, a likely explanation for our results is that the disrupted or discontinued work on doctoral projects increased uncertainty and dissatisfaction with the PhD training 24 . Additionally, the workload and time spent on work might have increased significantly during the pandemic 25 , which corroborates the reported levels of increased work-related burnout in our survey.

There were no changes in satisfaction regarding doctoral researchers’ salaries during the pandemic. In contrast to the general German population, ECRs were not affected by Germany-wide short-time working measures (i.e., temporary reduction in normal working hours and thus reduction in salary). Further, at the time of the survey, the first pandemic-related extensions of PhD contracts and scholarships were granted. However, given that many empirical projects were on hold, the time until completion of the PhD training might prolong beyond the period of the granted extensions, which could increase the burden of financial insecurity in the long run. Although this hypothesis cannot be tested with the current data, it should be considered in future studies.

Likewise, we did not detect significant changes in satisfaction with academic results before and during the pandemic. It is possible that because some aspects of academic life (i.e., attending conferences) were limited, doctoral researchers had more resources to focus on output related to their PhD projects. In that vein, research indicated that the number of journal paper submissions increased during the pandemic 26 . Notably, our sample consisted of doctoral researchers which were at least three months into their PhD training in mostly empirical scientific fields. Given that they had already collected data for PhD-project related publications, they might have rated their academic results not to be significantly impacted by the pandemic.

Greater satisfaction with the PhD training in general, and with work-life balance in particular, were important resilience factors for all depression, anxiety, and burnout. This finding is in line with previous studies, which indicated that higher job satisfaction was associated with lower prevalence rates of depression and burnout in the general population 27 . Other studies highlighted that employees, who are satisfied with their work, can transfer positive feelings to non-work related contexts, resulting in a positive relationship between job and life satisfaction 28 , as well as psychological and social wellbeing 27 . Thus, maintaining ECRs’ satisfaction with their PhD training seems to be an essential mechanism to prevent mental health problems.

Further, our data showed that decreased satisfaction with PhD supervision is linked to burnout. Although we have no detailed information on the nature of the supervision quality, support from supervisors and other members of the research facilities have previously been reported to be critical to doctoral researchers’ persistence and scientific outcomes 29 . Research showed that the quantity and quality of meetings with supervisors can impact ECRs’ satisfaction 30 . Quality supervision can be characterized as involving precise and timely feedback, frequent meetings that include open discussion about roles and responsibilities, a supportive and collegial relationship, and encouragement to maintain the flow of work throughout the PhD training 31 . One driver of supervision dissatisfaction could arise from misaligned interests of ECRs and their supervisors: While the latter might be more inclined to tune their interest towards the scientific community as a whole, they might lose sight of ECR’s individual needs 32 .

In addition, we found that satisfaction with career perspectives is an important predictor of anxiety and burnout. It was recently argued that being optimistic about career prospects might help to decrease levels of depression and anxiety about the future 33 . However, long- and short-term academic career perspectives are uncertain, which may degrade academia to an “alternative career” path. Missing career outlooks, in or outside of academia, amplify the mental burden of ECRs, leading to the levels of anxiety and burnout 34 . This factor might be even more pronounced in countries of the Global South, where—compared to the Global North—levels of inequality and labour informality are higher and research funding is more limited 35 .

Within our analysis, the strength of doctoral researchers' social network emerged as an important resilience factor for depression and anxiety. Indeed, there is substantial evidence that individuals with richer networks of active social relationships tend to be more satisfied and happier with their lives 36 . However, due to the demands of their PhD training, ECRs often report declines in social interactions 37 . Lack of social support has also been found to correspond with lower wellbeing and a higher prevalence of mental illness in ECRs 38 . Similarly, in the current study ECRs who pursued an individual doctorate were more likely to suffer from burnout than their peers in structured graduate programs. Within a structured PhD program, doctoral researchers are integrated in a framework with peers from the start of the training, whereas individual doctorates require ERCs to build their own scientific community.

Another resilience factor identified in our data was self-efficacy, with higher levels being linked to lower burnout scores. Self-efficacy is an important motivational factor for identity development of ECRs 39 , especially when it comes to the confidence in successfully performing research tasks 40 . It has been found to be significantly correlated with interest in research and the production of scholarly publications 41 . Conversely, ECRs with low levels of self-efficacy may be more likely to engage in self-handicapping (e.g., procrastination) to avoid being perceived as incompetent 42 .

Finally, men in our sample showed higher levels of depression and anxiety symptoms than women. This finding is at odds with the literature, where women have been reported to suffer more often from mental health problems than men both in the general population 6 and ECR samples 2 . Although this finding is difficult to interpret, previous research showed that men have lower participation rates in voluntary surveys 43 and engage more rarely in help-seeking behavior 44 . Thus, it seems possible that the data reflect the effects of our convenience sample: Men may have participated in our survey because they experienced mental health problems, which resulted in increased clinical symptoms in this group. Further, although our male participants reported higher levels of depression and anxiety, female participants reported higher burnout scores. As shown in previous studies during the pandemic, women were more likely to engage in housework, care and family 13 , which relates to physical and psychological fatigue and exhaustion 15 , but less so to depression.

Call to action

Our sample of doctoral researchers reported profound PhD training-related mental health problems, which worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, mostly single researchers or initiatives founded by ECRs (e.g., German ECR initiatives like N 2 , Scholar Minds) devote their mission to reduce harmful work conditions and the stigmatization of mental health matters in academia. However, sustainable preventive and interventional solutions aiming to improve ECRs’ mental health should be prioritized and addressed on different systemic levels, such as academic institutions and political initiatives, to ensure a healthy and supportive work environment. Combining our findings with recent literature, we have identified several factors to improve conditions for ECRs. These factors are not exclusively tied to improving the situation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic but relate to more general aspects of ECRs’ mental health:

Institutional mental health support

Firstly, psychological burden could be alleviated if the institutional culture of a research facility was more welcoming, inclusive, and understanding of ECRs’ backgrounds 20 . To this end, an open discourse about mental health problems is needed, which would also help to increase personal and public de-stigmatization of mental health problems still being present in academia 45 .

Secondly, institution-based psychological counseling should be the standard at every research institution for prevention and interventional needs. Especially for international ECRs who are not familiar with the local health care system, institution-based counselling could be a first low-level opportunity to de-escalate arising mental health problems. Although some counselling opportunities are already in place, ECRs are often unaware of their existence (e.g., no advertisement of services; information difficult to access 46 ). In addition, psychological counselling opportunities do not seem to be specifically tailored to doctoral researchers’ needs, but are rather similar to those designed for undergraduate students 47 . Thus, institutions would need to provide easily accessible PhD training-tailored psychological counselling.

Work-life balance

Working overtime and disregarding holidays is still part of the academic culture 48 . With an average of more than 46 h of work per week 16 , doctoral researchers contribute to the normalization of this culture, likely neglecting their work-life balance. When employed part time, doctoral researchers have been shown to work even more over-time hours than postdoctoral researchers (difference of up to 7 h per week 48 ). Irrespective of the type of working contract, the implicit rule to work overtime should be discouraged by employers and supervisors. Additionally, workshops on self- and time management provided by research institutions can strengthen ECRs’ ability to deal with the stressful demands of academia.

Quality of supervision

Mentoring contracts between ECRs and supervisors could help to set expectations for both parties. This procedure is already in place at many research facilities, however, it is yet to become a common practice. Further, improving supervision quality should be incentivized by research facilities. Whereas ratings of teaching are already a part of applications for professorships, a similar quantification for supervision skills could maintain supervision quality over the course of the PhD training. Integrated evaluations by doctoral researchers could both incentivize senior academics to monitor their quality of supervision and offer tangible rewards for their efforts.

Providing career perspectives and transferable skills

Even though staying in academia is still viewed as the most desirable career path for ECRs 49 , only a small percentage can continue to work in academia after the completion of their PhD training 50 . The creation of more permanent positions on a post-doctoral level is an important political challenge. In Germany, 98% of employees under 35 years of age are working on limited contracts in academia. Thanks to public attention on precarious working conditions in academia initiated by the German grass-root movement “#ichbinHanna” ( https://ichbinhanna.wordpress.com ) , first political consequences that will lead to the creation of more tenure track positions, have been taken. Furthermore, opportunities to continue a career outside of science should be considered more strongly. Although many structured PhD programs have started to integrate educational content on alternative career paths, more room should be given for concrete opportunities to develop new skills as, for example, in the form of internships or role plays 51 . As skills acquired during the PhD training can successfully be transferred to careers outside of academia 34 , these real-life experiences might decrease anxiety regarding future job perspectives.

Growing social networks

Research facilities play a major role in socializing ECRs 51 which is why an important task constitutes the establishment of sustainable ECR networks in research facilities to grow sustainable social networks to discuss science matters and work-related challenges. Some graduate schools already provide induction days and buddy programs (e.g., connecting doctoral researchers across different PhD cohorts) to facilitate ECRs’ future academic career. In addition, regular check-ins with members of the research facility could help to identify and solve problems with settling into the research institution and its social network structure.

Moreover, within- and between-institutional networks have the potential to help ECRs to shape their career paths. Some graduate schools are already providing alumni talks to connect ECRs with graduates from various career fields. This approach not only helps to expand the professional network, but also sharpens the view of which career options may be available after the doctorate and how to target these options early on.

Fostering self-efficacy

To maintain self-efficacy, the PhD training should entail tasks that are challenging, but achievable within the specific conditions of the doctoral project. Quite often, there is a mismatch in expectation between ECRs and research facilities 52 , likely arising from insufficient information at the admission stage regarding roles and responsibilities 53 . This parallels our finding that the majority of ECRs rated their PhD training experience markedly below their expectations. Thus, ECRs need to understand what explicit and implicit requirements are present toward the completion of their PhD training. One opportunity to enable clear expectation management is to offer an orientation day in graduate schools where potential doctoral candidates have the opportunity to receive information from administrative members, but also ECRs who are in different stages of their PhD training to provide testimonials.

Limitations

Due to different potential biases in our sample, we acknowledge that our data might not be representative of the whole population of interest. As we might have mainly reached doctoral researchers, who are interested in or even affected by mental health problems, we recognize that this procedure may have created a sampling bias. Further, the nature of the survey questions might have created a demand characteristics bias, potentially leading to elevated levels of reported burden. However, we think that the extent of these biases is comparable to other studies investigating mental health using self-report questionnaires. We also detected a gender response bias: We had more female responders even though we targeted mainly research fields related to neuroscience with a slightly men-dominated gender distribution 16 . BSI scores of our sample were rather low for overall anxiety, but rather high for the subscale phobic anxiety (56%). The latter subscale includes items that might have changed in weighting in pandemic times (e.g., “being in large crowds”), leading to increased scores. We also acknowledge that doctoral researchers’ retrospective assessment of their wellbeing might have led to biased judgements of aspects before the pandemic.

In addition to this limitation, we captured the history of mental illness more broadly (e.g., having contact with psychiatry/psychology or being previously diagnosed with a mental disorder), but did not ask for the specific diagnosis. Thus, our data does not allow for the exploration of the relationship between the mental health indexes and one or another mental disorder in-depth. We recognize that this could be especially important as we observed that a prior diagnosis was the main predictor of several dependent variables. Further, we did not assess the direct impact of the pandemic on the participants (e.g., being infected or having lost relatives or colleagues due to the pandemic). However, we asked participants if they experienced any event within two weeks prior to participation which would render their answers unrepresentative for a longer time perspective and excluded the respective data. We believe that losing a loved one or experiencing high stress due to a COVID-19 infection would have been captured in this response.

On a global scale, our survey focused on German doctoral researchers, with a certain focus on international students within the field of neuroscience, which may be generalizable to countries of similar funding opportunities and research culture. However, limited assumptions should be made about ECRs’ mental health in countries with diverging research conditions (e.g., of the Global South 35 ).

Our findings extend the ongoing debate about the mental health crisis in academia: Doctoral researchers’ self-reports showed increased levels of depression, burnout, and loneliness and further decreased mental wellbeing under the influence of the pandemic. Importantly, self-reported mental health problems were strongly linked to the PhD training, which emphasizes the need to improve academic work culture. Initiatives founded by ECRs have sought to actively reduce harmful work conditions and the stigmatization of mental health problems in academia. However, long-term change also demands top-down solutions. We thus call research institutions to action to create PhD training conditions that target the factors we identified and bring about sustainable systemic changes for academia.

Materials and methods

Participants.

We sought to target early career researchers pursuing their doctorate at research facilities in Berlin and the greater Berlin area to investigate the status of their mental health and potential COVID-19 related mental health changes via an online survey. The cross-sectional study was approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Psychology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants provided written informed consent. Participants had the option to take part in a raffle to win 25 Euro. In total, 335 doctoral researchers completed the survey. As we aimed to compare the perceived mental health and satisfaction with PhD training of doctoral researchers before and after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we excluded participants who did not start their PhD training at least three months prior to the beginning of the pandemic (March 2020 in Germany; n = 75). Additionally, we excluded participants who indicated that they experienced an important life event which could have influenced their mental health significantly in the last two weeks (n = 38). In the remaining sample of 222 participants, the age ranged from 24 to 52 years ( M  = 29.8; SD  = 3.4). Gender, nationality, years into the PhD training, and type of the PhD program are summarised in Table 3 . Type of PhD program refers to structured programs (as often provided by graduate schools) vs. individual doctoral projects. They differ in characteristics, which are potentially important for doctoral researchers’ wellbeing, especially in the pandemic. For example, doctoral researchers in structured programs are often organized in cohorts or years, which facilitates the growth of a professional peer network.

Data were collected cross-sectionally between January and February 2021 with an online survey administered via the SoSci Survey platform ( www.soscisurvey.de ) and further processed in R ver. 4.0.2. The R code including data, analysis code and a HTML file with all procedures rendered in accessible form, are available at an OSF repository ( https://osf.io/q5w4g/ ). The survey consisted of standardized measures of mental health and self-developed questions regarding changes in satisfaction before and during the pandemic in relation to PhD-specific aspects.

Standardized measures of mental health

We included three standardized questionnaires to assess participants’ mental health state. For all these questionnaires, higher scores relate to greater significance of the measured mental health problem. We used the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI 54 ), which has 53 items to assess nine mental health symptom dimensions: somatization, obsession-compulsion, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism. Participants were asked to choose how much a described problem bothered them in the last week (e.g., “Nervousness or shakiness inside”, scale: “Not at all”, “A little bit”, “Moderately”, ”Quite a bit”, and “Extremely”). For each dimension, raw scores were transformed into t-scores to relate the results to the general population. In reference to the BSI manual 54 , we considered t-scores equal to or larger than1 SD (t-score = 60) as clinically relevant.

The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI 15 ) was used to measure personal and work-related burnout (the third CBI scale, namely client-related burnout, was omitted in our survey as the work of doctoral researchers is rarely concerned with clients). In 13 questions, participants were asked how often they experienced described problems in the last weeks (e.g., “How often do you feel tired?”, scale: “Never/Almost never”, ”Seldom”, ”Sometimes”, ”Often”, “Always”) or how intense these problematic experiences were (“To a very low degree”, ”To a low degree”, ”Somewhat”, ”To a high degree”, ”To a very high degree”). For scoring, each answer is assigned a numerical value from 0 for “Never/almost never” or “To a very low degree” to 100 for “Always” or “To a very high degree”. The score is calculated as the mean of all items.

Further, we used the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale (11-item version 55 ) to measure social and emotional loneliness. Participants were asked to indicate how often they experienced different situations (e.g., “There is always someone I can talk to about my day-to-day problems”, scale: “None of the time”, “Rarely”, “Some of the time”, “Often”, “All the time”). Maximum total score is 11 (one per item), which combines six items from the emotional subscale and five items from the social subscale.

Self-developed questions on mental health and satisfaction with PhD training under consideration of the pandemic

In order to assess participants’ perceived mental health and satisfaction in relation to their PhD training, we created questions specifically targeting these topics considering the context of the pandemic situation. We based wording and content of the questions on other surveys targeting ECRs’ mental health, such as the survey of the N 2 network 16 and the annual Nature survey 3 . We subsequently adapted the questions to capture the influence of the pandemic.

Besides demographic questions and PhD specifics (e.g., years into PhD training), we collected information on existing and past clinical mental health diagnosis, expectations regarding the PhD training before its start, potential support structures, and changes in satisfaction with PhD-specific aspects (e.g., supervision) caused by the pandemic. We thus asked our participants to evaluate these aspects retrospectively for the times before the pandemic as well as the current in-pandemic situation. The results reported here include a subset of all questions administered in the survey; the full list can be found in the OSF repository ( https://osf.io/q5w4g/ ).

Statistical analyses

To conceive the actual mental health state of our participants, we used descriptive statistics for the standardized questionnaires. Therefore, we computed the mean and standard deviation of the BSI, CBI, and De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale scores to compare these values with existing literature. For the self-developed questions on mental health of doctoral researchers and ratings of satisfaction with PhD training, we calculated percentages per response category. We then performed two exploratory statistical analyses: The first analysis aimed to investigate whether there was a change in retrospective pre-pandemic and current in-pandemic ratings of PhD-related satisfaction aspects and items contributing to mental health issues. We performed two-tailed dependent t-tests for all related items. The second analysis aimed to investigate potential predictors of three mental health aspects: depression, anxiety, and burnout. We chose these aspects because they are most frequently considered in the context of the mental health of ECRs 2 , 3 , 4 . To this goal, we built three multiple regression models with the BSI depression t-scores, the BSI anxiety t-scores, and the CBI work-related burnout scores as dependent variables. To control for mental health issues potentially unrelated to the PhD, we included prior clinical diagnosis of a mental disorder (pre- or since the beginning of the PhD) as a control variable in all models. We expected that the three mental health aspects would be related to years into the PhD training, overall satisfaction with the PhD training, being a member of a graduate program, and gender, but we were also interested in the contribution of other factors. Therefore, we entered all suitable survey questions (see column “Predictor” within the HTML file on the OSF page) as potential predictors in the models, and conducted a stepwise selection of the best model with the bidirectional step() function (stats package). This procedure allows for iterative adding and removing predictors based on the model’s fit estimated with the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). The predictors in the selected models are chosen based on their statistical significance for explaining variance. Due to few data points in the following categories, we excluded participants who (1) did not identify as a woman or a man (n = 9), (2), did not indicate being part of a structured or individual PhD program (n = 14), and (3) chose not to provide information about whether they were diagnosed with a mental disorder (n = 1). This procedure resulted in a sample size of 198 participants for this exploratory analysis. Responses to the question “How long have you been living in Germany?” were binned into three categories: 0–3 years, 4 + years, and native. Due to the design of the survey (participants could not proceed without giving a response for each item concerned for analysis), there was no missing data.

It should be noted that stepwise regression is a discouraged method for hypothesis testing and should be interpreted with caution in data exploration. The reason for this is that it may produce narrow confidence intervals, high t statistics and low p values 56 . However, when treated with caution, it could generate valuable insights about the relationships in the dataset and produce ideas for future hypothesis testing studies. Further, because stepwise regression is less effective with more explanatory variables 56 , we did not include interaction terms in our exploratory models. Finally, because the p values in stepwise regression are not accurate and should not be interpreted as they would in a hypothesis-testing, theory-driven analysis, we do not correct for multiple comparisons, as there is no straightforward method to do so and no apparent benefit for the interpretability of the results. With all this in mind, in the current study, we do not encourage other researchers to use the reported statistics as true effect sizes in the population, but rather to consider this procedure as an exploratory tool for building insights about our data and generating future hypotheses in theory-driven studies.

The stepwise selection procedure confirmed that prior diagnosis explained significant portions of variance in all models. Hence, other predictors explained additional variance in the data suggesting that PhD-related aspects may have a somewhat additive (to clinical diagnoses) influence on mental health problems. We also explored models without prior diagnosis as a predictor, which showed a similar pattern of results as the full models presented below (see point 6.2 in the HTML file in the repository). The selected models were checked for regression assumptions (normality, linearity, multicollinearity (with Variance Inflation Factors), homoscedasticity), which were met for all models (details for each model are reported in the HTML file). The significance level for all the tests was set to 0.05. However, it should be noted that these analyses are data-driven and thus any statistical significance should be considered with care. To estimate the main effects in the analyses (across levels of multiple categorical predictors), we conducted a type-II analysis of variance using the model parameters.

Ethics approval

The study protocol was reviewed and approved by the ethics committee of the Department of Psychology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Data availability

Data and code that support the findings of this study are openly available at the OSF repository: https://osf.io/q5w4g/ .

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all members of Scholar Minds for their support in conceptualizing this survey project. Scholar Minds is a Berlin-based initiative of PhD candidates concerned with mental health in academia ( www.scholar-minds.net ; Berlin, Germany) which was, together with other PhD researchers, co-founded by S.N., M.M., K.B.

Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. This study was supported by funding from the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft (sdw). We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the German Research Foundation (DFG)—337619223/RTG2386.

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Sandra Naumann, Magdalena Matyjek, Katharina Bögl & Isabel Dziobek

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S.N., M.M. and K.B. were involved in the survey design, data collection, and interpretation of the data. M.M. conducted the statistical analysis S.N., M.M., K.B. and I.D. drafted and reviewed the manuscript.

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Naumann, S., Matyjek, M., Bögl, K. et al. Doctoral researchers’ mental health and PhD training satisfaction during the German COVID-19 lockdown: results from an international research sample. Sci Rep 12 , 22176 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26601-4

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Impact of Work-Life Balance on Employee Work Performance: The Mediating Role of Employee Creativity

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Modern people have many personal and professional obligations. Work-life balance has become a key factor that attracts more people. This study investigates the relationships between work-life balance, employee creativity, and work performance. Five main aspects of work-life balance are explored, including work overload, work stress, flexible work arrangements, family responsibilities, and organizational support. 419 accounting and auditing personnel in Vietnam are surveyed to obtain research data. Qualitative research methods were used to better understand the relationships and improve the pre-designed questionnaire. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) method is used to estimate the relationships between concepts. Three dimensions of work-life balance, including work overload, work stress, and family responsibilities, have harmful impacts on work performance, according to the findings. On the other hand, increasing flexible work arrangements and organizational support promote work performance. In addition, employee creativity acts as a mediating variable, enhancing the positive effect of organizational support on work performance. The findings provide important empirical evidence for management recommendations to improve employee work performance by reducing the negative effects of work overload, work stress, and family responsibilities while increasing the positive effects of flexible work arrangements, organizational support, and employee creativity.

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Ho Chi Minh City Open University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Nguyen Minh Ha

Finance, Economic and Management Research Group (FEMRG), Ho Chi Minh City Open University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Nguyen Minh Ha & Ngo Thanh Trung

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The Graduate School, Ho Chi Minh City Open University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Nguyen Thanh Phuong Thuy

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Ngo Thanh Trung

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Nguyen Hoang Sinh

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Ha, N.M., Thuy, N.T.P., Trung, N.T. (2024). Impact of Work-Life Balance on Employee Work Performance: The Mediating Role of Employee Creativity. In: Tung, L.T., Sinh, N.H., Ha, P. (eds) Disruptive Technology and Business Continuity. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-5452-6_11

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-5452-6_11

Published : 30 August 2024

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Work-life balance during and after PhD

Anybody that has been in graduate school knows well that work-life balance is pretty difficult to maintain(to put it lightly). I'm curious to hear the experience of people that graduated with PhD in ECE about their free time during(was there any?) and after PhD.

I have already noticed severe lack of time and energy for extracurricular stuff and hobbies in grad school and I wonder if that's also going to be the case once you graduate. Or perhaps suddenly you get so much free time on your hand that you don't know what to do with it? Were you able to get back to your old hobbies, move around the world freely?

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