33 lines
4.4 KiB
Markdown
33 lines
4.4 KiB
Markdown
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title: 'Part time PhD: Mini-Sabbaticals'
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author: James
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type: post
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date: 2018-04-05T13:08:51+00:00
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url: /2018/04/05/phd-mini-sabbaticals/
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medium_post:
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categories:
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- PhD
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tags:
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- productivity
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- sabbatical
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---
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Avid readers amongst you will know that I’m currently in the third year of my PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Warwick whilst also serving as CTO at [Filament][1]. An incredibly exciting pair of positions that certainly have their challenges and would be untenable without an incredibly supportive set of PhD supervisors ([Amanda Clare][2] and [Maria Liakata][3]) and an equally supportive and understanding pair of company directors ([Phil and Doug][4]). Of course I have to shout out to my fiancee Amy who also puts up with a lot when I’m stressed out or I have to work weekends.
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Until recently, I’d been working 3 days a week at Filament and 2 days a week (plus weekends where necessary) on my PhD. However I found that the context switching back and forth between my PhD and work life was incredibly disruptive and I was wasting a huge amount of time simply switching between projects. There’s a really good [article on human context switching][5] by Joel Spolsky that explains the harm it can cause.
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Just after Christmas, I had an idea (in no small part inspired by Julia Evans’ [rust sabbatical][6]). What if I could minimise context switching but maintain the same ratio of PhD to Work time? My plan was simple: work for Filament for 4 days a week, 4 weeks at a time. This still gives me at least day a week (sometimes I PhD on saturdays too) to focus on smaller tasks, read papers, reply to emails and usually get half a day of productive coding done. Then there’s the clever bit: every 5th week, I take a mini-sabbatical from Filament. I block out my calendar, turn on my email auto responder and mute slack. This means I can be super productive for a whole week and really get to grips with the more complex challenges of my PhD that take more than 1 or 2 days of focus. From Filament’s point of view, this arrangement is better too. Instead of lots of sporadic, short term absences, everyone knows what my schedule is well in advance and we can plan around it.
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I was incredibly grateful to Phil and Doug who welcomed this idea and let me trial it for the first time at the end of Feburary when I was putting together a submission to ACL 2018 (paper’s in review, fingers crossed). The trial was a success as far as both parties were concerned and today I’m 4 days into my 2nd mini-sabbatical, having spent 3 very productive days on part of my current mini-project (details will be revealed soon) and today getting organised and starting to figure out where I need to go next.
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It’s difficult to explain just how productive these mini-sabbs are compared to ad-hoc days off every week. I’ve decided that I’m going to start writing a blog summary each time I have a mini-sabb to remind myself just how much I can get done in a week of solid, focused PhD time.
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If you’re already doing a part-time PhD or considering it, finding the perfect balance between work, play and study is a tricky task. If you’re in a fortunate enough position to have a great working relationship with your company and your phd support staff (and make no mistake, I am aware how incredibly lucky I am in this respect), you might want to think about whether there’s a more efficient way to be splitting your time and if its feasible to give it a go!
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[1]: https://filament.ai/
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[2]: https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/cs/staff-list/staff_profiles/?login=afc
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[3]: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/maria_liakata/
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[4]: https://filament.ai/about-us/
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[5]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switches-considered-harmful/
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[6]: https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/12/02/taking-a-sabbatical-to-work-on-ruby-profiling-tools/
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