PhD Student Goal Setting and Planning in Uncertain Times | 12 week plan

A PhD student lays out a structured 12-week plan for staying productive during uncertain conditions—while keeping health and mental well-being as the top priority. The schedule runs from April 6 through June 28 and is designed to be flexible enough for remote work, family safety, and shifting research demands, yet concrete enough to maintain momentum on papers, thesis progress, and professional development.

The planning system is built around a customizable bullet journal spread (with weekly lines for every week in the 12-week window) and a recurring 28-day cycle drawn from a productivity book, “In the Flow,” which links planning phases to women’s hormonal rhythms. Each 28-day block is divided into four-week phases: a “planning” week for mapping out what needs to happen, a “communication” week for supervisor check-ins and starting work, a “doing” week for executing research and writing, and a “reflecting” week for consolidating sections like discussion and conclusions. Over the full 12 weeks, the student targets three cycles of plan–communicate–reflect, aligning research tasks with the rhythm of paper development.

The core academic goal for the early part of the plan is preparing and advancing a short paper that expands on a previous publication. The “planning” phase is used to decide what research is still required and which algorithms will be used; the “communication” phase is reserved for talking with a supervisor and beginning the project; the “doing” phase focuses on implementing the research decisions and drafting; and the “reflecting” phase is aimed at finishing synthesis work such as discussion and conclusion sections.

Beyond research, the plan tracks progress across three categories: PhD-specific work, transferable skills, and personal items. Transferable skills are monitored in a detailed list that includes research skills, personal organization, teamwork and leadership, career management, entrepreneurship and innovation, writing and publishing, public speaking, media and scientific communication, and more. The student’s near-term targets are to raise several of these areas—especially teamwork/leadership through an entrepreneurship project with a PhD peer, career management via LinkedIn and CV work, and writing/publishing through completing coursework and producing additional academic writing.

Professional visibility is also treated as a measurable objective. The student plans to deliver a live webinar in the Doctorate Studies User Group on Facebook (noting the group’s large membership), present research to a PhD cohort and/or at an online conference, and continue building a YouTube channel with a goal of reaching 1,000 subscribers. Content plans include longer “study with me” style videos focused on reading papers and taking notes, plus a separate video on academic writing.

The schedule also accounts for fixed obligations: coursework deadlines, demonstration hours (teaching hours), grading, an exam, an entrepreneurship bootcamp, a summer school-style cohort event, and a stage two transfer date on June 15. The student intends to use the weeks before and during these commitments to complete major thesis components—such as a literature review and at least one substantial thesis chapter—while also developing an online app prototype to collect data for future project stages. The overall message is pragmatic: productivity is pursued, but not at the expense of health, and progress is reviewed weekly so priorities can shift as reality changes.