Deep Work in Ph.D.
·PhD is process where you are the officially owner of the work. So accountability is completely yours for the process. No one is going to hand hold you to push you write papers or define how long you will or should take to complete PhD; even though you cant control the outcomes because it depends on reviewers if they accept your work and single paper publishing in a journal may take even 6 months.
There are various techniques that help in deep work:
1) Give yourself goals for specific period of time
2) Breaking down your big timeline goal into small goals
3) Writing and follow up with your progress from time to time
4) Following pomodoro technique ie to work for specified minutes and then take a break
5) There are various other techniques in the book Deep Work by Cal Newport.
One part of deep work is PhD is to keep in mind that your work in the PhD is to extend the human knowledge and thats how you work. PhD work is about creativity for finding a solution; critical thinking to question an existing work and following your intuition to find a desired research question. One more thing that I am trying to learn is being strategic towards the work and bringing more clarity before continuing towards a defined solution. This process can be broken into more technical terms:
1) finding a research problem : like the first problem that I picked up was event localization.
2) finding a research question : for that two main exercises are understanding the previous works critically and finding a problem in the work or mentioned in the paper that you can work on.
3) working towards building a solution : what I have understood while talking to some seniors the main aim with starting a solution is not perfection, but working towards it consistently. It may take a few iterations to refine the solution. Starting anyway is more important than aiming for perfection. And what I concluded is that your paper does not need to be perfect to get published; it just need to define an idea.