Editor’s Note: Previously in the Career Talk series, our experts on Ph.D. career counseling have offered advice on prepping for job interviews, using AI on your application materials, looking for industry positions, and other career-planning topics.
No doubt you are looking forward to the break as the semester winds down. Yet you probably are also facing the time off with a long to-do list in mind. It’s tempting to go to extremes during academic-year breaks — either planning to do nothing whatsoever or stressing yourself out by trying to do everything.
As ever, the middle ground is where you want to be. Here are some strategies to help you plan the right mix of relaxation and work during the break.
Decide when you will not work. Yes this is a great time to catch up on tasks that went undone during the semester. However, it’s also an opportunity to relax and reset mentally. Give yourself permission to ignore work for part of the break, and decide ahead of time when that will be.
Then stick to that plan. Doing so will relieve you from the constant mental buzz of, “I should be working right now.” Letting yourself fully rest for a stretch of time will enable you to be more productive when you resume working.
Decide how much you will work on your designated work days. It’s certainly aspirational and diligent to imagine you’ll labor six or eight hours a day during the break, but is it realistic? What could you accomplish if, instead, you planned to work two hours a day — and then really did so? Too often we say we’re going to set aside seven hours to work and then we spend most of the time doomscrolling and thinking about how we should be working. It can be much more effective to check off a few tasks on your to-do list in a short burst of time.
Deciding early on how much you’re going to work will also let you schedule other things reliably around that block of time. Setting aside two to three hours to work in the morning allows you to make other plans in the afternoon. Work has a tendency to expand to fill the time allotted, so putting boundaries around it can help you accomplish more in less time.
Make a reasonable to-do list. Winter breaks vary considerably in length. You may have as little as two and a half weeks off if you are on the quarter system, or as much as six weeks on the semester system. Be realistic about how much you can accomplish in your allotted break. In making your list, think ahead to the next semester:
- What will your primary responsibilities be in the new semester? Will you be teaching? What research will you be expected to accomplish? Do you have any service obligations you’ll need to fulfill?
- Are you looking for a job right now?
- Do you have other professional development goals?
- Working backward in each of those categories, what are the tasks you’ll need to complete to set you up for success on the first day of next semester?
- And, perhaps most important, in which area will you have the most work to do?
Break down each task into smaller steps that can be accomplished in a day or two. Finalizing a course syllabus or revising a dissertation chapter for publication are less intimidating tasks when divided into multiple steps. Put the intermediary steps on your to-do list. That way, even if you don’t finish the larger task, you’ll still know that you made progress.
Mix in some “easy wins.” For example, winter break is an ideal time to do a little networking. Search LinkedIn for people you can contact to set up informational interviews (after the holidays) to learn about their profession. Use a generative AI model to start doing research on prospective careers beyond academe. Or perhaps you have a job talk that is almost done but needs some final touches, or you’ve got some data cleaning that doesn’t require much concentration. Tackling these easier goals during your break can also turn them into more of a habit — tasks that can be accomplished without too much effort during a busy semester, too.
Set some personal goals for your break. Use these weeks off to reset some habits and find time for things that restore you. Do you want to try some new recipes? Get back into yoga? Read a novel for pleasure? Especially for graduate students and early-career academics, leisure activities and hobbies can be important to your mental health. And there are many Ph.D.’s out there whose side interests opened up whole new career paths for them.
Factor in some time for creative intellectual practice. Doctoral study isn’t meant to be about drafting to-do lists, emailing people, organizing events, or wrangling students. Well, it is about those things, but it’s also about intellectual engagement, ideas that excite you, creativity, sparks of enthusiasm. (Our scientist colleagues have turned us onto a new term and resource for this creative praxis, Night Science.)
We all need the space to imagine and create in a way that doesn’t have a planned outcome. Are there books, podcasts, or other materials that you’ve been meaning to engage with, not because they’re directly connected to your current project, but because they’ve captured your interest? Do you have some thoughts you’d like to get down on paper, away from the distraction of a screen? Aspirational tasks are important, too, particularly in this challenging political climate.
Be kind to yourself. You probably won’t finish all the tasks on your to-do list. That’s OK. Keep in mind: They are priorities, not mandates. The main thing to avoid, in our considered opinion, is spending your break not working while continuing to think about work, or worse, berating yourself for not working.
Colleges build breaks into the academic year because the work is intense and exhausting. Your future self will thank you for checking things off your list, but also for using at least some of this time to rest. Treat the break as a break, be reasonable in your work expectations for these weeks, and take pride in your wins, however modest.
