Planning. We all have to do it to get by. A lot of us hate it. Many of us overdo it. Some of us are serial planners while others make a plan and then sigh as it slips past.
This post is for the planners who fail and the continual plan-adjusters. Some of the more successful planners might find it of interest, even if it only makes you feel better about your own relative prowess with the plan. It's the first of a few on planning and this one's about the PhD.
I guess you know there's this thing called the planning fallacy. That's when we make predictions about how much time something is going to take but underestimate the time. Sometimes what we are planning actually takes much longer to do than we thought. Our plan was wildly inaccurate. It gave us a false sense of being organised.
Psychologists say that planners often suffer from an "optimism bias" - we plan as if something is going to take a particular amount of time even though deep down we know that similar tasks have taken longer and/or that we need to leave time for unexpected events and our own wavering energies. And, psychologists tell us, other people have a tendency to have a pessimism bias when they look at our plans. They see all of the possible and probably things that might get in the way of our timeline that we have apparently ignored.
Now the planning fallacy can be a helpful idea for PhDers and those who work with them. Of course, like all ideas you can drive a truck through the ways in which the notion of the planning fallacy was deverloped if you want. But I prefer to think about what might be useful in the idea.
At the core of the planning fallacy proposition is the idea that people make plans on the basis of what they want to happen, rather than on what they know is more likely. Well, that makes sense. Unless you're Eeyore and simply glad there have been no earthquakes lately, you're always likely to hope for the best. Aim for the best case.
But what happens if you don't actually know what is likely? This is the situation that most PhDers find themselves in. They can't really tell how long it will take to do their data work because they've not done anything similar before. The PhD is likely the first time they've done a project of this size and complexity. They don't know how long it is going to take them to analyse the stuff they have generated. They don't know how long it will take to write a big monograph text or to get three papers published.
Despite not being able to know what doing the PhD actually entails, PhDers are continually asked to prepare and present plans for completion. While plan preparation certainly helps to get across the notion of an end point and a final deadline, what happens in between is a space which is largely imagined. Not based on prior experience.
I am sure that most supervisors do try to make PhDers aware of the amount of time that analysis and writing take. But these individual conversations would really be helped if we supervisors had more detailed resources available which would help fill in the knowledge gap about the time it takes to do and write research.
Perhaps somewhere some universities do have completed PhDers come and talk with starter PhDers about plans. And how their plans were not necessarily what happened. How they would plan differently if they had to do it again knowing what they know at the end. Perhaps somewhere some universities make serial plans from PhDers and/or actual timings available to new starters so that they can see for themselves where the time really does get spent.
Without some resources available to them PhDs making plans are really working in the dark. It is no wonder that optimism prevails. It is also no wonder that PhDers often find themselves running out of time and out of money largely because they had not been able to anticipate how long they would actually need to complete their work.
It does seem to me that universities need to do better in this area. It is not enough to set deadlines and ask for reports and plans. It is good, but not enough, for graduate services to offer workshops in project management. It is good, but not enough, for supervisors to discuss time and to ask PhDers to backwards map their PhDs. It seems to me that it would be VERY helpful if there were more effort directed towards building up understandings about time, and developing some plans and resources that really help PhDers to get to know what time is likely to be required.
This doesn't mean more of the I-did-my-PhD-in-two-years-and-you-can-too, or I-wrote-my-thesis-in-three-months-and-you-can-too resources. It does mean talking out loud about the different PhD times that people take – it's a range – and why. Different people have different projects, work in different contexts, have different supports and face different obstacles. But understanding the variety and the continuum of time taken might be part of the process of new PhDers getting more realistic about making plans.
Getting over optimism bias is always a matter of knowing yourself and your particular circumstances. And this might mean PhDers and their supervisors thinking more about scenarios than plans. What's the best and what's the just OK scenario for completion of this PhD? What needs to be watched out for as this PhD goes along? What are the signs that the best case scenario is off track? What might be done to move from what appears to be just OK to something more like the best case?
Understanding and taking account of the planning fallacy might be a bit of a first check on over optimism. Knowing the fallacy can be a reminder not to be over optimistic. A little prod to temper your enthusiasm.
PS And apologies to the PhDers I've worked with where I haven't been as clear about this as I am right now. Thinking about the planning fallacy has helped me to learn about and from my past supervision experiences.
Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash
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