How you may have a hand in your supervisor causing you stress with additional workload

Today I met a very motivated and ambitious PhD researcher who is struggling with sticking to his planning. In his opinion he can’t manage it because his supervisor all too often seems to have major request for him. One of his examples was that his supervisor needs him to attend this conference, but that also requires him to write a paper first. This delays what he's currently working on and is causing him a lot of stress.

When I took a moment to reflect on his examples I noticed a pattern. These weren’t the typical examples of a PhD researcher complaining about extra tasks which aren’t directly related to his/her own research project. Nor was it moaning about how supervisors mistakenly think how fast young researchers can finish tasks (and thus always have time to add an extra one).

So I decided to explain him what and why this is happening to him. And since I hear variations on this problem quite often, I thought I'd share it with you as well.

#1 You didn't add sufficient buffer time. Research projects have to deal with a lot of uncertainties and unexpected events, and you didn't foresee enough margin for that. Or maybe you were too ambitious and you just wanted to do too much within your project.

#2 You didn't show your planning to your stakeholders when you made it. It's impossible to plan an entire PhD project and think of everything yourself if you've never done this before. So you need feedback on this, especially from your supervisor.

#3 You showed it to your stakeholders, but you didn't discuss it properly. You only asked feedback on what's already part of your planning, not on what you forgot to include. You only planned your goals, but what about their expectations? Did you ask about what other job responsibilities you have besides the research project?

#4 You forgot about expectation management. Once you know your stakeholders’ expectations, include the outcome of this discussion in your planning or at least add it to your list of requirements to meet. This way there won't be any big surprises left. 

#5 You are a researcher, so by nature you are curious: you want to know more than you have time to investigate. Your supervisor also is a researcher, (s)he will see many interesting opportunities along the way as well. However, to protect the quality of your work, you need to be selective in what you will work on. So early on, collaboratively decide what’s in your scope and what’s left out.

He wasn’t aware of it, but it turned out that the PhD researcher in question made multiple errors of judgement here. My explanation was the eye-opener he needed. If you are struggling with similar problems, I hope this article can do the same for you.

Good luck!