Åsa Burman

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The doctoral student handbook

"These techniques have had a significant impact on my everyday life. I get more done during work hours and I no longer need to work evenings or weekends."

Doctoral Student, Lund University

"Åsa provides a great set of suggestions about how to become a highly effective and less stressed-out dissertation writer."

Doctoral Student, University of California, Berkeley

As academics, we spend a great deal of time focusing on the content of our work, but sometimes we forget to pay attention to the work process, or how we work, think, and act. However, the process is important to finishing our academic work and managing stress levels. As individuals, we often have one main strategy, or a certain way of thinking and acting, for dealing with a variety of situations. For many doctoral students, the main strategy is to work harder. Our main strategy often works perfectly well, but as we encounter new situations we may need a greater variety of strategies.

This book shifts focus from what to how and provides you with strategies and hands-on techniques to finish your dissertation on time and feel good along the way. You will learn about units, the weekly schedule and the 80/20 principle, and apply these concepts to your own work situation. These effectiveness techniques are closely connected to stress management techniques: the demand-control-support model both explains causes of stress in the academic environment and supports you in shifting from negative stress to positive stress.

Åsa Burman holds a Doctorate of Philosophy from Lund University in Sweden and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the past eight years, she and her Finish on Time colleagues have supported doctoral students across a wide variety of academic disciplines.