The PhD is a creative project

Here is what a lot of the productivity advice targeted at PhD students on the internet misses: the PhD is, above all else, a creative project.

When PhD students look for advice online, it is assumed they know what they are doing and need help with how to do it better. This assumption is not neutral. It is also an assumption that this student will have had close contact with other PhD students before starting their own doctorate, perhaps that they are not a first generation academic, or even that their supervisor is not in an over-worked or precarious position and will be able to dedicate time to talking to the student about the epistemological nature of a doctorate and not just about the subject matter. These are all big assumptions in a world where higher education is under increased pressure.

Either because they assume people know what a PhD is or because they believe in the framing of intellectual work as a capitalist endeavour always trying to maximise productivity, some “gurus” out there offer a toolkit for PhD students to do more, write more, achieve more. I have found myself on both sides of that spectrum, sometimes giving out and sometimes seeking advice on how to be a more productive PhD student.

Here is the thing though: if you already think of yourself as someone doing an inherently creative project, productivity advice can be really useful. However, if you skip to the “how” before reflecting about the “what” and the “why”, you end up in a hamster wheel competing against a proverbial other PhD student who has published more articles than you. This is more than a communication problem: not only does this focus on the “how” stem from the exclusionary assumptions listed above, it also perpetrates a status quo that pushes us to burnout, especially those of us with disabilities, caring responsibilities, or who have had to migrate to get their degree. Before you think about productivity, you should therefore think about creativity.

Creation is at the very core of every PhD. Each higher education system has its own rules: in Brazil, a PhD involves coursework; in France, it does not. In the United States, you must sit an exam before writing your thesis; in the United Kingdom, you do not. Despite these differences, there is one common element that distinguishes a PhD from all other degrees: the significant original contribution to knowledge.

A PhD requires original research, it requires discovery. It requires creativity. Yes, there are technical elements associated with it and it is an exercise that proves you adhere to certain codes before being welcomed into the scholarly community, but the defining element of a PhD is the originality.

While there are certainly some people out there who produce their most innovative work under pressure and in competition, this is certainly not the case for everyone - as the one-size-fits-all, project-management-orientated, corporate-minded productivity advice would have us believe. Yes, every doctorate entails an element of discomfort: we have to sit with the realisation that, as a society but also as individuals, we do not know everything there is to know about a certain topic. We have to allow that one thing we do not know niggle and eat away at us until it becomes a research question, and that is a very vulnerable place to be. That gap in knowledge is, however, where the discomfort should end, because filling it requires original thought and therefore creativity, and creative endeavours require safety, breathing space, and contemplation: things that are lacking in a gruesome job market, but also things that are often antithetical to the “just wake up at 5am and take a cold shower” hustle culture.

Creativity requires peace. If the 5am cold shower, calendar blocking, Gantt-charting brings you peace, then fully embrace it because it will bring you closer to your original contribution to knowledge. But the “how” needs to serve the “what”, and what a PhD is is a creative exercise, not a project to be managed to optimise productivity or profit. You are not hustling, you are not grinding, you are creating.

This does not mean you should ignore the more labour-based elements of this journey. You do have to produce something, not the least your PhD thesis. If you are employed by a university, there may be certain expectations linked to your contract, such as a teaching load or a certain number of publications you need before you graduate. If you are self-funded, a carer, or find yourself in a myriad of circumstances (which can change throughout your degree!) which mean you cannot take too long before seeking stable and paid employment, you may have to hustle and be productive just to get yourself over the finish line. Women and non-binary scholars, first-generation scholars, scholars of colour, scholars from the Global South, scholars with disabilities or caring responsibilities may have to hustle more than others just to stay afloat in a system that was not designed for us. But our PhD is not the hustle and we are not defined by how many hours we work or how quickly we publish articles.

The very essence of the PhD is creativity, and that comes from peace, from safety, from having a room of one’s own, to quote Virginia Woolf, which does not have to be a room at all: from my shared studio-flat in France to my baby-inhabited one if the UK, my peace and safety have been a mug with the cover of A Room of One’s Own, but I’ll take what little peace I can afford and channel it into creating original knowledge.

So the next time you feel like you are behind and like you need to find advice on how to be more, do more, write more, ask yourself who you are even competing against. And next time you go online looking for productivity advice for PhDs, ask yourself if the tools you are being presented with simply replicate corporate productivity or if they will actually help you find the peace and the rhythm that you need in order to create. That is, after all, what a PhD is all about!