Strategies I used to finish master's degree early

Hi there! Today, we're going to talk about what are some of the tips and tricks and even agile principles that I've used to finish my masters earlier. Let's go. I was doing my master's few years ago before the pandemic. It is a two-year program. Six semesters with summer and I was able to finish it in five semesters instead of six. A lot of my classmates, I later learned had to stay even longer than six semesters due to several factors. That made me think about some of the strategies that made me capable to finish my masters earlier. So, I had a part-time job and I also was able to publish several academic papers not entirely on my own of course, I had different co-authors but still for a master's student, it's considered to be quite a good achievement. And I was also able to get scholarships for my research. I think I was able to kind of combine speed and quality. First of all, I think it really helped that I was doing my masters after having few years of work experience. I think at this point had maybe five or six years of full time work experience. And it really helped especially when I was comparing myself with students who were fresh out of undergrad. How it helped me is that I think when you work full time, you become much better at time management than when you were a student. You also focus on the important things instead of focusing on things such as grades. You kind of have a better understanding of what matters, what does it, and grades are definitely not the things that matter at this point. In the case of masters, if you want to later do your PhD, things like published academic papers matter, your research matter, your collaborations matter and not so much. your. . If any of you are listening and thinking that because you graduated from undergrad a long time ago, it somehow puts you in disadvantage. I would argue that the opposite is true. The more work experience you have, the more efficient you will be at doing your masters. So that's the first tip, is to actually have some work experience before you go and do your master's. It'll really grow you as a human being, and it actually gives you a nice perspective of what really matters in the real world. The second thing that really helped me was that I've read all of Cal Newport's books at around that time. I've discovered Cal Newport shortly before I began my masters. I've read all of his books in a span of maybe three months. I've read his books such as "How to Be an A-Plus Student", "Deep Work"," So Good They Can Ignore You". These books helped tremendously and some of them, I still re-read every year, highly recommend it especially the "Deep Work" and "So Good They Can't Ignore You". These two books are on my top list of recommendations. The principles that he provides in his books were fundamental at helping me finish my Masters earlier. I was so influenced by his work that I pretty much applied his major principles to my master's degree. The first one is of course, time blocking. I did it religiously from day one of my masters. I had a very clear plan for the week. I knew when I would study. I knew when I would go to class. I knew when I had to work on my part-time job. So, I had a very clear timetable every week, and I tried to keep it similar so that I can get used to the same routine. I like to do all my deep work in the morning. Before lunch, I would have maybe three hours of reading or maybe doing some writing when it was time to write my thesis. I would basically do the hard academic stuff early in the morning. I would go to a coffee shop. I had like a selection of three that I would just rotate. I would go to one on Monday, then to another one on Tuesday, and I would kind of keep the same routine. not only doing time blocking, but also keeping it quite similar from day to day really allowed me to build this rhythm that made me consistent with all the efforts that I was doing in my masters and also having this timetable allowed me to have evenings and my weekends to myself. From the very beginning, I decided that I don't want to study or do any of the school work in the evenings, and I don't want to do that on the weekends. I want this time to myself, to go see my friends, to do things that I wanted to do and not have to think about school. That actually allowed me to re-charge and do some quality leisure activities that later on led to a more productive week. Another principle that I've religiously adopted from his books was the dislike for social media and almost for the entire time I was doing my masters, I didn't use Instagram. So, I quit Instagram. I know such an audacious thing to do these days, but I really needed to do that. The reason why is, when I started doing my masters, I had to read this academic papers and it's been five to six years since I've read the last academic paper in my undergrad, and I couldn't really read them. I would like read them but then my brain was not capturing all the ideas. Somehow, it was very difficult for me to read this difficult information. And then I was like, yeah, no wonder, because our brains are so dumbed down by social media that when you are presented with a more complex, difficult information, your brain doesn't know what to do it. If I wanted to be able to understand this difficult information, I should stop dominant down with social media. Otherwise, like it wouldn't work. It's kind of too counter-productive things. I'm shortening my attention span with social media, but academic papers require long and uninterupted attention span that can last for pages and pages of difficult academic research. So, I pretty much quit Instagram for sure. I also limited YouTube time. Funny enough during this process there was one year where I made a New Year's resolution to read 50 books in one year. And that was when I was doing my masters. Not only was I required to read all these academic papers for my thesis and for my masters, but I also decided to start reading more books and read 50 books a year. What was amazing is that not spending time on social media was the main factor that allowed me to do both. So, I would read difficult academic papers during the day, but then in the evening or when I needed a break, I would read fiction for fun or non-fiction. So, it's not as difficult the for literature as academic papers, but I was kind of using it instead of social media. In all the situations where I would use social media before, I would now read the book. I ended up reading more than 50 books that year and the number one reason was because I didn't use social media. It really does something with your brain where it starts working on a much higher level where it can comprehend more difficult information and a lot higher amount of it. So, highly recommend if you are in a very difficult academic field. If you want to improve your grades, if you want to maybe increase your chances of doing PhD., really re-consider your relationship with social media because it does things to your brain that are the opposite of what you want your brain to do when you are involved in academia. Another thing that I did, again, highly inspired by "Deep Work " is I found this writing group, it was actually a bunch of professors who were doing it. But I was introduced to this group and they kindly accepted me. It was a group of professors who get together once a week for two hours and they write. They do their research projects and pomodoro intervals. So It's four pomodoro intervals of 25 minutes. Then they have five minutes break. It's, again 25 minutes. They go through four rounds and then everyone goes and does their own thing. That was incredibly effective because you know, you are surrounded by people. You know that all of them are working on their research, on their proposals, whatever they have to do, because nowadays professors, they also have a lot of des distractions, a lot of admin stuff that they need to focus on emails and all that stuff. It's very hard for them to actually carve out the time to do their research, to do the writing, to proofread, to do the research stuff. It was quite brilliant how they came up with this solution. I went to these meetings. I found them to be very effective, and it's just this communal sense of people doing deep work, was very nice and inspiring. Because when you go to the library, you kind of think that you would get this effect. But you see people you know on their phones, they are chatting with each other, so you don't really get the same feeling that people are working on difficult things. But when you go to groups that are designed to study hard to write, then, it's much easier to do the same. So if you can find, or even if you can form a group with your students, with your classmates maybe with professors who were like a writing group in your city, I highly recommend you do that. Having this pomodoro schedule is also quite helpful. You can do the same thing where it's 25 minutes of work, five minutes break, and you repeat that as long as you want to. Okay. Another, and probably one of the main reasons I was able to finish my masters earlier was, I was very picky with my thesis supervisor. I think that is the number one differentiating factor between me being able to finish earlier in some of my classmates who had to postpone their graduation date. For everyone who's listening, when you get accepted to do your masters, you might get assigned a supervisor. A lot of people think that it's final. It's like, okay, I have the supervisor, I can't really change it. That's not really true. And what I did was like, okay, I was assigned that supervisor, I was happy to meet him. I was trying to reach out to him and he was very late at responding to my emails. It took like two weeks to arrange a meeting. Then I went to meet him and he was late for like 20 minutes. He forgot that we had an appointment. For me, maybe I'm being a bit too judgemental, but it was such a red flag that, okay, if this is what's happening right now, imagine how difficult it's gonna be to set up appointments with this person when I'm doing my research and because it's a thesis-based program, research is, you can really screw it up. It has to happen. So, I was like, okay let me see if I can find other supervisors. I went and I researched and basically, to be quite honest, my main criteria was how organized a person was and his or her track record of previous students and kind of like what results previous students got with this professor. After a lot of my research I ended up working with a professor from a completely different department who've never worked with my area of research, but he was extremely organized. He had his shit together, excuse my language, and he also introduced me to a lot of his previous students, and all of them said the same things. It's like he's gonna push you, but you gonna finish on time. And if you want to finish earlier, you can do that as well. He'll give you the program, he'll give you the steps that you need to achieve. He'll be strict, but he'll get it done. I was like, okay, this is perfect. This guy is an organizational genius. He has everything clearly defined and I ended up working with this professor, forever grateful. And he was able to meet with me on a regular basis. He helped me to set goals for each month and he gave me feedback very quickly. Basically, he was willing to establish consistent relationship where like we meet on a regular basis. I think it was once a week or every other week, something like that. Then we would get into this cadence that provided a consistent outcome. And that's what I was looking for, especially after having experience working with Scrum and Agile. I knew that I wanted to approach my masters the same way my previous company approached building a new tech product. I was like, okay, I'm gonna break my thesis into sprints. Each sprint would last about a month. So my thesis supervisor, helped me to establish goals for each sprint. The definition of done. He really helped me do the sprint reviews all of that. I didn't necessarily call it like that when I was talking to him, but I asked him the right questions. I also asked him whether should focus on what the final results should look like. And he was very helpful at helping me establish all these things. As for Agile Principles, focusing on one month at a time was very helpful and having sprint goals for one month. So, every month I would focus on, let's say finishing literature review. That would be the first month. And then maybe writing up the literature review section. That will be the next month. Then designing and writing in the first study. That will be the next print. And stuff like that. The definition of done, also very helpful. So My supervisor would tell me, how many pages or words you are looking at for each of the sections. and Also, what helped me a lot was starting working on my thesis from the very first year. A lot of my classmates, what they chose to do is to do all of their coursework in the first year and then focus solely on their thesis in the second year. From what I've seen, it wasn't a very successful path. I did spread out my courses into two years. I was taking less courses, but I was working on my thesis from pretty much day one. I was so grateful because some of my studies didn't work out. When I was planning to have three studies for the entire thesis, I ended up needing to do five studies instead of three. So, if I started in my second year, then I would've run out of time, and that's not cool. You should definitely plan for more time. If you can start working on your thesis from the very beginning, then you can break it down into small enough chunks where you don't have to work in the evenings or where you don't have to work on the weekends, you can spread it out evenly. And Also, I think not having courses in the second year can kind of screw up your rhythm, your cadence, your consistency, because I think these courses kind of help you shape your week and bring to its and boundaries. But if you don't have that, and if you are only focusing on your thesis, then it's like the whole time is up to you. I think it's much easier to procrastinate when you don't have any other external commitments going on. These are the principles that helped me with my masters and the sort of the same principles I've been applying when I was starting monthly method, when I was looking for a job, when I was changing my careers, when I was in the busy season at work. I have very similar advice for pretty much all the life scenarios that you can have. Do the time blocking. You can do the flexible way or the strict way depending on how busy you are at this given point. I've done a bunch of episodes on those. Really, limit the social media. Guys, I don't think that moderation necessarily works with social media. You should understand that there are hundred s of the smartest people, the highest paying talent working in these companies in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all of that. Hundreds of the smartest people with PhD in psychology, working on making their platforms as addictive as possible. Do you really think that you, as one human being has a chance against these genius people who know, who've dedicated their life and figuring out how to pick your brain? I don't really think so. I don't believe it. I'm just one human being and I have no chance. No chance at standing against whatever hacks and algorithms that they're producing. No, it's like cocaine for your brain. If you really want to do something productive with your brain that requires a long attention, I would really invite you to re-consider your use of social media because it's counterproductive. It's like smoking when you're trying to become professional athlete. It's like it doesn't really work. If you want to produce high impact, mental outcomes, then social media is like smoking. ,It does the opposite effect. So yeah, time-blocking, social media, having high quality leisure time, so not working too much on the weekends and evenings. Having a good manager, mentor supervisor who you meet with on a consistent basis, who can help you out and really be selective here, like, don't settle down for less. You can always choose the person who will make you grow. I hardly recommend you spend enough time upfront finding this person. Of course, sprint planning and short-term planning and kind of focusing on one chunk of work at a time, shipping it out as soon as you can, getting real life feedback and then continuing, because if you look at the thesis, it's a huge, overwhelming thing. But if you look at, okay, I just need to read 30 papers on this topic in this first month, that's all I need to do for my thesis. Then it's much more manageable. And then the next month you are saying, okay, now I just need to write five pages of literature review from the articles that I've already read last month. You do that. And yeah, just focusing on one sprint at a time and having a very clear definition of done literature review. How does it look like? How many words, how many pages, how many articles do you need to cover in this literature review? What are we looking for? If you don't know, if your thesis supervisor doesn't help you, go and do some research on your own. Find successful graduates, look at their thesis and see how they've done it and copy the same strategy, why not? Okay. So that's what I wanted to share with you today. If you want to sign up for that coming sprint, go and check out monthlymethod.com/enroll Otherwise, have a great week and I'll talk to you next time. Bye.