# 1. The Take Away

The three most important pieces of advice I can give to you are only one word: Focus, Focus, Focus. You want to finish in time and your supervisor also wants you to. The work you do for your research – gathering articles for your literature review, formulating additional hypotheses, robustness analyses, implications for theory and further research, the list grows longer and longer, you see I am losing focus here – all of the things you do in your research project hold temptations that make you lose focus.

Your focus is only one: to answer your research question. By working systematically towards that goal you save yourself a lot of trouble. It’s a little boring not to post status updates on Facebook or chat with your friends while you’re searching for articles or running regression analyses, but it works.

Start your day fresh. That means: before you start your work, close your e-mail program(s). Plan two limited periods of time to check messages. For instance half an hour after your lunch break, and fifteen minutes at 3 PM. Open and read only those messages that help you with your research work. Open only your text processor. Close all other programs. This also goes for your web browser. Only open tabs in your web browser that you really need for your research.

Put away your phone, and do not check messages on social media while you are at work.

When you’re at work, build in regular checks and ask yourself: is what I’m doing still relevant for the research question I’m trying to answer? How is it relevant? Why do I need to do what I’m doing right now? Depending on your distractibility level, ask yourself these questions once or twice a day, once every hour or perhaps every ten minutes. Whatever keeps you focused.