 Starting a PhD position after years of being a student and worrying only about attending lectures during your homework and studying for your exams can be detrimental to your productivity. So I'm here to give you some time management tips for new academics. Number one and most important is create a schedule and stick to it. There's nobody who is going to hang over your shoulder until you need to work these eight hours a day. But you're an adult, you have a job, it's your responsibility to make sure your PhD is as successful as it can be. So create a schedule, stick to it, do your daily hours of work. You'll be happy that you did it. Number two, use pomodoros. Pomodoro technique is a very, very simple method of managing your time. You set a timer for 25 minutes or pick a different time if that works better for you. Experiment a little. Oh no, I have to send that email. Scroll it down, forget about it. Focus on the task that you've chosen to work on for these 25 minutes. Check all the things that you thought of and that you urgently had to do. It can wait for these 25 minutes. And you will have had a nice window of time where you can focus on things that you might not want to do otherwise. What I always enjoy doing is creating a reward system. So number three, a reward system can be as playful as you want it to be. I'm going to work 40 hours this week and I'm going to buy myself a chocolate sundae. There are even online services such as Habitica that help you manage your to-do lists and checklists and every single scheduled item that you have to do can be gamified. You can collect points, compare yourself to others in a similar position and in fact a lot of PhD students do do that to make their lives a bit easier and to feel a sense of community. If you want to make it a little bit more modern, you can also use a Kanban board. Create a big board on a poster. You can probably get an extra poster from the printing staff at your institution and just put some sticky notes on them to decide what belongs to which project, what you need to accomplish, what you're doing right now and the most important bit, what you've finished to make yourself feel good. Look at all these things you've done. It really does help and pushes you forward. If you're struggling with writing, then number five is writing tips. There are again many online services that may help you with this. A very popular website is writeordie.com where you can reward yourself for every, let's say 200 words you write. You get a kitten gift, jump out of you. Or perhaps if you don't write any words in 20 seconds, they'd start getting deleted. There's also a really nice website called For The Words where you get to gamify your writing process, fight monsters, be a part of an RPG community. Number six are browser extensions. Now I know we live in an era of the internet and you are watching this video on the internet, but sometimes you should really stay away from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and news portals. There are many browser extensions for your browser of choice that will block all these social media websites from you and at the same time allow you to browse papers and online resources and databases. Number seven, music. Now there's a lot of research that says that music does make you happier and makes it easier to work. However, when you're trying to focus on something and work on something mentally exhausting, research says that music doesn't help, it makes it harder to focus. So if you're dealing with something very stressful, feel free to turn that music on, but as soon as you get to an important part of your daily work, shut it off, focus, turn on a pomodoro and get on with work. And eight, and I think most important, is be comfortable. There are all these little things in your office that might bother you. Maybe it's the noise from the neighbouring offices. Close the door, perhaps invest in a pair of noise-canceling headphones. Maybe you don't feel all that comfortable with your desk. Ask around, maybe it can be lifted up or put down a little bit. Spend five minutes adjusting your chair so that you don't end up with back pain after a full day of work. And if you're a woman, perhaps you're cold in the winter months. Maybe what works for me is I invested in a pair of fingerless gloves and an office blanket. So when my male colleagues lowered the temperature in the office, I still get to be comfortable and keep writing and keep working. So these were my eight tips for time management for new academics. I hope they help you and I hope you have a very productive time.