As it will be mentioned often in these posts, a PhD is a long process that is not always very clear since the beginning what the ultimate goal is. It of course depends on whether you are working for a well defined project or for a broad idea of what needs to be achieved. To achieve such a long term and not well defined goal, it is beneficial to follow a specific reasoning. It is both beneficial for the quality of your work and also for the sanity of yourself. The approach I would like to describe is what I call a top-bottom-up approach. It’s a combination of a top-bottom and a bottom-up approach, because it follows more or less that order.
One of the greatest problems one has to deal with when performing research, is procrastination. What I mean by procrastination is not only the fact that you are not working when you’re supposed to. Besides that, you can also fall in the trap of procrastination when you are working on things you are not supposed to be working (e.g. due to their lower priority/importance). Through these years, I have been a victim of procrastination multiple times (and still am), but now, at the end, I am thinking that I could have achieved so much more had I managed it a bit better. While talking to colleagues about it, I tried to distil why procrastination is so common for PhD students, and I came up with three very good reasons for that:
I am sure many of you remember the legendary Quake series games. We grew up with this stuff. And you remember what was the coolest feature of Quake? No, it was neither the graphics, nor that you could blow your friends in little pieces, after you have killed them: it was the console. It was the only game series that I am aware of (ok, I’m not really a games freak, so don’t take my word for it) that it was offering a ‘console’ to the players. You could do all short of cool things just by pressing the tilda (~) key, such as change from FPS to a TPS mode, draw benchmark data like Frames per second, alter your avatar and so on. In one sentence, it was giving to the player the one thing that Command Lines usually give: POWER!