On the Road to your PhD

In the blog Between a rock and a hard place, James Hickey posted a valuable list of tipps for succeeding in your PhD:

1. Learn Latex
2. Use Bibtex
3. Keep your papers organised
4. Keep a formatted list of your own publications and conference abstracts as you go along
5. Always give conference abstracts different titles
6. Keep on top of your emails
7. Manage time
8. Hypothesis testing
9. Keep detailed notes
10. Avoid perfectionism
11. Always give deadlines when you want feedback
12. Source additional funding
13. Write as you go
14. Don’t be scared of your supervisors
15. Log out of Facebook
16. Keep an eye on your budget
17. Diversify yourself
18. Music
19. Get your workstation set up
20. Take notes in meetings
21. Read around your subject
22. Write a literature review
23. Socialise!
24. Sport and/or hobbies
25. Go to conferences and workshops
26. Network
27. Establish a routine
28. Take the lead
29. Practice presenting your work
30. Be prepared for the worse
31. Back up, and back up again
32. Small steps to success
33. Keep on top of admin
34. ENJOY IT!

Being somebody who already has his PhD, I find the list very useful, the title "Things I wish I knew when I started my PhD..." definitely holds some truth, although I accidently did many of the good things mentioned there. See the original post for a detailed explanation of every item!