I have a complicated relationship with productivity. I do not want to become a machine — but I have started to think that the best version of myself is somewhere between fully human and fully mechanical. Emotion and unexpectedness are where discovery comes from. Discipline and system are what let you actually do something with that discovery. This post is my current attempt to hold both: what I have learned, three years into a PhD, about building a life that makes good work more possible.
Body: staying in motion
I used to treat exercise as something that competed with work — time I had to carve out, justify, and defend. The gym meant logistics: changing clothes, getting there, getting back, timing it against my schedule. I admired people for whom it became an anchor. For me, it mostly became something I avoided. The shift came when I stopped looking for the ideal solution and started looking for the frictionless one.
The walking pad was the first answer. After seeing a lot of people doing their walk while podcasting, I think that I might do the same to ensure I exercise at least 15 minutes a day. Answering emails, attending lighter meetings, reviewing slides, listening to a podcast: none of these demand the fixed posture I assumed they did. The walking pad lets me blur the line between moving and working. Whenever I feel very drawn in sitting still, having a walking pad is my semi "break." It also dissolved the guilt I used to feel about "not exercising" — because I was, quietly, all along.
Ice skating was the second answer. I signed up for lessons mainly because seeing people skate on Lake Mendota was so cool. And also because I had noticed something unsettling: I was becoming more timid as I got older. The fearlessness I used to have was quietly receding. Learning a physical skill as an adult — one where your body occasionally goes out of control — turns out to be genuinely useful beyond fitness. It forces a different kind of attention. That enforced presence, that contact with something completely outside my usual world, has been more restorative than I expected. And because learning a new physical skill still counts as learning, it quietly dismantles the guilt that exercise is stealing time from something more important.
Mind: a system for thinking outside your head
Academic work generates a particular kind of cognitive clutter. There is always more to read, more to write, more to track. I have come to believe that the mind works best when it does not have to hold everything at once — when it can offload, externalize, and see. My note-taking system has three layers, moving from immediate to permanent to digital.
The white board is my immediate layer. It holds whatever matters this week: goals, floating ideas, urgent tasks, questions I have not yet answered. What I value about it is that it is not precious. A notebook implies you should fill it with considered thoughts. The white board has no such expectation. I can write badly, erase half of it, draw arrows that make no sense, and start over. It gives me permission to think in draft, even when my only audience is myself.
The flip chart is my permanent layer. I think of my PhD as a kind of living journal, and I want the large ideas — the arguments I am building, the skills I want to develop, the research threads worth following — to be somewhere I can see them at scale. A notebook page is too small for that kind of thinking. So is a laptop screen. Standing at a large sheet of paper with a marker, writing big, stepping back to look: this is how I see structure. Macro-level thinking is harder to access when you are always working at the sentence level, and the flip chart forces me back up to altitude.
The Remarkable sits at the boundary between physical and digital, and it has done more for my reading life than almost anything else I own. Reading PDFs on a laptop is, for me, a losing battle. One tab becomes five. The Remarkable is separate — it has one job. I can read, annotate, take notes, and stay inside the document. It has the quality of paper: gentler on the eyes, better for sustained attention. For academic work, where reading is constant and annotation is necessary, that separation has been worth a lot.
Obsidian and VS Code handle the digital layer. I had tried Obsidian before, but the sync was unreliable and it never fully stuck. I returned to it when I finally accepted that my notes were too scattered to rely on memory alone — a second brain had become non-optional. What made it work this time was using VS Code alongside it, integrating with Claude Code to reorganize old notes, maintain folder structure, and reduce the overhead of the system itself. I have come to believe that a note-taking system only works if maintaining it does not become its own project. The less I have to think about the system, the more I can actually think. This post, in fact, was co-written and refined with Claude Code — using it to bounce ideas back and forth, tighten the argument, and make the writing more coherent. It is one more way the same principle applies: the right tool removes friction between thinking and expression.
Inner life: getting professional support
In Vietnam, therapy carries a stigma. You go when something is seriously wrong. I did not think I had a serious problem — just the ordinary stress and occasional anxiety of a PhD student living far from home. But I was curious, and I did not think I had to be in crisis to benefit from understanding my own patterns better.
My therapist approaches emotion with a scientific rigor I find genuinely useful. He has given me frameworks for understanding why I respond the way I do, and concrete techniques for when anxiety spikes — grounding exercises that engage the five senses, breath practices I can use in the moment. What I practice now has measurably changed how I move through difficult days. The peaks are lower. The recovery is faster.
My wellness coach does something different. Where therapy tends to look inward and backward, coaching looks forward and outward. She listens carefully, reflects back what she hears, and then asks questions that lead me to my own answers — the goal is not to give me solutions but to help me find them. The effect is that I now set goals for myself that are specific and achievable rather than vague and aspirational. One of those goals, which is how this blog post exists, is to read something outside of academia every week and write about it. That idea came partly from listening to Ocean Vuong and Terence Tao talk about what it means to create in the age of AI — the argument being that we need to cultivate the conditions for uncommon serendipity, for the unexpected collisions that produce something genuinely new. Disciplined curiosity, not just disciplined output. If you are reading this and have something you think I should read or watch, I would genuinely love to know. She also introduced me to Finch, a habit-tracking app I have found surprisingly easy to sustain, possibly because it is designed to feel gentle rather than demanding.
Both have changed how I relate to my own functioning. Not by solving problems, but by making the internal landscape a little less opaque.
What did not work
Not every tool or system improves life just because it sounds right in theory.
The gym never became sustainable. The logistics outweighed the benefit. Group fitness classes were worse: fixed schedules made me feel managed rather than supported, and missing a session produced guilt instead of momentum. I function better when movement fits around my life, not when my life has to schedule itself around movement.
The Fitbit taught me that I don't need data as a source of motivation. The device went from wrist to drawer within a few months. Also, it feels very cold and uncomfortable wearing it. It can't track my steps when I use my walking pad. So what's the point?
The iPad sat in an uncomfortable middle ground between laptop and notebook: too distracting to feel like paper, not capable enough to replace a computer. Every time I used it I felt slightly unconvinced. I gave it a genuine chance. It never stopped feeling like a compromise.
What I actually think
Looking at what has worked, the common thread is fit. I try my best to reduce resistance rather than adding it. What also runs through all of them is a willingness to stay curious, to try something unfamiliar and see what it turns into. That openness has brought me to things I would never have planned for. New apps (Finch), new skills (ice skating), and often those unplanned things have been useful. What failed, failed mostly because it added friction: logistical, emotional, or both. Not because the thing was bad in itself, but because it was wrong for me at this point in my life. That is the part productivity writing usually skips over.
The best system is not the most optimized-looking one. It is the one you can actually live with. And living with something, I have learned, requires that it not cost more energy than it returns. That is how I define productivity now. Not doing the maximum. Not proving anything through discomfort. Just building days where focus, clarity, and endurance are a little more possible. I feel like this PhD journey teaches me to learn to optimize under my own conditions.