Having regular one on one meetings with your supervisors is one of the most important thing in the PhD Journey. Not only it is an opportunity to check progresses but a useful way to stay focussed and disciplined. This should happen one per week, max once every two weeks. Regular meetings are crucial for avoiding long-term problems and for progressing steady in research.
Supervisors will be familiar with many challenges you’re likely to face as they have gone already through a PhD and already brought to completion doctoral scholars. Their experience can offer invaluable advice to solve technical challenges quickly and offer perspectives to put your mind at ease. It is nearly impossible that during the meeting there will be nothing to discuss. In fact you are likely to end up receiving lots of other advice, not only related to your research, that you may not have been actively seeking near the start of your PhD, such as career guidance. Also your supervisors have years of experience with the subject in hand, the design of research, its implementation and evaluation. Trust them 100% but also always offer your perspective. What you will be learning is also part of their learning, since doctoral research is the process to discover something new. It is important to point fallacies in reasoning, justify every design decisions and point to alternative potential solutions.
A perk of a doctoral research study is that it is flexible in nature. You should be able to control your own time, work when you think is relevant during the day, but also take breaks when you feel is right. Some people see this flexibility as merely theoretical and instead end up working really long hours. Do not overwhelm your self, but progress steady, constantly and be disciplined. Discipline is probably the most important skills for a PhD scholar to master. Treating your PhD like a job. Working roughly 9-5 Monday to Friday from day one, should be more than enough time to complete a PhD at a top tier university in the right time. Every hour wasted or procastinated will likely need to be recovered at the end of your Phd. Please do not accumulate many hours and days, otherwise few more months will be needed to complete a PhD thesis.
Along with working in line with the previous suggestions about the number of hours you put in per week, new PhD students should learn to work smart and take breaks where necessary. Don’t waste time being unproductive. Procastination is the number one reason PhD student get frustrated and feel overwhelmed during their research. An effective PhD student should not need to chuck their entire life at the PhD research. Instead, learn how you work best and use this knowledge to find a work pattern which boosts your productivity. Besides figuring out whether you prefer work earlier or later in the day, it is important to know how long you can sit at a desk before productivity and efficiency deteriorate. As a consequence taking frequent but short breaks are great also for your sanity. Have a walk, a coffee, a piece of fruit.
You are not clearly in a position to publish original research, for some time after you start, and your first year is often filled with a lot of reading or coding. However, publishing as soon as possible is important for a number of reasons. First, reading related work and relevant research manuscripts help defining your project direction and boosting your understanding of the reearch topic. Secondly, writing things down in your own words will strengthen your comprehension. You won't be proficient in academic writing at the beginning, so a number of iterations will be necessary to communicate research arguments precisely. Thirst, reading can form the basis for the literature review in your final PhD thesis. Your supervisor will have a bigger picture in mind, and can guide you towards certain research directions. However, often these directions need to be expanded and updated. Put yourself in charge and take responsibility for this. Eventually, and most importantly, publishing a conference or journal article early inyour PhD not only can demonstrate you have already achieved preliminary skills in writing, communicating, designing an experiment, implementing and evaluating it, but also is an opportunity to go through the peer-review process earlier and get essential feedback from the community, its reviewers who can point to fallacies or limitations you were not able to see. Embrace this as peer-review is one of the pillar of the modern scientific method. Engage early in a survery/review article to get confidence in the publishing process, which is quite overwhelming and intimidating.
Some good habits should be established right at the beginning of your PhD . Think about what kind of habits you would like to have by the end of your first year and start putting plans in place to work towards them. These include managing your own time effectively using a calendar so as to not be late to meetings or lab bookings; reflecting on times that you procrastinate and instead pushing yourself to take proper breaks; Healthy and low-cost eating habits such as own cooking rather than dry outdoor food; Getting a good amount of sleep; Doing regular exercise
As interesting as your research can become, you should not work on your own in the lab or at home. Take the opportunities for collaborating with your peer and discussing your own progresses, challenges and limitations. Working with other people can be much more fun and can lead to some interesting developments for your own project and the resolution of technical challenges way quicker than you can imagine. Engage in presenting progressing at school/faculty meetings and conferences. Don't be scared of presenting as most of the people in a conference are similar to you. Research is not about judging others' work, but about constructively improve our knowledge as humans. Make connections with people working in your field, contact them, email them, invited them for a coffee. Keep learning new skills not only such as programming techniques, but also analytical techniques, statistical methods and writing skills.
There is no doubt that a PhD can be tough and very challenging at times but do try to enjoy it and remind yourself how lucky you are! As a PhD student you are in an enormously privileged position because you are getting paid to do research to become an expert in a topic you find interesting. Savour the PhD experience as the years will fly by before you know it, so make sure to take a breath once in a while to appreciate where you have got to and where you are going. PhD is not for everybody, and it is probably the most difficult thing you will do in your life. It is a unique experience, a mix of fun and frustration. Embrace it. You can do it.