Hello and a very warm welcome to this course on making progress in your PhD. Maybe at the moment you feel as though you are languishing at the bottom of PhD Mountain. You're looking up towards the top and it's quite overwhelming. Well, in this course I'm going to help you develop a strategy for getting further towards the top.

Here's what we're going to cover.

First of all, working out what still needs to be done; performing an audit on what you have already.

How much time do you have left? Have you stopped and thought about this yet?

Who can help you? Because this doesn't have to be a solo expedition.

What else is going to make it easier? Are there additional resources that you need?

And finally, how can you become more productive? You're probably going to need to speed up a little bit over the next few months, so we'll find out how you can do that.

By the end of this course, you should have a strategy for gaining momentum with your thesis, a clearer sense of how long everything will take so that you can be more realistic, and also lots of resources to help you along the way.

You can use this course in any way you like, but I suggest that you watch through the videos first. Then you schedule some time for the activities. Make yourself a cup of tea or another beverage to work through the activities. They'll be much more effective if you're relaxed and you've allocated some time, and then you can get on with applying what you've learned as you finish your thesis.

Our mission in this course is, first of all, to define your project. What are you trying to achieve here? What is required from your thesis?

Then we'll look at your plan. When are you going to do this? So we can map it out over the next few months.

And also we'll examine your performance. How are you going to do this? What will you do each day to make this happen?

First of all, though, we are going to start with why. Join me in the next video.