My student had a rough week.

One of those weeks where mistakes just snowball — small errors that lead to bigger ones, things they’d never gotten wrong before suddenly going sideways.

They’ve been juggling a lot: experiments for a PI’s grant that are only partly related to their own project, writing a review paper, running experiments for a proposal, mentoring undergrads, and preparing for qualifying exams.

On top of that, they’ve been in the lab 8–10 hours a day, even on weekends.

And then, in the middle of all that, their mentor told them to work harder and faster and basically forget about work–life balance.

I could see the frustration and fatigue building. So we sat down to talk.

Grad school is built to overwhelm you

I told them, “This isn’t about you not working enough. Grad school is set up to give you more than you can possibly do so you learn to prioritize.

Especially here — there will always be more you could be doing. The key is deciding what matters most right now.”

We talked about defining the minimum necessary for success — the 20% of tasks that would actually move their dissertation forward — and letting the rest wait. Just seeing that their real “must-do” list was much shorter seemed to lift some weight off their shoulders.

Batch your work instead of living in context-switch hell

They’d been bouncing between wet lab work, data analysis, and writing, often in the same day. That kind of context-switching is exhausting and makes mistakes more likely.

I suggested blocking time by type of work — a stretch in the wet lab followed by a stretch focused on writing and computation. Even parking half their projects for now to give the urgent ones room to breathe.

Mentor like your sanity depends on it

They’ve got a new student arriving soon. I told them that without a clear plan, mentoring can drain your time and energy fast.

We walked through what that plan could look like:

• Define the project and milestones before the student arrives.
  
  

• Explain how the work fits into the big picture.
  
  

• Give them protocols so they can work independently.
  
  

• Set clear expectations for when and how they can ask for help. Setting times and frequencies of when the student can ask for help protects the mentors energy.
  
  

Mentoring well early on saves time — and frustration — later.

Push back (nicely) when the hours creep in

When you’re told to work 90 hours a week, the question to ask yourself is: Do I actually want that life?

I told them it’s okay to say (politely), “If you want great data, you need to let me work in a way that produces it.” Because sometimes slowing down to plan is the most efficient thing you can do.

The week ahead

We made a plan:

• Dedicate next week entirely to moving the review paper forward.
  
  

• Spend the two days before the new student arrives preparing their onboarding and training — not over-prepping experiments they’ll redo anyway, but setting them up to work independently.

Grad school will always have “everything at once” weeks. But with focus, boundaries, and a willingness to drop what doesn’t matter right now, you can keep moving forward without burning out.