Probably it's not early enough, but it should be not too late to realize how important a well planed schedule is. However, a good plan means no longer to just have the assignment done in time, a PhD student should be able to look further, prepared to encounter difficulties and make important decisions. When you become a PhD student, the emphasis of study shifts from course work to research, since what cares most becomes your achievement in research rather than how high your grade is. But still your time is taken up for other stuff besides research. Course work, social activities, entertainment, etc., all those can cut your time into pieces. You can probably survive if you always just wait for stuff that you should do comes to you. But if you want to spend quality time on most parts of your PhD life, making ambitious feasible schedule is critical.
Due to the flexibility of research, it's up to the PhD student to control the progress. If loitering until the day before group meeting, I should hurry to pick up what I have left last time, and then work overnight to have some stuff done to keep me from the embarrassment of saying nothing during the group meeting. Or otherwise I can make some achievement every day, probably not as much as I can finish in the last-day situation, but at the group meeting day, I can give a clearly outlined presentation. It's just a matter of self-control, self-management. But these two different choices result in totally different outcomes especially in the long term.
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