It happens many times that your advisor assigns a task and before even you close their office door you begin to think like “This would take me 2 weeks to finish”.

From my experience, advisors care most about seeing good enough results now rather than excellent results later. In this sense, always try to show the progress you’ve done often even if it’s not final or publication ready. This will allow you at first to discuss with your advisor about the work plan you are following and modify it if necessary and secondly to check if any preliminary results are correct in the first case. In addition, delivering fast keeps your motivation up since it makes you feel that you are actually making progress and producing something. But note that delivering fast doesn’t mean doing perfunctory work. You still need to spend some time on the task so you don’t make trivial mistakes or ask profound questions. The latter will help increase your productivity as well, by not repeating sub-tasks again and again.

It’s good to have in mind that all these apply not only in producing the results, but also presenting them. As an example, say that you have some preliminary results which you want to send over. Have you imagined spending an hour producing a beautiful plot only to find that your supervisor wants a different presentation or even worse, it’s not the kind of data that they want to look at? That’s a waste of time. So the idea is to show at first a draft plot, poster, etc. so you get feedback and improve on the next iterations. You’ll be later given the chance to demonstrate your aesthetics and presentation skills.

Finally, don’t think too much of important milestones. Rather, concentrate on these (many) small tasks, each one at a time, that will eventually get you to this final destination (e.g. publishing a paper, finishing a programming code, etc). You should think relative instead of absolute. Namely, you should ask yourself “Have I made progress compared to a month ago?” instead of “When am I going to complete this code?“