the finish line: how do you manage your time and energy when the end is in sight?
I have had a few seasons of intense productivity before a final deadline - turning in my dissertation, launching courses, etc. You’d think I’d know how to do it! But while I was working, I noticed a lot of things happening in myself, and in my clients, like:
Apologizing for working long hours
Feeling guilty about the irregular scheduling
Shame about falling away from habits and routines that are proven to be helpful
Physical symptoms - exhaustion, fatigue, mental fuzziness that isn't easily solved by some extra sleep or a cup of coffee
Fear (rational or not) that it will always be like this, or never end
All of this got me thinking about whether we have to, or should, consider the period of time right before the finish line as a particular type of work. I take it as a fundamental premise of my coaching practice that people need to rest, every day. People deserve self care and they do not earn it through work or productivity. Things that recharge us ultimately serve the work, and therefore we do not need to barter with them. But how does that square with a period of time when you know that you have to work to get things done because you're nearing the finish line? So here are my guidelines on how I decide what constitutes a finish line situation, and tools to survive in them!
Two weeks is the limit. In high school, my French teacher said "anyone can do anything for two weeks" as a way to motivate us to study really hard for an AP test, but I've often returned to that as an idea as an adult. I both use it to motivate - it's hard to do something for two weeks, but it doesn't last forever! There's a light at the end of the tunnel! - but also to check myself: am I really sure this will only last for two weeks (or less)? If you're looking at your schedule, and the finish line is more than two weeks off, it might be helpful to think about ramping up, rather than sprinting, as your metaphor. You can be gradually increasing the work time, but not going ALL out, up to the two week mark, but you cannot be pushing yourself to go ALL OUT for more than that without some serious consequences.
It's okay that things look different during that finish line time. In a perfect world, I always get 7 or 8 hours of sleep, I always have some sort of movement, I make food that makes my body feel good, I take time to meditate, I have creative pursuits, every day has something fun....but the finish line is not the perfect time. It's okay! The more work I create for myself, apologizing to others, feeling guilty, feeling shame about what I didn't finish earlier or more gracefully, the harder the finish line is going to be. Giving yourself permission to do things differently under the circumstances is the key to starting to let go of some guilt.
You can enjoy your other work. In true finish line time, I use other tasks as a reward. For example, when I was really working hard on my dissertation over the finish line, teaching or even cleaning the house felt good - doing anything different felt like a relaxing break! So going into those moments and tasks, trying to be present and really enjoy them, without worrying about what I wasn't doing, helped me not forget the rest of my life and tasks, but also get a little space from my main focus.
Rest and relaxation doesn't have to be all or nothing. It also helped me to start being really purposeful about the self care I was doing. I couldn't afford a whole day off to vegetate on the couch, but I could take a walk around the block with a favorite podcast to just look at some trees. Rest didn't have to take up hours - but I could be really present for it, and really enjoy it, making the most of what I could do.
Decide on your non-negotiables. My chronic illness and mental health demands that I sleep at night. I cannot pull all nighters. I need at LEAST 6 hours of sleep - so this was my hard line. I could skip workouts, eat a little junkier/faster than normal, but sleep was going to happen, whether I felt like I had done enough or not.
Let other people know! I told my parents, I told my friends, I told my husband: this is crunch time, I could use your help! This let people know I might not be as responsive over the phone, and gave me a little space to withdraw into my work cave without raising alarms, but it also gave people a chance to support me in concrete ways. My husband made dinners and didn't give me a hard time about spending less time together, and I could offer him in return a commitment to the end date - this wouldn't last forever.
Respect the spirit of the finish line. Once you cross it - once the draft is in, the project launched, the deadline passed - you have to stop working. That's the only way this works - crunch time only really works if it's time limited. So once you hit it, it can be really tempting to look back and say "look at everything I got done! Imagine what I could do if I kept this up!" RESIST THIS. You cannot keep this pace up forever - so give yourself a break. Absolutely take the best strategies and what you've learned about how you work to apply it to your normal life - but you will suffer real consequences to your health and well-being if you never end the crunch time.
Managing my chronic illness as a graduate student
First, a note about my specific flavor of chronic illness and some disclaimers. I was diagnosed at 24 with endometriosis, a condition tied to my hormonal cycles. In many ways, I was grateful to have a name for my painful cycles, gastric distress, fatigue, and mental cloudiness that I had been telling doctors about for years, which resulted only in various suggestions to relax and eat more yogurt. Because of the nature of the endo beast, I can predict with a fair degree of accuracy when I will have a flare, and there are some medications and lifestyle changes that help me get some of my symptoms under moderate control. I understand that not all chronic illnesses can be predicted, or have their symptoms managed, and so I am sharing what helped me with the full understanding that it might not be a solution for everyone, even those who have my same diagnosis.
When I have an endo flare, I can sleep for 12-18 hours a day, and have trouble sitting upright at my desk, focusing for any length of time, and often need to stay near the house to manage my digestive system. So I have developed a few strategies for writing (which I imagine as a catch-all for many self-directed tasks that graduate students are tasked with) that help me manage when work is the last thing I want to do.
Preparing for a flare. Because my symptoms are tied to a hormonal cycle, I know (within a day or two) when things are about to take a turn for the worse. Tracking my symptoms in my bullet journal has helped immensely in getting to know the warning signs of a flare, and about how long they last under different conditions. If possible, I don't schedule meetings or appointments during flares, and will move appointments if I can. I also try (as much as I am able) to ride energy waves when I do have them, so that I feel more comfortable taking time "off" when I need to.
Setting manageable goals, and actually respecting my limits. My ability to sit at a desk and write, or leave the house to work at a coffeeshop, is different during a flare. A reasonable set of goals for the day - one hour of writing instead of four, focusing on "low hanging fruit" (more on this below) and only doing things that NEED to get done - respects my body's limits, and doesn't set me up for feeling guilty about a long to-do list that didn't get done, but also didn't need to be done today. And when I hit the wall, I don't push through it. I give myself a chance to rest, knowing that I will eventually feel better and can balance out my work when my energy stores are higher. Rest is only restful when you aren't flagellating yourself for not working, so focusing on manageable tasks lists and truly resting when I need to prevents me from over-working and not really resting.
Having a list of "low hanging fruit." I keep a running list of work that I can do that takes very little physical and mental energy. It includes: cleaning up entries in my citation library, organizing my digital files, light research on future topics, formatting footnotes, and inserting figures and diagrams. These are all tasks that need to be done eventually, but definitely disrupt the flow of more active writing. On days when my brain is foggy or I'm not feeling up to the full mental and physical exertion of writing, I turn to that list and start working on it. I then feel like the day wasn't wasted, and I can save my better quality work days for tasks that require more focus.
Embracing couch/bed/comfy office. I often advise my clients to have a dedicated work space, if possible, for their writing, so that when they enter that space, their body and mind knows it is time to go to work. But, if the work isn't going to happen in real office, I would rather do an hour of work in bed than zero hours of work in my office. When I feel better, I go back to real office, but knowing that more comfortable options are available to me lowers the bar for actually starting my work just enough to make it possible on off days.
Thinking about my work on longer timelines. While I understand the commitment to challenges like "writing everyday" or "500 words a day, no matter what," that just is not a reality for my body. It took me months to trust that even if I take a day or two off because my illness demands it, I could still have a productive month. Tracking my work, having smaller goals, and checking in regularly let me prove to myself that I could "afford" to work differently during a flare, and have the resilience to restart my writing routine when I was up to it. I often hear from clients that they're afraid of "losing momentum," but to my mind, writers with good habits know how to restart after time away from the desk, and can see their work away from the "all or nothing" writing mentality.
Working around my chronic illness is an ever-evolving balance of listening to my body and adjusting for the conditions, day to day, and sometimes hour to hour. It helped immensely to learn of others that manage adaptive writing routines and still remain productive scholars. But, showing myself some compassion and learning that not all days have to be perfect writing days in order to make progress has made the biggest difference in a culture where "publish or perish" and the pressure to perform writing for my advisors, and online, seems to be the norm.