you might never be a morning person: working with, not against, yourself
Depending on your perspective, I am about to drop some terrible news.
You might never be a morning person.
[Or insert the habit you've desperately been trying to start for the last five years: running, reading fiction before bed, meditating, writing for an hour before coffee, cleaning for 15 minutes a day...]
But here's the really good news: there's a big difference between the habit and the intention. Just because you might be struggling to establish a habit DOESN'T mean you won't be able to honor and incorporate that intention into your day.
When do you give up on a habit?
Clients come to me often with a set of habits or routines that they have decided (normally through careful research!) will revolutionize their lives. They want my help in supporting those habits - and to be clear, great!! Sometimes a new habit is just the lightning bolt you need to get other things in your life in order. Yoga was that way for me in grad school - the more I went to class, the better the rest of my life functioned, and if it was a habit to go to yoga, it became easier to hit the benchmarks in the rest of my life.
But more often than not, if the habit was a good fit for someone, they wouldn't need my help to get it started. My classic example of this is the "morning person" habit - I hear so often that clients want to start getting up earlier, and become morning people. If only they could get up at 5 am (or 8 am, depending on where they're starting from!) they would be productive academic writers and they would workout before dawn and everyone in their household would eat a delicious and nutritious breakfast prepared after 20 minutes of soul-filling meditation.
But something always stops them. Kids don't get to bed on time, so the alarm rings after three or four hours of sleep, and gets shut off. Inspiration hits at 7 or 8 pm, and writing goes late into the night. A few days of sleeping in after being sick and the sleep cycle is all off. Everything is great when alone, but when you add a partner who does not feel compelled to get up at 5 am, together time at home is cut down to only an hour or two because of the mismatched bedtimes. Being a morning person works and is great, but it just can't be sustained without huge sacrifices.
At a moment like that, you can go one of two ways: decide that the sacrifices are worth it, and keep the habit up in spite of those challenges. Or you do what I suggest next: stop looking at the habit as the cure-all, and look at the intention.
Break your habit into the intention parts
Habits are powerful; they take the choice out of activities that we know will serve us in the long run. Instead of deciding twice a day whether it is worth it to brush your teeth, if there's enough of a reason to brush your teeth, you just do it. Those two minutes, twice a day, are long term investments in your dental and overall health and you don't have to waste brain energy on making that investment - it just happens.
But if you're struggling to make a habit stick, sometimes the distress of stopping and starting that habit (and the guilt and shame spiral that can come with that) is enough to make the whole process unpleasant and unhelpful. So instead of forcing yourself to "be a morning person", or whatever the habit is, be clear about what the intention of that habit is.
For example, if you really, really want to be a morning person, is it that you:
Want some time alone before others wake up to center yourself before taking on the day?
Want writing time that is unlikely to be scheduled over or come into conflict with other duties?
A regular workout time in order to start the day?
Time to meditate or journal?
Regular nutritious breakfasts?
It might be that you want all of those things - but I would encourage you to narrow your list down to the one or two most important things that you want to call in or start.
Maybe you really want time to center yourself before you start the day, but don't have time for a full 45 minute journaling routine in the morning, no matter how hard you try. Why not shift the bulk of that journaling to the end of your work day, and then only do five or ten minutes in the morning? Still time to center, but broken up and much easier to squeeze in to a hectic morning routine.
Struggling to find a time to make working out a consistent part of your schedule? Maybe you broaden what you mean by start of the day! If you can't get to it before dawn, maybe you get to it before the start of your writing day - you tackle a few hours of chores/appointments/administrative things, and then make a lunchtime yoga class, or go for a 10:30 am run before you sit down to write.
But breaking the habit down into the intended effects, and focusing on how to make THOSE work, can be a total game-changer. Despite what others may tell you, not every habit or routine works for every person, and even if it worked for you before, it might not work now! But by identifying the intention behind the habit you're working so hard to start, you can open up a few pathways to succeeding, rather than pinning everything on an all or nothing habit.
You can always start to stack your habits - get your 10 minutes of meditation in every morning, and once that feels stable, add breakfast! Put a workout afterwards! Add five minutes of planning and schedule maintenance! But always remember that it isn't the routine that's the miracle - it's the commitment that you show every time you show up and put the work in. Commitment isn't time bound - only habits are. If you're committed to the change, and the habit is standing in the way, let the habit go and focus on making the most of your commitment to change.
schedule blocks: how to use your schedule to have the kind of day you want or need to have
I am a big, big fan of protecting time in your schedule. I live and die by my Google calendar, because I can always access it, but on that calendar, you'll find more than appointments.
There are two kinds of scheduling - appointment and defensive. Appointment scheduling is pretty self-explanatory - you have somewhere to be at a certain time, and so you put it in your calendar! These are the kinds of things that people usually use their calendar/schedule/planner for, and of course, it's useful! It gets you to where you need to be when you need to be there!
But defensive scheduling is a little different. It's about protecting time, rather than filling it up. You put something on your calendar so you WON'T give that time away to someone/something else. You claim your time before someone else does.
To help clarify the idea a little, here are a few different kinds of scheduling blocks you can add to your week!
Morning routine block. I just don't feel centered and ready to start the day if I don't: 1) have a cup of a warm beverage 2) do a little stretching 3) have breakfast 4) do my morning pages. So I've started blocking time off in the mornings to do just that. It also helped me be realistic about how long I need to get going in the morning, and, following that, how early I need to get up, and then, when I need to go to bed for that to be reasonable.
Sleep block. Oh, to be 18 and able to swing between four and ten hours of sleep without any real ill effects! Alas, that's no longer my reality and after months of denying it, I've accepted the fact that the quality of my sleep often directly impacts the quality of my work for the next day. Putting a block that says "bedtime" or "night routine" or "phones off" has really helped me clean up my sleep hygiene and get better rest. Seeing it my calendar makes it so much more concrete - added bonus for the phone reminder I can set!
Movement block. I am a very good exerciser....as long as I don't have to decide when and where to work out. When faced with the option of working out or staying at my desk and working more, I almost always pick work. So I started scheduling in my workouts into my calendar - they correlate to fitness classes, or challenges with some online accountability. I'm just better about working out if it's in the calendar and I know that other people are aware of my commitment. You can also experiment with a quicker session of walking or stretching in the afternoons or mornings to break up big writing sessions!
Transition or buffer blocks. When I was teaching, I dreaded finishing class and then feeling like I had to turn around in 15 minutes and start writing my dissertation. The switch from one headspace to another was brutal, and so I often just didn't write. Until I realized that I could schedule in some transition time - a half hour or an hour to get something to eat, walk around outside, check my email, get my notes out, settle into a new task. I now use these all the time - between client calls, when I'm trying to switch from admin work to writing, when I need a little space after therapy or time with a friend. If you build in time to transition, you can stop feeling guilty about needing to take it!
End of day routine blocks. I've written more extensively about this here, but leaving just a little bit of time at the end of the day to wrap my day up has made it easier to leave my work at work, and get started again the next day.
Firefighting blocks. This is my newest and most powerful scheduling friend: setting aside time to deal with all the stuff that comes up during the day. I used to have a really hard time getting to my writing, because invariably something would happen (an email that I needed to handle, an admin problem to work out, someone else dumping work on my plate) that would feel more important and urgent than the writing. I started leaving a few hours in my schedule, every couple of days, to deal with all those things that come up. If nothing came up, then hooray! Free hour to do whatever I want! But I always know I have some time set aside to deal with these things, and I can focus just a little bit more easily on the task at hand.
The power hour block. This is an incredibly powerful idea from Gretchen Rubin: set aside an hour, once a week (or as often as you need it) to work on all the tasks you never seem to get done (or want to do) at other times of the week. Make your dentist appointments, pay your bills, return your library books, deal with your citations - but schedule the time in so that you actually have time to do them. It sounds like the worst hour ever, but in practice, it can feel really good to get some of those tasks that float around in the back of your brain off the list.
As always, know that new schedules and routines take a while to crystallize, and then, just when you think you've nailed down your perfect schedule, and you're really crushing things.....it'll change. It always does. But think of these blocks as tools in your scheduling tool belt - pull them out when you need them, or when you want to get to know them better. I hope that they'll serve you well!
you pick two
i truly long to be a person who can do the same things, every day, at the same time. what discipline! what predictability! what stability!!! but, alas, my brain, body, schedule, life, and current status of “resident of planet earth, 2020” mean that it just isn’t in the cards for me.
but that doesn’t mean that i can’t have some sort of structure in my life - but it’s really hard to find a middle ground, a midpoint in the scale from “i put out whatever is most on fire, all day, every day” to “every minute of the next two weeks is perfectly scheduled”.
so i’ve come up with a model, and after some testing with clients, i’m ready to present it to the world:
you pick two.
yes, like that national chain of restaurants where you can pick between a soup, salad, or sandwich!
the idea is that there are three major parameters that you can use to structure your schedule:
time - how long you want to work
task - what things you want to work on
frequency - how often you want to have work sessions
and normally, we’re encouraged to pick a goal or set a schedule that controls for all three - 15 minutes of dissertation work a day, 2 hours of teaching every other day, etc. Instead, try combining just two of the elements for commitments that you can stick to. For example, you could:
read for your dissertation every day, but not worry about how long you do so
read for your dissertation for two poms, whenever you can squeeze it in
work on your dissertation for two poms every day, on whatever task makes sense
have 2 two hour work sessions a day, on whatever makes sense
work on your teaching every day, for however long you are able
write up one paper for your lit review every day (sometimes it’s shorter, and sometimes it’s longer!)
have a work session focused on a specific project every day, without worrying about how much is enough time.
It isn’t about no rules - just no structure that will instantly (or at least, rapidly) fall apart and leave you feeling like you can’t finish anything. and you can always revisit the rules, or switch things around! but some structure will provide some boundaries so that your time doesn’t become a soup of “everything all the time no rules!” without setting up a lot of structure that just doesn’t match where you are.
Scheduling writing
Many of my clients (most of my clients) (all humans everywhere, probably) lead busy, full lives. There are a thousand things competing for their attention and writing can sometimes seem like the least urgent thing in the room. But, there's a difference between urgent and important.
Urgent: things that need to be completed soon or there will be dire consequences. Urgent things are often public, and they often impact other people. These are the fires you're putting out on a daily basis.
Important: things that have a high value. It will matter if you do not do them. They're the big goals, the huge milestones, the end of the road.
But the two aren't always together. For example, if your cat escapes from your house, locating them would be both urgent and important. Submitting grades on time for your students is both urgent and important; it impacts your students (and your evaluations) if they're late, and doing well in your teaching assignment can have a long term impact on your career.
It's easy to understand why urgent and important things have to be prioritized. But if you're running your schedule solely by what is urgent, things can fall off your plate. Long term projects, far away deadlines, and your overall goals can slip out of focus when you're only dealing with the tasks and roles that are demanding your attention day to day.
Writing tasks often fall into the important, but not necessarily urgent, category. How many of us have put a conference submission deadline on the calendar months in advance, only to wake up that morning without an abstract? I struggled during semesters where I was teaching, working, and being a human to prioritize my writing - there were simply too many other things to do, and those deadlines were a long way off anyway. But then, a therapist introduced an idea to me that changed my life:
Schedule your writing.
As part of a "Dissertation Stress and Anxiety Management" support group, we were asked to track our activities and moods for a week, down to the half hour. If you spent a half hour checking Twitter, you noted it. If you slept for 12 hours, you wrote it down. It was eye opening for several reasons, but most of all, it exposed a fatal flaw in my own scheduling.
You see, I went into the exercise feeling confident that I would "do well." I was busy! I took care of important tasks and kept multiple projects up and working all at once. I rarely spent whole days procrastinating (or resting, but that's a subject for another time.) But what I realized, when I looked at the week written out, was that I spent all my time dealing with urgent tasks as they came up. I worked to the deadlines, letting others' schedules dictate my time. And I wasn't writing. I wasn't moving any of my long term goals forward. I was busy, and productive, but I was avoiding the writing because it was big, and scary, and not due yet.
So the therapist shared how she balanced her own dissertation writing with her clinical hours - she blocked out 3 hours, twice a week, as her "Dissertation Class." She was great, she reasoned, at making meetings and seminars - she would never schedule over that commitment. So, why not treat the dissertation work the same way?
She put it on her calendar, and she respected it. She didn't schedule meetings over it. She wouldn't move the time around, even by an hour, no matter how busy or behind she felt. And if she ever felt compelled to skip, or move it, or otherwise not work during that time, she would run the "class" test.
"If this were a class, with other people in community with me, would I skip it?" And if the answer was no, then she went to work. Having just six hours a week blocked off made a massive difference in moving her writing forward. It gave her time to focus on important things, not just urgent ones.
Make it work for you.
Maybe you have plenty of time for writing - but by the end of the day, you're too tired to work out. Maybe you're blocking plenty of time for your academic goals, but your professional development and career planning is falling by the wayside. You can use the same principle! Make a list of the things that are important to you, and work backwards to block time off to work on them.
Sign up for conferences or workshops around your professional development - having a commitment "on the books" can support your growth.
Look at your schedule for time you're not using as well as you could - would scheduling in a fitness class or walk around the neighborhood that you treat as immovable help you be more active?
Take an inventory of your life in its totality - where are you hitting your goals? Where could you put more focus? Does your schedule give you protected, dedicated time to work on your long-term objectives?
It can be hard to focus on important things when they aren't urgent - but eventually, they become urgent. Your dissertation chapter is due in a week. The conference abstract is due today. You are graduating next month. Your health is suffering, or your mind is anxious. Blocking time off, in the amounts and places where it works for you, in advance will help you focus on both the short and long term picture.
Plan out your time mindfully. Respect the time you set aside - you are a priority. The urgent things can (sometimes) wait until you're done.
So you're more efficient. Now what?
Congratulations! You've made some changes to your work/life/tools/thinking/way of existing and you're getting more done in less time than you used to. You can grade a little quicker, write a little faster, submit things a little bit sooner.
Or, if you're not quite there yet, imagine that I have gifted you five extra hours in every week moving forward.
How would you spend them?
No really, imagine how you'd spend them.
When I did this exercise for myself, I came up with three work projects I have been struggling to get launched. Did you say something related to your work as well?
Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with being more efficient at work things so you can work more.
There is a problem when you have internalized the idea that the only worthwhile use of your time is working.
So as you explore ways to be more focused, schedule better, plan more efficiently, and work smarter, also turn a critical eye to where you start to spend some of that newly freed up time. Are you doing the things that fulfill you, that advance you, that enrich you, that line up with what you value, what you find important? And if not, why is that?
What's missing?
When you sit down to make a schedule, the first impulse is to put in everything that needs to be there. You put in your classes, your work commitments, your travel times - the immovable blocks that everything else has to fit in around. But once you have a first draft of your schedule, after you've put in everything you think needs to be there, I challenge you to do something radical:
What is missing from your schedule?
"Katy, how do I know what's missing if it was never there in the first place?" I imagine you yelling, in frustration. Here are some ways to find out what might be missing, or what you could add in as a regular schedule block that you haven't ever considered including.
What are the tasks that you are consistently doing at the last minute? Could you schedule regular time to get on top of them?
What are the long term projects that you wish you could work on more? Can you find time, even bi-weekly or monthly, to set aside to focus in that area?
What kind of invitations (social, family, professional) are you consistently turning down? Would you be more likely to go if you set the time and place?
What are the skills you want to build? Are there places in your schedule, a project you could undertake, a group to join, to help build a structure around your learning?
Do you need to build in a block that's purposefully unscheduled? Could you use some time, every week or even every day, that you protect but don't decide ahead of time how to use? That way, when it comes up, you can use it however you want and still have a little spontaneity in an otherwise very scheduled life.
Sleep is often missing!
Schedules are great - they help keep us on track, they protect our time, they make it easier to wear all the hats that we do on a daily basis. But they're also a good place to look to see how our values are being reflected in our day to day lives. Is everything that's important to you reflected in the way you use your time?
Making the most of the middle.
There is a natural excitement to the start of something new - a chance to do things differently, the hope and promise of a fresh start. And usually, by the end of a project, the excitement of the finish line can carry you through, even if you're tired. But how do you keep up your stamina in the middle? How do you push through the weeks or months when you just have to show up and do the work and there isn't anything structural to charge you up? Here are a few ideas about how to make the most of the middle of a project:
Add in something exciting: If you hit a five day streak of consistent work on your project - it's reward time! 20 day streak? Something bigger! Make your progress visible - put your word count on a post it that you can see, or fill in a sticker chart for every pom you finish! But celebrate the in between time with some extra festivity because if you don't make an explicit effort, nothing about the process will celebrate for you!
Build in accountability for the long stretches between submissions: Send your advisor an update weekly or biweekly so that your progress is communicated to everyone. Join a writing group and exchange early drafts with one another. But if your tendency is to hide out until something is due, building in some extra visibility can help you stay on track and work at a more consistent pace over longer stretches of time.
Work with your writing process or workflow, rather than against it: Do you need a lot of drafts (I do!) or do you like having lots of deadlines to structure your time? Work those things into your timetable - how long do you want to be revising? How much time do you need to do final proofreading? Will it help to schedule a week of slush time just in case life happens? Figure out what your workflow is, or what you need, and then work around that, rather than pretending that you don't need many drafts when you do, or that one deadline is enough when it isn't.
Figure out what you need to do to keep up the pace: If you can't be sustainable with your work habits in the middle of the project, away from the stress of deadlines, when can you? If you're likely to skip over things like movement, sleep, hobbies, or social time, schedule them in! Pay for an exercise class so you will feel like you're wasting money if you don't go. Make plans with friends and loved ones so you have accountability around leaving the house. Set regular work hours and keep to them! But if you can work through the middle without burning out, you're all the more likely to figure out how to push at the finish line without destroying yourself.
Grad school, and later academic, life is a lot about making yourself a structure to contain the work because it often isn't given to us. What do you need to thrive? What do you need to feel sustained and energized in the middle of work when you need it most? There's no office culture to tell you when to come into the office, or when to be on campus, or how to take breaks, so you have to empower yourself to create that culture. But if you take the time to do it, it makes the daily practice of working easier, and that makes the middle less of a slog and more of a routine!
So you made a schedule. Now respect it.
Making a schedule is half strategy, half fantasy; you sit down, you imagine how the next few days or weeks will go, and you attempt to write it into existence. But what happens when, you know, life happens? Here are a few tips to help respect (and help others respect!) the schedule you make - and maybe a few pointers on when to be flexible, too!
Figure out not just the schedule, but the tools/resources you need to make it work. If your plan is to wake up every morning and write from 8 am to 11 am, how much sleep do you need? Do you need to have an idea of what your breakfast will be so you don't need to make that decision before dawn? Do you need help getting other humans in your house out the door, or the dogs walked? Schedules are great, but they don't happen in isolation, so figuring out what you need, and when you need it, to make the work happen is important.
Have you considered buffer/transition time? A written schedule can be deceiving - the class you teach might end at noon, but do students often want to speak to you afterward? Do you need to eat lunch (probably!!)? Do you need a few minutes to walk around the block, or answer emails, or switch locations so that you can write in peace? Accounting for that buffer, rather than always being "behind", can lower the "ahhh I'm late for the schedule that I created!" anxiety.
Are you inviting in distraction? Some distractions can't be prevented, but others can be anticipated and headed off at the pass. Maybe you just can't get into the deep focus state you need for writing at home, where there is laundry to do and meals to prepare - so you stay on campus an hour later than normal to get two good poms of writing in after you teach. Maybe your lab computer has an internet browser, so you're surfing Twitter while running experiments, instead of reading, or grading, in the down time. Email inboxes are basically a list of invitations to do something else - snoozing your inbox, keeping the tab closed, and removing notifications from your phone can help you look at your email more purposefully. Yes, you can work through distraction, but if you can prevent it, that's more energy to use on your scheduled task and less you need to spend on sticking to your schedule.
Communicate about your schedule to stakeholders so they can help you keep to it. Especially if you're starting a new schedule, it can help to give people a heads up about changes. Include a line in your syllabus that you check your email once or twice a day, and rarely in evenings or on weekends, so that your students know when to expect a response. Ask your PI or lab mates if there's a possibility of protecting a block of time for your writing, and then speak up if there's a meeting schedule that conflicts with that protected time. Tell your parents or friends that Thursday evenings work well for phone calls to catch up (because your brain is tired anyway!) and that unless it's an emergency, texts are a better way to get in contact. Put a sign up on your office door so that your office mates, kids, partner, or roommates know that when the door is closed, you're focusing. These boundaries can be hard when they're new, but the more that you present them as necessary and not optional, the easier they are to enforce.
But, schedule in time to be present with your life, too! If your schedule is all work, it can be hard for people to know when and where you can be with them. In my house, I will schedule "work nights" where I know that I will have to focus into the evening, but I balance them out by making sure that when I'm not working, I'm actually present (no emails on my phone while I'm supposed to be watching a movie!) Write it in your schedule - this is the time when I live my full, human life.
Of course, there will always be things that come up - a sickness, a family schedule change, a last minute advisor request, a deadline, days or weeks when you get behind. It is so easy to slip into the magical thinking loop where you imagine how if you had just stuck to the schedule in the past, everything would be perfect in the future. Schedules are helpful tools, but they are just tools. Showing up, trying again, believing in your ability to make progress no matter how it looks - that's what finishes tasks and gets things done.