6.8 it just needs one more week and then i can submit it
you said you'd send the chapter on friday, but if you just had one more week....
do it once? okay. but no one ever presses snooze just once, right?
let's talk about this loop - and how you can get out of it, in this week's episode
mentioned:
if i work hard enough on this draft, i won't have to revise it
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
This season is called Just at Me already, where I go through all of the different kinds of people that I run into and have been myself as a coach for academics. And we talk about how to shift that if you want to. I.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
This week's episode is called, it's Not Ready to Send right now. I just need one more week and then I'll be ready to submit it. And this is one of the most requested episodes this season because so many people come to me and they say, Hey, I really need to submit this draft. I said it was gonna be done a couple of weeks ago, and when I asked the person I'm working with, you know, what's stopping you?
And they think, man, I just, you know, I just need one more week, and I think I'll be able to get there. The last couple of weeks have been totally bananas, but one more week. I'll definitely be ready. I'll definitely be ready by Thursday. I'll definitely be ready by Monday. And on and on and on. Now, there's a couple of things that feed into this.
Number one is perfectionism and misunderstanding what the role of revision is in the writing process. This is something that's come up in a bunch of the episodes this season, and it's not because I really like repeating myself. It's because it's that common, it's that prevalent, and it's this idea that we need to shift from the, I write it once.
I polish it, I maybe do a little bit of adjusting, but then it's pretty much ready to go. It's ready to be graded, which is how we used to approach papers, seminar papers, even in grad school. But definitely before final papers, term papers, you work on it, you build up to it all semester, you submit it, and then you get graded.
Life as an academic writer is completely different because up until that last submission deadline, you are always submitting your work with the expectation that it will get feedback and that you'll need to revise it. And that's not a punishment. That's not something that you've been sent back to do because you didn't pass this hurdle.
It's how academic work, which is complex and needs a lot of attention in order for it to be clear and readable and persuasive. And you can't get it all in one go. It can be really scary to submit things knowing that you're gonna get feedback. So of course you think, huh, I'll do that next week.
I'll make sure that I spend this next week really working on it. There's that fear, there's that sense of being unclear. Is this ready? Is this what other people send? Is it not? And we just don't really know when the point is that somebody else wants to see it. We know they probably don't wanna see a stack of notes all jumbled up with no complete sentences, but.
There's a big space between, here is a bunch of completely unorganized paragraphs, and here is a publishable journal article or a publishable dissertation chapter. There's a lot of space in between there, so how do you know when it's ready for that feedback?
The problem with the one more week. Is you set a deadline.
Usually you're trying to make yourself accountable to somebody else, your advisor, your writing group, and then you press snooze on that deadline, just like an alarm clock. It goes off at 7:00 AM and you press snooze and you think, okay, I'm not ready right now, but I definitely will be in 10 minutes. I'm not ready to send this to my advisor right now, but I definitely will be in a week.
The problem with this cycle is that there's a hit of temporary relief, right? You press that snooze button and you think, okay, I get a couple more minutes of sleep. I was feeling really anxious about getting ready to submit this, and now I have an extra week to make sure that it feels better,
like the fourth or fifth time, or maybe even a little bit more that you press that snooze button, it gets harder and harder 'cause that temporary hit of relief hits less strongly. The first extension feels like an amazing relief, and the third one feels. Less powerful, more anxious because you know that time is getting away from you and it's harder and harder to submit it because you think, okay, well I've had X number of extra weeks.
It needs to be that much better because it's late. It needs to be that much better because I'm behind. And so every time you get there you think, okay, I definitely do just need another hit of time because this isn't gonna be what I want it to be when this person sees it. Now. What are some ways to get out of this loop if you find that you're in?
The first one is to outsource this decision. This is something that we did talk about last week with editing checklists, and I will make sure that I link to last week's episode and also some of the checklists. In the show notes, but if you can outsource this decision to a checklist, amazing. Where you say, okay, here are all of the things that I wanted to get done on this draft.
I wanted to make sure it was all complete sentences. I wanted to make sure that all my topic sentences were really fresh and crisp and sharp, and I wanted to make sure that all my references were in there. I hit all those three things. It must be ready to submit. Now, if you like me, can think your way into and out of a checklist where you say, okay, this is definitely gonna be it.
And then you don't feel quite ready anyway. You can also outsource the decision to another person. Have a trusted friend or colleague go through and read your draft and say, okay, is this ready to submit to my advisor? Is this ready to go to a writing group or not? And having that friend check means that it's somebody else's responsibility to help you make that decision.
And then they can even help you press that submit button if you need. They can attach the file to an email, write it for you, and send it. Maybe not that far, but you get what I mean. Your friend can help you make that decision. If you are like, I just, I think I need one more week. They check in, they say it's ready.
You trust them. The other thing to note thing number two is that that done feeling is. Almost never an internal state or a switch that flips. I never work with any writer who says, yeah, I sat, I worked on the draft. I worked steadily through my revisions, and it's 100% ready to go. Everybody is always submitting because.
It's the deadline because that's when their advisor wanted it, because they need to keep moving because they need to move to the next section because they need to have the time off at the end of the year. A thousand different reasons. These things come to administrative ends, not content-based ends.
You're submitting it because it's due, not because it's done, and that distinction can be really uncomfortable, but it's the one that helps you move forward faster. Because if you accept as a premise that you are gonna have to do some revision, you are gonna have feedback, well, then the earlier you submit it, the earlier you can get started on that feedback and get it to the next hurdle.
The third thing that I wanna share with you. Might feel like a little bit of tough love, but I think it's one of those things that if you can wrap your heart and your head around it, it can make a really big difference. And that thing is that what you're avoiding.
The feedback, the criticism, that awful ego hit of not doing a good job is survivable. But avoiding that thing, avoiding that vulnerability is what makes it a harmful situation to you and kind of the overall life scheme of things. It is completely understandable that nobody wants. To get a bunch of criticism, a bunch of feedback, even if it's the most kind, gentle, constructive feedback in the world.
It's not fun. Nobody likes looking through somebody's red line edits on their work, but it is survivable. It is something that you can support your way through. You can have a friend look through those comments. You can take a break after you read them, you can read them, process them, put them in your task manager and then move on.
It is survivable, but the more you avoid it, the more it turns into this trap where you can't move on because you're trying so hard to avoid a thing that you can survive. It's not fun, but it is. Something that if you can commit to doing it, to sending that draft, to moving forward, to letting other people see your work and give you feedback, you might be able to shift your writing process away from this system of perfectionism and avoidance and feeling stuck and into a conversation, a conversation between you and the draft between you and advisors, you and your writing group, and eventually you and your readers.
Because you're not going to have that piece of writing enter the world if you're hanging onto it for just one more week, perpetually at the end of every week. I hope that this helps you. I have heard from lots of people that it's helping them, but the most important thing is that you are not alone in pressing that snooze button.
It is scary to submit something that you're not a hundred percent confident in, but it is survivable. And if you can survive it, then the writing can keep making its way through that cycle, through that repetition to get it to be the most clear version of what you want it to be out in the world.
I'm hoping that for you and I'm hoping that for all of us, and I'll see you that, and I will see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
6.7 if i just do it perfectly now, i won't have to revise it later
sure, it takes longer up front to get the draft as close to perfect as you can, but it will save time when you don't have to revise it, right? right???
taking on one of the most common writing fallacies in today's episode - this is for you if you've ever justified not sending the draft by saying you'll just get it to a better state first. you are not alone, but there are other ways <3
mentioned:
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
This season is called Just at Me already, where I go through all of the different kinds of people that I run into and have been myself as a coach for academics. And we talk about how to shift that if you want to. I.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
This week's episode is called, if I just do it perfectly right now, I won't have to revise it. And it is for all of my people out there who are working on making their drafts as good as they possibly can because it's efficient, right? If I just submit a really good draft now to my supervisor, to the editor, to whomever.
I won't need to revise it. It's taking me longer now. Sure. But I'm saving work in the long run. Oh, how I wish that this worked. I wish that this was an effective strategy because it is a logical strategy. It does make sense that the more that you polish something ahead of time, the less time you're gonna have to spend on the backend, revising it, responding to feedback, et cetera.
But more often than not, what I find happens is what I call the half drawn horse phenomenon. I'll link to this in the show notes, but I'm sure that you've seen that meme of a drawn horse. Somebody's sketch of a horse and the back legs and tail are rendered perfectly. They're so detailed, they're beautiful, they're realistic.
And then by the time that you get to the front of the head of the horse. It's a stick drawing. It looks like a kid did it. And often this is what I find when people are really working to make the drafts quote as good as they can before they submit it. There might be a chapter, a section, a part of it that is perfect or as close to it as you can get, and you eventually run out of time for the rest of it.
Chapter two and three are really, really solid. And chapter one you wrote over a weekend there's nothing wrong with this. Plenty of dissertations have been submitted as half drawn horses. I know that there are definitely parts of my own dissertation that are much more finished and polished than the others, but it is.
A beautiful example of this kind of fallacy that we have, which is that the time that we spend upfront, the time that we spend on the earlier drafts, working just with ourselves, where we're protected, where we don't have to have this feedback, we don't need to be as vulnerable, that time is going to pay off by something in the end
and I wish that were true, but usually what happens is that you run out of time. You run out of time to respond to the feedback that you're inevitably going to get. You run out of time to write the pieces that don't exist yet, and it feels more uneven than it could or it should. So I this week would encourage.
To think about the cycle of book development. This is a term from Dr. Laura Portwood Stacer, whose book I'll link to in the show notes. But it's brilliant. But the idea is that your manuscript, you're writing, it's always a cycle. You're always clarifying what the piece is going to do, soliciting feedback, and then adjusting to that feedback and.
You cannot prevent that cycle from running at all by just writing better. You can't prevent your advisor from having feedback by double checking every single sentence because invariably, you want your work to be out in the world. You want it to be something that people can respond to, and whether that's your writing group.
Your advisor, a peer reviewer or an editor, you can't guarantee that they're going to always have amazing feedback, but you can make it so that they can help you move forward faster than you would on your own. I have three strategies that help me when I'm feeling really stuck in this kind of efficiency trap where I feel like I have to keep going and make this draft perfect even though I'm running out of time, because the more I spend now, the less I'm gonna have to do later.
The first strategy that's really useful for that is having a feedback panel. Graduate students especially don't have access to a lot of writing feedback. Maybe your advisor, maybe a committee member, but. Sometimes your peers, and it's really difficult because your advisor might be busy, they might not be skilled at giving constructive, useful feedback.
And if you have a panel of people that you can go to, if you have a writing group, a peer group, a person that you do draft swaps with an accountability group, even a non-academic who can read and proofread things, you'll be amazed how much easier it is. To get feedback and to practice sending your work for feedback earlier if you have more people to try it with.
It's probably not going to be your best strategy to increase the frequency of feedback, solicitation with your advisor. They might be busy, they might not be that good at it, but if you can broaden the team but more people on the team get more support for your writing, it can really help.
Because yeah, you're right, it might not be the most efficient path forward to give your draft to your advisor right now, but that doesn't mean your writing group can't look. At it. That doesn't mean that somebody in your program can't take a look at it. It doesn't mean that you can't give that draft to somebody else, get their feedback, and then move forward.
Strategy number two is to outsource some of that. Is this done or not? Anxiety to a checklist. I there are lots of different checklists that are floating around. I'll link to a couple in the show notes. But the idea of this checklist is that you say, okay, I'm not going to know maybe when this draft is done or ready for feedback, but if it has all of the content that I wanted to include, if I've proofread it for sentence fragments, if the citations are all correct, then I'm ready to send it.
And that way the checklist is in charge of whether or not it's ready to send and not your internal feeling, which may or may not be an accurate representation of if that draft is ready to go. In my experience, very rarely do people send work because they have an internal feeling of, yes, this draft is ready to go.
It's, I've taken it as far as I need to. Almost all of us are sending it because of some external force, whether that's a deadline or a writing group swap, or a, an editor who needs it, or your funding is running out, so you have to submit the dissertation. It's that external force that makes it done, not the internal.
Qualities of the document. So you give yourself more chances to incorporate feedback, more chances to strengthen the document if you send it more frequently and earlier in the process. And last but not least, I really encourage you to examine the premise of how you're thinking about revision. So many of us we're really good writers as undergraduates.
It's earlier in our career, you might be really good at seminar papers or short blog posts or newsletters or other forms of writing, but academic writing is complex and because it's so complex, it often is difficult to get it clear, concise, content filled, compelling, all in one pass. So if you think about the premises of your writing cycle, are you.
Thinking about it as I need to get this to 80% before people see it, or 90% or a hundred percent, or if I just work really hard at it, nobody will give me any feedback at all. Those are really beautiful ways to protect yourself from the vulnerable moment of getting feedback, but they're definitely slowing down the process in ways that you maybe don't want to or don't need to.
So I encourage you to think, okay, if I start from the premise of I will get feedback whether I want it or not, I will. Use other people's feedback to strengthen what I can't see clearly about this draft that I've been staring at for weeks or months, or maybe even longer. If you start from the premise that that feedback is part of the process and not an additional add-on that you trigger because you didn't do it well enough the first time, how might you plan that cycle differently?
Who might you invite into the process that you wouldn't have otherwise considered? Feedback isn't a punishment. Feedback is the way that all of us get stronger as writers as communicators. So I encourage you to think about how you are leaving yourself out of spaces and places and cycles that will help you be a stronger writer.
It might not be the most comfortable, but it is going to move you forward. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
6.6 if i'm invisible, you can't ask me about my draft
if you have ever:
ducked into a bathroom to avoid your advisor
gone days (or longer) avoiding your email in case someone asks you where your draft is
worked furiously through a weekend so no one noticed you didn't send that draft in on friday
this episode is for you. let's talk about why we go so hard into avoidance mode when writing is late, and why that often is the least helpful way to go about it. plus we talk about ways to soften that feeling, and things you can do intsead.
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
This season is called Just at Me already, where I go through all of the different kinds of people that I run into and have been myself as a coach for academics. And we talk about how to shift that if you want to. I.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
Close your eyes with me and imagine you told your advisor that you would have that draft to them by the end of the week, Friday at the latest, Friday arrives, and it's not done. So you think to yourself, ah, who's checking their email on Friday? Anyway, I'll just work this weekend. I'll get it all wrapped up.
Send it Monday morning. It'll be like nothing ever happened. And then you work over the weekend, you get closer, but it's still not done. And you think, yeah, Monday's like Tuesday and that cycle repeats Wednesday, Thursday. Then maybe you think, okay, well I'll have it to them by this Friday, and I'll just pretend that's the Friday that I mean, and eventually it keeps snowballing and snowballing until you are actively avoiding your advisor. Maybe you're just avoiding talking about your draft when you see them in the hallway, or maybe you're even avoiding looking at your inbox in case they're in there asking for the draft. I've even seen people hint, it's me not go into their department building.
They won't be seen on campus. They're hiding. They're sneaking around corners afraid that somebody will ask them about that draft that's overdue. If that's you this week is for you. I'm sure that almost everybody listening relates to some part of this dynamic where you say that you're gonna have something done, it doesn't quite get there, and then you just withdraw and withdraw and withdraw until you finish it, which creates this kind of double edge cycle where a.
You need the support more than ever because it's behind and the anxiety is ramping up and the stress is ramping up and it's getting harder and harder to finish it, and B, you're more and more ashamed of the fact that it's not done. So you pull even further and further away from maybe not even your advisor, but the other places that help you, your communities, your writing group, anywhere else.
It's a really tricky cycle. I get it because. That's me. That's a lot of us who wants to stand up and raise their hand and say, Hey, I have this thing. It's not done yet. I have this thing and I know you need it, but I haven't gotten to it. It almost doesn't matter if it's not done because life has been lifeing or if, because you're working really hard on it.
It's not done, and so you're withdrawing and you are more and more alone. The draft is more and more behind, and it's almost impossible to see yourself out of the bottom of that hole. I have some strategies for you. If this is you, maybe this is you in the future. Maybe this is you in the past. Maybe this is you right now, but the first is to communicate.
And I am gonna just straight up acknowledge right now that this is not the easiest thing to do. Nobody wants to send an email that says, Hey, this thing is late, or it's due, or, I know I was meant to send that to you, but that's part of what being a professional academic is. I had a beloved mentor who used to say, listen, the problem isn't being late, the problem is ghosting.
And I have taken that lesson so much to heart I've worked a lot of different jobs, whether that is for myself as an academic in teaching and learning centers and a bagel shop. I've worked a lot of places and things get overdue.
Things are late. It's a fact of life, especially right now when things are so hard, and you've got so many things to do, but the best way to head off that isolation. Cycle is to own up to it and communicate. I always recommend that people communicate when they know that the draft is gonna be late, where it's Wednesday and you said it was gonna be due Friday, and you just know that between now and Friday, there's no chance that it's getting finished.
You can send an email that says, Hey, I am not gonna have this draft done completely on Friday. Would you rather look at the part that's polished? On Friday like we agreed to, or wait until next week when more of it is finished. Or you could send an email that says, Hey, X, Y, and Z happened This, this draft is late.
I hope to get it to you by next Friday, but either way, I will reach out. These emails are tricky to send and I understand why nobody is rushing to put this podcast down and send that email. But the more that you can give people the information that they need, the better. If you've ever taught undergraduate students, you know that.
Yeah. Is it annoying when students don't have their essays submitted on time? Absolutely. But would you rather know if they're struggling so that you can, A, help support them, but B, schedule your time better so that you know, okay, I don't need to be waiting for this to grade. I can check back in with you in a week and grade the ones I already have.
It's about recognizing that you are in a community with your advisor, with your writing group, with anybody else that's waiting for your writing. There's often flexibility and you are entitled to that flexibility. The worst they can say is no, but the best they can say is yes, and then you can spend.
All of your energy getting that draft over the finish line and not half of your energy panicking that somebody will ask you about it before it's done. A pro level tip is that I often encourage my clients to send their advisors an email every week or every other week no matter what. A quick update email, this is what I've done, this is what I'm planning to do the next time, and this is where I'm stuck.
Those kind of emails are a great track record to kind of low state. They're a great thing to have in writing so that your advisor has evidence that you are moving along, even if you're not meeting with them regularly, or even if you haven't shown them any new writing in a while, and they help make it so that the update, the communication, the support isn't tied to the thing being done.
It is tied to a regular occurrence. In the calendar that arrives no matter what, so you're never going too long without being in communication.
Support works best when we're really stuck, and unfortunately that is some of the hardest times for us to ask for it, and I do wanna just acknowledge that maybe your advisor isn't the place to get that support. I know that for me, my advisor had very strict ideas about when and where they wanted to read my writing, and so I.
Ended up usually sending writing to anyone but my advisor. I sent it to my friends in my cohort. I sent it to people above and below me in the program. I sent it to people in my writing group. I got that writing support that I needed from other places, and I will be honest, it was easy to hide from them too when I was feeling bad about the fact that the writing wasn't done.
But their help moved me further faster when I asked for it. Than it ever did with me hiding and hoping that I would just be able to catch up and they wouldn't notice that I was behind. In any case, isolation is one of the biggest contributors that I see to people being stuck frozen, not advancing, not moving forward in the way that they want to.
You don't have to reach out to your advisor if you know that things are gonna be stuck. But if you reach out to someone, if you remember that you're not invisible and that people can help you, you often can unstick yourself and keep going. And just so that you know, everybody gets stuck. Everybody has drafts that are due and they miss that deadline.
Everybody has. Things that they wish were moving faster, things that they wish weren't so behind. The secret is learning how to communicate before or when you know it's due, getting the support that you need so that you can meet that second best deadline, which is whatever one you set after that. Thank you so much for listening and I can't wait to see you next week.
Bye.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
6.5 research exquisite...draft non-existent?
this is for all my friends with 123908 open tabs of things to read, a pile of ILL requests to pick up at the library, four unwatched webinars on how to do academic things in their inbox....who are still feeling stuck turning all that research into writing.
we talk this week about why it happens, and how to move forward, on this week's episode. get into it!
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
This season is called Just at Me already, where I go through all of the different kinds of people that I run into and have been myself as a coach for academics. And we talk about how to shift that if you want to. I.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
All right. If you're sitting on piles of research, so much data notes up the wazoo. If you're guarding it like a dragon guards, its hoard. This one is for you. I call this episode research exquisite, draft non-existent, because this is one of the most common things that I see, especially in early writers.
It could be that your research is around the content of what you're working on. It could be that you're actually researching the process. Like how to write a dissertation or how to write a book proposal, or maybe you're even still in the data collection phase.
One more experiment. One more trip to the archive. But this pattern looks like you are waiting to start writing. You're purposefully holding back on the writing until you hit some point where the research feels done, where you feel like you know how to do it, where you feel that you are ready to start writing from a place of confidence.
I see three different flavors of this. One is the kind of underwriting question of did I find everything? Is there another article out there that says what mine says that I need to cite, that everyone will be so embarrassed for me if I don't cite.
That's so key to the conversation that I'm having that by not finding it and reading it and citing it here, I'm gonna be laughed off the face of the subfield that I'm in. That's one version. Did I find everything? The second version is, I'm not ready. I don't know enough yet. This is a variation, but it's often like, oh, well, I was researching this idea and then this method came up, and then I'm researching the history of this method, and you're following each one of the links,
like you're on a Wikipedia deep dive. You're just clicking the backlinks and the backlinks and the backlinks, and they keep going, and so you assume that you must not know enough because you keep finding new ideas, new pieces of evidence, new research, that are important for you to at least be aware of before you start writing.
And the third kind of iteration of this looks a lot less explicit sometimes, but it boils down to, I feel safer here. I feel safer behind my desk, reading articles, doing notes, looking at books. I am not ready to write. It seems scary, seems hard. I don't want to do it. I don't have time to get into it. It seems like it's gonna be really difficult, so I'm just gonna keep doing more research because I know how to do that.
I feel confident in that and I know I'm not going to mess that up. So any of these three flavors can really stall you because no one is going to accept your mental download of a research folder. For publication, not as a chapter, not as an article, not as a conference paper. So you eventually do need to move into the writing phase, but there's a reason that so many of us get stuck here, and it's because there are these persistent thoughts, these ideas that if I just find the secret thing, it's all gonna feel real.
And a lot of that boils down to this idea that when I'm ready to write, I'm gonna know it. I'll feel ready to write. I will feel full. I'll feel confident. I'll be ready to go. And I really hate to share this with you, but it also could set you free. That ready isn't a feeling ready is a decision, and that it actually is a lot faster to start to teach yourself, train yourself, support yourself in writing earlier than you feel ready with less research than maybe you feel ready because that that act of.
Putting your thoughts onto paper where you can read them, where you can read them back, and when maybe other people can read them is going to move you further faster than endless loops of research. So. In terms of strategies that you can walk away with right now, the first is to start writing earlier. I really encourage you to have some sort of active writing process that goes along with your research, whether that is taking notes, answering questions, putting things inside of your citation manager, or a little bit of free writing to warm up or end a research session.
Practicing synthesizing those ideas in a low stakes way. That's not for anybody else, but you can be a really excellent way to get the kind of writing juices flowing earlier in the process. But just in general, start writing earlier than you think you should, than you think is reasonable, because it is almost always going to be the thing that helps you refine your research questions or show you how much you already know already.
So. Start writing earlier, push it back by a week, push it back by a month or maybe right the whole time. The second strategy is to write around the gaps. I am a big fan of putting in parenthetical notes to myself when I'm drafting, like insert reference here, or a question to my future self, like, does this need a citation?
Or, which one of these papers should I use? I then go through at a various stages of my draft, and I fill in those parenthetical resources, or I decide that I don't need them, that it was actually extra evidence or. Extra support that bogs down my argument instead of making it clearer. But the more that you can practice writing around the gaps, writing a paragraph that says blah, blah, blah, insert big idea here, and then keeps going.
The more you're going to let yourself stay in the writing flow, instead of reaching for a book, reaching for A PDF, looking for your notes. You can always go back and add, and that is the skill that many of us have never been taught how to do, how to write in more frequent, shallower passes than I took this class and then I stayed up all night to write the term paper.
Your academic work probably won't follow that same pattern, so this is about practicing writing in a different way. Ultimately, this boils down to the idea that writing and research overlap much more so than you might be familiar with from other kinds of writing that you've done in even your academic past.
But because of the way that academics are expected to have multiple projects going. Projects that branch off from each other, that overlap, that intersect, that maybe are parts of collaborations or solo authored. But when you have so many different things in your quote unquote academic pipeline, it is a skill and a benefit to be able to have the research process and the writing process.
Not follow one after another where you wrap up all of the research and then you start the writing, but that they happen in tandem, so that as you write and the argument develops, you know what research you need to do further, and then you can do it in a more targeted, efficient, effective way. Ultimately, that feeling that you're not ready to start writing, it might not ever go away.
I know that I felt that way on the day I was defending my dissertation. When that project was as done as it ever was gonna be, I was like, I'm not sure I'm ready. I don't know that I know enough, but ultimately that feeling isn't a fact. It's a sign that what you're doing is vulnerable, that it means something to you, that it's high stakes.
That there are things that need support inside of you. Maybe you need somebody to give you some feedback and say, actually, this does need a little bit of development. Or, I think that you're really bogged down in the weeds here. Maybe you need something really cozy to kind of help support your nervous system while you sit down to write.
Or maybe you just need, like almost all of us do a little bit more practice building a writing. Habit or writing practice that's going to serve not only the kind of writer that you're becoming, but the kind of projects that you're being asked to do. Thank you so much, and I will see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
6.4 always firefighting, no fire prevention
you're careening from due date to due date, and still, everything is due in the last three weeks of the term. you know that you're supposed to be working ahead, and making time for important projects that aren't due yet, but.......how?
let's talk about this pattern - maybe one of the hardest ones to shift - and concrete things you can do to try and shift it. because you CAN do things to shift into a less due-date driven life, but they're not nearly as simple as "just schedule time for your writing".
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
This season is called Just at Me already, where I go through all of the different kinds of people that I run into and have been myself as a coach for academics. And we talk about how to shift that if you want to. I.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
All right. I call this one all firefighting, no fire prevention, and this is maybe the one I see the most. Okay. If this is you, this is what your day life week semester ends up looking like. There. Are constantly due dates. There's always something due. There is something due Friday, there's something due next Tuesday.
There's something due the Tuesday after that. It's grading. It's submissions. It's your service. It's your teaching. It's the dissertation chapter you need to finish. It all has a sort of next urgent thing, and you never really get a chance to catch your breath. There is always something that is due. Or maybe even overdue, and you're never quite doing any of the work that you feel like you need to.
You are not getting that next conference proposal planned. You aren't working ahead, and you always feel like you're behind, even if you're getting things done on time or nearly. Let's talk about why this pattern happens and why so many of us are careening from due date to due date without getting a chance to catch our breath.
Part of it is that academic work is on its face, usually extremely important, if not for the broader world than at least for you in you and your own career progression. There's very little innate urgency to it. The one exception for this is teaching, which is why if you go back a few episodes, we see so many people who are completely on top of their teaching because that has a built-in rhythm and urgent. To it. The students need their grades back for assignment one before they can finish assignment two and so on.
There's a natural temporality to it, which is easier to keep it on track as opposed to a dissertation chapter where your advisor just says, okay, come back when you have a draft that you want me to look at. And that could be in two weeks or two months, or much longer for a lot of us.
So there's these important projects that we're expected to be self-directed on, and the only thing that really works for a lot of people all the way down the chain is to have a due date. Academics and the systems that they create often require these due dates to add urgency. Your advisor needs a due date in order to prove to their boss the chair of the department, that you're progressing on time.
And so they say, I need to have your chapter by the end of the semester so that I can say with good confidence that you're on track. But all of these systems, the writing system, the conference system, the grading system, the human system, they're overlapping. They're not talking to each other. No one sits down at the faculty meeting, at least as far as I know, and says, okay, let's sit down and make sure that all of these due dates aren't coming at once. People, right? Nobody's saying that the advisor is setting the due date because that what works for their schedule. The student is setting the due date for themselves because. It's what their advisor gave them.
Nobody's thinking, Hey, let's make sure that not all of this happens on midterm week or finals week. Maybe it would be nice if we didn't expect people to have to work through their break or their summer completely full out in order to just catch up. These conflicting systems mean that there are always due dates.
There always are fires to put out, and who's gonna get a chance to work ahead, work more systemically if they're always chasing that next due date. That's just another two days, another three weeks or something really big, comes up with a due date that all of a sudden is really soon, and they haven't done enough work along the course of this semester or the month to make that even feel feasible.
To add insult to injury in a firefighting system where you're careening from one important thing being due to the next, if you get a spare moment, you're not gonna work ahead. You're not gonna pull reading for that next project. You're not gonna make sure that your systems are all tagged out and filed.
You are gonna crash your butt right down on that couch. You're gonna crash and you're gonna get the rest that you desperately need, or at least part of it because you've been working full out in this high pressure, high stress, high urgency environment. All right. That's why it happens. Now, how do we shift it?
And I'm gonna be really honest. This is one of the hardest patterns to shift. It's why your advisor, to some degree, works like this. It's why a lot of people work like this, and it's why everyone kind of puts the due date up, give me a due date, or it won't get done, right? That's what everybody says at the end of these meetings, and it's because this is an incredibly difficult pattern to shift.
One is that if you're going to do the common piece of advice, which is schedule time to work on these projects, schedule in your writing, protect time, that is actually not an administrative ask as much as it's a boundary ask, right? Not only do you have to block off time, you have to protect it. Sometimes defend it from people who feel entitled to it, your own self or in a lot of cases, just the natural stuff that comes up in the course of working on complex projects in a complex world.
You need to be able to not only make the structure to work on these projects a little bit at a time, but protect that structure once you do it. And that is harder than it sounds. That is putting your phone in the drawer that is dealing with the discomfort. Of, I know that there are really important things that I could be doing right now, and I am not.
I'm working on this thing that I know will serve me well. The other part is that if you are going to work a little bit at a time, most of us have zero faith whatsoever that that system pays off. I know that it was literally years into my PhD program before I felt like I knew how to write in another way that wasn't just a massive all-out writing push.
It was usually a couple more days than the all-nighters I was doing in my undergrad and let's be real, and some of my master program. It was maybe a writing push that lasted for a couple of days, maybe even a week, but I didn't know how to do it any other way. I only knew how to maybe do a little tiny bit of prep work and then all out push at the end.
And so if you asked me to say like, okay, see if you can write a couple hundred words a day, see if you can write two hours a week. What if you did two hours, two days? There was no part of my body that believed that was a reasonable way to do my writing because I'd never done it before. So how could I trust that it would work?
And there was something really unsatisfying. If you are used to writing a whole chapter in a week or getting a ton of work done right before a deadline, there's something kind of unsatisfying, right? About sitting down and being like, oh, I just did my 500 words. I just did my tiny palm. None of this matters, which makes it even harder to commit to those sessions moving forward because they don't feel satisfying.
So you need to be able to not only block the time, make the resources available to yourself, protect them from the people that you want. Then you have to sit in the discomfort of, I don't know if this is gonna work. This feels unsatisfying. This isn't how I've done it before, and be able to still move forward.
So this is. A podcast episode where I say, this is a hard pattern to shift. This is something that you have to actively work on and it's going to be uncomfortable. If this is something that you wanna work toward, here are two or three things that I would do in the next couple of weeks to see if you can shift it just a little bit.
The first, I would go on your calendar and I would find the first two hour block where you think you could reasonably work on a project before it's due. And protect it, block it off. , put whatever title on it that you need in order to know that this is serious. It might not be. Let's be real. Next week, it could be in a couple of weeks.
It might not be till December. It could be maybe even after your classes end. But I want you to block that time off and make sure that you maybe make it recurring. Block it off. Now, if you need to flip ahead to winter 2026 semester in January and February and block off then, but the idea is that if you never start blocking.
It's never gonna appear in your calendar, right? Because if you can't find a two hour block this week, it's reasonable to think that that's gonna still happen the next week and the week after that. So block far ahead and then practice protecting those when they do come up. The next thing is I would like you to practic.
Small amounts of discomfort around smaller writing sessions that maybe feel less productive. So the best way that I like to do this is having a kind of writing log. Where I have a journal and I can say, okay, today I sat down, I did two palms. It was 500 words, and then I rate it on a scale of one to five.
One to five. Five being, this felt really good, this felt useful, and one being, this feels stupid. Why do this? But being able to track those sessions over time is the only way that you're gonna see that data for yourself. I can tell you on this podcast until I'm blue in the face. That it does add up that there are real benefits to working on a project consistently.
Even if you can only get 25 minutes, even if you can only get 50 words, even if you just read a page or two, but your brain's not gonna believe it until it sees it right there on the page. And in the absence of being able to zoom out and zoom into the future and see the whole process with a done chapter or a, a big project where you can look back and say, ah, yes, this really worked.
A journal or a lab sort of notebook approach where you say, okay, this is what I did, and you kind of quickly jot it down. It's gonna provide that data. So if you're out here fighting fires and never doing that important work of building toward the future, that strategy that everybody says works, but you can't really see how it works, know that there are millions of us out here who are struggling with the same thing.
But there are concrete things that you can do right now to try and shift this pattern and a few things a little bit starting slow. It does get easier. All right, see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
6.3 just a quick check of the email.......and it's 3 pm
this is for all my folks who love to warm up, sit down to check their email......and the whole day is gone. we talk about the cycle, places to interrupt it, and three specific strategies to try - all in less than ten minutes. hop on in and let me gently roast you for the good of your draft.
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
This season is called Just at Me already, where I go through all of the different kinds of people that I run into and have been myself as a coach for academics. And we talk about how to shift that if you want to. I.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
Now, I might be coming for you. I'm definitely coming for myself. But this week's episode is all about the people who sit down with all good intentions to do their writing and they think, okay, let me just do a quick check of my email. I'll just make sure there's nothing bad in there. And then I'll of a sudden they look up, hours have gone by, the writing hasn't been touched, and they think, man, I guess I'll just start again tomorrow.
This is a really common practice for a variety of reasons, and I know some of the reasons that it happens to me. One, I don't have the willpower necessarily to start a really heavy work task without giving myself a little bit of a warmup first. I have never been able to sit down and write first thing. I probably never will be able to sit down and write first thing, but when I check my email.
Or any other place where tasks tend to stack up for me as that warmup task, ugh. Things can quickly go south because I start thinking, man, I'll just take care of this. Take care of this. I'll clear the decks, right? I will make sure that nobody needs anything from me before I start writing. And the problem is.
That in this particular day and age, everyone is going to need something from you all of the time, forever, probably. Or at the very least, the emails will keep coming. The tasks will keep piling up, and we're almost always going to have at least an invitation to do something that isn't our writing in these corners of the internet where people can get into contact with us.
I'm not saying that you should never check your email. I'm just saying that a lot of times when we sit down to warm up, we do this quick check, we start to work on things. There's actually another second thought pattern that goes on, which is, okay, I'll just get some of these quick wins out of the way.
I'll clear the decks, right? I'll make sure that my writing conditions are perfect. These are the kind of sneaky ways that we can avoid our writing.
Who doesn't have a thousand other things that they need to get done right? And it makes perfect logical sense that it would be easier to focus on your writing if you had those annoying tasks that anyone could stop and interrupt you and ask about out of the way before you do this. Deep dive into a high focus, high energy draining activity. The problem isn't the emails, the problem isn't the warmup.
The real problem in this whole cycle is that little voice that says, Ugh, it's too late now. I don't have enough time. I'm not gonna be able to do this. I might as well start again tomorrow.
It's what I call the snooze button, where you're like, okay, I will clear the deck and then everything will be better tomorrow. I will get this done and then I'll, I'll really get down to it after lunch. And the problem is that every time we do that, we build up a little bit more of avoidance. We build up a little bit more of that sticky, this is hard, I don't wanna do it feeling, and it makes it that much more difficult to try again the next time.
And if we're only giving ourselves one or maybe even two chances a day to try that really hard thing, then that's one or two chances where it's really easy to press snooze. Then we do all of the things that of course, need to get done, but maybe don't need to get done with the very best of our time, energy, and deep focus blocks.
I'm not gonna just leave you there and say, good luck. This is a terrible pattern. I hope you figure it out. I'm, of course going to share with you three things that I have found to be really effective for me, for my clients to interrupt this pattern and think about other ways to structure your time and protect those writing blocks that you went to.
All of this trouble to schedule. Number one is eating the frog, which is. A time honored tradition. I'll be honest, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. This is one of the tools that often doesn't work for me because like I said, I like to warm up, but the idea here is that your willpower and your ability to resist.
Temptation, resist invitations to do other things is going to be the highest when you're the best rested. And so if you wake up and you are the most focused, the most caffeinated you're ever gonna be, use that energy to do your hardest thing. Eating the frog, for example. Like I said this is mixed benefits, but for the people that it works, it really works.
So if you've never tried doing your writing first thing, or with at least a very minimal warmup, then experiment with it. What's the worst thing that's gonna happen? The second tool that can be really useful are restart times. I like to do these on the top of the hour.
I think that the, the zero zero is a crisp number. It appeals to my brain, so if things don't happen at nine o'clock when I'm meant to get at my desk, then. At 10 o'clock, I can start again at 11 and 12. This is particularly useful for people who have a lot of uninterrupted time, which is its own blessing and curse.
But I find that if you have a lot of time and only certain amounts of energy for writing then give yourself a lot of chances to start it. And so if it doesn't happen at nine, you can try again at every top of the hour and giving yourself five or six chances to start is just statistically gonna work a lot better than giving yourself only one or two.
And last but not least, a tool for those of us who just are exceptionally busy and there almost always is a catastrophe in that inbox. And so there are good reasons why we check it, and there are good reasons why we get pulled into it. I suggest leaving some open time in your calendar. I really like wednesday afternoons and Friday mornings for this. But your mileage may vary, but leave them blocked off, but unscheduled. I call these buffer times. The idea is that you have some time in your calendar to work on the things that are going to inevitably pop up, and then you don't have to steal time from other places to deal with the catastrophes when they emerge.
So you might get an email on Tuesday that says, ah, this terrible thing has happened. I need you to drop everything and do it. And you can then email back and say, you know, I don't have time today, but I do have time Wednesday afternoon. I promise to get back to you before the end of the day. The idea here is that you're not stealing time away from your writing, from your sleep, from your family, from anything else in order to handle those emergencies.
You've got some time blocked off for you to use on the things that come up, and then you aren't cannibalizing the rest of your intentions. And hey, worst case scenario, you have two extra hours, and if no emergencies appear, then it's two hours you can use. I hope that this episode gives you a little bit of perspective about why this pattern starts and things that you can do to interrupt it.
We're all just here trying our best, and I can't wait to try again with you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
6.2 a+ teacher, colleague, friend....c+ writer
you're a rock star teacher. you're everyone's favorite colleague. you show up in your community and you never miss a chance to help out. something has to give....is it your writing?
if you're checking a million things off a day and somehow, that pit in your stomach about your writing getting snoozed is only getting bigger, this episode is for you.
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
This season is called Just at Me already, where I go through all of the different kinds of people that I run into and have been myself as a coach for academics. And we talk about how to shift that if you want to. I.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
Today we're talking about one of my most beloved avatars. I have been this, and maybe you have been this person too. You are an a plus colleague, teacher person, community member, family member, you're a plus at all of it, and you're a c plus writer, and by that I mean you are the most available, present, responsive person in all of these areas of your life. You show up, you do the things, you're on time, you help people.
Except for your writing, which gets just enough to get by. It's not that you're failing at it, you're just giving it just enough to kick the can down the road ways you might know that you're this person is if you are constantly checking things off, you are present. You are making all of your commitments work.
Your students love you, your family loves you, your community loves you, and you also have this sinking pit of dread all the time because you know there's something major that's not getting done. Your. Pressing snooze on things like writing, research, that longer term project, publishing, all of these things that are self-directed and don't have the sort of immediacy and freshness and vitality that your more in-person work does.
If you are checking off the tasks that are due, if your grading's done on time, you are in the meetings, you're responsive, you're collegial, and your work is snoozed. I have three questions to help you unpack it a little bit.
And maybe see if there are ways to move forward and bring that grade up just a little bit.
Because after all, it's not about the grade. It's about that pit of dread in your stomach and what we can do to lessen it so that you can take your best self to your most important projects. Question one. What are the things that make tasks move up in urgency and priority on your to-do list?
What are the things that you will set aside everything for. Now, this isn't an accusatory question. This is simply a data collection question. Do you always set time aside for students? If a student emails you and needs help with a paper or needs support in extra office hours, if a colleague asks you to cover, if somebody asks you to, you know, help out with this conference or join this panel, or share your expertise, what are the things that always move up the list?
For me, it's often things like, this is going to help another person. This is covering a need, this is paying forward. This is being part of a community, and like I said, this isn't accusatory. This is about noticing what triggers that instant priority switch in your brain. Number two, how can you reinforce some of the habits, plans, and tools that you know work for your longer term projects?
For example, I am a person who, if you put me down in my chair in front of my computer and you give me 10 to 15 minutes to get my tantrum out, I almost always will start writing if that's what I'm meant to do. I need uninterrupted time in order to get my writing done.
I can do it in snack size bites, but if I have those blocks of time, I will do it however. It is hugely easy for me to schedule over my own blocks of time if something more pressing or urgent comes up. If I need to take somebody to the doctor, if I need to cover a class. And sometimes that's appropriate, and sometimes that's absolutely what you need to do.
You're the boss of you, you know your own values, and I am in no way encouraging you to abandon those. But if you are always running over those blocks, then it might be worth it to see how you can reinforce them. For example, when I am really busy, I use something that I call the 24 hour request rule, where if people ask me to volunteer my time, my services, will just hold off on responding to the email for 24 hours because my first instinct, whenever I receive a request is to be like, yes, absolutely. Of course I can do that because it's true. Some of it is because I like being needed, and some of it is because I like being part of a community, but it often does mean that I go over my own boundaries.
I give more than I mean to, and I don't have enough left in the time or energy tanks to do the more self-directed work. By instituting that 24 hour pause, it gives me a chance to let that initial rush of, there's a problem and I can fix it, or they invited me and I'm so special. Ego hit. It gives it a second for that to dissipate, and then I can truly evaluate.
Okay. It's not that I can't do this, but is this the best use of my time and energy in this specific instance,
and the third question that I want you to dig into as you're thinking about how to shift some of that energy from the a Triple plus job that you're doing on campus into your writing is how can you support yourself when things are feeling uncomfortable?
I mentioned a few minutes ago that when I sit down to write, I need about 10 to 15 minutes to get over my tantrum about how hard writing is. You can go through any of my group chats, especially in the last couple of weeks. And there I am being like, writing is stupid and hard and I don't wanna do it, and does anyone know what my writing is about? And if they could just tell me and also write it down, that would be great. I write it in my free writing sessions. I scribble it on my notebooks and my journals. I need to get some of that foot stamping.
This is hard and uncomfortable energy out before I can keep going. And as soon as I scheduled that in and stopped trying to rush myself through it, I can settle myself down and write a little bit more effectively. You might need to schedule in co-writing sessions or add in a little bit of community or visibility.
You might wanna start a writing group or a writing or a work together at your campus or in your department. Add some accountability, add some visibility, add some external people. But if you know that there are things that are really uncomfortable for you, think about how to support that. Because often we're jumping to these other tasks, not just because they're quick, not just because they're helpful, but because they help us feel a little bit less.
Not skilled at something. I don't feel confident in my writing skills a hundred percent of the time, but I feel very confident in my ability to show up to a meeting and be responsive and helpful and be in community. And I like feeling good at things more than I like feeling not so good at things. So of course my brain defaults to saying yes to opportunities that I know are gonna give me that hit of dopamine in connection and checking things off in momentum that I'm really craving. So if it's feeling a little uncomfortable, instead of thinking, how can I get more comfortable? Because you might never, I've been writing as an academic for longer than I care to admit at this point, and it is still uncomfortable for me.
So it's not about fixing the feeling, it's about supporting yourself so that that feeling can pass. I love that you invest in your teaching. I love that you invest in your communities and no part of me is saying don't do those things. This is just a call to say, how can we shift some of that energy from the a triple plus parts of your work into the parts that might need a little bit more attention going forward?
Thank you so much, and I will see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
6.1 intricate plans, instantly abandoned
welcome to season six of the podcast - this time, i'm going through the kinds of behaviors and patterns i see as a coach (and in myself, too) in a series i'm calling "just at me". we'll talk about how they show up, and how to shift them - with love and humor, of course.
this week is for any of us who are spending, ahem, a lot of time on making intricate plans - in our notebooks, planners, apps, and project management software, and then instantly abandoning them because life is going to life. if your weekly plan is already out of date when you're listening to this, this one is for you!
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
This season is called Just at Me already, where I go through all of the different kinds of people that I run into and have been myself as a coach for academics. And we talk about how to shift that if you want to. I.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
today. I'm lovingly, gently roasting all of my favorite people who make intricate plans down to the second color coded, look beautiful, highly decorated. Everything's in there, and then they're instantly abandoned. Let's talk about why this happens and what you might wanna do to shift it.
So, like I said, I have been all of these people. I am still some of these people and I am an intricate planner. Planning is one of my favorite ways to take my anxiety out for a walk. I like to look at all of my tasks all in one place. I like to look at my calendar. I like to match them up.
Like if I can plan it and it's all there, then it's definitely doable, and then my anxiety calms down for a second. A famous story about me is that once in the middle of one of the busiest points of my PhD program, I was getting married in two or three weeks and about to start my comprehensive exams, which I took on the weekend.
So I would teach and work all week write my exams on the weekend, and then the very last weekend of that three. Weekend cycle. I got married, so I was busy to say the least, and I came into my therapist's office with a chart of two weeks of work, literally mapped out to the 15 minute increment. I was like, okay, this is when I'll go to yoga.
This is when I'll drive home. This is when I go to the grocery store. This is when I will make dinner. And I was so proud of myself because I was like, look like I scheduled in seven hours of. Sleep, and I included all of these things that are so great for my body and my mind and my therapist looked at me and then said, okay, but what if you hit traffic on day two?
Which is something that often happened to me on the way home, and I realized that there was so much effort and work that I went into. That went into making this intricate plan and I was going to have to abandon it at some point because there are always things that are gonna come up. There will always be things that are gonna shift that schedule.
Internal things, external things, and. I find that once you abandon that initial plan, you fall into one of two categories. You might be the kind of person who feels such urgency and such a need for the plan that you stop everything and you redo it. You get a new page of your planner, you get a new to-do list, and you start all over again.
And all of that effort gets shifted into this cycle of plan shift, plan shift, and there's less and less time for the actual work. Or you tend to be a person that once you make the plan and you have to abandon it, you avoid it. You put it in a drawer, you try not to think about it, you then drift oftentimes further and further away from what you meant to do because you are afraid to even look in and see what you had planned to do.
Both of those categories have their pros and their cons. All of them are emotionally driven and all of them make it a little bit harder to use your best energy toward your most important tasks, which is all that a plan really wants you to do. If you find yourself using planning to manage your anxiety and not your work, your tasks, your time, your resources, your energy.
Here are three questions that I want you to check in with yourself. Question number one is what I am doing with my planning, helping me see what the highest priority items are. Is your plan a. Thing that you can look at it in a glance and say, okay, if I only have time to do three things, these are the most important three things.
If I only have time to do one thing right now, this is the most important thing to do. Oftentimes our plans devolve into lists, and I'm not saying that a to-do list isn't important or that there aren't seasons where a bucket of tasks are all that you can manage. But if all your plan is is a list of things to do or a list of times and appointments, it can be really hard to see the most important thing to use your best time and energy for.
Okay. Question two. What is going to help you plan out the various resources that you have to manage throughout the week? Now anybody who's ever heard the advice to block out time for your writing has thought about resources, right? When do you have a couple of hours without any meetings or just an hour?
If you're like most of us, when do you have childcare? When do you have time in a library? When do you have time away from campus? When do you have time? That also overlaps with the hours that the bank is open that you desperately need to go to. Thinking about what kind of resources you have, and the resources are gonna be highly dependent from person to person.
You might want to manage your best brain energy. Maybe your most limited resource is time in the lab or time in an archive. But whatever those resources are, is your planning strategy or what you're doing to help kind of think through what needs to happen next, helping you see what resources you have and when they are and aren't gonna be available to you to the best of your ability.
There are some resources, like for me, as a person with a chronic illness, my energy is something that I have sort of vague inklings about, but I can't plan it in advance. Which leads to question three, what is going to help you in your planning process, assess what you have in the moment? This self-assessment step, I find, is the one that we overlook the most frequently.
So if there's only one question that you're gonna take away from this podcast and think about, I want it to be this one. What's gonna help you Check in with yourself. Am I tired? Am I hungry? Do I need to take a rest? Am I doing what I'm meant to be doing? Am I in a space where I have everything that I need?
Am I. Ready to do this right now. These kinds of questions might seem silly or like the answer's not important. Who cares if you're tired, right? Katie? Like we're all tired all of the time. But if you are tired and you know that you have space tonight to have a good night's sleep, and tomorrow might be a better rested day, and it might be more useful for you to do some of those low energy tasks like go to the grocery store or fold your laundry or update your citations or click through and grade your discussion posts, whatever falls into that category for you. This isn't about giving yourself a pass. It's about noticing what you are, what you are, and how you're feeling and matching up what you need to do with the you that has showed up.
It's okay if you make intricate plans. I myself this morning sat making a list that is a rainbow colored and a bazillion pages long because it helped me think through everything that needs to be done this week. But I know that that energy is going to help me see the most important things that are on my plate this week.
It's going to help me make decisions about how to use the energy that I have, and that's all that I need my plan to do. Bonus points if it's rainbowed, bonus points if it's sparkly and makes me feel good. This isn't about never planning.
You're gonna find the system that works for you. I'm just offering some questions so that you can use your best planning energy to have your best week. See you soon.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.12 wave or boat - choosing when to work
when everyone is posting their desk selfies, or their out-of-office views, it can be really isolating when your flow doesn't match theirs. this week's episode is about how we choose, or choose not, to work, and how we can square that with what we see and what we feel. let's dig in!
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=Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
This week's episode is a phrase that I have found myself using more and more as the times keep becoming less and less unprecedented. And that phrase is sometimes it's the boat, and sometimes it's the wave. So the longer version of that phrase is sometimes work is the wave that's going to sink you.
And sometimes work is the boat. It's going to help you stay afloat amid all the waves. This is my way of explaining that sometimes work feels like the very last thing that we're going to be capable of, and there are other times where work feels like a tiny bit of stability inside a lot of instability.
I started saying this to myself, to clients because there is so much guilt about work, especially in an age where there is so much performativity around work. If you're working, when you're working, how much you're working, what you're working on, and you can feel really guilty if everybody else. Is working.
When you are feeling completely torn under by something really sticky in the world or in the political situation or in your own life more locally, it can feel really hard to be the one person according to Instagram or TikTok or wherever you're looking. The one person who's not working. And it can also feel really bad to be the person who is working where everybody else is.
Like, how can you do that? And that question is not a, Hey, how did you do that? Or What's helping you right now? But more of a judgmental, how can you do that? How can you work on this thing that is so insignificant when the rest of everything is just picture me flailing my arms around. And so this is my way of kind of explaining and giving space for the fact that sometimes it's going to be the wave.
It's the one thing that's going to completely throw you under. And so you can't do it. And there are sometimes where it's gonna be the one thing that's gonna help you ride out some of that storm. Someone is almost assuredly working through conditions that might take you. Off your game. There is probably someone right now who is working through the unimaginable that you can't imagine working through.
And also it's really a normal question to be like, why can't I do that? Why can't I put it to the side? Why can't I just set a timer and focus? Why can't I just close my email or not read the news or put my phone on silent. There are all of these questions, right? That really can be cudgels that we use against ourselves to be like, why can everybody do this, but not you?
But I'm here to say that sometimes you can't even really predict when work is going to be the thing that throws you completely off your game. There have been times in my life where on paper, I would've guessed that I was going to be able to work. That I'd be able to work through that, no problem. I'd done it before I would do it again, and I found myself on the couch watching Gilmore Girls or whatever comfort show of the week that was for sometimes days at a time, if not weeks.
There are some things where in my head, in my plans, I was going to be able to ride out that storm and I simply couldn't work was the thing that taxed my resources the most and I just couldn't get there. And other people were working through it and posting about it and making me feel really tough.
And it was useful for me to be like, you know what? Sometimes this is the one wave that's just gonna knock me out to sea and I don't have to swim in this right now. And then there were other seasons where I would have sworn to you for $1 million that there was no way that I was gonna be able to work.
Personal things that went wrong, world conditions that went wrong, configurations of my scholarly and humanly life where I was like, you know what? I bet that I won't be able to work through this. And then work actually became something really if not soothing, stable. It was something that I controlled.
It was a place where I could close the door and go somewhere else in my brain. And sometimes physically in my body going to coffee shops or the library or getting out of situations that felt really tough and overwhelming Sometimes I found that it was only making sense of my citations or only spending a little bit of time polishing sentences.
That gave me a little bit of breathing space. It gave me something concrete to focus on. Something to do with my energy when a lot of other options didn't feel as comfortable, and I'm sure that people were like, wow, what a monster. I can't believe that she can do that right now. I can't believe that she can focus on it.
And all I know is that in my body and my world and my configuration, it felt correct. It felt safe. It felt important to be working. There is no perfect mix. I wish that I could tell you that there was, but there is no perfect mix that's going to work all of the time of your humanity and your scholarship.
It is always going to be in flux. So if there's no way to say you should work through this, you shouldn't work through that or to give you any ironclad rules, what do I have to offer you this week? This week I have to offer you the. Absolute truth that if you don't have practices around checking in with yourself, knowing what your resources are, what your signs that you're edging into burnout are what weighs your body and your circle and your family will step in and signal to you that this is too much or this isn't enough.
If you don't have practices for checking in with yourself around what you have capacity for and what you don't, and either you are just steadfastly working no matter what the conditions or completely avoiding work, no matter what your capacity is, then you're gonna be in some sort of difficult state eventually.
It might not be soon. It might not be immediately, but that's a recipe for burnout or for some pretty hardcore avoidance. Working or not working without checking in with yourself. That's the thing that can get you into trouble. It isn't actually choosing to work or choosing not to work. Those things, more or less neutral. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's gonna help you and sometimes it's not. I'm not making any hard and fast rules about working or not working.
What I am saying is that if you are not doing those things, making those choices in conversation with yourself, with how you feel, with what you have to give, with your ability to focus with what your resources are, then that's the thing that we really wanna work on. I hope that this gave you some sort of solace.
I hope that this gave you a permission slip in either direction or at least reignited a little bit of a desire to check in with yourself before, during, and after your work sessions. This week, I'm gonna be taking a short break. I'll be back in October with a brand new season of the podcast. But thank you so much for joining me with this one.
I will see you all soon. Okay.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.11 don’t have to fix it - it feels hard because it is hard
if you have felt like the world's most powerful expert in your field on a monday, only to feel like the biggest beginner baby on tuesday, congratulations, you're an academic.
what if i told you that it wasn't a problem?
it feels hard because it is hard. let's get into it this week <3
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
This week's episode is all about the phrase, this feels hard because it is hard, and if I could give you one gift of compassion for yourself and for other people this week, it would be that phrase. It feels hard because it is hard now, academia life.
Being alive in 2025. It's all hard stuff, right? And I think that there's this idea that if we just try hard enough, if we get the right schedule, the right tools, if we read the right books, if we hire the right coach, it will all be easier and it will feel easier. And that the feelings that we have of being stuck, of struggling, of working really hard are signs that we're not doing enough, as opposed to.
Assign that actually what you're doing is really hard, and that's why it feels the way that it does now in academia specifically. It is hard work from top to bottom. It doesn't stop being hard because as you keep going, there are more things to learn, more roles to take on, more responsibilities to shoulder, and your life keeps moving too, right?
So you're moving into new life phases. Your family might have a new configuration, you might have new caretaking, responsibilities, all kinds of stuff. So it moves and fits and starts. You get feedback, whether that's direct or indirect, and then you have to keep going. In the microcosm of a writing project or the macrocosm of an academic career, you are always working in multiple drafts.
And it can be so difficult because one of the reasons that academia is so appealing to a lot of us is because we like school. We were good at school. I know that when I finished my undergrad, I felt like I was at the top of my game. I was an expert. I had completed a thesis. I had never known more than I did at that particular moment.
And then I got to grad school and it was this constant push and pull between, yes, I'm at the top of my field. I'm learning these things that are so complicated, I'm using them correctly in seminar. I'm writing these papers, they're getting accepted. I'm passing my exams. And then at the same time of feeling this.
Sort of incredible mastery. I also never felt like more of a beginner. I felt like I didn't know how to write. I felt like I didn't know how to read. I was going back to the beginning to learn all of these things that I thought I was really good at. You know, on Friday you're presenting a paper to your seminar and you're on the top of the world, and the next Monday you're getting feedback that the draft that you turned in was actually not at all what they expected, and you need to go back to square one.
That dissonance between I'm at the top and I'm also a beginner. I've never been better at this, but also I'm still learning is one of the hallmarks of academia, and I think that so much of the time we internalize this idea that if it's feeling difficult, if we feel like a beginner, if it's feeling like a challenge.
We feel sticky and heavy and stuck, then that means we're not doing it well and that there are other imaginary people out there who are only feeling the top of that wave and trough cycle. You know, they're only ever getting the standing ovations and the acceptances and the contracts and the jobs, and they're never going through some of that bottom stuff.
And of course it's easy to feel that way when academics cont tend to only really publicize the tops of those waves. Or when people are on social media showing you their to-do lists or how locked in they are at the coffee shop. And you're not really realizing that between every moment of success that you're seeing, there are probably so many more of difficulty.
Challenge starting from square one, going backwards, really feeling lost, that you just don't see. I can promise you that if you're looking at an academic anywhere, they have felt this dissonance between. It is hard, and also I've never been better at it, so I'm really encouraging you to lean into the idea that this is a feature of the academic life and it's not a bug.
This feeling, this feeling of it being really hard, never really goes away because it isn't tied to any external marker. If the feeling of being. Challenged by academia went away. It would've gone away already because think of all of the milestones that maybe you yourself have already accomplished. You have gotten accepted into the PhD program.
You passed your first classes. You made it through your coursework. You maybe you've passed your exams, maybe your prospectus has been accepted, maybe you've gotten that paper accepted. Maybe the journal article's been published, maybe even book chapters or whole books. It doesn't really matter because every accomplishment that you get, if it was going to make that feeling go away, it would've already and as.
Hard as it is for me to tell you this. I also hope there's a little bit of solace in the idea that as you keep going, here are a list of other things that don't make that feeling go away either getting the academic job, getting tenure, getting to be full professor, getting to be the chair of the department, elevating yourself into dean or an administrative role. None of it makes the feeling go away because that feeling isn't achievement driven. It's a feeling of I am working at the top of my game to do something that's incredibly hard and it feels this way because it is that hard. So to all of my friends. Who find themselves stuck in the feeling of this is so hard.
I encourage you to not ask yourself this week, what would I do to make this feel easier sometimes? That's a great question, but this week I want you to ask yourself, what would make it easier for me to do hard things? For example, if the question was not, how do I make it easier to pass my exams, but how do I make it easier to study and prepare as much as I need to in order to feel confident about my exams?
It's a switch from trying to. Change the way you're going about a task to trying to change the way you're supporting yourself through that task. Because these are really hard things and they might get easier with time. You're going to find that the first chapter of your dissertation is going to be harder than writing the fourth chapter, but still will always be hard.
It's always gonna be a hard thing. So instead of focusing on relentless improvement, maybe this week, give yourself a chance at relentless support instead. See you soon.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.10 reset or rest - getting past resistance
if you've ever sat at your desk, willing yourself to get unstuck, and not having it work, this episode is for you. i give you my two step formula, reset or rest, for getting past resistance, because belting yourself to your desk chair (actual suggestion i received once from a prof) isn't it.
mentioned:
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
If you have ever found yourself sticky, distracted, frustrated, or worse, this episode is for you. This is a saying, , an anchor phrase that I like to use, which is called reset or Rest, and it is a phrase that I use when re. Comes up now. Resistance looks different for different kinds of people. It can be when you're sticky, you're distracted, you are spinning your wheels, you're frustrated, you can't land.
For some people I know it looks like scrolling. It could look like switching between all of your tasks all at once. It could look like tab hoarding. It's as individual as the snowflake, but almost all of us have. Experienced resistance when we just don't wanna do it or we can't get into it, or we can't seem to figure it out.
We're just stuck. Now, many people will tell you to push through and there is some merit in that advice, I guess. If you keep pushing, sometimes you do get there, but I find that it is a recipe for burnout much more frequently than it's a recipe for success. So push through methods often look like, ah, set a timer and make yourself stick to it.
I had once a professor who recommended that you belt yourself to your chair if you were finding it hard to write because you would eventually have to do it if you were belted to your chair.
Now. There is some. A theory behind strong arming yourself into doing something. But what I find much more often is that that actually feeds the resistance. It makes it harder to keep going because not only are you, trying to do something that's very hard, which is why you're experiencing resistance in the first place, I guess.
But you are also now stuck in this loop where you're trying to do a hard thing. You find it hard, you feel some resistance, and then you amp up all of those negative feelings. By forcing, by cajoling, by punishing, by removing good stuff. It just leads to more frustration, more fear, more anxiety, because if every time you sat down to write, you had to physically belt yourself to your chair in order to do it, then of course you're going to avoid that.
You're going to find it harder to get excited for the next writing session. You are gonna find it harder to settle. It just doesn't work long term. You might get a short term gain, you might be able to do it that time, but as a sustainable solution, a sustainable strategy, I find that it does more harm than good.
Now, I of course, am not gonna leave you there and be like, this thing doesn't work. Good luck out there. Bye. But what I do find that works is if you offer yourself the choice to either. Reset or rest. This is part of a loop where you notice that you're getting distracted. Where you notice that you're feeling the resistance.
It is difficult to learn how to do that because for many of us, it feels like multitasking. It feels like busyness. It feels like we're at least removing something. But if you find yourself just sort of circling the task and never quite landing, noticing that. Next, accepting that and being like, yeah, I'm feeling it again.
Harder than it sounds. A skill to practice and then taking action. So as part of this notice, accept, take action strategy, that last part, the taking action is where the reset or rest comes in. A reset is something that I love. I love a good reset. I've talked about it on this podcast before. I will share links in the show notes, but basically to quickly sum it up, there are two types of reset.
In my vocabulary, there's a soft reset where I just say to myself, okay, we're resetting. I like to couple it with something physical a little bit of stretching, some wiggling, doing a lap around my office, or maybe a lap around your workspace. Switching tasks and being like, okay, this one doesn't work, but maybe this other one will.
But you basically give yourself the permission. To reset the vibes. You reset them physically, you reset them in terms of what you're working on, what you're focusing on, but instead of just staying stuck in that loop of resistance, you do something else. Now, soft resets work for me through the like gentle resistance.
If I'm really not feeling it that day, if it's really sticky, then I often need what I call a hard reset. Now a hard reset is definitely body forward. You need to do something different with your body. In order for this reset to really take, I find my go-to is a shower. I basically am just declare it a new day and do whatever I'm gonna do In my morning routine.
I take a shower. I sometimes go as far as to getting a new cup of my favorite hot beverage. I can offer myself a snack, but basically I'm giving my body a chance away from my desk to do something different. I find that the more overwhelming the difference, like the difference between my shower and my desk is pretty big, so that works really effectively for me.
But going in through my body, giving it a break, giving my mind, my literal eyes, a chance to do something different, hear something different, feel something different, and then coming back to it often works so much better than trying to think my way through it. That reset acknowledges that I'm not doing what I wanna be doing.
It gives me a chance to breathe, do something different, and then try again. You might say, oh, I don't have time for that. But what I find is that it actually is faster to acknowledge that you're stuck. Take a step to a ameliorate that situation and then come back to it than it is to try and sit and soldier way, soldier your way through it, and figure out how best to move forward without taking an action.
Now that's the reset side of the reset or rest equation. But more often than not, a rest is actually maybe what you need even more profoundly. I don't necessarily mean going back to bed, although sometimes a really good nap can do it. There are lots of different kinds of rest. There's community, rest and creativity.
Rest and sensory rest. I will link to a great article in the show notes to help you explore the different kinds of rest, but giving yourself a chance. To replenish can often make much more of a difference than punishing yourself until you feel ready to work. My therapist likes to say that we're all just big toddlers and that a snack and a nap fixes most things, and I wish that that were less true.
But for me, it really is, and for you it might be as well. So give yourself that chance to say, okay, I am probably finding this even harder than normal because I'm tired, because I'm sensory overloaded, because I'm burned out because I had a really intense few days. I had a really intense situation this morning, and I need to rest before I can try again.
And like resetting where it often is faster to take care of yourself and come back to it. I find that adding rest into the flow of your day or your week can be much more effective than waiting until you absolutely collapse and then resting all at once. So taking some time to give yourself some physical rest to go and stretch your body, to take a fitness class, to have a snack.
All of these different things help you notice, accept where you're at and take action as opposed to just trying to do everything through your brain. This can be hard advice to take sometimes. It's definitely stuff that I am still working on, but when you find resistance, I encourage you this week to reset or rest.
See you soon.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.9 everything changes - when what worked before doesn't work now
few things can be scarier than the feeling of "wait, this used to work....why doesn't it work now?" if you've always studied, written, read, or scheduled in a certain way, it is easy to jump to shame-filled conclusion when you aren't getting the same results. this episode talks about that moment, and what you can do when you find yourself in a new season.
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
this week's episode is called Everything Changes or What Worked Before Might Not Work Now, and Why? That's okay. This is one of the biggest hurdles that I see my clients go through. They turn to things that have worked for them in the past. Certain tools, programs, habits, routines, you name it, they've used it in the past.
It worked in the past, and then when they try and use it, now it doesn't, and that causes a spiral. Because What do you mean it doesn't work? What do you mean? That the scheduling tricks I've always used, or this habit or this routine that have always gotten me through aren't doing the trick right now. I first see this hurdle show up.
A lot of times when people are starting to prepare for their first like big end of semester push in grad school, they turn to what worked for them in undergrad, and obviously it worked because they're in grad school and so they turn to all of their tools, whether that is scheduling or time blocking or what have you, and then they find that.
It just doesn't work the way that it used to. Maybe they needed more time to work on those papers. Maybe they needed less. Maybe they were over focusing on readings. Maybe they weren't spending enough time managing their to-do list across all of their different responsibilities. It doesn't really matter what happens, but when what worked before doesn't work, now, it can cause panic because you're like, okay, I've always been able to do this and now I can't.
I must not be ready for grad school. I must not be able to do this, and I assure you that that is not the case. What worked before might not work now, but that doesn't mean that it won't ever work. It just might mean that you need new tools. The problem is that our lives, especially in grad school, especially as you get older, they change and they change in different ways than you're maybe used to.
You might have a different set of demands semester to semester, or honestly even week to week, depending on what your life looks like. Maybe there are seasons where you need to do a lot of research. What you need. The tools that will help you thrive in a season like that, most likely won't be the same tools that really support you through a teaching heavy semester.
You might also have changing resources. Resources like time or energy or childcare or access to research funds. Those things all fluctuate. And as they fluctuate, the tools that you need to manage and account for them are probably gonna change too. Now, you might also be of a brain flavor that sometimes just needs a little novelty.
So sometimes I work with clients and they are mystified because what was working before doesn't work anymore, and it's because it's gotten a little stale. It's gotten a little boring. Their brain needs that hit of dopamine, and they've gotta change things up purely for the sake of novelty.
Any of those changes don't mean that you're broken or that you're never gonna be able to figure it out. They just mean that new methods are needed to cope with new conditions. I think a lot of times when the tools that have worked before don't work anymore, we can feel like we're backsliding, like we are not able to handle challenges that we felt like we had under control.
It can be a really bewildering feeling to be like, man, I used to be so good at getting everything checked off on my to-do list, and now I'm terrible at it. Or to be like, I really knew how to write a paper and now I don't know how to write a paper. That feeling of this isn't working in the way that it used to.
Can feel like a personal failing, like I used to be good at this and now I'm not. I'll never be able to be good at it. And I just want to assure you again that that's not necessarily true. It often means that you're either at a new level working with a new set of conditions, or maybe you're just doing something new.
And when you're doing something new, you often need new tools and new support. The most important question to ask is not, can I do this? But is what I'm doing now, working in the way that I need it to, and I'll say that again because it's an important question, is what I'm doing now to support myself working in the way that I need it to.
And if not, that's okay. If yes, carry on. Feel free to skip the rest of this episode. If no, the answer to that question isn't a value judgment. It doesn't mean anything about you or your work habits or your dedication or your discipline. It just means that you need to change things up.
I'll run you through a short example so that you know what this might look like for you when it's not working, and what you can do to pivot. One of the tools that I have the most up and down binary relationship with is time blocking. Now, there are certain seasons in my life where time blocking is the most important tool in my arsenal for getting things done. It was essential for me in seasons and semesters where I had a really heavy teaching load because I had these irregular time patterns. My classes didn't always meet at the same time, and I had immovable commitments.
My class met whether I was there. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So I had to be there Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and there wasn't any, eh, I'll move this to Tuesday. I'll switch this around to to Thursday. It had to be what it had to be. So the only way for me to get my resources aligned when in these seasons, it often was like quiet time away from campus, away from my students who, bless them, always wanted more from me, more answers, more office hours, time.
I needed time. To myself with all of the supplies that I needed for my writing, which was often access to my research, access to my notes, different drafts, a computer that was pleasant to type on. I needed to get all of those resources aligned, and the best way to do that was to know ahead of time when I was gonna be writing.
So I would set up writing blocks often for the days that I wasn't on campus and wasn't teaching, and I protected them with a ferocity never before seen and probably not seen again. I was so committed to blocking off that time that it was the only way that I could get the writing done, and I knew it was in my schedule.
It was protected, and it made it easy for me to show up for those writing sessions and actually make progress even though my schedule was jam packed. Now, time blocking was beyond frustrating and almost useless when I was on fellowship because I had a much more open schedule and my phone would ring and it would say, okay, it's Tuesday at 10 time to do your writing.
And a voice in me would say, you're not the boss of me. And I would just straight up and not write. Not for any particular reason, not because I couldn't write, but because I didn't like my phone bossing me around and because there wasn't that intense time pressure around this or this or nothing at all, I just didn't do it.
And it actually became harder to make my writing happen in the beginning of my fellowship than it was when I was teaching and three times as scheduled. So I had to lean into other methods of making my writing feel inviting and actionable, which usually looked like a lot more detailed to-do lists. It looked like writing co-working sessions with friends that were scheduled, but had that.
Added hit of accountability and it looked like a lot more creativity, where if I wanted to spend the morning reading I did because it helped keep me in the world of the project. And as long as I did some writing, most days, I knew I was on track. It's not easy to switch tools. It's not easy to feel like there's no one magic routine or structure that's gonna work for you all the time.
But if you can give yourself permission to embrace the idea that everything changes, it can take some of that hit of shame and frustration. And I will never be able to do this out of these moments of reevaluation because I promise you, we all have them. Many of us switch up the ways that we work and live regularly for novelty reasons and because everything changes.
I hope that this gives you a little bit more permission to try something different. Try something new and give yourself a little bit of patience while you figure it out. See you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.8 momentum is fleeting - work for clarity instead
work every day! write every day! finish your dissertation in 15 minutes a day! there are endless variations of this writing advice, but they almost all depend on you being able to show up, and work effectively, as frequently as possible. but what if that isn't possible, for any number of reasons? what can you count on if momentum isn't going to be a sustainable fuel for you?
let's try clarity - and in this episode, i'll give you a bunch of ways to try and build it in!
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
Have you ever forced yourself back to your desk even though you weren't feeling well, you didn't have the time, or you had something else more important to do because you were worried about losing your momentum? Have you ever looked back at a good string of writing days and thought, yeah, that's it.
That was the momentum I had it. Have you been wishing for that momentum to visit you again and not really understanding why it hasn't? Well, this is the episode for you. I. Think that perhaps the most common piece of advice, especially for writing, is to do it every day, even for a minute, even for 15 minutes.
Some people will prescribe 15 minutes or a hundred words. It really depends, but everyone says, work every day. Show up every day. Build that consistency, make it a habit. A lot of the advice just pushes this idea that you have to keep going, that you have to have that momentum and. I have seen that be true for some people, but what I've really seen is that it makes it all feel very fragile because what happens when you can't make it back every day?
What if you have a teaching schedule or a caretaking schedule or a body or a brain that just doesn't want to, can't, can't access the everyday rhythm? What if momentum isn't really possible for you? If momentum is possible for you, feel free to turn this off. Keep going. You have other things to do with your day, but if you've been frustrated by that idea that if momentum isn't real or if momentum isn't something I can access, then how am I gonna make steady, measurable plannable process?
Then I have some good news for you because I think that at least 80% of the time when we say that we have momentum with a project, we actually mean that we have clarity. If you've been writing every day for two weeks, you probably have a lot of clarity about your argument, about your text. It all feels recent and alive.
And if you don't have detailed notes, it's not that much work to figure out where you left off because it was just a couple days ago, and you'll be able to quickly and effectively access what needs to come next. There's a clarity that comes from being in the head space of the project. When you know where you are and what needs to be done, it's so much easier to get started.
It's easier to stay in that flow and that rhythm because you're not using all of your energy to reorient or refamiliarize yourself. I know that one of the hardest things about getting started for me after some time away is that it takes so much time and energy to spin it back up. I know that I can have some real resistance.
To opening that document again, to finding my notes, hunting down where things are. I've even worked with clients that can't bring themselves to turn on the computer. I get it. That resistance is real. And a lot of times when people say they have momentum, they mean that that resistance is gone because they know where that next step is coming.
So if you are looking for momentum. And are finding that it's hard or maybe even feeling impossible to access. Here are some quick things that you can do to introduce some clarity so that you might still be able to feel that energy moving forward, even if a specific every day or very frequent rhythm isn't possible for you.
Step one, spend some time leaving good notes for yourself. Where to start the next day, what you were thinking about, what to read. You can do this in a couple of different ways. I like to use a task manager for this. I also am a big fan of post-it notes and scribbled down notes everywhere. I even know someone who used to leave their writing in the middle of a sentence just to make it that much easier to pick back up again, but.
It might feel like wasted time to leave those notes, but I promise that future you will be grateful that past you left them some breadcrumbs to follow on the trail. Next, make your tasks as actionable, small and concrete as possible. If you are in the habit of having really big task things on your list, like write the method section instead, try and break that down into 15 or maybe even 20 tasks, like describe the lab equipment, describe the process for filling out those vials.
Write a sentence, introducing this citation. Make sure that your citations are formatted. These small concrete tasks are gonna help you feel like you know what the next steps are because they're clear as opposed to something as big and nebulous as write that section. You might wanna schedule some time to reread your writing or your notes to re-familiarize yourself with projects that are feeling dormant.
I sometimes like to think about this as taking an old project out for a coffee date where I get myself a nice treat, I make a good cup of coffee, and I just spend time reading through things to reorient myself. Not squeezing that in in the beginning of a session when I'm trying to quote unquote, make a lot of writing progress, helps me feel like I'm dipping my toe back in, in a way that feels useful and like I'm moving forward without adding extra pressure into my very precious writing time.
Or you could experiment with spending a few minutes, even two or three journaling about your work to ease into the head space on the days where it would feel hard or impossible to do more. I used to think about this like sending a voice note or a quick check-in text to a friend that I couldn't see. You know that there are some seasons in your life where you would love to spend hours on the phone with a good friend or maybe see them or go for a walk or a hike or whatever you do, but it's not possible.
So instead of just ignoring them and hoping that they're still there for you in a couple of weeks, why don't you send them a quick text and say, Hey thinking about you, hope you're doing well. How's this specific thing going? It's a much lower lift. It's definitely not gonna take the place of some really good quality time, but it's gonna help you feel connected.
Journaling about your work can be that way too. Spending two or three minutes in between classes or recording a voice note when you're in the pickup line. About your work is gonna help you maintain that connection, that feeling of clarity, so that when you do have a little bit more time or a few more resources, you're gonna feel that much more connected and that much less distant.
And then lastly, challenge this idea that momentum is something ineffable that you can't control. I know that when I was looking at sports teams growing up, there was this sense that like, momentum was something that visited a team, that you couldn't control it, that it just sort of arrived and that it was powerful but impossible to schedule.
I don't think this is exactly true for our writing for our academic process in general, start believing if you can, that you are in charge of clarity. Momentum might be something that you don't have as much control over, but clarity is something that you can create through practices, through habits, through tools that help you outsource a lot of that work that happens when you're working on something consistently to keep it fresh.
Gives you a little bit of a chance to access that when the rhythm itself isn't going to be doing that heavy lifting. I hope this has been helpful for you. It's always helpful for me to remember that even if one specific rhythm isn't accessible to me in a certain time or season of my life, that there are ways to feel how I wanna feel using different tools. See you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.7 gas will expand to fit the container - boundaries and time
if gas will expand to fit the size of the container, academia must be the most gaseous substance on earth. this week's episode is all about the way that grad school will expand to fit every second it can - and how to combat that with containers of your own so that you have space for your humanity and your scholarship.
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
today in further adventures of Katie drags up things she learned in earlier science classes to help you see and help herself see some of her behavior in a new light. Let's talk about how gases expand to fit the size of the container.
This is the idea that a gas will expand to fit the container, not that it has a stable. Size I regardless of the container. If you have a physical block and you put it inside of a cup, the block made of wood won't expand to fit the cup. But if you have a bunch of oxygen gas in that same cup, you will find that it expands to fill a drinking cup or the same amount of gas will fill a coffee mug or a gallon jug.
On and on and on. The gas will expand in a way that a physical wooden block just won't.
Okay, now this shows up for me and for a lot of the people I work with in the way that the task that they're working on seems to expand, to fit the time that's available to it. Now you might say, okay, I have what I estimate to be two hours of grading to do today, and if you have two hours and 15 minutes with tight boundaries on either side in which to do that grading.
Sometimes, chances are you might get it done. The grading fits in the container that you have to give it. Now, if you have eight hours open and available all day without any hard boundaries like needing to go somewhere or run errands or teach another class, then you might find that that two hours of grading magically expands to fit the eight hours that are available to it.
This is very common for me. It's common for a lot of people that without those containers to keep a task right sized, it's really easy for the task to expand. Now, academia is, to my knowledge, one of the most gaseous substances on earth. In that, I mean, academia will absolutely expand to fit all of the time that it has available.
Because so much of the work is self-directed and because there is always something that you could be doing in grad school, it's really easy for it to expand and take over every second that you give it, and a lot of seconds that you didn't mean to give it. This happens in one of two ways. I find. One is that the task will expand to fit the time that you have available because there isn't always something really pressing that makes it so that it needs to be finished and done.
Now there are some tasks that this isn't true for, like grading. Eventually your grades do have to be in, although sometimes you can find ways to really drag your feet on that too. But things like chapter drafts where you pick your own deadline. Or, you know, studying or reading that thing, there's a real sense that you should do it, that it would be helpful for you to do it, but there's no real firm boundary or container that forces that activity to have an end point.
So. If you are working on a chapter and your advisor doesn't notice that your September 1st deadline has flown by and you don't say anything, it can easily go until October or November or sometimes even later before anybody says, Hey, how's that chapter? And it's not that you haven't been working on it, it just means that it's been expanding and expanding and expanding to fit the time that it had available.
Okay, so if one problem is that tasks will expand because there's not as much external accountability, the kind of self-directed nature of a lot of this work. The other problem is that oftentimes no one is going to step in and make a boundary unless you do it yourself. So if you're looking for that container to be made in the way that external containers used to be made for you classes and semesters would end, papers would be due.
Professors would send you kind, but pushy emails, Hey this thing is due in 12 hours, or it was due a couple of days ago. People were on your case in a way that once you hit certain levels of grad school, they're just not anymore. So it is very rare almost. Unheard of to have somebody step in and say, Hey where's that chapter?
Or to even stop and say, Hey, I think you're letting the work writ large, take over more of your life than you should. It is very uncommon for an advisor to say, Hey, your teaching is really great, and I wonder what would happen if you took a little bit less time on teaching prep and shifted some of that energy into something like self-care.
Or spending time with your family. The reason that this is so hard in academia is because your advisor or your chair, whoever is responsible for your dissertation, often isn't responsible for your teaching. They are sometimes not responsible for your research. You might have three or four different people who are in theory, supervising various parts of your professional life, but no one of them usually has the whole picture.
And there is often a sense that they're just gonna let you cook, right? They're just going to assume that you have it unless you tell them otherwise. So they're not going to actively mentor you in the way where if you were working at a company and you had one direct supervisor, they might take more of an interest in helping you balance the various parts of your job, the various.
Ways that your job interacts with your life, one person is easier to do it. And when you have the aggressively hands-off nature of many supervisory relationships, coupled with the fact that different people supervise different parts of your life, no one's really gonna step in. And say, Hey, I think this is taking up too much space.
I don't think this is getting enough space. And if they do it, it often is in a reactionary. Things aren't going the way that we want to, and it feels like a really harsh criticism rather than an active mentoring step. So let this podcast episode be some of that active mentoring where I say, what things in your life are expanding to fit a container that's maybe too big for them?
For example, when I was in grad school, I loved to teach. Teaching lit me up. I think I've talked about that before on this podcast. But I could spend all day, all week, all month, all summer, working on my lesson plans. I loved to do reading, to fill out my syllabus. I loved to prep assignments and often. I spent more time on that to the exclusion of some of the other things that I also needed to get done.
So if the choice came between watching two new movies to see which one was going to be the better one for my lesson, and doing some research for my dissertation, I often picked prep for my class, or I picked grading, or I picked a meeting with a student for that extra office hour that they requested that I really shouldn't have scheduled during my writing time.
Teaching would expand to fit whatever time I gave it. So I had to be. Hard with myself and give myself the support I needed to sit through that uncomfortable moment of I'm switching from something that I really like, that I get immediate value from, into something that is hard for me, that is emotionally intensive and that makes me feel more of a beginner than I'd like to, which is how I felt about my writing.
So I had to be really conscious of the fact that I needed to make the teaching container smaller so that other space in my life. Was a little bit more available for you. You might notice that there are some things that no matter what happened, they just don't get enough space. . It could be aspects of your job. It could be aspects of your life. It could be your physical health, your relationships, your community, your commitments outside of academia, whatever it is. There usually is something that's not getting the attention that you need, and it might be because it doesn't have a designated container.
I have always struggled with moving my body. Enough, let's say, I love to think, I love to be at my desk. I can get stuck there, and so it's hard for me to be like, yeah, I should absolutely stop what I'm doing and go for a walk or go to a workout class. So in order to make that container for myself during my PhD program and for a long time afterward, I would sign up for exercise classes that made me pay a financial penalty if I skipped them.
Which is a very extreme way of creating a container. So I would create a container for the task, and then the task would be in it. And if I didn't fill that task, if I didn't go to that class I would lose 15 bucks, which was a lot of money, and it was enough to get me to stop what I was doing and switch and do something else.
So this week's episode is just a call to say that it's not that you are inherently bad at doing any of these self work life balance things. There is no real such thing. There is no. Real practical, stable sense of work life balance. At least not in my estimation. We're always changing. The work is always changing.
The life is always changing, so it makes sense that we're always trying to get to a place where we're monitoring the containers. Are we giving enough space to the tasks that we want to, are the things that aren't getting enough attention? Do they have containers to fill or are we hoping that they'll just squeeze in somewhere?
Miraculously, these are active skills to practice and they're also not a final destination. There's something to keep an eye on and something to work. So I hope that you this week can find a container or two that needs a little tweaking and see if that helps you feel a little bit more empowered to do what you wanna do as a scholar and a human.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.6 show your work - complex problems need complex solutions
i used to HATE it when my teachers told me to show my work - why would i slow down and write down steps that are so obvious i could do them in my head? turns out that making physical records of your thinking - even if they're messy! even if you have to redo them! - is really helpful, especially as your work gets more complex. and what's more complex than the work you have to produce in grad school??
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
this week's episode is called Show Your Work, and this is advice that I give all of the time, despite being personally frustrated with it many, many times. If you were to zoom back in time and look at elementary or middle school or even high school, me, I would be sitting at my desk refusing to show my work.
Because why would I slow down and show all of the steps that I took to solve a math problem? If I could look at the paper and know what the answer was, why would I take extra time to write unnecessary thought processes down so that people could follow them after the fact? I don't like going slowly. You might not like going slowly, but as in math class and in the PhD, there are a lot of benefits to showing your work because even if you can do it in your head, there are so many reasons why it can help to write out your thought process.
One, it can trace your thinking after the fact. You might be able to, in the moment, in the middle of a calculus class, write down all of the, the answer to that derivative. But if you go back 10, 15, maybe more years later, it might be helpful for you to trace the steps back. You might not remember all of the things that you did in order to solve that derivative.
It was clear to you at the time, it might not be after the fact. Slowing down and showing your work helps you be more intentional. It gives you a chance to let your brain work at a different pace and see all of the places where you might be getting stuck and. As any person who maybe didn't do as well in math class knows you can get partial credit, right?
Like you can say, okay, I understood this part and not that part. The same benefits apply here. In your PhD or your grad school process because showing your work gives you a physical record of your thinking. I don't know about you, but I know that when I come back to my notes after a couple of weeks, maybe even months away from a project, I'm almost always grateful that past me took down some.
Because even if it felt really clear and fresh when I was in the middle of the project, sometimes I unexpectedly have to put things down and having a record of what I was thinking and why is more valuable than I can say. Next complex problems demand complex solutions. You might not need to show your work for simple arithmetic, but you definitely might for something more advanced like a calc proof.
So why wouldn't the same be true for your PhD? Why wouldn't it be true that there are simple things that you can do in your head, and there are other things that it is helpful to let yourself slow down and work through complex ideas on paper. This also can help you when you get stuck because you'll be able to see where exactly the wheels are coming off your particular thought process or problem.
I know that oftentimes I sit with clients and I say, okay, like let's walk this through step by step. First you did this and then you did this, and it often becomes clear when you start to write down those steps. That actually this is where I got stuck, or this is where I have a choice that I'm not sure I know how to make.
And when you're just sort of ruminating on it in your head and it's that constant ticker tape of anxiety just running through your brain at all times, it can be really hard to slow down and say, okay, this is actually what's feeling stuck. Instead of just being like, ah, I don't know how to do this. It also can let other people see your thinking in a more tangible way.
A math test is one thing. You might get it, start it, finish it all within the space of an hour, there are very, very few tasks in your grad school career while you will be given the task, and then you will sit down and finish and then get feedback right away within an hour. So it's helpful to have a physical work product that you can show other people, a writing group, an advisor, even your future self, so that you can make some of that internal work a little bit more external and make it easier to share.
Okay, how's this gonna look? Katie? I understand what it means to show my work in a math problem, but what does it mean for my PhD? This might mean that you take some notes during reading. Some of us are pen fiends and we really like to take notes because it's a chance to use our notebook or our fancy obsidian setup.
And the idea of taking notes is totally great. Others of us would like to just read. And get on with things. If you are a person who does not normally take notes, I encourage you to maybe develop a lightweight note taking system. It doesn't have to be fancy, it doesn't need to be extensive. You don't have to print things out, but a place where you can just sort of record the complex thoughts that I guarantee you are going through your head as you read other pieces of scholarly work or primary sources or secondary sources, or any of the things that you have to during your grad school process.
This might look like free writing. I am a big proponent of free writing because I think that it helps us practice the writing muscle outside of the higher stakes of, oh my gosh, I'm in a draft. So maybe showing your work is sitting down at your desk and trying to write maybe say, 300, 400 words about a specific problem.
I just wanna normalize the fact that your free writing could be messy and completely not for public consumption. Almost all of my free writing sessions start with at least two to three sentences up top about how much I hate free writing and how much I wish I weren't doing this. But often as I kind of get that muscle going, it's like the first couple of minutes of a group workout class where you're like, Ooh, I really wish I wasn't here.
But then after you're there and you're experiencing the structure, things flow a little bit easier. This might look like tentative outlines or physical tools like index cards to shuffle around and play with the structure of an argument that stuck. I can't tell you how many times when I was trying to draft or revise a chapter that I had to physically sit down and make my piles of books or write things down on pieces of paper and shuffle them around, have other people look at my outline.
Look at the blocks and say, yes, this makes sense, or no, this doesn't. Somehow using something tactile made it feel more real to me and it made it a little bit lower stakes. I'm just making an outline. I am just shuffling note cards around on a table, but it made it so that it wasn't just in my head, it existed somewhere else.
This could look like early drafts or writing an abstract for a paper that's not done yet, or drafting out some figures just so that you can see what that chart or that table might even look like. You know, it's not gonna be the final product, you know that there's gonna be four or five other versions of it probably, but it gives you something physical to look at your thinking from a more external place.
This might also look like on the kind of higher order scale of things, conference papers or journal articles or guest lectures where you know that you're working on a big multi-year project, like a dissertation or a book, and so you chunk off a little piece of it to teach to your undergrad. Or to present in a grad seminar for a friend or to present at a conference paper or to submit for that book chapter.
It's a way to take a smaller piece of that process and make it more real, more concrete so that you can keep moving forward. Showing your work is vulnerable. It's messy. It forces you to slow down. And a lot of us like to go fast because deep down, we all think we have to move fast all of the time because there's so much work and there's never enough time to do it all.
But I promise you that even some messy work, um, a. Outline in a notebook that you might never look at again, a series of note cards to help you shuffle through some big terminology or organize a a lit review. It is going to be messy. You might never show it to another soul. You might, uh, rip that page out of your notebook and start again.
But it helps you build a drafting mindset. And so many of us are in grad school and finding it difficult because for the first time, the tools that work for us. In earlier phases of our educational career aren't working as well anymore. You used to be able to sit down and write a pretty good first, or maybe even a pretty good final draft within a few days or maybe the night before something was due, and all of the sudden you're being asked to work on something that's multiple orders more complex than what you're used to.
It might be multiple orders, more length than you're used to. It is. In a style that's unfamiliar. It's so many reasons why grad school work can be hard. Giving yourself a chance to practice the idea that there is a lot of work that you create that isn't the final product only helps build that drafting mindset.
I know that the most prolific the most on time, the most comfortable writers. And that I know of are the ones that produce a lot of work for every word that ends up in a final draft. And that's not them wasting time. That is them externalizing all of this complex thinking that I promise you that you're already doing and making it so that it's tangible, it's measurable, and it'll help you move things forward just a little bit.
I hope this helps and I can't wait to see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.5 objects in motion - ways to get moving
if you find yourself curled up like a shrimp in your desk chair, or stuck making ever more complicated plans and to do lists - this episode is for you. i take newton's first law of motion and use it to give you the permission you need to start - anywhere - because once you're moving, it's easier to stay moving. and moving is where the magic is.
mentioned:
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
This week we're talking about the phrase objects in motion, or the full phrase, objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Now, I'm not a scientist, but I believe this comes from physics, and it's the idea that it's a lot easier to keep something in motion once it's already been in motion, that there is a startup cost to getting started, like the friction between a ball.
The ground that you need to overcome with a push in order for it to stay in motion, but that once that energy has been applied, it usually tends to stay applied unless something else acts on it. Now, like I said, this isn't about physics. This is a metaphor like so many of my other ideas are, but this is a metaphor for how I notice a lot of clients' energy works throughout the day.
So how might this look for you? I personally can get a little bit stuck. Especially when I am in a season of overwhelm, or if time is short or if I feel any pressure whatsoever, I can do something that looks a lot like freezing or staying in place. Now, sometimes this looks. From the outside, very productive.
I'm planning, I'm making notes in my notebook. I'm reorganizing my to-dos. I might even be investing in a new to-do list manager, but I am not in motion. I'm not making much. I'm not. Doing much. I'm sort of stuck in that pre-launch phase of thinking things through and trying to figure out the best plan.
Sometimes this actually looks really physical for me, where I am stuck at my desk scrolling. I am stuck in bed scrolling. I might be sitting on the couch. You guessed it. Scrolling scrolling is my go-to stuck activity. Yours might look a little bit different. The idea is that I sometimes am stuck and I can get really in my head as a lot of us can about what the best thing the right thing is to start.
But the thing that always helps me get started is to remember that. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and that it often doesn't even really matter what I do. But if I start doing things often, I do things after those initial things. Once I get started, things keep going. So this does look different on everybody as I mentioned, but the, I'm going to talk about two different categories.
When the body feels stuck and when the brain feels stuck, because. It looks different for everyone and sometimes it helps to have strategies that are specific. So this is an episode that's almost a corollary to the what feels possible episode. What feels possible is the warmup question that I ask myself when I notice that I'm stuck.
But the theory behind it is that once I get going, it's easier to stay going. So start anywhere. What feels possible if you tend to be or are in a state of feeling body stuck, where you can't quite get up, you're feeling sticky, you are maybe scrolling or doing whatever your avoidant activity is, I invite you to physically move your body.
This, I say with full awareness is this can be one of the hardest things in the world. And then if it were as easy is me just saying, Hey, find a new place to work, or Why don't you try that coffee shop? Then I would make a million dollars because they would've fixed all of your problems. But I often feel a huge burst of energy.
If I do what I call, start moving the body first and let the brain catch up. I get up, I start doing the dishes, I pick things up off my desk. If I'm feeling really ambitious, it might look like going to a new location. Sometimes it's as big as just changing the position that my body is in. If I am like a cooked shrimp, I'll curled up in my desk.
I might try just starting to put my feet flat on the floor unhooking a little bit of that body curve that I'm normally in and putting some hands in a more stretched out position. I might actually stretch. Sometimes it's about just physically starting any task. I like to start with tidying because my brain gets overwhelmed pretty easily by clutter.
So I will just start picking stuff up. And now that I have a toddler, there's always stuff to pick up. But let's be real. I was a mess before that anyway. But the idea is that if your brain is feeling stuck, move the body first. I don't make any grand promises to myself. Like once I do the dishes, I'm gonna start writing.
It's just I'm gonna get started. And usually once I put a dish the sink, I usually then find it a little bit easier to put some dishes in the dishwasher. I might then move on to tidying some counters, and eventually I build up enough momentum. That is a little bit easier to get started on maybe my main priority tasks for the day.
But when in doubt, move the body first and then see if the brain wants to follow. And if not, at the very least, you've picked some mugs up. You've put some of your massive mug collection in the dishwasher, and that's not nothing. That means you'll have some clean mugs for tomorrow, and that's always gonna help.
If you are feeling just some intense brain stickiness now this can look a lot more subtle than the body things because like I said, it might look from the outside like you're doing stuff. I look quite on top of things when I am in my planner picking the perfect shade of blue pen to match this week's layout, looking at my tasks, copying them ever so beautifully into my preferred to-do list manager of choice.
But. It's not doing the things, it's getting the pre-launch stage is beautiful and as aesthetic as I can make it. . You might just wanna know for yourself what your treading water looks like. For me, it's definitely planning using my planners, using my pens, making the to-do list, perfecting the to-do list, prioritizing the to-do list just perfectly.
And that's what it looks like for me. But for you, it might look like reading yet another article. It might look like making sure that there isn't been anything published that you needed to be published. It might look like free writing for you, where you sit down and you draft and you draft and you draft.
It might look like revising. Like I said, it's gonna look a little bit different for everyone. So if you are a reader in your treading water stage, you might want to take a few notes. By, by hand can be a really great way to feel a little bit of motion that can kinetic sense of the pen on paper, but maybe it's about typing some notes in the same window just to keep the friction as low as possible.
If you are a planner and you really like to spend like me, then you pick a task, any task, and you just start it. You say, that is a beautiful enough plan for today, and you pick a task. But. The idea is that you start something that feels like it's moving more than what you're doing already because objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and what I find is that once you get kicked off into the sort of doing phase of whatever your day is, it's easier to stay in that phase. It is so hard to manage your time, especially if you, like all of us can't have a consistent writing schedule every day.
Maybe don't have a body or a brain that produces the same energetic or physical or emotional conditions every day. So these are some easy ways to kind of make it so that you can feel that motion, even if it's not the exact same set of conditions that you experienced the day before.
I hope that this has been helpful. It's certainly been helpful for me, and I can't wait to see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.4 unlimited restarts - for distracted brains and tricky days
i am sure this never happens to you but - i sometimes say that i'll get to my desk by 9:15 am, and then it's 10 and i think "well, gotta try again tomorrow!" or i'll mean to start with one task and do six other ones and then feel so badly about not doing what i meant to that i'll watch XO, KITTY instead. this is the phrase i use to help myself get back to what i meant to spend my time and energy on, and i offer it here in case you, too, could use an extra restart or two.
mentioned:
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
Today's episode, we're talking about the phrase unlimited restarts. Now, if you've worked with me in any capacity, you've probably heard me say this, but this is actually one of the phrases that I use the most myself because I need unlimited restarts. You don't get just one chance to start something, you can actually keep starting over and over again.
Maybe you like me, can get a little bit frozen, a little bit shut down. Especially if you get too in your head about advice, like eat the frog or start your day with the hardest thing, or make a schedule and stick to it. Now this is all useful. Practical advice, it can help to start the day with the hardest thing or to have a schedule because it takes some of the decision making out of the way, right?
You start with a big win. You know what you're gonna be doing when that's great, but if anything happens to disrupt the start of that day, then a lot of us have trouble with that. Maybe you sleep in, maybe you get derailed by an email. Maybe the cat knocks over the coffee. Maybe something unexpected happens, and then before you know it, it's an hour or it's two hours, or it's a day after your imagined start, or that imagined thing that you thought you were going to be working on.
It's been set aside and you think, man, I have two choices. I can restart tomorrow and then do tomorrow perfectly, or I can work on something easy so that I don't waste all this time and I'll just save that hard thing for tomorrow. I'm here to offer you a third path, which is what about unlimited restarts?
Now I think about this game all of the time. It's a video game. I actually have not personally played it, but I'm really bad at video games. I didn't have them growing up as a kid, and so I like to watch other people play video games, but this video game is called Super Me Boy, and it's really, really hard.
You are a ball of ground meat trying to escape. This maze of saws, I think in order to rescue a princess and it is mind bogglingly difficult, you only can get through it because you have unlimited restarts. The way that the game works is that you go, you play for a second or a second and a half, and you die, and then you start over again.
But there's this interview with creators of the game in a documentary, and I'll link to it in the show notes if you want. But they talk about how when they were building this game, they knew it was gonna be really, really hard, hard for people, and that the chance that a player would get frustrated before they build the skills in order to be able to actually play Super Meet Boy and have it be fun meant that they had to make the restarting process as easy and painless and frictionless as they possibly could.
Otherwise, you would get so frustrated trying to reload the game that you would just give up. You would be like, man, this is too hard. And you would do one of the infinity other things that you could possibly be doing. So restarting the game is as fast as they could possibly make it. There's no loading screens, there's nothing to reset, there's no respond point.
You just start back over again. Super Meat Boy is hard. Restarting is easy because the creators know that it was hard and they respect that. So they make the process of you trying as easy as they can so that you actually will try. I think about this all of the time in the context of grad school, because in my head I thought the grad school was gonna be fine.
I didn't know it was gonna be this hard, and you might be laughing as you hear me say this because like of course Katie doing a PhD is hard. You talk about it all the time. The name of this podcast is grad school is Hard, but, but I honestly will tell you that my brain can trick me into thinking that I should be better at these things.
I should be faster at them. And now, even though I'm out of my PhD and I have that fancy doctorate title, I still think things should be easier than they actually are. So. I have to remind myself that it's actually really hard to get your day started. It can be really hard to sit down and get yourself into the flow of work.
It can be hard to ignore emails and open up that dissertation. It's hard to sit down and write for 25 minutes. It's really hard to stay in a research headspace when there's a thousand other things. You could be focusing on grad school. Is hard, and sometimes you need to make it really easy to do things one bazillion gazillion times until it gets slightly easier to do that stuff.
So what could you do to make unlimited restarting? As frictionless as it possibly could be. Here's a quick example of how it looks for. I have a target time of getting to my desk. Let's say it's 9:15 AM Whoops. I got caught cleaning up the kitchen and a bunch of other life errands, and now it's 10. My brain sometimes will like to whisper and say, Ugh, we should just try again tomorrow, or try again next week.
It's already Wednesday. Let's just try and have a whole fresh week. My brain loves the idea of a whole day, a whole fresh start, but instead I tell it let's restart again and we try again at 10. So the 10:00 AM means that I will start writing my morning pages, which is a tool that I've used off and on for years where I try and start my day with some freehand or typed just like brain dump type writing.
It's at 10 o'clock marginal, whether this is still the morning, it's definitely not the first thing I've done over the day. It does really help me. But whoops, I clicked away from the tab, or I saw my phone light up with a notification and I responded to a bunch of emails and in my head I was like, oh, that could be a quick warmup.
But now it's 1115 and some things are done, but I still have not touched my morning pages. Unlimited restarts means I can do my morning pages. At 1115 or 4:00 PM or whenever I want to, my apologies to Julia Cameron, the creator of this practice, who firmly believes that you should in fact do your morning pages as soon as you get up during the day, or at least as soon as you sit down to work.
But they're a tool and she can't see me at my desk, so I. Do them. Whenever I can do them. I give myself an unlimited number of times to try them during the day. If I don't do them one day, I get to try them again an unlimited number of times the next day. Another way to think about this is that you're coming back to the present moment.
In meditation, another practice that is wildly difficult for me personally. It actually is really hard to stop yourself from thinking or to have a completely clear mind or to focus on your breath or to even detach from your thoughts. So. I love what one of my meditation teachers told me one time that the job of a meditator is not to control their brain, but it's just to notice their brain.
It's about noticing when you've drifted and you've started thinking about the color of the walls or the coffee that you really wanna have later, and you come back to that anchor, the breath, the visualization, whatever you're using. We all spend so much time trying to control our environment, our schedule, and our habits, and yeah, there's good reasons to do that.
Reduce distractions. If you can set yourself up for success, build on those habits that are gonna support you. But if you could spend some of that energy caring for yourself as you necessarily need to do things over, make it easy on yourself. Don't beat yourself up every time the day gets out of hand.
Give yourself unlimited restart. That is going to help you feel less activated, feel less upset, feel less distracted by the fact that things aren't going the way that you want them to, and easier to come back to the things that you wanted to do. The creators of Super Meat Boy knew that restarting would be the defining mechanism of their game, so they spent as much time as they possibly could, making it feel good and supported, and pain-free and easy as possible.
What can you do to help yourself invest in what you do and tell yourself around that practice of restarting, adjusting, and coming back to your goals? What would make it 10% easier to do that? Is it a sticky note that you put on your desk? Is it a little restart routine with some deep breaths and a glass of water?
It's totally up to you, an individual, but I promise you that the more times you offer yourself the chance to restart, the more likely it is that you're gonna finish what you meant to start. Anyway, see you next week, I hope.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.3 do it on purpose - intentionality as a tool
in an age of dual monitors and triple screens and nearly unlimited ways to work, it can be really tempting to do a thousand things, or three things, at once. this episode is about how that might actually be costing you time and energy. an ode to intentionality, see why i want you to do it, no matter what it is, on purpose.
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
I am a human and I watch Netflix just like everyone else. I also wander away from my desk to do one thing and find myself doing six other things and forget the original thing that I meant to do. And sometimes I ate a whole bag of candy before I noticed that I had more than just a handful. We all do things on autopilot or we keep doing things without making a conscious decision to do them.
It's actually really hard to do things on purpose. Especially right now when everyone is stressed and, and I mean everyone, it's so much easier to do things in zombie land and then boom, it's the next month, the next week, the next year. So I keep bringing myself back to one of my foundational rules. Do it on purpose.
If you're going to watch Netflix, really watch it. Get some snacks, get a blanket, get cozy and watch every frame. If you're gonna nap, do it on your bed or on your couch, rather than just dozing off at your desk. If you're gonna eat some chips, put them in a bowl. Really go for it. Savor them. Be present.
Enjoy every last crunch. If you're gonna do emails, set some si time aside and put all your attention on that task rather than just mindlessly refreshing your inbox all day and not doing the work that you actually wanted to do. And if you catch yourself in autopilot and let's be real who isn't in autopilot at least part of the day, then you can recenter and ask, wait, am I doing this on purpose?
Rest feels so much more restful when you actually commit to it, instead of just working at 20% and then hoping that you feel rested and then are also somehow done with everything at the end of that session. Work is going to feel more focused and efficient if you're doing task on purpose. With all of your energy focused on it like a laser beam, you might get more done in 15 minutes actually focusing on it than you do in two or three hours with only 20% of your attention.
And when we continually check in with that intentionality, it's so much easier to see the traps that we set for ourselves or the beliefs that we've inherited that really don't benefit us. Are you watching Netflix in the background because you're trying to write and you're so tired that the only way that you could convince yourself to sit down at your workspace is to actually have your media friends on in the background?
Why not actually watch your show? Enjoy an hour or 30 minutes of an actual rest break, and then try again after you're done. Are you trying to work but doing so much in a time and place that isn't really set up to help you thrive? Yeah, maybe you need to make some changes like keeping your phone away from your desk or using a website blocker, closing your email tab so that you can actually do what you meant to do.
There's no shame in using those tools. There's no shame in making it easier to do things on purpose. That's why yoga studios have a door that close closes. That's why people meditate in places that are quiet Sometimes you have to change the environment to help the brain. There's no bad or wrong thing to do, and one of the great benefits of being a grad student is that you have some flexibility.
So if you need to take a 30 minute break at 10 o'clock in the morning, take it. Enjoy your show, have a little breakfast, you make yourself a really good coffee, and then get back to it. Everybody needs to answer emails. Probably almost everybody needs to get some writing done, but if you're gonna do it, try your best to do it on purpose, because when we snap into that autopilot.
That programming of what we need or what we're gonna do, or that little voice in our head. Or maybe it's not even fully a voice that says, Hmm, maybe I'll start with some emails, or, Hmm, maybe I'll just check and see what's going on in the news that programming might not be lining up with what actually needs to happen or what actually helps support you in this particular moment.
Okay. Doing things on purpose lets us actually tune in to how we're feeling, what we need in this specific moment. It might be different than what you needed this morning or what you needed last week, and it lets you make some changes. Doing things on purpose is one of the best ways that I know to work through really sticky seasons, because doing a few things on purpose almost always takes less time and less energy than doing a million things on autopilot.
I am sending you this message because this is what I needed to hear this week myself. It's what I needed to do. I needed to not try and get six things done at a time I needed to do one thing, even if that one thing was take a walk or take a couple of stitches on my sweater or make myself a really good cup of coffee.
Enjoy it, do it on purpose, and I'll see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.2 the second best time - starting in the mess
the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.
the second best time is today.
it is so easy to get stuck in the undeniable truth that things would be better/easier/faster if we started them earlier, or had better working conditions. this episode is all about how i work through that truth and give myself permission to start it messy, and do it in pieces.
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
Today I'm gonna talk to you about one of the phrases that I use all of the time to help get myself moving when things are less than ideal. That saying is the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is today. I. Now I'm a logical person and I bet you are a logical person as well, and it can be so easy to get stuck in that undeniable truth that almost everything that we're working on would benefit from more time, more resources.
More planning ahead, more strategy. Who hasn't sat down and thought, man, this would be so much easier if I had just started last week, or if I had just gotten this plan moving earlier, or if I had done X, Y, or Z. And let's face it, you're not wrong. It would be easier with more time. It would be easier with more resources.
It would be easier to do what you had to do today if you had started it yesterday. But it's so easy to get stuck in that first part of the saying that the best time was 20 years ago and not focus on the second part about what it would look like to start today. The second best option. Now, you might not be sitting at your desk thinking, man, you know.
I couldn't get this started a month ago, so there's no point in starting it today. I guess I'll just give up and, you know shop for pens online. You might be able to tell that. I'm very interested in stationary right now. It's my kind of hyper fixation window shopping thing. Very few people are doing this to the letter where they're like, man, you know, I can't do it perfectly, so I'm just not going to do it at all.
But I see this happening in things like, okay. I won't be able to start this this week, but next week I'll have a full slate. You know, I'll have a blank slate. I'll be able to focus on this a hundred percent. So I'm gonna wait for next week. I'm gonna wait for the top of the hour. I'm gonna wait for the next Pomodoro.
I'm gonna wait for next semester or next month or next year, or when I get tenure. Lots of people think about this kind of like perfect conditions, and that's really what this phrase gets at for me, that sure. If you had perfect conditions. It would be easier and better to start underneath those perfect conditions.
But what if we think about the second best conditions, which usually means getting started. Now it's less poetic and satisfying to get part of something started. I'm gonna be the first one to admit to you that this is something that I'm really personally struggling with. Before I became a parent, I had more time and energy and resources to get things done, and I used to be able to sit down and do whole tasks in one go.
I could draft, write, edit, and send something. All without stopping if I wanted to. And now I sit here recording this podcast with one eye on a baby monitor, hoping that that baby stays asleep as long as he can so that I can maybe get this podcast recorded because I drafted it last night. I know I'm gonna have to edit it later.
If I'm lucky, I'll get it posted today. It's just the reality. And so if I wait for a. Perfect set of conditions, I'm probably never gonna get there. I'm probably never going to find that perfect window where the baby is sleeping and I am rested and everything is under control in my inbox and nobody needs me anywhere else and I can do it.
And it's really easy for me to get stuck in the man. I should have just done this yesterday when I actually did laundry, or I handled something that was more pressing or I could only get myself to, search for a couple new books in the library that I know I wanted to read, and that was literally all the brain power that I had.
It's so easy to be like, yeah, I wish. But the second best option is for me to do it. Now, the second best option is for me to do it in pieces. The second best option is for me to try it, experiment, hit a wall, and know for tomorrow or for the next day, or for whenever I get back to it again, that that path isn't gonna work.
Very, very rarely do I talk to anyone who regrets getting something started. Having half of an assignment that you need to have drafted for your class helps when you sit down to start it again, having a draft or an outline or some post-it note thoughts about the thing that you need to write this afternoon.
They help, they make it a little bit easier. Your brain isn't wrong. It would be better to do all of these things having started earlier or under more ideal conditions. And it can be helpful sometimes to be like, yeah, brain, you're right. This would be better, this would be easier, but. The next best thing is for me to get a little bit of motion on it right now.
This is the next best thing, the second best thing. And unlike getting magical, more time or a time machine, or more resources or changing the kind of very real conditions of your working life today. Getting started now, planting that metaphorical tree. It's still possible. This is a short and sweet idea with the hopes that maybe you hear it and it hits you and you think, okay, what's the next smallest thing that I can do today?
What's the thing that feels possible? Hearkening back to last week's episode. I am there with you in the thick of it, doing bits, doing pieces, and moving forward what I can when I can. Thank you so much and I will see you soon.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.1 what feels possible - finding the cracks when you're stuck
in this episode, i explore the question "what feels possible" - an anchor phrase i started using five years ago and still reach for today with clients, and with myself. i talk about strategies to check in with your brain and body, and start there to make small but useful progress when you feel stuck and overwhelmed. get into it!!
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
Today's episode is all about a question that I have used since the pandemic, but find more and more useful, honestly, every year since. The question is what feels possible right now. And I started using this question with clients and with myself because there was so much overwhelm that I was seeing.
There were a million things. That people could do. There were a thousand things that needed to be done and all of that pressure, time sensitivity, it just led to a state of overwhelm, a state of freeze, and there would be clients and we would sit on calls and I would be like, okay. I am not sure what to do.
Are you sure what to do? And we could intellectualize it all day long. We could say, oh, it would be most efficient if we started here, or it would be the easiest if we started here. And the problem that I kept seeing was that we could think through those things, but we couldn't get the body to actually do it.
I know that I've talked about the brain body split a couple of times on this podcast, but I think that it's really useful to turn to it when we're thinking about how we're moving through the day when things feel really sticky and tough. So check in with yourself right now.
Take a deep breath, let it out, and notice what's happening in your brain right now. Is it doing a thousand things? Are you listening to this podcast, but also thinking about what to make for dinner and what grading needs to be done? Is it busy, busy, busy? And then also check in with your body. Maybe it's a physical movement thing.
Are you on a bus? Are you sitting in a chair? Are you doing the dishes? Are your hands moving? You could think about it on the level of movement, but you could also think about it on the level of sensation. Do you feel tightness in your throat or in your shoulders? Maybe you feel a sense of anxiety. That kind of prickly, tingly electrical feeling is how it shows up.
For me from the top of my head to the tip of my toes, that makes me feel restless. Restless, restless, but also like I can't really settle on anything. Maybe you feel a little bit frozen. Your limbs could feel heavy, your senses could be a little bit dull. You might even feel pressure like you are underwater or in a big, heavy space suit and you can't quite move.
And these are all different states that you could feel, or maybe you feel perfectly regular. You feel like there is energy and movement and you could go here or go there and your breath feels restorative and your senses feel on point. The question, what feels possible? Is a way to check in and think about where your brain and body can get synced up and you can maybe move forward with something if your brain is really leading.
I find that that looks like a lot of, for me, planning, strategizing, and in this. The very minute that you're doing it making that epic to-do list thinking through your schedule, making all of these plans, it really feels like you're moving forward. It's like, yes, I've proved to myself on paper that all of this can happen, but I notice that when I'm doing a lot of that planning, I, my brain is really active, but my body feels a little bit shut down sometimes that it seems to know that every.
Single thing that I put on that list is just another thing for me to do, another thing that needs to get done. And it feels heavier and heavier as I keep going, even if my brain is lighting up and thinking, yes, yes, yes, this is it. Sometimes I am feeling really ready to go physically. Limbs feel good.
Pain feels good. I am. Physically limber and loose and you know, I'm moving around my house and I'm putting things away, but my brain, she's not checked in. She is not really capable of the high level work that say, like reading my draft, it might be, or writing a blog post or doing some grading. What feels possible.
Is a question that you can use to see, okay, where's my brain at, where's my body at? And what feels possible for me to do right now? I will walk you through an example. This is a little bit vulnerable, but I will show you right now how it shows up for me. And so. I am a person who hates getting in the shower first thing in the morning.
I find it a violent way to enter the day, but I also know that, lots of people recommend starting a shower every day. I live in a house with people who shower every day first thing in the morning, and it's one of those things that my brain has decided is a quote thing good productive people do.
End quote. So I can sit in bed and be completely. Mentally amped up like, okay, here's my day. Here's what's going on. Here's my schedule. I have this at 10, I have this at 12, and I will hear. In my sort of litany of the day that like, okay, you gotta get up shower first, and my whole body rebels about that.
And so I end up scrolling on my phone looking at my book. I might start even working in on my phone in my bed, which I don't necessarily love it when that happens, but because I've said, okay, I should take a shower first. I get stuck, I get frozen. I. Start doing things that don't feel necessarily lined up.
Because I have this big barrier. I have to take a shower first, and then I can get started with my day. So instead of asking what should come first or what would be the best thing to do, first thing in the morning, I ask myself what feels possible. It might not feel possible to take a shower, but it might feel possible to.
Get up, use the bathroom, brush my teeth, put on some comfy clothes and start making breakfast. It might feel possible to get up, brush my teeth, take my meds, and head down to my desk and see what emails are there, but look at them in a place that feels a little bit more supportive and not purpose driven for work, let's say.
It feels better for me to check my email and my computer than it does to check it on my phone. So if I say, okay, what feels possible right now, it, it physically gets me up and out of bed and moving because I'm giving myself permission essentially, to move through what feels possible instead of what I think I should be doing.
This might show up for you at your desk where you sit down and you think, okay, I really need to get started on that draft. I should get started on that draft. Everybody says to start with the most important thing, but your brain and body just straight up rebel, and so you end up shopping for, a bathing suit that you might not ever need, or you do what I do and look at the newest pen releases and think, man, I really need those rainbows out of pens.
That would really make this easier. And because you've told yourself that you have to get started with the writing first, that that's what you should be doing, you end up freezing. You end up doing things getting stuck in a swirl of procrastination and stuckness. So maybe you say what feels possible.
It might not feel possible to start right into your draft right away, but it might feel possible to open up your inbox and pick an email to respond to. If you feel overwhelmed by the state of your inbox, it might not feel possible to say, okay, I'm gonna set a timer for an hour and I'm gonna sit here and respond to emails until they're knocked out.
But it might feel possible to respond to a specific email that's really been bugging you, and then see what happens from there. I myself, very rarely sit down at my desk and jump into anything. High intensity intellectually. I often need a little bit of a warmup. And then once I feel that movement, they're like, yes.
That sense of checking things off. I feel a little bit less stuck. I feel a little bit less heavy, and I feel a little bit more confident with some of the higher, more intense tasks. What feels possible is a way to sense. The cracks in that feeling of overwhelm. So many of us sit down and we see a wall of everything that needs to be done, and instead of trying to climb that wall or go around that wall, or you know.
Instead of trying to climb that wall or go around that wall, we just sit down in front of it, or we walk in the other direction or we move, do anything we can to not acknowledge the weight of everything that needs to happen. This question, what feels possible is a way to say, okay, I sense that this part of the task, this part of the thing that feels so heavy, this part, this tiny part.
Feels a little bit more possible. It feels a little more doable. It feels like a way in. So you start there cracks are how the light gets in. As the old adage says, you start with the cracks and the what feels possible question helps you see those cracks. Ways to know that you might need this question as a way to get started on your day or as a way to reset or just a question to use anytime.
If you are hearing a lot of should or would in your internal monologue, that's a really good sign that your brain is creating that vortex of stuckness. I should start with this. I should shower first. I should eat the frog. I would really benefit from doing X, Y, or Z first. Instead, what feels possible as a guiding question helps you focus on the coulds.
I could start with breakfast. I could put my library books away. I could start with my morning pages. I could respond to that email instead of, I should respond to all of these emails. I. Give yourself a little bit of permission to see if you can't start a little bit of movement, a little bit of a pathway out of that sense of feeling frozen and into a sense of possibility.
What feels possible remains one of the biggest gifts of a time of a global instability and overwhelm. It's been a gift to me. I regularly have people tell me that they still use this question five years later. I still use this question five years later, and as so many of us are facing another period of instability and overwhelm, whether that's on a national scale or a global scale, or a university.
Kayla, or maybe just a personal one, I thought it might be useful to come and share that gift. Thank you so much and I will see you soon.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!