12 - Why is it so hard to stop for the day?
episode 12 - Why is it so hard to stop for the day?
Why is it so hard to stop for the day (or the week)? One of the big benefits of academia is setting your own schedule so.....why do so many of us end up with a "feel like I should be working all the time, crash on the couch" schedule? This week's episode is all about figuring out how to stop for the day so that you can break (or at least, soften) the push/crash cycle that we all get caught in sometimes! Enjoy!
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Welcome back to another episode of grad school is hard. And one thing that I know for certain is hard. Actually stopping, stopping at the end of the day, stopping at the end of the week, maybe at the end of the semester or the end of the year. But stopping is harder than it sounds like because most of the time grad school encourages you to crash. And a crash is not really a choice. A crash is something that happens when your body decides that you're ready to take a break.
So, what would it look like to stop before? The crash. Let's get into it.
So one of the reasons that the crash is so normalized, not just in grad school, but everywhere. Is because there's always more to do. Every episode of his podcast could be a critique of grind culture, but grad school is one of those places where grind culture runs rampant. Because there is something legitimately more that you always could be doing.
You could get ahead on your grading. You could read that extra article that came out. You could. Procrast to clean your apartment. You could answer those emails. You could send those networking requests. The list goes on and on because there are so many things that we're encouraged to do to get ahead. It's really hard to know when to stop for the day because there's no natural. Uh, yes, I finished my to-do list. It's time to take a break. And kick back.
It's also then really hard to know. What needs to get done today? What things would be great to get done today? And what are just some things that you should do? I don't know about you, but nobody sat me down in my first year of grad school or in any of my seminars and said, okay, here's how you manage your time.
Here's how you make it to do list. Here's how you parcel out projects. They just sort of assume that you know how to do that already, that wherever you came from before your PhD or M a program taught you how to do that. And let's be real many places. Didn't so it's so easy to not really know how to manage your time or manage long-term multi-month multi-year projects because nobody ever showed you how to do it, or even how they do it.
And it's really easy to get off of a normal nine to five or work five days a week and two days off or a work four days and three days rhythm. It's really easy to get off some of the more traditional work schedules. Because one of the things that actually is really valuable about academic life is the flexibility.
But with that flexibility means that there can really be a tendency to switch into a push push push, and then crash cycle. It happens to all of us. And in some ways it's baked in. What is the end of semester finals and grading crush, if not a push and then a crash. And when so much of our work actually ends up being deadline driven.
And it makes sense that there is a place and a reason that we're culturally called to push and then crash. But it does mean that if you happen to be an academic with a non-academic partner or children who are not yet in academia, or. Anyone in your life. Who's not necessarily an academic. There can be the sense that everyone else is stopping for the day and you don't get to because there's so much else that you need to do.
So let's dig into. Some of the questions that might make this a little bit more specific for you and give you a sense of where you might want to experiment with the strategies that are coming up.
First question. What is your normal sign that it's time to stop at the end of the day? Do you have a time in absolute cutoff time? Does it go by your to-do list? Does it go by one, you fall asleep on your desk or when you have a yoga class?
What's the normal reason that you stopped working for the day. If you do.
What stories do you tell yourself, or are you hearing out in about, in the world about how long other people are working? If I had to have you guess, how many hours do you think the other people in your cohort are doing? What about that random person on Twitter that you look up to? How about your professors? How about your colleagues? How much do you think other people are working?
And then lastly, what stories do you have floating around about rest at the end of the day or the week? Or the, between semesters. Do you have to earn rest? Or is it that your brain tells you that if I just get more stuff done, my break will be better. So it's worth it to cut into the end of the night routine to get just that little bit extra done. What stories do you have that are floating around about rest? What activates it and how you earn it?
Now the good stuff, let's get into three different experiments that you can try in the next week, two weeks. These are all, some pretty clear data-driven strategies that might give you a sense of what it would look like to incorporate a stop sign into your days or your weeks, both in an effort to get more rest, but also in an effort to counteract the narrative that any minute where you're not legitimately crashed out asleep on the couch.
There is a minute that you should be working on your grad school stuff.
Okay, first experiment. Attempt to set an end of the day quitting time. No, I don't have time to get into the historical and cultural context between the nine to five day. And I'm not even suggesting that you've worked eight hours, but instead of having a regular schedule, you set a quitting time where. Unless there is the world is literally on fire or my dissertation is due tomorrow. I stopped working. Or I put my computer away or however you want to define it to yourself. At say 8:00 PM. For many times in my PhD program, my quitting time was actually seven o'clock. It didn't matter. What wasn't done. It didn't matter what things were off track. I stopped at seven o'clock and I either went to yoga or I made dinner. Yes. I eat dinner really late. It's a problem. We're working on it.
But having that stopping time was helpful for my non-academic partner to know that I would eventually be stopped doing things for the end of the day, but it was also really helpful for me because when I thought about what I was going to get done in a day or a week, it wasn't that I thought I had 18 available hours. I just had, you know, until seven o'clock.
It made it easier to schedule things with friends to call my parents, to get workouts in, to go to the grocery store, to do laundry because I had a quitting time. That was more or less non-negotiable. You can experiment with it and it doesn't need to be seven o'clock or eight o'clock. Maybe you try it for just one night or two nights a week or the nights before you're teaching.
Or the days where you have a really bad pain flare experiment with it, but see what happens when you set a definite quitting time.
Experiment number two. Use an ABC list to get a clearer sense about what you must do on any given day.
I love it to do list. I'm always going to love it to do list, but what can be really difficult about it is that. There are some things that are really small start laundry, make a dentist appointment, read an article. Maybe now there are some things that are very big. Like great. All of the papers or write that chapter or revise.
Where it's not really clear if you're going to finish it today. Or tomorrow and setting up a task list that has more manageable tasks is a subject of a whole other podcast episode. But if you have just one long list with really big things, really urgent things, things that are coming up, things aren't due for months.
It can be really frustrating because you literally never get to the bottom of it. And that sense of crossing things off is multiplied when it's the last thing that you're crossing off for the day. An ABC list is a tool that actually gives you a way to parcel out the various different tasks into the, a column things that you must do in order.
To avoid serious and immediate consequences. Say your grades are due from the university tomorrow. You have finished your grades and get them processed. There will be severe and immediate consequences. If you don't get that done. But that consequences bit really could help an anxious brain determine the difference between this really does need to happen tomorrow. And.
That would be great if this could happen today, but it's not going to completely collapse my world. If it doesn't.
That second category. The bees are exactly that latter type of task. It would be really great to get the stone today. It would open up some flexibility for me. I would feel really good about it, but if it doesn't happen, the world won't collapse. It might graduate to an, a task tomorrow, but for right now, I have a little bit of flexibility.
And then the C task column. Is. Everything that you know, you need to do, but you are giving yourself a pass right there right then to not do it today. I talk extensively about how to manage this in a YouTube video that I will link, but why I like it and why I've included it here. It's because if you have all of your AI tasks, all of those things with severe and immediate consequences checked off.
You can stop for the day. Yeah, sure. Maybe if you have a couple of hours before your quitting time, you do a couple of BS or a couple of T C tasks. But if everything that has immediate consequences is checked off, then it helps give that little bit of an anxious brain. A chance to say. Yeah. Okay. All of the immediate stuff has done.
I can take a deep breath. I can watch some Riverdale. Get myself a little bit of rest.
And last, but not least is one of the things that I think is an underrated tool and strategy for anyone, but especially people who are working on ongoing projects. It's creating a shutdown routine. Now. The whole world, the internet is a blaze with techniques and different things that you can do in a start up routine.
Start with your morning pages, get your coffee, sit down with your journal, sit down with your planner, clean your desk. There's a thousand things that you can do. And morning routines definitely have a place, but shutdown routine can really, really make a difference. And it's something that a lot of us aren't really coached into doing.
I know that for me, my brain, as soon as I can feel the sort of like. Oh, cliff coming at the end of the day, I want to slam my laptop closed and run out the door and it doesn't matter. What mess I've left for myself. There could be a million different coffee mugs on my desk. It doesn't matter when I'm done, I'm done and I just quit. So what has been really helpful for me is instituting a shutdown routine.
Were about 15 or 20 minutes before I want to stop for the day. I do some of the following things. I get all of the coffee mugs. And I've been building up over the day. And I take them down to the sink. I check my emails for any last things that have come in that I want to address. I take a look at my task manager and make sure it's set up for the next day.
I cleaned my desk off of all of the sort of extraneous papers. Sometimes I unload the trash can not always, sometimes I fold up the blanket in my office, but not always, basically I try and reset everything to where I want it to be when I arrived the next morning. This gives my brain a chance to kind of decompress. I don't have a commute. Right.
And you maybe don't have a commute. and even if you do have a commute, those couple of extra minutes before you leave. Whatever your workspace, whether that's physical or mental before you leave for the day makes a signal to your body that says, okay, we're winding down. It's time to transition.
It's okay to stop working. And it also does future you a favor because when you get back to your desk or wherever that workspace is, It's not going to be covered with crusty old coffee mugs. A ton of post-it notes that don't make any sense to you anymore. And whole bunch of fires that you pretended didn't exist so that you could run out of the office.
It's really hard to stop. But in my experience, clients that learn how to stop well, Stop before they crash or at least stop before they crash some of the time. Have a shutdown routine that helps make it easier to not avoid their desk, have a lot more success working in a sustainable way. And like I mentioned up top, there's always going to be a little bit of a push and crash in academia. That's the nature of self-paced flexible work schedules that are majority deadline driven.
But if you can soften some of those pushes and especially softened some of those crashes, so that every time you come into the office, it's not an absolute sprint until your body collapses. And every time you sit down to work, you know that, yes, you're going to sit down and you're going to show up, but there will be an end.
It really helps ease some of that Sisyphean feeling of pushing that rock up the hill and never quite getting to the top. I hope that this episode finds you well and finds you stopping well, and I'll see you next week. Bye.
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