3.2 follow your rhythms - the three chunk method for scheduling

if time blocking (aka writing in your calendar, "dissertation 10 am to noon") always felt arbitrary to you - then may i present the three chunk method? this is what i use for all kinds of different schedules to help balance out work on various projects, and take advantage of that mythical "flexibility" we all say we love about being a scholar!

get into it!

• transcript

  We all say that we love the flexibility of being able to set our own schedules and make our work fit into our lives. But what does that actually look like in practice? Join me as I share my favorite trick for doing just that. On this week's episode Of

  📍 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.

  And in season three, I'm demystifying some of the most important, but often invisible parts of grad school that learning about might just make your life a little bit easier. 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

  A question that I get all of the time is how do I break my day up? And I get it. It can be really difficult to go through the mental and emotional strain of having to figure out your schedule. Week-in week-out, especially if you're in a place where there aren't as many structuring. Elements. For example, if you had a job that required you to go in to a specific place every day at 9:00 AM, and then leave that place at 5:00 PM. If you're lucky,

  Then you have some structure. There might be meetings in there. There might be a lunch break. There might be other sorts of activities, but you have a real sense of when to show up when to leave and the rest of your day often follows around that. As scholars, we often don't have that sort of stability. You might teach Tuesday, Thursdays, or you might have to be in the lab, but only on certain days or in certain seasons, you might have a stable week to week schedule. Or you might have. Something that feels a lot closer to chaos. But I'm here to show you a tool that I have used really successfully, whether I have been in a season where I was really structured, you know, on campus for the same amount of time, every day with lots of meetings or when I was on fellowship and had complete control over my schedule. And basically every other thing in between.

  And that strategy is breaking my day up into three parts. Now. This is one of those tools that sounds really self. Explanatory. And in some ways it is. I think that most days have about three separate chunks in them, but the beauty becomes in the customization.

  For example, my default that I suggest to people when we start talking about this technique is to use your structuring meals. If you're a regular meal person. So. When I was on fellowship, I used to have one chunk of my day. That was before lunch. I would have lunch. I would have another chunk between lunch and dinner.

  And then I would have a third chunk after dinner. You might want to split your chunks up based on your teaching schedule. For instance, maybe you have a chunk of that goes until you start teaching. Maybe you have a chunk after you teach and then a chunk after you get home from campus, or you could chunk it up in terms of your part-time job.

  You know, I have my chunk before I go to my job in between my job and something else. And then finally in evening junk.

  The magic of the junk is following the natural sort of splits in your day and not trying to force them. So in other time management techniques, like time. Fucking for like time blocking, for instance, you might be encouraged to set up a calendar and be like two hours for this two hours for that. And they would start and stop relatively arbitrarily at nine or 11:00 AM. So on and so forth.

  What's nice about the chunk method. Is that whether or not I have my lunch at 1130 or 3:00 PM, which is the natural range for somebody like me, who often gets caught up in their work and does not necessarily break for lunch when I should. Then the chunk is less about the specific time and more about the fact that I have a certain brain energy that tends to be pretty stable for me in the morning.

  Same between after, after lunch and before dinner. And then the last evening chunk usually feels in my body. More or less similar whether or not I ate at 7:00 PM that day or 8:00 PM. 9:00 PM. Don't tell anyone I'm a late dinner eater. So for you, it might be that your chunk say you're, pre-teaching junk.

  Might only be two hours on some days, and it could be six hours on other days, but the natural break in your day comes when you do this really intense activity teaching. And it's not worth it to kind of fight that.

  Now, what can you do with these three chunks now that you have them? So I like to use my three chunks and use it to in the same way that people will use time blocking in order to spread out my attention around different projects. So when I was on fellowship before lunch, I often would do my writing heavy tasks because that was one of my best brain energy was normally there.

  In between lunch and dinner, I'll be very honest. I often, uh, volunteered at the humane society. I went to yoga classes some days I would run errands. I would do laundry. I might do a little bit of reading or a little bit of admin, but it wasn't my best brain energy. And I didn't force it to be so.

  And then the third chunk, I often had a third wind after dinner where I would do a little bit of grading, do something that was less intense, but still move me forward for the next day. What I loved about the three chunks system though, is that I had a rule with myself that only two of those chunks was going to be focused on work.

  And so if I woke up in the morning and I wanted to noodle around on my phone all day, then I'd be like, okay, you get to do this in your pre-lunch chunk. And then after that you're going to switch gears and your next two chunks are going to be a little bit more. Work-focused.

  It's not a perfect system, but it really helped me feel like I could have more space in my time for self care activities or just the work of being a human. And it allowed me a flexibility around that, that I didn't necessarily have before. In my pre chunk days, I would often say, okay, I will go to whatever yoga class starts after I finished my work for the day. And more often than that, that led to me noodling around for most of the day, feeling really guilty and then working at a rush, missing yoga, and then feeling the kind of after effects of not taking care of my body.

  Lots of people. Who have more standard structure jobs have the kind of expectation that they will go to work. And then they will have some sort of chunk of time after their work completes or before it, depending on what their shift schedule is, where that time will be their own, it won't belong to their employer. So the idea that I too could have a chunk that did not belong to my dissertation was revolutionary and it really helped me lean into some flexibility.

  Speaking of flexibility. That's another benefit of the chunk system. So as I alluded to before, I often have a mid-afternoon crash, it was true in 2020. It was true in 2015. It's true today. Between lunch and dinner. I often am not at my sharpest. I don't particularly focus well during that chunk. And so I.

  Got in the habit. It's being like, well, there's no one to stop me from going to the grocery store or going to a yoga class or going on a walk with a friend or making phone calls or scheduling dentist appointments. I was like, here's this time. I'm not necessarily going to use it for work or use it effectively for work anyway.

  Why don't I just use this chunk for me. And then I'll use time where I often am more settled down in order to take a little bit more. Yeah, concerted intentional action on my work.

  If you're finding it really hard to make space for anything that's not your dissertation or not your scholarship or not your teaching. It can be really useful to use this trunk system as a way to kind of do a gut check and say, okay, Um, I working at 20% focus for all three chunks. Is there a way that I could narrow down my focus, be a little bit more intentional and then free up one of these blocks of time for something other than work.

  As a scholar, you do have the benefit of flexibility. And this is one of those double-edged swords that we talk about all the time is a benefit. And then often don't really give ourselves. So we say, ah, it's. So I love being able to set my own schedule. I love to be flexible. I love to have all of this freedom about how I spend my time.

  And yet we default into a, I need to be at my desk at night, or I have to work until 6:00 PM or 8:00 PM, or I have to work until my to-do list is done. And we don't take advantage of the flexibility that we say is so important to us. So the chunk system might help you write a little bit of a permission slip to be a little bit more flexible in that particular way.

  But this is just one of those concepts that you could experiment with.

  It might really work for you to think about your day was as having three blocks of time, two of which goes to your work. And one of which go to your human self. That might be great. Maybe your experiment is saying, okay. I am. Currently using zero chunks for my dissertation. I'm using all of them for my teaching. I want to shift that balance a little bit.

  Or maybe it's about coming to grips with the reality that right now, in this particular season or micro season of your life, you need to have two human chunks for every one work junk. This is just a way to kind of make less decisions. Around how, and when you'll spend your time, And just say there's three buckets. I'll pick three things and I'll go from there.

  Yeah. I hope this helps. It's always helped me in the past. Feel free to take what's useful and leave the rest. And I can't wait. To share more with you about all of the awesome things that we have going on this fall and thrive PhD. 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!