3.5 the next right thing - breaking down big tasks
"just break that [insert scary huge] task into smaller steps" - it's evergreen advice but in my opinion, it's some of the hardest to implement. i talk about why, and give you a few new things to try when you're looking at a monster of a task!
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I'm sure. At some point, somebody has told you to break that big task down. But if you don't know how to do that, then this is the episode for you.
📍 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
In the hall of fame of straightforward, but hard to actually implement advice. Is the, if you have a big task and it feels intimidating, just break it down into smaller pieces.
I know that I've been given this advice several times and while intellectually I understand what they mean. Take the big thing and break it down into smaller pieces. Practically that can be really challenging for a variety of reasons. And the biggest one for grad students at least is that sometimes you're doing a task where you don't know what the steps are.
If I told you to break the task of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich down. You would probably have some context for the smaller steps that go into making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Maybe you don't, maybe you have other kinds of sandwich experience, but at least you have some context for understanding the general scope and parameters of making a sandwich with specific ingredients, peanut butter and jelly.
Now, if I tell you to write a lit review for your chapter, you might not have any context for that. You might not know how long it should be. How it should be formatted, how it should be structured, how many sources you need to read the order in which you need to read those sources, how quickly you should switch into outlining.
All of these things, plus a thousand other hidden secret interior tasks to a lit review. Are part of the context that make it really difficult to just look at your piece of paper and say, okay, I'm going to break the lit review task down into smaller pieces. If you don't know what the smaller pieces are yet, or you don't have a sense of the way that you want to approach a complex task, like writing a lit review, then it's really hard to know what those smaller pieces are going to be.
So I find that specifically for people who are in the beginning of projects or in new types of projects or projects that don't really have a clear end point. That the breaking things down. Advice isn't as helpful as it could be. Now. I will not just leave you here and be like, Hey, this piece of advice that everybody says is really good. It's actually not going to work for you. Abandon all you who hope.
I'm going to actually give you three different ways that you can break tasks down when you're in that kind of nebulous space, where it's not immediately clear the steps that you need to be following. The first way is to use the time. Now. I'm a fan of timers. I've recorded several podcasts about how much I like timers, but
the reason I like to use time when I am working with on approachable, intimidating, big tasks. Is that I might not know what the first thing that I should do for lit review is, but I do know what 25 minutes feels like. So I encourage you. To in the beginning, say, okay. Eventually I will get stuck into this project and I will have a better sense of what the next tasks are, but for the first week or two weeks, or maybe even longer, I'm going to focus on measuring my progress by time, rather than by the tasks that I'm accomplishing.
And then pick a chunk of time that feels less intimidating to you. If it like it does, for me, feels absolutely impossible to work on something for an entire hour. Then set up a 25 minute goal. I'm going to work on this for 25 minutes. Now it is a little bit slippery. To say, okay. Um, in those 25 minutes, what are you going to do? But if you are really struggling with getting started,
And sometimes just saying anything that you're going to do on this project is going to be great. Just do it for 25 minutes. Using that kind of open-ended strategy can really help take some of the intimidation down and make it a little bit easier to schedule. Bonus points. If you combine that with other supportive mechanisms like co-working or to do list or some sort of reward system.
The time really lends itself to.
Using this time strategy really lends itself to working in cooperation with some of the other things that help make your brain go. Yay.
The next strategy that I recommend that you do. Is think about the phase of the project that you're currently in. Now I don't mean to oversimplify it, but most academic work projects below. Most academic work projects have a relatively similar flow of work tasks. Now, of course there's variation. Of course, there's reasons why you can and might shake it up. But normally there's a research phase where you learn how to do the task.
There is the collation of source material, whether that's experiments or reading, or a little bit of both. There's some sort of planning where you make a sense of the structure, then there's drafting revising. And then finally polishing. Now. Not every task is going to fall into that category, but if you're absolutely completely lost, then I say, start with step one, which is research how to do this task.
And in case nobody's ever told you, this is a task that almost all people do for any kind of new tasks that they're encountering. Once it's your fourth lit review. You might not need to spend as much time in this particular stage, but if it's your very first lit review that you're ever writing, then yeah, I really want you to go and read a couple of blog posts about how to structure a lit review. Ask for some support, maybe go to one of your writing books.
There's a thousand ways to do it. I don't think you need to read it. Every writing book. I don't think you need to pay for a special course. I don't think you need to read every blog post that's ever been published on. On the internet about it, but one or two is going to give you a sense of at least an approach or two that you could follow.
Next. When you're thinking about these phases of work. I do find that if you're struggling to break tasks down, that sometimes it's helpful to say, okay, I'm not sure exactly what things I'm going to be reading. For example. Inside of this room. Lit review reading sub phase that I'm in. But I do know that I don't want this phase to last any longer than the next two weeks without me checking in and making some sort of reflection point.
Now this can sound overly prescriptive. Like two weeks is kind of arbitrary. What if it takes me two and a half weeks? And to that I say it absolutely is arbitrary. You pick a date that you feel relatively comfortable with, and it's not saying that if you go. Any past that date with your reading, that you have to stop.
All it is, is saying that in two weeks, you're going to check in and you're going to assess, do I need to read more? Do I need to read different things? Do I need to change my strategy? Am I ready to start doing some reflective writing? Am I ready to start outlining? These are all low stakes questions. You don't need to ask them to anybody but yourself, but it can be really useful to say, okay, this reading phase, won't just continue ad nauseum until I feel like I'm done because the secret with almost all of these phases and.
By extension, a lot of these tasks. Is that there is very, very rarely in fact, practically never a sense of an internal switch that flips that's like, ah, I've done enough reading or yes, this outline is perfect. I'm ready to start. And so having an arbitrary date where you check in, gives you a little bit more data and it encourages you to not just read until you feel ready, which could take two weeks, but it could also take six months. And many of us don't have six months. So putting a date on it.
Making a decision. Even if it feels arbitrary, it can be really helpful.
Now. What I have noticed is that when people are in a specific phase, it's a little bit easier to break down some big tasks. So you might not have a thousand point to do list of all 1000 steps that you're going to take in order to write this lit review. But if you're in a reading phase, you might know the next three things that you want to read.
And I'm sure that three things will be, get three more things, but for now you can break it down and say, okay, These are the next three articles that I want to read. So when you're focusing on breaking down these big tasks, I really encourage you a to use time
to give yourself some structure around. Yes. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do, but I'm going to work on it for this amount of time. I encourage you to think about the phase that you're in. And consider setting up decision points.
Even if you don't know how long it's going to take you to do some of these tasks inside of this particular phase. And then last but not least, I really am encouraging you to zoom in. And think about. What are the next two or three things that you can do that are going to move you forward? You don't need to know the entire list in order to make progress. So focus on the next three things. You're going to read the next paragraph that you're going to write the next revision task that you're going to tackle.
Breaking things down is a skill that gets stronger over time. So I encourage you to practice it. I encourage you to experiment with maybe a new strategy that you've never tried before. And know that. Even for the most seasoned and skilled of us, this can be a really challenging thing to do.
Thanks so much for joining me and make sure you check out the show notes for news about ACRA IMO. 2023, which is coming soon. Bye
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