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. 

• transcript

      📍  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!