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.
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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!