6.3 just a quick check of the email.......and it's 3 pm
this is for all my folks who love to warm up, sit down to check their email......and the whole day is gone. we talk about the cycle, places to interrupt it, and three specific strategies to try - all in less than ten minutes. hop on in and let me gently roast you for the good of your draft.
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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.
This season is called Just at Me already, where I go through all of the different kinds of people that I run into and have been myself as a coach for academics. And we talk about how to shift that if you want to. I.
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
Now, I might be coming for you. I'm definitely coming for myself. But this week's episode is all about the people who sit down with all good intentions to do their writing and they think, okay, let me just do a quick check of my email. I'll just make sure there's nothing bad in there. And then I'll of a sudden they look up, hours have gone by, the writing hasn't been touched, and they think, man, I guess I'll just start again tomorrow.
This is a really common practice for a variety of reasons, and I know some of the reasons that it happens to me. One, I don't have the willpower necessarily to start a really heavy work task without giving myself a little bit of a warmup first. I have never been able to sit down and write first thing. I probably never will be able to sit down and write first thing, but when I check my email.
Or any other place where tasks tend to stack up for me as that warmup task, ugh. Things can quickly go south because I start thinking, man, I'll just take care of this. Take care of this. I'll clear the decks, right? I will make sure that nobody needs anything from me before I start writing. And the problem is.
That in this particular day and age, everyone is going to need something from you all of the time, forever, probably. Or at the very least, the emails will keep coming. The tasks will keep piling up, and we're almost always going to have at least an invitation to do something that isn't our writing in these corners of the internet where people can get into contact with us.
I'm not saying that you should never check your email. I'm just saying that a lot of times when we sit down to warm up, we do this quick check, we start to work on things. There's actually another second thought pattern that goes on, which is, okay, I'll just get some of these quick wins out of the way.
I'll clear the decks, right? I'll make sure that my writing conditions are perfect. These are the kind of sneaky ways that we can avoid our writing.
Who doesn't have a thousand other things that they need to get done right? And it makes perfect logical sense that it would be easier to focus on your writing if you had those annoying tasks that anyone could stop and interrupt you and ask about out of the way before you do this. Deep dive into a high focus, high energy draining activity. The problem isn't the emails, the problem isn't the warmup.
The real problem in this whole cycle is that little voice that says, Ugh, it's too late now. I don't have enough time. I'm not gonna be able to do this. I might as well start again tomorrow.
It's what I call the snooze button, where you're like, okay, I will clear the deck and then everything will be better tomorrow. I will get this done and then I'll, I'll really get down to it after lunch. And the problem is that every time we do that, we build up a little bit more of avoidance. We build up a little bit more of that sticky, this is hard, I don't wanna do it feeling, and it makes it that much more difficult to try again the next time.
And if we're only giving ourselves one or maybe even two chances a day to try that really hard thing, then that's one or two chances where it's really easy to press snooze. Then we do all of the things that of course, need to get done, but maybe don't need to get done with the very best of our time, energy, and deep focus blocks.
I'm not gonna just leave you there and say, good luck. This is a terrible pattern. I hope you figure it out. I'm, of course going to share with you three things that I have found to be really effective for me, for my clients to interrupt this pattern and think about other ways to structure your time and protect those writing blocks that you went to.
All of this trouble to schedule. Number one is eating the frog, which is. A time honored tradition. I'll be honest, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. This is one of the tools that often doesn't work for me because like I said, I like to warm up, but the idea here is that your willpower and your ability to resist.
Temptation, resist invitations to do other things is going to be the highest when you're the best rested. And so if you wake up and you are the most focused, the most caffeinated you're ever gonna be, use that energy to do your hardest thing. Eating the frog, for example. Like I said this is mixed benefits, but for the people that it works, it really works.
So if you've never tried doing your writing first thing, or with at least a very minimal warmup, then experiment with it. What's the worst thing that's gonna happen? The second tool that can be really useful are restart times. I like to do these on the top of the hour.
I think that the, the zero zero is a crisp number. It appeals to my brain, so if things don't happen at nine o'clock when I'm meant to get at my desk, then. At 10 o'clock, I can start again at 11 and 12. This is particularly useful for people who have a lot of uninterrupted time, which is its own blessing and curse.
But I find that if you have a lot of time and only certain amounts of energy for writing then give yourself a lot of chances to start it. And so if it doesn't happen at nine, you can try again at every top of the hour and giving yourself five or six chances to start is just statistically gonna work a lot better than giving yourself only one or two.
And last but not least, a tool for those of us who just are exceptionally busy and there almost always is a catastrophe in that inbox. And so there are good reasons why we check it, and there are good reasons why we get pulled into it. I suggest leaving some open time in your calendar. I really like wednesday afternoons and Friday mornings for this. But your mileage may vary, but leave them blocked off, but unscheduled. I call these buffer times. The idea is that you have some time in your calendar to work on the things that are going to inevitably pop up, and then you don't have to steal time from other places to deal with the catastrophes when they emerge.
So you might get an email on Tuesday that says, ah, this terrible thing has happened. I need you to drop everything and do it. And you can then email back and say, you know, I don't have time today, but I do have time Wednesday afternoon. I promise to get back to you before the end of the day. The idea here is that you're not stealing time away from your writing, from your sleep, from your family, from anything else in order to handle those emergencies.
You've got some time blocked off for you to use on the things that come up, and then you aren't cannibalizing the rest of your intentions. And hey, worst case scenario, you have two extra hours, and if no emergencies appear, then it's two hours you can use. I hope that this episode gives you a little bit of perspective about why this pattern starts and things that you can do to interrupt it.
We're all just here trying our best, and I can't wait to try again with 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!