6.4 always firefighting, no fire prevention
you're careening from due date to due date, and still, everything is due in the last three weeks of the term. you know that you're supposed to be working ahead, and making time for important projects that aren't due yet, but.......how?
let's talk about this pattern - maybe one of the hardest ones to shift - and concrete things you can do to try and shift it. because you CAN do things to shift into a less due-date driven life, but they're not nearly as simple as "just schedule time for your writing".
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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
All right. I call this one all firefighting, no fire prevention, and this is maybe the one I see the most. Okay. If this is you, this is what your day life week semester ends up looking like. There. Are constantly due dates. There's always something due. There is something due Friday, there's something due next Tuesday.
There's something due the Tuesday after that. It's grading. It's submissions. It's your service. It's your teaching. It's the dissertation chapter you need to finish. It all has a sort of next urgent thing, and you never really get a chance to catch your breath. There is always something that is due. Or maybe even overdue, and you're never quite doing any of the work that you feel like you need to.
You are not getting that next conference proposal planned. You aren't working ahead, and you always feel like you're behind, even if you're getting things done on time or nearly. Let's talk about why this pattern happens and why so many of us are careening from due date to due date without getting a chance to catch our breath.
Part of it is that academic work is on its face, usually extremely important, if not for the broader world than at least for you in you and your own career progression. There's very little innate urgency to it. The one exception for this is teaching, which is why if you go back a few episodes, we see so many people who are completely on top of their teaching because that has a built-in rhythm and urgent. To it. The students need their grades back for assignment one before they can finish assignment two and so on.
There's a natural temporality to it, which is easier to keep it on track as opposed to a dissertation chapter where your advisor just says, okay, come back when you have a draft that you want me to look at. And that could be in two weeks or two months, or much longer for a lot of us.
So there's these important projects that we're expected to be self-directed on, and the only thing that really works for a lot of people all the way down the chain is to have a due date. Academics and the systems that they create often require these due dates to add urgency. Your advisor needs a due date in order to prove to their boss the chair of the department, that you're progressing on time.
And so they say, I need to have your chapter by the end of the semester so that I can say with good confidence that you're on track. But all of these systems, the writing system, the conference system, the grading system, the human system, they're overlapping. They're not talking to each other. No one sits down at the faculty meeting, at least as far as I know, and says, okay, let's sit down and make sure that all of these due dates aren't coming at once. People, right? Nobody's saying that the advisor is setting the due date because that what works for their schedule. The student is setting the due date for themselves because. It's what their advisor gave them.
Nobody's thinking, Hey, let's make sure that not all of this happens on midterm week or finals week. Maybe it would be nice if we didn't expect people to have to work through their break or their summer completely full out in order to just catch up. These conflicting systems mean that there are always due dates.
There always are fires to put out, and who's gonna get a chance to work ahead, work more systemically if they're always chasing that next due date. That's just another two days, another three weeks or something really big, comes up with a due date that all of a sudden is really soon, and they haven't done enough work along the course of this semester or the month to make that even feel feasible.
To add insult to injury in a firefighting system where you're careening from one important thing being due to the next, if you get a spare moment, you're not gonna work ahead. You're not gonna pull reading for that next project. You're not gonna make sure that your systems are all tagged out and filed.
You are gonna crash your butt right down on that couch. You're gonna crash and you're gonna get the rest that you desperately need, or at least part of it because you've been working full out in this high pressure, high stress, high urgency environment. All right. That's why it happens. Now, how do we shift it?
And I'm gonna be really honest. This is one of the hardest patterns to shift. It's why your advisor, to some degree, works like this. It's why a lot of people work like this, and it's why everyone kind of puts the due date up, give me a due date, or it won't get done, right? That's what everybody says at the end of these meetings, and it's because this is an incredibly difficult pattern to shift.
One is that if you're going to do the common piece of advice, which is schedule time to work on these projects, schedule in your writing, protect time, that is actually not an administrative ask as much as it's a boundary ask, right? Not only do you have to block off time, you have to protect it. Sometimes defend it from people who feel entitled to it, your own self or in a lot of cases, just the natural stuff that comes up in the course of working on complex projects in a complex world.
You need to be able to not only make the structure to work on these projects a little bit at a time, but protect that structure once you do it. And that is harder than it sounds. That is putting your phone in the drawer that is dealing with the discomfort. Of, I know that there are really important things that I could be doing right now, and I am not.
I'm working on this thing that I know will serve me well. The other part is that if you are going to work a little bit at a time, most of us have zero faith whatsoever that that system pays off. I know that it was literally years into my PhD program before I felt like I knew how to write in another way that wasn't just a massive all-out writing push.
It was usually a couple more days than the all-nighters I was doing in my undergrad and let's be real, and some of my master program. It was maybe a writing push that lasted for a couple of days, maybe even a week, but I didn't know how to do it any other way. I only knew how to maybe do a little tiny bit of prep work and then all out push at the end.
And so if you asked me to say like, okay, see if you can write a couple hundred words a day, see if you can write two hours a week. What if you did two hours, two days? There was no part of my body that believed that was a reasonable way to do my writing because I'd never done it before. So how could I trust that it would work?
And there was something really unsatisfying. If you are used to writing a whole chapter in a week or getting a ton of work done right before a deadline, there's something kind of unsatisfying, right? About sitting down and being like, oh, I just did my 500 words. I just did my tiny palm. None of this matters, which makes it even harder to commit to those sessions moving forward because they don't feel satisfying.
So you need to be able to not only block the time, make the resources available to yourself, protect them from the people that you want. Then you have to sit in the discomfort of, I don't know if this is gonna work. This feels unsatisfying. This isn't how I've done it before, and be able to still move forward.
So this is. A podcast episode where I say, this is a hard pattern to shift. This is something that you have to actively work on and it's going to be uncomfortable. If this is something that you wanna work toward, here are two or three things that I would do in the next couple of weeks to see if you can shift it just a little bit.
The first, I would go on your calendar and I would find the first two hour block where you think you could reasonably work on a project before it's due. And protect it, block it off. , put whatever title on it that you need in order to know that this is serious. It might not be. Let's be real. Next week, it could be in a couple of weeks.
It might not be till December. It could be maybe even after your classes end. But I want you to block that time off and make sure that you maybe make it recurring. Block it off. Now, if you need to flip ahead to winter 2026 semester in January and February and block off then, but the idea is that if you never start blocking.
It's never gonna appear in your calendar, right? Because if you can't find a two hour block this week, it's reasonable to think that that's gonna still happen the next week and the week after that. So block far ahead and then practice protecting those when they do come up. The next thing is I would like you to practic.
Small amounts of discomfort around smaller writing sessions that maybe feel less productive. So the best way that I like to do this is having a kind of writing log. Where I have a journal and I can say, okay, today I sat down, I did two palms. It was 500 words, and then I rate it on a scale of one to five.
One to five. Five being, this felt really good, this felt useful, and one being, this feels stupid. Why do this? But being able to track those sessions over time is the only way that you're gonna see that data for yourself. I can tell you on this podcast until I'm blue in the face. That it does add up that there are real benefits to working on a project consistently.
Even if you can only get 25 minutes, even if you can only get 50 words, even if you just read a page or two, but your brain's not gonna believe it until it sees it right there on the page. And in the absence of being able to zoom out and zoom into the future and see the whole process with a done chapter or a, a big project where you can look back and say, ah, yes, this really worked.
A journal or a lab sort of notebook approach where you say, okay, this is what I did, and you kind of quickly jot it down. It's gonna provide that data. So if you're out here fighting fires and never doing that important work of building toward the future, that strategy that everybody says works, but you can't really see how it works, know that there are millions of us out here who are struggling with the same thing.
But there are concrete things that you can do right now to try and shift this pattern and a few things a little bit starting slow. It does get easier. All right, 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!