6.1 intricate plans, instantly abandoned
welcome to season six of the podcast - this time, i'm going through the kinds of behaviors and patterns i see as a coach (and in myself, too) in a series i'm calling "just at me". we'll talk about how they show up, and how to shift them - with love and humor, of course.
this week is for any of us who are spending, ahem, a lot of time on making intricate plans - in our notebooks, planners, apps, and project management software, and then instantly abandoning them because life is going to life. if your weekly plan is already out of date when you're listening to this, this one is for you!
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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
today. I'm lovingly, gently roasting all of my favorite people who make intricate plans down to the second color coded, look beautiful, highly decorated. Everything's in there, and then they're instantly abandoned. Let's talk about why this happens and what you might wanna do to shift it.
So, like I said, I have been all of these people. I am still some of these people and I am an intricate planner. Planning is one of my favorite ways to take my anxiety out for a walk. I like to look at all of my tasks all in one place. I like to look at my calendar. I like to match them up.
Like if I can plan it and it's all there, then it's definitely doable, and then my anxiety calms down for a second. A famous story about me is that once in the middle of one of the busiest points of my PhD program, I was getting married in two or three weeks and about to start my comprehensive exams, which I took on the weekend.
So I would teach and work all week write my exams on the weekend, and then the very last weekend of that three. Weekend cycle. I got married, so I was busy to say the least, and I came into my therapist's office with a chart of two weeks of work, literally mapped out to the 15 minute increment. I was like, okay, this is when I'll go to yoga.
This is when I'll drive home. This is when I go to the grocery store. This is when I will make dinner. And I was so proud of myself because I was like, look like I scheduled in seven hours of. Sleep, and I included all of these things that are so great for my body and my mind and my therapist looked at me and then said, okay, but what if you hit traffic on day two?
Which is something that often happened to me on the way home, and I realized that there was so much effort and work that I went into. That went into making this intricate plan and I was going to have to abandon it at some point because there are always things that are gonna come up. There will always be things that are gonna shift that schedule.
Internal things, external things, and. I find that once you abandon that initial plan, you fall into one of two categories. You might be the kind of person who feels such urgency and such a need for the plan that you stop everything and you redo it. You get a new page of your planner, you get a new to-do list, and you start all over again.
And all of that effort gets shifted into this cycle of plan shift, plan shift, and there's less and less time for the actual work. Or you tend to be a person that once you make the plan and you have to abandon it, you avoid it. You put it in a drawer, you try not to think about it, you then drift oftentimes further and further away from what you meant to do because you are afraid to even look in and see what you had planned to do.
Both of those categories have their pros and their cons. All of them are emotionally driven and all of them make it a little bit harder to use your best energy toward your most important tasks, which is all that a plan really wants you to do. If you find yourself using planning to manage your anxiety and not your work, your tasks, your time, your resources, your energy.
Here are three questions that I want you to check in with yourself. Question number one is what I am doing with my planning, helping me see what the highest priority items are. Is your plan a. Thing that you can look at it in a glance and say, okay, if I only have time to do three things, these are the most important three things.
If I only have time to do one thing right now, this is the most important thing to do. Oftentimes our plans devolve into lists, and I'm not saying that a to-do list isn't important or that there aren't seasons where a bucket of tasks are all that you can manage. But if all your plan is is a list of things to do or a list of times and appointments, it can be really hard to see the most important thing to use your best time and energy for.
Okay. Question two. What is going to help you plan out the various resources that you have to manage throughout the week? Now anybody who's ever heard the advice to block out time for your writing has thought about resources, right? When do you have a couple of hours without any meetings or just an hour?
If you're like most of us, when do you have childcare? When do you have time in a library? When do you have time away from campus? When do you have time? That also overlaps with the hours that the bank is open that you desperately need to go to. Thinking about what kind of resources you have, and the resources are gonna be highly dependent from person to person.
You might want to manage your best brain energy. Maybe your most limited resource is time in the lab or time in an archive. But whatever those resources are, is your planning strategy or what you're doing to help kind of think through what needs to happen next, helping you see what resources you have and when they are and aren't gonna be available to you to the best of your ability.
There are some resources, like for me, as a person with a chronic illness, my energy is something that I have sort of vague inklings about, but I can't plan it in advance. Which leads to question three, what is going to help you in your planning process, assess what you have in the moment? This self-assessment step, I find, is the one that we overlook the most frequently.
So if there's only one question that you're gonna take away from this podcast and think about, I want it to be this one. What's gonna help you Check in with yourself. Am I tired? Am I hungry? Do I need to take a rest? Am I doing what I'm meant to be doing? Am I in a space where I have everything that I need?
Am I. Ready to do this right now. These kinds of questions might seem silly or like the answer's not important. Who cares if you're tired, right? Katie? Like we're all tired all of the time. But if you are tired and you know that you have space tonight to have a good night's sleep, and tomorrow might be a better rested day, and it might be more useful for you to do some of those low energy tasks like go to the grocery store or fold your laundry or update your citations or click through and grade your discussion posts, whatever falls into that category for you. This isn't about giving yourself a pass. It's about noticing what you are, what you are, and how you're feeling and matching up what you need to do with the you that has showed up.
It's okay if you make intricate plans. I myself this morning sat making a list that is a rainbow colored and a bazillion pages long because it helped me think through everything that needs to be done this week. But I know that that energy is going to help me see the most important things that are on my plate this week.
It's going to help me make decisions about how to use the energy that I have, and that's all that I need my plan to do. Bonus points if it's rainbowed, bonus points if it's sparkly and makes me feel good. This isn't about never planning.
You're gonna find the system that works for you. I'm just offering some questions so that you can use your best planning energy to have your best week. See you soon.
📍 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!