2.19 sometimes you can't avoid it - how to make working on vacation suck a little less
of course, i want everyone to take completely work-free time off this summer. but the reality remains that summer is often some of our most precious time as scholars. so how do we balance the immoveable deadlines of work with the very human, very necessary time off that can also come in the summer?
this episode has some of my best tips for negotiating boundaries, setting schedules, and dropping into focus mode quickly! enjoy!
mentioned:
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I wish that I could promise you that you will never have to work when you're traveling or away from your desk or on vacation. But if you ever need to, because academia does not sleep. This episode is for you.
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for a brand new summer planning template, all available for you for free. Now. Let's get into it.
Summer is usually a time for traveling home. Taking a little bit of a break. Being able to see people that you care about. Sitting in the sun. At least for me going to the pool. And there is also this alternate pressure. There is something so seductive about starting the new academic year. The new term with a fresh slate. And so many of us try to balance.
Work and time off during this time of the year so that we can get the best of both worlds a summer that's restful, and also a fall term or new academic year that isn't going to kick us in the butt immediately. Once it starts.
All of this is so complicated because we are often burned out after a long academic year. We're tired. We're exhausted. And we also put a lot of these human milestones, whether that's vacation with the family or time away or chores that we're going to catch up on or life projects to the summer season, too. So.
Of course, I want for you to take intentional time off over the summer. And that is a really good plan. And I wish that for all of us. However, if you can't just take two or three weeks to completely disconnect. Or you do have pressing deadlines. Let's talk about how you can balance both. How did, can you be a human and still get some things done over the summer?
The first area that I think is important is to think about setting boundaries with the people that you may be traveling with or with yourself. So step one is to communicate what you need as clearly as you can. When I go home to visit friends and family and I live about five hours away, so I don't get to see them as often as I like it is so easy to fill up every minute of my time.
With family. Visits with friend catch-ups with eating all of my favorite foods and seeing all of my favorite places. And if I need to get work done, it can be a huge obstacle because every minute of my waking time is filled. And I don't have any other brain focus hours available to do any work. So I find that it's really useful to let everybody know the impacted parties, so to speak.
As soon as possible that I'm going to need to do some amount of work when I'm traveling. Because it can help set that expectation in advance. I tend to say things like I am so excited. To be coming home or going on a trip with you are going to stay. But as you may know, I also have this really big deadline coming up.
I'm planning on working for an hour or two every morning when I get up. So between eight and 10:00 AM or between nine and 11. And after that, I'll be all yours. So two hours in the morning, but then the rest of the time is yours.
The second thing to think about is compromised. Is it easier to skip one whole day of festivities and get everything wrapped up, really get into that deep focus zone, get some time and some energy and some space to really focus. Or to scatter that work throughout your break. I like to make the bargain with myself personally, that if I worked for an hour or two every day, I can make the rest of the time present and focused with the people who matter.
With no phones or computers. But you might find that it's actually easier to just clear one day of your schedule and get that deep focus instead of trying to work more regularly. It can also be helpful to remind people that by skipping a quote-unquote low level event, you know, not the main thing, the wedding that you're traveling for, or the most exciting day of your vacation.
But by skipping something that's slightly less of a priority. You can be there for something that is a really big priority. The work is a moveable. Usually that's why you're doing it. I'm breaking the first place, but the timing of it can be flexible.
And lastly, inside of this boundary category, I really recommend that you develop a signal, your own personal signal for do not disturb. Will you be in a location where it is easy to be distracted? I know that when I try and work at home at my kitchen table, it is very difficult, both for me and for everybody else to respect that I'm working and not to be disturbed because I'm right there in the middle of it.
So develop a way for people to quickly and quietly know that you're in a focus zone without them having to ask if you're working. This could be a sign on your bedroom door that announces that when your door is shot, you aren't to be disturbed. Or wearing headphones or sometimes even leaving the space.
A little bit more on that in a minute.
The next category of suggestions that I have in this area are about setting up your work conditions quickly and easily so that when your work time does come, you can drop right in. Step one in this process is to use your work rituals.
My brain, for example. Associates certain visual and taste cues with working. Yeah, I almost always will sit down in a chair, put in a piece of peppermint gum. When I'm trying to get ready to work. So when I'm traveling, I make sure I bring that ritual with me. Proper mint gum, my playlist, sometimes even a candle. If I can manage it.
Even if I'm in the busiest airport. By brain slips more easily into these work modes because it knows that peppermint gum equals go time.
It might also be useful to find a work zone. Is there a new coffee shop in your old childhood neighborhood? Does your uncle have a sweet home office that you can borrow? Are the libraries open? Sometimes you have to go to a new location to totally escape the, Hey let's make cookies right now, or, Hey, do you want to sit down and watch the new episodes of love island?
Be creative. So many places have wifi or better yet wifi and coffee, and they can help you make the most of a few hours and really reinforce that space between vacation you and work. You.
Last in this category is something that all of us struggle with and for good reason. Trying to avoid some time traps. So if you only have a few hours to work and get really important things done while you're traveling or while you're on break. Then try to avoid the time consuming tasks that don't necessarily have a huge impact and move right into the high value work.
This might mean putting in a website blocker that blocks Twitter or Instagram or the new threads or wherever you hang up. Maybe even your email. And setting up a vacation autoresponder can give you some space to respond to emails in a delayed way. Maybe you put your social media on pause, use the short work hours for the most pressing high impact tasks to make it feel like you really accomplished something when you snuck away.
Last, but not least this category be mindful. Be compassionate. Because this thing is really hard to do.
First step, take a few centering breaths. Are you having a sticky encounter when you're rushing to finish this essay before the deadline feeling guilty, maybe about missing some of the festivities, maybe you are resenting every life choice that ever led you to be at your high school library, grading student papers.
Well, everyone else is enjoying time at the pool. We've all been there. Take a few deep breaths and get re-centered. Rather than letting all of that bubble up and be a low. Or maybe high key distraction during your work sessions, it sometimes can even help to free write it. Write it out in your journal or maybe even a Google doc so that you can revisit those thoughts or not afterwards.
Be compassionate with other people too. Many of us come from backgrounds that don't totally understand all of the work that goes into a grad degree. And it can be so vulnerable to explain that you're behind on a deadline. To others, it might look like a sequence of typing activities that you are doing into various windows.
But that work is important enough for you to take time away from other things to finish it. Being compassionate with others that might not understand how important the work really is. Can help you feel not quite as attacked when those well-meaning, but probing questions and comments, start to roll in.
And last, but not least be compassionate with yourself. Missing out on a long awaited and often expensive trip or travel opportunity, it can be hugely upsetting for me. I start to feel really guilty about not finishing things earlier about having to take time away from the people who I've traveled so far to see people who care about me and that I'm not having this like idyllic holiday season.
Where I'm really making the most of every summer minute, or even sometimes I can feel guilty about not resting enough.
Having to work during the summer break or any other break doesn't necessarily mean that one high priority is higher than the other. It just means that you have a full, complex life with values and roles that sometimes overlap. We all wish that we could take perfect summer breaks and be there for every minute of all of our exciting trips and time together with our families and loved ones, but finding a way to fit the work into the whole picture of our lives.
And try new things out to support ourselves can be a gift. All on its own. And if you're looking for a little bit of structure, I really do encourage you to join us in summer camp. We're about halfway through, but you can still sign up. We are taking new members all the way through the end of August. Don't forget to use the word podcast for 10% off. Thanks so much. And I will 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!
2.18 i'm back, baby! - coming back to your desk after time away
whether it was a vacation you looked forward to all year, or an unexpected break from work, coming back to your desk after time away is not as easy as it sounds. i give you two strategies for combating the dislocation that can happen, all through the lens of jet lag!
resources:
blog post on shut down routines
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Whether you're just coming back from a break or about to leave for one. Let's talk about how to ease back into your work when you get back. On this week's episode of
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for a brand new summer planning template, all available for you for free. Now. Let's get into it.
I'm a big fan, as you probably know, if you've listened to this podcast of taking a break and sometimes those breaks are super intentional, like time off in the summer. Or a vacation or time off in between terms. And sometimes they're a little bit less intentional. Like when you have to go away unexpectedly because of a chronic illness or an emergency, or just a sickness that you didn't predict.
And I talk a little bit about that in a blog post that I've put in the show notes, but whether you want to weigh on purpose or it was unplanned, you then do have to deal with the inevitable coming back. Now. I love coming back to my desk. Usually. If the break was long enough and I got enough rest and recovery points in the old system, I often am really excited to come back, but that doesn't mean that my brain and my body are totally in sync when I do. . So in this week's episode, I'm going to share some of my theories about how you can tackle this little bit of brain, body dislocation when it comes to being back at your desk.
I approach coming back to your desk a lot. Like I approached jet lag. Or that sense of time dislocation when you travel and arrive in a location, that's a different time zone from where you started. Now, if you've experienced jet lag, you know, that it is a mind body phenomenon. And I truly believe that transitioning back to work after time away is the exact same thing.
So there are two different ways that you can deal with jet lag. But either way it's going to happen. And whether you're traveling cross country or around the world, or coming back after a break. But I want to normalize the idea that very, very few people I know am hopping into their desk chairs the day after vacation wide eyed and bushy tailed and ready to go with no sense of kind of weirdness or sluggishness jet lag happens. You can prepare for it. You can shift your schedule, you can try and sleep while you're traveling. You can take a sleep aid and you're still going to be a little bit off and it's the same way with work.
When you get back to your desk, no matter how well you planned and prepped to be a way you're going to be a little bit off when you get back. And that's okay. So there are two strategies that I use to try and deal with the sense of just location when it comes to being back at my desk. And the first one is the similar to a way that I handle jet lag, which is trying to get my body on the schedule of the place where I wanted to be in this case, my work routines.
This is a common strategy for dealing with jet lag. Like I mentioned, You do your very best to keep your body doing the things that it should be doing. And it's new time zone. So if you fly and suddenly it you've lost a whole day, you might try and stay up until bedtime, even though you missed a night of sleep.
You might try to eat meals around mealtime. Your brain might not be fully there, but you just adjust the body as much as you can. And hope that the brain follows. In a return to work context. This looks like trying to keep your schedule. So you get to your desk. When you want to, you keep your meetings and you worry a little bit less about your brain following suit.
You do what's possible and your body helps to guide your brain back into work mode. So you might show up at your desk at the appointed hour, nine or 10:00 AM. You might check your emails. You might noodle around on the internet. You might make sure that your files are backed up. You might do any of that kind of fluffy admin work that sure. Isn't the big stuff. But the goal on that first day of the trip is just to try and adjust to the jet lag.
And the goal on that first day back is just to try and get your body where it wants to be. Strategy too. Is to worry a little bit less about the schedule and focus on the tasks. Sometimes you get to your new location in a jet lag context and staying up or keeping a schedule, just isn't an option. When I was in grad school, my dad lived and worked in London. And when I would fly from California or from Michigan to visit him most times I would try really hard to stay up and beat the jet lag. But sometimes probably two or three times, I just crashed out. I got to his flat, I fell asleep for eight hours.
It's not ideal. But it's what my body needed at that particular time. In a work context, this looks like identifying the most important task or to. And working on that, no matter when or where you can get to it. So if you know that you really need to get that syllabus finished up this week so that you can send it to your department, you don't really care if you do it hat 10:00 AM like you would ideally do. Or if you work on it from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM, because that's when your brain feels like it's ready to function.
You worry less about the schedule. You'll get there eventually. And you focus on the tasks and stuff.
Either way in either situation. I really encourage you to give yourself time to adjust. If you are planning a really big trip, you save for it, you plan it. Ideally, you're not going to do the most important things. The things that you're really most looking forward to right away when you land, because jet lag will make it harder.
If you can't wait to visit that museum and you do it straight off the plane. Chances are you're going to be at least a little bit dislocated, if not full, improper suffering. So it's the same way. If you're getting back to work.
In the same way, if you're getting back to work and there's a way to avoid it, warming up with some adjustment days can be really helpful before you launch into the most important stuff. I often spend the first day back catching up on emails, doing some planning and getting things organized. If I tell myself the day after time away.
That. Okay. You must arrive at your desk five minutes before the appointed time drink one cup of coffee and then do the hardest thing on your list. When I am already feeling a little bit weird, a little bit off. That's a sure fire away for me to spend that whole day being annoyed and frustrated.
And it's very unlikely that I'm going to get that writing done. I know though that the second day is a little bit better. And the third day's a little bit better too.
Basically all of this boils down to no matter how you left or how long you've been gone coming back to work as a transition. And transition's always go a little bit more smoothly when you support yourself through them, rather than wishing you weren't going through it. I know there are very few things that I can just think my way out of and that post vacation slump is one of them.
So, if you need to reread the whole chapter that you were working on to get oriented. I do it. If you need to plan a half day and then take a nap in the afternoon planet. If you feel. The way that you feel that first hour back is not the way that you're going to feel forever, but it is the way that you feel in that moment.
I encourage you to support it and be open to it. Changing. And if this is the kind of advice that you're looking for, or if someplace with a little bit extra support. Fun and excitement sounds like a great way to ease back after your first half of the summer. And I encourage you to check out summer camp. We are starting our fourth session on June 26th, but you can join us every other Monday.
As we are going to be going all summer long. So, if you're looking for something with a little bit of support to help get you back to that desk, after some expected or unexpected time away, we would love to have you. And make sure you use the code podcast for 10% off. Thank you so much for listening and I will 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!
2.17 one notebook to rule them all - research notebooks
i have never felt jealousy like i did the day i heard about research notebooks.
but my jealous can be your gain - learn all about why keeping a notebook might help you develop more insights into your research process! i give flexible examples, and reflection questions to help you see what things you might want to record in yours!
resources mentioned
dr. raul pacheco-vega's everything notebook
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast! And if you are user pcynde, you won this month's free session! Email to claim!
Summer Camp has officially kicked off!! Learn more about it here - and don't forget to use the code PODCAST for 10% off any sliding scale level or payment plan!
Get your free summer planning workbook here - get a more spacious, fun, and supported summer!!
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I have never experienced jealousy like I did when somebody described their research notebook to me. And so i have done the hard work of translating it into a tool that any phd student can use. On this week's episode of
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for a brand new summer planning template, all available for you for free. Now. Let's get into it.
The first time I heard of a research journal, I was talking to a client who worked in a wet lab and was required to keep a research journal that stayed in the lab at all times. They kept track of the experiments that they ran, the reagents that they used, all kinds of good stuff. They kept notes about preliminary findings.
It seems like a dream to me, especially as a humanities PhD. First of all, the idea of a lab was immensely appealing a place to go and do your research instead of just on the couch. But mostly I really loved this idea of being required to keep track of what I did during the day, the steps I took, the literature I reviewed the sources I consulted. How helpful would that be?
And as someone who can regularly lose whole days or weeks to research tangents or record of what I did sounded so good and so useful. Now several years later as a coach, I recommend research journals to a lot of my clients. And now by extension to you, dear listeners on this podcast. There are as many ways to keep a research notebook as there are research projects. So infinity number of ways,
but most methods boil down to two key functions. One that it's in a singular location. Digital or analog where you get in the habit of checking in and checking out at the start and end of each work session. And feature number two, it's a way to capture the day-to-day of your research process.
Experiments, run materials, use boxes, process literature, read, et cetera, so that you can go back and refer to it when, and if you need it. And that's it. A notebook where you keep everything all in one place and that everything, or the steps of your research.
Perhaps the most famous of these research notebooks methodologies is Dr. Pacheco Vegas, everything notebook. I'm going to include a bunch of links in the show notes where you can learn more about his method. But basically he buys a specific notebook. He color codes, everything, there are pens, there's a system and it's a notebook that holds everything. It doesn't matter what research project he's working on, what stage of the project he's in, everything goes into this notebook and when he fills it up, he archives it.
And so he knows that everything literally that has influenced or touched his research process is in one of those notebooks somewhere. How helpful. I will say that you should explore his method for yourself. He does a much better job of explaining it than I do, but for me, the idea of the everything notebook became a little bit overwhelming.
I often had multiple projects on the go and I just can't be trusted to keep the same notebook and the same pens. And remember. From day to day, the specific, detailed color coding system that he uses. But if you're looking for something a little bit more flexible, I've got ideas and tips for you.
First of all in the digital realm, there are also lots of helpful examples of how and why you might keep a research notebook or a research journal. Some are run in LaTeX, some are based in notion and I will include those links in the show notes. As usual. I think that the specific tool that you use is so much less important than the intent or the function that you're using that tool for. Lots of tools can store information in a way that's linked in searchable. So it's really important is getting clear on what you want to keep track of.
So to that end in today's short and sweet research journal exploration. I have a few reflection questions that might help you. Guide the creation of what a research journal or notebook could look like for you. So. Sit down. Maybe pause this podcast and sit with these questions. Question number one.
What are the types of information that you most wish that you could recall after a long day or week of work? What are the things that slip your mind? What are the things that would be most useful? What are the things that you most wish. Would be automatically, or at least had a system to be captured.
Question number two. What are the types of information that are hard for you to reconstruct? Is it where your time goes? Is it hard for you to know what you worked on from day to day? Is it all just one big blur of a draft? Is it hard to know what specific things that you worked on, you started the day in one document you ended in one document and you're not really sure what happened in between.
Is it hard for you to remember? Or what is it hard for you to remember or reconstruct what motivated you to pull a certain source in the beginning or to make a certain experimental choice or the settings on the lab equipment that you were using? What's the kind of information that is hard for you to reconstruct after the fact, even if it seems really clear in the moment.
Research question number three. Would it be helpful for you to narrate? In a place where you can access them afterwards. Rather than just in your mind, the process that you follow during the course of your research. So many times I'm working with clients and they, I say, okay, you're sitting down with a new chapter, explain to me your process. And they can't really, they have.
It's vague sense that they start with an outline. They do some amount of research, but mostly it's a process that's driven by anxiety. That they do a whole lot of research that feels relatively unbounded. And then all of a sudden the deadline comes up and boom. They're anxious, they start to write. So would it be helpful for you to narrate the choices that you're making on a more day-to-day basis so that you can decide if you want to keep doing them or not?
Is it that you always need to pull every source in the library of Congress catalog? Heading of your specific research question. Every time you sit down, do you always need to read every article or did it work pretty well when you started writing a little bit earlier?
That's the kind of data that you can analyze. If it's written down in a research notebook.
And last but not least. How accurate are your perceptions of how you spend your research and writing time? Would a more concrete record help you counteract any inaccuracies? For my own sake. I am a deeply inaccurate judge of where all of my time goes.
Which is why I rely on a variety of different tools, whether those are time-tracking tools or a research notebook to help me remember what I did in any given day. Because if you ask me either, I'm going to misremember the amount of time that I spent on each thing. Or I'm going to forget things altogether.
So if you find that it would be helpful for you to have a more accurate record. Maybe for more accurate planning, then you might want to explore or research notebook.
And if these are the kinds of concrete tips that sound cool to you, then I really encourage you to check out the community. It is $5 a month. It's full of articles, resources, a coaching call library. There's actually a private podcast feed there, but mostly it's a place for graduate students to show up and say, Hey.
What is this thing called a citation manager, or how are you managing to balance syllabus creation with everything else that you're trying to do this summer? We've got challenges. There are prizes. There's all kinds of support in there and I encourage you to check it out. Otherwise, I will see you right back here next week.
Thank you so much for listening.
📍 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!
2.16 wait, do i know everything, or nothing? - bouncing between student and expert
it should be a smooth progression right? you start as a grad student, and you emerge as an expert! a doctor! a colleague!!
but why does it feel so bumpy? let's talk about all the reasons why you might feel like a superstar one day, and a trash racoon the next - and things you can do to soften the bumps, too!
and sign up for the FREE webinar on turning confusing feedback into effective edits - i'm hosting dr. bailey lang and i'm so excited!
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast! And if you are user pcynde, you won this month's free session! Email to claim!
Summer Camp has officially kicked off!! Learn more about it here - and don't forget to use the code PODCAST for 10% off any sliding scale level or payment plan!
Get your free summer planning workbook here - get a more spacious, fun, and supported summer!!
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One minute you're flying high. Feeling yourself, knowing that you are a scholar and then the next minute you feel right back at square one. And like, you don't know a single thing. Let's talk about the balance between student and scholar on this week's episode of Yeah.
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for a brand new summer planning template, all available for you for free. Now. Let's get into it.
One of the trickiest parts about grad school. And a lot of other experiences where we're expected to grow and learn while also doing something. Is that we are usually both the student and an expert. We're at least growing into an expert. And this feeling of being both, it causes major intellectual, emotional, and sometimes even physical whiplash.
One second. You're writing up your research and you need to state your authority and your originality and how brilliant you are. And then the next minute your supervisor is taking pains to remind you that you haven't read every book that they have and their 92 year career. And you, in fact know nothing.
One tradition, at least in a lot of the U S departments that I'm familiar with is to invite a successful candidate back into the room after they have their thesis or dissertation defense by using their title. Can you come back in? Dr. Pepin my advisor said a signal that I had left the room for their deliberation as a student but I was entering back into it as a colleague. And in theory, that transition happened smoothly over the course of my five years in the programs. I started as a student, I went through coursework. I took my exams, I passed it into candidacy. I did my reviews. I went to conferences and slowly and slowly and slowly, I built up that expertise until poof. I defended I was an expert.
I was a colleague. I was a doctor. But emotionally and physically, and even sometimes administratively, I went backwards and forwards all of the time. Sometimes I felt like I was more than capable to teach my undergraduates and being an expert to all of my students write up my research. I felt like I was making original contributions. And then at other times I felt like I couldn't even be trusted to know what email was or how other humans used it.
Yeah. And I want to be clear that I'm not talking about here, the separate, but related issues of imposter syndrome. And the very real feeling that many of us get that the university decides our status by convenience. I will briefly say that it was in my department's best interest to call me a student when they did not want to pay me as an expert. And it was in their best interest to consider me an expert administratively when they wanted labor. Like a class covered or somebody to volunteer at a conference or to give a talk or a guest lecture, then it was fine for me to be an expert because they weren't going to be paying me anything extra. That's the nature of being a student in a program. And it also is one of the reasons that I'm such a big fan of unions for graduate students, but that's a whole other issue.
I want to be clear here, because I am not saying that all of us are manufacturing this whiplash in our heads. There are administrative and systemic reasons why our advisors, our departments, or universities, even the field itself consider us students when it's convenient and they consider us experts when it's convenient.
That changing back and forth can be really disorienting if not dispiriting or even worse. So I just want to name this feeling. It is so hard to flop back and forth between student and expert all of the time. And know that for important structural and systemic reasons, you are never going to be able to think or self care or self confidence or hype yourself out of that switch. Some of it is completely outside of your control.
But the truth is that you can also be both at the same time. In fact, we are often expert and student. teacher and learner and a lot of aspects in our life. We are always learning to do things more efficiently, more effectively, differently, and often we're using those skills in our daily lives, too.
We're learning to write better while we're also producing a lot of writing. We're working on our, improving our focus and our time management. While we also learn more about what makes our brains work and what tools do and don't support them. The important thing here that I really want to drive home in this podcast episode is that your skills have value even if, especially if you are working to improve them. You are not only worthy as a person once you're an expert. You can share what, you know, even if there are other people who do things differently than you do. So much of what makes PhD candidates stand out and why we're recruited into these programs for the first place. is our life experiences, our identities, our previous work experiences, the communities we grew up in the perspectives that we have. All of those things make us experts in our own lives, our own communities, our own spheres of knowledge. But it's so easy to get into the hollowed white halls of academia and forget that any of that matters.
So, if you are waiting to feel proud of yourself until you're an expert with nothing left to learn. You will probably never get the chance to call yourself an expert. And even if you do, if it's going to be at the very end of your career, What would it feel like instead if you gave yourself the chance to be proud of where you are right now?
while also giving yourself space to grow and change. What would it change for you if you gave yourself permission to celebrate how far you already come on this path? While still acknowledging that there's more to go. Yeah, it is so destabilizing to be in an environment that depends on distinctions between experts and novices, for promotion advancement and in a lot of cases for even praise and feedback. But don't let the ego games of academia convince you that you're still a scrawny student at the whims of your teacher in every facet of your life. And to that end, here are three different things that you can try over the next week, or maybe even further along, that might help you feel into the ways in which you are already capable. You're already an expert.
You are already a person who can learn and celebrate what you've learned at the same time. So the first thing to try is owning your expertise. You might find that you are an expert in all kinds of things. You maybe are an expert in how to cook a fantastic set of pancakes for breakfast, or you're an expert in using the autoclave machine in your lab.
Maybe you are an expert in a particular method or a piece of software, maybe you are the grad student that everyone goes to to figure out how to get their canvas sites to work. In what ways is your expertise already being drawn on as a resource in your department, in your human life, in your communities?
And what would it feel like to make a list of all of those things that you're already really good at? Our brains naturally focus on the stuff that we wish we were better at already. Like the fact that I am not as good at Excel as I want to be, or I can't code an R yet, or I'm still taking this course to improve my language skills. Everybody's got those things and yeah, it's healthy to keep growing and striving and always improving our skills.
To a point. But if we never stop and name, the fact that we have already improved ourselves, we have already grown and changed and learned things. Then it can feel like you're caught on that. Never ending hamster wheel of just never being good enough. So take a moment list those things that you're already an expert at and see if there's any way that you can claim a little bit of that expertise for yourself. And the next week or so.
Option number two that you could try is owning your expertise in non-academic spaces.
Maybe you teach a class at your local yarn shop about how to knit. Because it gives you such a pure amount of pleasure to be an expert in share something that you love. Maybe you go and volunteer at the local museum and you give tours and you feel like, wow, I'm a docent. And I'm teaching these kids things and it feels great. Or maybe you pick the most complicated recipe that you know, how to make you invite all of your friends and you wow them with the fact that you can make souffle's right there on the spot.
You do not only need to be an expert in the thing that you were working on professionally. And sometimes that little bit of mastery feeling in another space can really go a long way.
Last, but not least I would love it. If you experimented with remembering that it is okay to still be learning. And if it feels unsafe or unwelcome or a little bit tender and vulnerable to do that at work.
Why not still learn in another space. That's completely separate. I love learning new hobbies for this. I think that. Taking on hobbies during my PhD was one of the reasons why I finished it was so great for me to go to a yoga class and work on a new pose. And fall down a bunch and you don't mess it up a bunch and mix up my left and right.
A thing that I'm notorious for doing. And remember that it was okay to play. It was okay to fall down. It was okay to not be good at something yet. That was such a liberating feeling when I felt like every other aspect of my life was such high stakes. I encouraged you to find someplace where it feels a little bit more comfortable to not be good at something.
Maybe you take a pottery class or you watch a bunch of YouTube videos and teach yourself how to watercolor. The sky's the limit, but giving yourself that chance to practice learning in another space. Might help you feel a little bit more comfortable doing it in your professional life too.
But anyway, you shake it. Grad school is one long apprenticeship in which your expert in student status in theory progresses in a linear line, but most of the time bounces up and down sometimes a million times a day. And anyone's nervous system is going to get kicked up by that. Just remember that part of that is how the system is designed.
And there's also a lot of space to give yourself support. As you move through the ups and the downs on the path to becoming a doctor.
And if you are struggling with the ups and downs of revision, make sure that you check out the show notes. I am hosting a free webinar on June 20th, all about taking confusing feedback and turning it into an actual plan to edit and revise your writing. I'm hosting the amazing Dr. Bailey Lang to give this workshop. And I'm so excited to have her and all of you join us.
More links are at the bottom sign up it's completely free and it will also be recorded and transcribed afterwards. In case you can't make it live. Otherwise, I will see you around the neighborhood. Bye. Great.
📍 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!
2.15 get out the good pens - switching to paper
i'm not sure what came first - my passion for notebooks and pens, or my reliance on those tools when i feel stuck and overwhelmed with my writing. this week, i'm talking all about the benefits of going pen on paper - to slow down, to be less linear, and to get unstuck! if you've been waiting for an excuse to get out the good notebook and your favorite pen, wait no more!
resources:
summer planning workbook - she's free!
summer camp - enrolling now for the rest of the summer!
giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast! And if you are user pcynde, you won this month's free session! Email to claim!
Summer Camp has officially kicked off!! Learn more about it here - and don't forget to use the code PODCAST for 10% off any sliding scale level or payment plan!
Get your free summer planning workbook here - get a more spacious, fun, and supported summer!!
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Get out that fancy notebook that you've been saving, your best pen, or those cool post-it notes. You out. Because this week's episode is all about taking your thoughts and putting them on paper.
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for a brand new summer planning template, all available for you for free. Now. Let's get into it.
Computers are obviously amazing. They're so powerful. They're so capable. But have you ever met a really good notebook? That's bound just the way that you want to. And that pen that has the exact right ink flow. There's something that can't be beat about working on paper.
And one of the things that I encounter with a lot of my clients and even with myself, Is that there can be a real resistance to stepping away from the computer and working in another space. And I think a lot of that comes from this fear of not being efficient enough. Why would I do pre drafting work or outlining or restructuring? =On a piece of paper or a hard copy or a notebook, if I'm just going to have to quote, redo all of that work on my computer later. Now, I'm not here to try and turn any of us into people who write all of our drafts longhand, and then send them to the typist to get them ready for our advisor's eyes. But I am suggesting that in a few specific situations, it can actually help you speed up to slow down and work in the less efficient, but more tactile realm of the paper.
Computers are a place where you can move your writing forward really quickly. But this also creates a sensation of going a little bit too fast than the actual ideas are developing. If you have ever found yourself, lost scrolling through a long document, not finding what you needed, clicking way to Twitter to try and find it hunting down that citation, remembering that you needed to book a dentist appointment, Googling that.
The loop goes on and on then you've maybe experienced what I'm calling this sync up issue, where your brain is going at a certain speed and the computer allows everything else to go quite a bit faster. Writing, especially at certain points can be a slow process. You are generating new knowledge. Therefore it will take you a little bit of time to formulate these ideas, get them ready get them lined up sequentially so that you can write them down at a document.
Working on paper, it gives you a chance to break out of that linearity. Slow down and let your brain generate those ideas at the pace that's a little bit more comfortable for you. It's not to say that you won't get back to the computer and then have all of those temptations in scrolling that you might have already had.
But for the particularly sticky seasons, when you feel stuck, when you feel overwhelmed, moving to paper is actually a way to help break that pattern of kind of frantically clicking or typing and retyping and deleting things. That real frantic nature can be calmed down by a little bit of on paper work.
Here are a few of the ways that I like to work with my writing on paper. Take what's useful and leave the rest. But I think that these benefits alone are worth an experiment in the next couple of weeks. Writing on paper, it can open up a variety of different workspaces. Pop into an empty classroom to use the whiteboard.
Take your notebook to the library or a coffee shop, work in a different corner of your couch. This is one of those changes that seems really small. Why would it make a difference for me to go to the library instead of my office, where all of my things are and all of my special mugs. But if you were feeling really stuck, really sticky, really slow going somewhere else and going somewhere else without all of the trappings of all of the other jobs and roles that need your attention can really make the difference and get you a little bit of fresh air, so to speak.
Benefit number two. It can be easier to share your thinking with other people. If you're working on paper. A brainstorming session with a mind map that you make on a big piece of paper or a whiteboard in an empty classroom can be an excellent way to get your thinking about an argument more clear while you show your work to a writing group or an advisor.
I know that I used to sit in coffee shops with my very best friends and I would scribble things and be like, see, don't you see it? I would draw them diagrams and I would connect the ideas and having it on paper, helped them follow me a little bit more as I was trying to work out those ideas. And even if you don't have an extra person to share these ideas with, I have also done high quality brainstorming with my cats or with an imagined, interested. Yeah, kind of feedback giver. And the paper makes it easier for me to remember what I was saying and for them to follow along whether they are feline or human.
Writing long hand, whether in full sentences or just in bullet points. I can allow you to slow down the actual production of words and see your own thinking more clearly. I know that I think really fast and my fingers can almost get there, but if I'm writing long hand, it takes me quite a bit of effort to get all of those words out. So.
Free writing is one of those techniques where they slow the race and the kind of frantic nature of the thoughts down so that you can see them. As opposed to scrolling through the document, looking at the feedback, looking at the comments, imagining six different ways that you can restructure and trying to keep all of that in your head. If you're working through a particularly thorny organizational issue or argumentative change writing longhand, or even putting things on post-it notes can helpfully slow you down so that you can see what you're trying to do.
If you're in a very sticky spot. You're nervous. You're overwhelmed. Your nervous system is at an 11. Working on paper can make it easier to soothe that nervous system enough. And make it a little bit harder to bounce into a different task that ultimately is going to be a distraction from what you're trying to do.
I find that the slower pace of me writing my words out, hearing the scratch of the pen on the paper actually gives me a chance to kind of reduce that overwhelm feeling. And really dig into what I'm thinking and what I'm trying to say.
Now, there's no phase of writing that won't benefit from writing on paper. If you are feeling overwhelmed or frazzled, I find that it's particularly effective in two different phases, the pre drafting, and then the restructuring.
I have clients that start any writing project with post-it notes on the wall with big ideas, they might start with free writing in a journal or making a mind map on a big piece of paper. That pre-writing phase. Is often not linear. And when we force it into a linear by design piece of software, like word. Then it really can constrain us and make it hard to see how things might be organized.
The second phase that I recommend working on paper is if you're in the middle of a really big restructure. If you're in a restructure, then it can be really difficult to make all of those changes that people are recommending as you scroll through the document.
You might end up duplicating certain areas. You might accidentally delete more than you want to. You can get lost. It's really hard, especially with big, large scale documents to do that restructuring digitally. If you have access to a printer you might print it out, cut things up, make notes. You might re outline it or reverse outline it in a notebook just to give yourself a chance to sort of see what you have and then make a couple of changes on paper and then translate those changes back into the digital.
It's that translation process that I find stops a lot of people from slowing down and working on paper. And yeah, it is going to be a pain maybe. To sit down and type up those notes or to go through and make sure that your document lines up with the new outline that you made.
And it's this kind of tool that our brains like to tell us it's inefficient. That can be especially hard to reach for in the situations when you're feeling stressed or behind AKA the situations where they might help the most. But let me assure you that this really is one of those slow down to speed up situations. You might need to budget a little bit of extra time to input, work into your final document, but if working longhand, if writing in a notebook of doing it with your favorite pen gets you unstuck. It gets you a little more focused or support, then that benefit really outweighs the work that you need to redo. Plus pens and markers and stickers. And if you need any more of a pitch than that, I can't help you.
But if this is the kind of tool and encouragement that you really are looking for at this summer, then you are most cordially invited to summer camp. A new session is starting. It's soon. They start every two weeks and you can get more information at the link in the bio.
Plus you can download your free summer planning workbook and stay tuned for cool free webinars and all sorts of other things that are coming down the pike this summer. Thank you so much for listening and I will 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!
2.14 feel good at something - get a hobby!
in today's episode, i am going to encourage you to think seriously about your summer plans....no, not all the reading you'll do, or writing you'll get caught up on....but your hobbies. and i'll give you a bunch of research-backed reasons that hobbies might be one of the ways that you can make your life - human and scholarly - more sustainable!
resources:
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast!
Summer Camp has officially kicked off!! Learn more about it here - and don't forget to use the code PODCAST for 10% off any sliding scale level or payment plan!
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The best thing you can do for your scholarly work might be to do something completely different with a big chunk of your time. Let's talk about hobbies in this week's episode of
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for a brand new summer planning template, all available for you for free. Now. Let's get into it.
Whether it's conscious or unconscious, it's really common for academics to have a default setting of work for most of their free time. Half an hour? Get some reading in! Got a couple of days free that you didn't expect? Go ahead and get caught up on that writing project. But one of the things that is definitely true when your default for time is work, is that it is exponentially easier to burn out, lose interest, fall out of love with your project, and just generally feel less good because you're working all of the time.
Unlike other curves, the effort put in to work produced curve is not a linear one. What I mean by that is that the more work that you put in, it's not necessarily going to lead to more and more achievement. You can work 17 hours on a piece of writing, but if you're exhausted for 13 of them, it's not going to be that much better for your final project to have put in all of those extra hours, because you're just not as efficient.
What can we do about this math that we wish would math differently? And I'm here to introduce you to a secret. Maybe something you haven't heard about. Or maybe something that tickles a far away piece in your brain. Hobbies. Yes, that's right. This week's episode is all about why I think that you should get a hobby, resurrect a hobby, have a couple of hobbies, or just generally have projects that engage you outside of work.
And here are a couple of reasons why. I've always been a big fan of hobbies, but even more recently after I've read this book Rest, which obviously I'll link to in the show notes. Rest by Alex Soojung-kim Pang has lots of actionable things, but the best chapter in it for me is this chapter about recovery, where he talks about something that we all need, which is recovery time from the parts of our lives that are stressful, require a lot of effort and focus.
And if that's not a definition of scholarly life, then I don't know what is. So this chapter is pretty actionable and it's built on the workof, Dr. Sabine Sonnentag who's a professor of work and organizational psychology at the university of Mannheim. She has studied burnout and recovery from work-related stress for years and has identified four major components of what she calls recovery.
Psychological detachment; relaxation; mastery experiences; and control. Now I value your time and I don't want this podcast to take 45 minutes. So I'm just going to talk about two of these elements that I think that a hobby specifically can really help you with . But the idea behind all of these elements are that they don't just help you take a break from work. They actually help you recover, which is something different than just breaking.
It's going to replenish you recharge your batteries, so to speak. And I think if we approach the time that we're not working as something that is going to actively help restore us, it makes burnout a little bit less likely. Now of course burnout has its roots in all sorts of systemic and unjust systems. So you're not going to be able to fix work burnout or prevent it altogether with a hobby.
But it might go a really long way. And it's because having hobbies really help fulfill these two elements of recovery, psychological detachment and mastery experiences.
So psychological detachment. Is the ability to disengage from work-related thoughts and concerns during non-work time. If you laughed out loud at that, you are not alone. I did too. But it is useful to think about what activities, habits, or tools help you take a mental break from work. It might look like taking emails off your phone or reading fiction or watching TV to help put your brain in a completely different area of thought. My brain is a little bit. Uh, persistent, stubborn, and sometimes a single input isn't enough to get it to psychologically detach from work. So for me, this often looks like activities that involve my body too.
Otherwise, it's too easy for my brain to keep braining while I'm trying to watch that show. So I might add in coloring while I watch TV, or I might listen to that podcast, but go for a walk around the block at the same time. You get it. That's psychological detachment, one of the four elements of recovery.
The second element of recovery that we're going to talk about today are mastery experiences. So mastery experiences are anything that promote a sense of competence and achievement which you might feel at work, but maybe not all of the time. Dr. Sonnentag defines them these activities as engaging interesting things that you do well.
And there's a lot of research that the more uncertain your job is, the more doing things that you feel good at and competent at in your off time can help you to counteract that. Hobbies can be great for this. Games. Who doesn't love winning a game? Volunteering where you feel useful and needed. Teaching something non-related to your work like teaching a knitting class. If that's something you're into or teaching a niece or nephew, how to bake cookies.
But this element of recovery can seem kind of counterintuitive, right? Because it takes a lot of effort and mental energy to teach or volunteer or do something that is engaging and interesting. . It has that psychological detachment benefit. So it helps you think about something else on purpose and it makes you feel like you can do things and you can do them well, or that you're progressing at them or they feel supportive .
And it feels good to feel good at things. It feels good to do things ,well to be needed, to see progress, to notice achievement. And the more that you're not getting that at work, the harder those benefits are going to hit for you.
So. Why am I pushing hobbies so hard? And it's, I am pushing them because I A) think that grad school doesn't own every hour of your time. And that having more things that you're excited about or doing is only going to benefit you, but it's really useful because the time math doesn't always work out the way that we want it to.
You know, up top, I mentioned that the effort curve doesn't always make sense --that the more effort you put in you do reach a sort of plateau where more and more effort isn't going to necessarily yield the performance benefits that you want. But the time also works similarly, but to your own benefit. So if you have 40 hours in a week to work on a project and you spend five of them on a hobby or a separate project, um, hopefully something a little bit different from work.
But that hobby is going to have benefits that far outweigh the five hours that you quote unquote took away from the project. Those five hours, according to the research and definitely backed up by my own experience are going to help you focus better. When you get back, they're going to help you, help you recover more, avoid burnout, and avoid some of those crashes that's so many of us are prone to.
And now that we've reached the summertime, and if you're in the American quarter system, hold on, it's coming for you. But summer recovery is especially important because that default sense of time being work time, no matter what is intense during the summer, if you're a scholar, because that's when we're supposed to catch up. Right?
And it can feel luxurious to the point of irresponsibility to say that I have two equal goals this summer, and one of them is to learn how to crochet. And the other one is to finish this dissertation chapter. You might not want to say that to your advisor, but in my experience, if you actively invest in your own recovery, through hobbies, through other experiences that help you detach and feel good and competent, then you're going to have more energy, not just for the summer to help you kind of move past any stickiness or burnout that you might already be feeling or help you recover from any of the bumps and bruises that we all tend to get during the academic year. It's going to also make it much more likely that you're going to show up on the first day of your new term. AKA academic new year. Uh, more rested, recovered person instead of a husk that pushed hard all summer long to try and catch up, I didn't quite get there and it starting the year already behind.
And if this permission slip to have a hobby and to make that hobby important. If not, just as important as your other work, the summer appeals, then you are going to love the free new summer planning workbook that's available in the link in the show notes. It's got all sorts of questions and activities to help you plan a summer. That's actually going to help you. Move forward and not burn out. And it has all sorts of other information about things that are happening in the thrive PhD universe this summer.
I appreciate you listening to this so much, and I hope it gives you a little bit of space to start a hobby, or maybe pick one back up again in the next couple of days. 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!
2.13 define done-ness - it's less obvious than you think!
lately, i've been asking people to define not just the tasks they want to focus on - but how they'll know when that task is done. and it's a LOT harder than you might think it is! this week's episode gives you two strategies for figuring out doneness, and debunks a PERSISTENT myth about how other people know when they're done. get into it!
referenced:
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast!
Summer Camp has officially kicked off!! Learn more about it here - and don't forget to use the code PODCAST for 10% off any sliding scale level or payment plan!
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If the answer to this question was easy. I wouldn't need to record a whole podcast about it. Let's talk about how to know when you are done on this episode of
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you like what you hear on this podcast, you're going to love what I have cooked up for you in summer camp. More details in the show notes. Now let's get into it.
As part of the planning process for the sprint kickoff that I run in the summer camp program, I ask people to define not only what tasks they're going to work on over the course of the two weeks, but crucially how they know when that task is done. And you'd be surprised, or maybe you wouldn't be by how difficult an answer that can be.
If it were easier to know when things were done. I think a lot of academic planning, estimation, deadlines would be a lot easier because it'd be a concrete finish line. You're done preparing for exams when you've read all the books. You are ready to turn in that draft when it exists. But as we know those questions, aren't as clear cut. They aren't as black and white as we might want them to be. And that gray area invites in all kinds of new friends to play like perfectionism, avoidance anxiety, because your definition of done and everyone else's might be really different from one another.
So let's get into what kinds of tasks it's really important to define and done point for and how you might go about doing that.
Now. Raise your hand. Or don't, I mean, you're listening to a podcast, so I can't really tell, but raise your hand if you have ever thought. Okay. I wish that somebody would just give me a to-do list for everything that I need to do in order to have this project be done. Just give me a to-do list for my dissertation. I don't care if it's 600 things long. I want to see every single step so that I can check it out.
So that I can check them off one by one. It might take me years, but I will have my list and I will feel secure in my list hood. Now I have begged for such a list. I've had clients beg me for a list themselves and I regret to inform you that it really doesn't exist. And partially because there is no standard for when something is done.
For example. Take something like a draft of a piece of writing your advisor might leave you with a common refrain that says, come back to me when your draft is done and I'll give you some feedback and you say, great. That makes sense. As soon as the draft is done, I'll come back and then you work on it.
And you work on it and you work on it and then it's not really clear to you when it's done. Is it done when all of the pros exists, even if some of it is a little bit rough, is it done when all of the citations are there? Is it done when every table and figure is complete and in the document? Is it done when it's copy edited? Is it done when it's formatted or is it done at some other mysterious time that you don't really know about.
In just that one example, we can see where there are multiple invitations for your brain to jump in and either tell you that something is done way before it is. Or much more likely to stall you from the next step because you are pretty sure that your version of done isn't as good as what other people are expecting.
So in this week's episode, I really want to give you a couple of tools to define doneness. Not because they will protect you from feedback. Not because they are guaranteed to be the same definition of doneness as your advisor. Or your editor or whomever else you're submitting work to, but because they bring clarity to what can otherwise be a foggy finished line.
One way to measure doneness is to measure against the requirements. This is one of those situations where on paper, it seems really simple. Yes. Find the requirements for what a dissertation chapter must be, meet the requirements. And then I am done. But I don't know about you. Nobody handed me a list and said, here are the requirements for your dissertation chapter. It needs to be this number of pages. It needs to be this number of citations. It needs to be this level of formatted. People just said, come back when your draft is done and expected me to know what that meant.
Now. If you're in a program that gives you really clear guidelines. Enjoy them. Uh, feel free to skip ahead a couple of seconds, but if you don't. There's two ways to go about defining the requirements. The first way is to find a completed object that is similar to what you're trying to do. So in the case of a dissertation chapter, this might be somebody else's chapter that you're looking at, maybe an older graduate student who's a couple of years ahead of you is willing to share, you know, an in progress drafts so that you can see it.
But that's one way, find an example and then extrapolate backwards. If there's was 50 pages, then yours is probably going to be about 50 pages. If they cited 15 different sources, then you know, that 15 sources is probably closer to the ballpark than 30 or 50 or a hundred sources. It's not perfect.
But it will give you a ballpark estimate around about close enough estimate that will help, you know, when you've met all of the requirements. And if you meet the requirements, then you're done. The second level. The second way to know if you are done is to measure it against a deadline and your ideal plan.
So I sometimes refer to this is the Jedi mind trick effect. I had an advisor who only wanted to see what she described as polished writing. She didn't want to see anything in new draft version. She didn't want to see any bullet points or any placeholder references. She really wanted to see something polished, which meant that the space between when I could use feedback on my writing and what it was actually done enough to send to her was a pretty big space, months sometimes even. And so I had to build in a couple of extra deadlines and supports for myself, whether it was through a writing group or exchanging drafts with friends. Or doing what I would call a Jedi mind trick where I would finish up the chapter. I would know there were big holes in it. I would know that certain sections weren't as defined as other sections or that she might have feedback about things, but I would stop it at like 70% complete content-wise and then I would spend three or four days polishing up what I had.
I would go ahead and do all the formatting. I would add in the footnotes. I would make the tabs the way they were. We're supposed to be, and then I would send it to her. Knowing that it wasn't a complete draft, but it looked like a complete draft and it read like a complete draft. That way when she invariably had comments, I would go back and say, great. Thank you. That's awesome.
It was the only way for me to get feedback on my work in progress, and actually be able to revise it according to these requirements, that for whatever reason she was unwilling or unable to give me outright.
So, if you can't measure against the requirements, you can go with way two, which is do your best to make sure that it looks like it's done and acts like it's done. And then get that feedback. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It doesn't feel good to send in work that, you know, could be better. But more often than not the earlier you engage the feedback. The earlier you engage the next step of the process, whatever comes after being done with the phase that you're on. So if that means being done with the research, it means the sooner you can start writing it up.
It might be that the sooner you get a draft, your advisor, the sooner you have comments to revise, or the sooner that you send something out to a journal, the sooner they send it back to you. With, you know, their journal Lee. Judgment. The idea here is that being done- even if it feels a little uncomfortable, even if you receive feedback that things need to be improved- is ultimately a much faster way to move through the process .
Because I'm here to let you in on a little secret. I have not. In all of my years of working with clients of working on things myself. I met anyone who has an internal switch that flips and says, ah, yes, this thing is done. This paper's ready. This chapter is complete. This dissertation is ready to go.
Everyone's doneness this is at least partially. Constrained by an outside force, whether that is your funding running out or your maternity leave or your advisor going off break for the summer, there's a thousand things that could create an external circumstance, but often your doneness is defined at least in part by this external circumstance that may or may not even be related to your work.
Your dissertation is done because you need it to be defended in August so that you can start your job in September. Your journal article is ready to go back to the journal because they asked for it to be backed by this specific date. So, if you're waiting for this kind of mysterious sense of satisfaction to know that something's done, then, in my experience, you're going to be waiting a long time. But overall. If you have a task that's on your task list this week, or for this summer, I really encourage you to take a couple of extra minutes and decide how you will know when that task is done.
It won't guarantee that you don't spend an extra couple of days polishing or that you don't have some sort of emotional wobbles at the end , worrying about whether this is actually good enough, but by defining doneness, you won't be waiting around for this abstract, somewhat mysterious sense that this is ready to go.
Now you will have an outside list of requirements, maybe written down, maybe in your head that will help you judge that doneness. And then you can be on to the next thing. Because if there's one thing that's true about grad school, that there will always be a next thing.
And if this is the kind of thinking that really appeals to you, then you might want to check out summer camp.
Summer camp is built around two weeks, sprints that are going to help you work more intentionally and also rest more intentionally. Join us for the sessions that work for your schedule. Skip the ones that don't and know that there are all sorts of benefits and perks. There are planning courses, live events, small group cabins, so that you can get to know people, A camp fire to work around chat, share resources and much more. The link in the bio has all of the information about various packages. That'll save you money, sliding scale payment plans.
Session one is already underway, but session two starts on May 29th. And like I said, these are going on all summer long. If you are interested in joining us. Use the code podcast for 10% off. Any sliding scale level or payment plan. Thanks so much. And I hope to see you around either the camp neighborhood or back here in this space 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!
2.12 it'll bury you if you're not careful - staying on top of the reading
everyone says they're trying to stay on top of the reading - but is that possible? and if so, how do you do it???????????
this week's podcast is all about reading - how to manage it, how to plan for it, and how to think about it so it doesn't bury you alive!
resources mentioned:
AI tools for mapping citation networks
oliver burkeman on reading piles
his book four thousand weeks
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast!
Summer Camp has officially kicked off!! Learn more about it here - and don't forget to use the code PODCAST for 10% off any sliding scale level or payment plan!
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Everyone says they're trying to stay on top of the reading. But. Is that possible? And if it is, what does it look like? Let's get into it in this week's episode of
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you like what you hear on this podcast, you're going to love what I have cooked up for you in summer camp. More details in the show notes. Now let's get into it.
One day I'll get on top of the reading is something that I've heard a thousand academics say, and I've said it myself too. I can even feel that way about the rest of the reading that I would do for fun. One day, I'll catch up with that series.
Let's be real, the amount of things that we need to read versus the amount of time that we have available to read them - it's one of the biggest mismatches in all of academic life. There's just simply too much to read and too little time to do it. So in this episode, let's talk about some strategies for how to make time for the reading, how to figure out what to actually read and how to organize it all so that you're not doing duplicate reading when you don't need to.
The first thing that I want to say about reading is that the goal of reading as a scholar, as a grad student, as a person who is working in a specific field is not to memorize everything and be able to spit it back word for word, anytime anybody asks you about it. That's often how we think about reading, even if it's unconsciously, because that's how we were taught to read as undergrads, read this, it'll be on the test. Read this. You'll need it for your paper. As a scholar though, you're going to read it and you might need to use it later and you might not, or you might need to use it for six different things. And you're probably going to have to reread it for each one of those use cases, because what you need out of it, it's going to change.
With all of that different context, how do we know what the goal of reading is? I am here to propose that the goal of reading is actually to make a system so that you know how to find that specific piece of scholarship again, when, and if you need it.
Let me say that again. The goal of reading is to know how to find whatever you're reading again. Now, the reason that I frame it this way is because so many of us are obviously working under the fear of not being able to memorize things- totally legitimate- and probably also beside the point. Most of us outside of very specific defense related situations are going to need to spit back word for word or even all that accurately the main details of pieces of writing. Most of the time, you're going to be able to go back to your notes, go back and actually reread it. And knowing that is going to set you free.
The goal of reading is to know what you're reading so that you can find it again. Find it, when you want to teach with it, find it when you want to cite it, find it when somebody is talking about something and you have the perfect paper for it. You don't need to read so that you never need to look at your notes again. You need to read and create a system to organize your reading so that when you need something, you know how to find it relatively efficiently.
So the goal of reading is to find it again, how practically speaking, and this is a practically speaking type of podcast. Are you going to be able to do that?
So the first thing I'm going to share with you. Is, I think you should lean into your citation manager. And I'm going to link in the show notes to the episode that I did all about citation managers. But if there's one place that I recommend that you organize your reading. I tag it. Keep notes it's with your citation manager, because it's going to help you in a lot of different contexts. I myself have in my citation manager, tags for taught with this; could teach with this; in this specific chapter; in this research project; this is a library that I share with a collaborator. And I need to be able to find all of those things again, and for the way that my brain is set up, it's useful for me to go back and be like, okay, what was that thing? That I thought I might want to teach with. If I ever needed to find an example for X media theory. You're going to want to set it up the way that your brain works. Maybe that's by year of publication or by lab group that does specific things. You might tag it by kinds of protein. I don't know your project and your brain are yours.
But your citation manager can do a lot of that heavy lifting for you and bonus, that means you don't need to print out or store a whole bunch of physical notes, books, print-outs of articles. You can imagine how quickly that stuff adds up.
Now, if you want to stay on top of your reading, you do at some level need to schedule some time for reading. And if you need a permission slip, I'm here to grant you one. I -Dr. Katy Peplin founder of Thrive PhD and host of this podcast- write a permission slip for you to schedule some amount of time. -An hour a week. An hour a week. A half day a month, your schedule is going to be your own - I give you permission to schedule time to do reading that isn't necessarily linked to any specific project writing piece that you're working on, class that you're teaching, et cetera.
A lot of us need to read more broadly than we have time to. And the only way to have time is to schedule it in and protect it. Now. For every three wide reading blocks that I schedule in, I probably worked through and did something specific for two of them. But that one where I sat down and I read that book, I was really interested in, or that article that everybody was talking about in variably enrich my scholarship.
Yes. I might not have directly cited it in the piece that was due in another week, but an informed, I thinking gave me something to talk about at conferences. It let me know where the conversations in my field were located and it was fun to read. In a way that reading for a specific paper or for a syllabus can often feel really purpose-driven and dry. This felt more like why I went to grad school in the first place to read cool ideas and have a little bit of time to sit with them.
Another way to stay on top of your reading is to follow the footnotes and see what other people who are writing things that you're interested in or citing themselves. Now I'm not an AI expert, but I will link in the show notes to a variety of different tools that might help you map this kind of footnote or citation.
Desk density. Footnote or citation density. This is more effective in some disciplines than others. It really depends on sort of the mechanism of how your various different journals of note organize and tag and make things searchable. But if you want to look for clusters really quickly, so that you're concentrating your more, expansive reading efforts into places where there's a lot of activity. Some of these AI tools are going to be really useful and helping you map that and locate really rich areas to read.
And my last tip for staying on top of the reading is to reduce the amount of effort that you need to. Put in when you're reading. Is to reduce the amount of labor that you're expecting of yourself. When you read in this sort of more broad, more expansive. More general way. If you have a system where every single PDF you read, you have to create a one page summary and outline all of the notes and color code it and tag it in six different ways and make sure that everything gets then re uploaded into the cloud.
Then, yeah, nobody's going to really want to sit down and do that with their quote unquote fun brain power on a random Friday afternoon. But if you build a note system, as you go. Where you download something, you store it in a folder in your citation manager. You read through it and add a couple of content tags after you skim it so that you can find it again when, and if you need it.
Now that's not zero labor, but it's also not so much that it's going to put you off the task. When you shift and think about the goal of reading is not to perfectly document every single idea in it so that you never have to reread it again, but to make it so that you can find it when, and if you do need it again, can really help you limit the amount of extra labor that you're putting in and give you a chance to read a little bit more quickly, a little bit more playfully and stay on top of that reading a little bit more easily than you might've when you were expecting yourself to do two hours of labor for every PDF that you touch.
The last thing that I'm going to leave you with in this podcast is an idea that I have taken from Oliver Burkeman, who wrote a very interesting and provocative time management book that I will link to in the show notes, but he talks about the reading pile and he's not specifically writing to academics here, but I think that there's a lot that's really useful for academics in that is to think about your reading list as a river, rather than a bucket. So, so many of us have carry around big buckets of things that we want to watch, do, read. We have huge bookmark folders. We have systems. We have lists. We have phone apps to keep track of everything that we want to consume information wise.
And when we think about it as a bucket, we think that we have to either empty that bucket before we can add new things into it. Or we have to, you know, always be dipping from that specific pool that we've preselected ahead of time. And if you're anything like me, the bucket only gets heavier. As you read new articles, read new books, explore new areas. There's just more and more things to read.
He instead, counsels people to think about these lists as a moving river that you're going to pop in and out of said river at various times in places. And the goal is to select things that feel relevant to the you in that river, in that moment. So say you're having a really big sort of interest level in a specific area in your field.
You dip into the river of literature available, you read a couple of things in it, and you don't worry so much about what you were interested in two weeks ago or what everybody else is interested in. You come in, you feel like the water is fine. You feel the current moving and then you step back out again.
That can give you the permission that you need to not feel like you have to catch up or even necessarily stay on top of the writing.
And that is how you know that this particular episode title was a bit of a bait and switch by me because I actually don't think that you can stay on top of the reading. I encourage you to think about reading as a type of professional development for yourself. And a little gift to that inner scholar, that little kid scholar inside of you that really just likes to read and likes to think about these things in the field and started this degree in the first place.
When we think about the reading as not something that we have to quote, stay on top of, or that is a to do list that never actually ends, but instead something that we engage in when we want to feel refreshed, when we want to think about new ideas, when we want to connect with the larger conversations happening around us.
Then reading gets a little bit more fun.
And if you like the idea of taking some of the regular scholarship labor that we all have to do and thinking about it in a way that increases fun and reduces guilt, and you're going to love summer camp. I invite you to click the link in the show notes and learn a little bit about the program that I have created.
Summer camp is built around two weeks, sprints that are going to help you work more intentionally and also rest more intentionally. Join us for the sessions that work for your schedule. Skip the ones that don't and know that there are all sorts of benefits and perks. There are planning courses, live events, small group cabins, so that you can get to know people, A camp fire to work around chat, share resources and much more. The link in the bio has all of the information about various packages. That'll save you money, sliding scale payment plans.
Session one is already underway, but session two starts on May 29th. And like I said, these are going on all summer long. If you are interested in joining us. Use the code podcast for 10% off. Any sliding scale level or payment plan. Thanks so much. And I hope to see you around either the camp neighborhood or back here in this space 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!
2.11 - don't fall into the traps! - summer planning strategies
what's like new year's eve, but even MORE if you're a scholar? the first day of summer - or any time when you're released from other jobs and "get to" focus on your writing!
however, summer can be a trap! and if aren't careful, you can end the summer even more exhausted than when you started - so listen in for my top three strategies for planning a summer that gets stuff done, but not at the expense of your health and well being.
plus find out about my new summer camp - and don't forget to use the code PODCAST for 10% off!
resources:
PS! if you are user "DakotaPlains" you won a free session with me! email at hello@thrive-phd.com to claim your free session!!
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Nothing says summer, like great weather, endless blue skies and a completely unreasonable plan for how much work you'll get done to catch up and start the school year off right. Join me for some tips on summer planning on this week's episode of
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you like what you hear on this podcast, you're going to love what I have cooked up for you in summer camp. More details in the show notes. Now let's get into it.
If you're listening to this podcast, it's probably because you are having some sort of a schedule change in the next couple of weeks. For American and Canadian academics specifically. Although I'm sure that our colleagues around the globe and in various different hemispheres also have a similar situation.
The academic winter term is ending. The seniors are graduating, the campuses are emptying out. You can finally park again. And for most academics, that means that the drumbeat has started. Time to catch up on your writing. Time to catch up on your work. Time to get done. All of the things that you said you were going to do over the school year, and really didn't get a chance to.
So this week, I'm here to share a couple of my top tips for summer planning in the hopes that you won't make the mistakes that I did. And you'll set yourself up for a summer where you not only emerge having done the most important things that you wanted to do.
But you also arrive in September, not burned out, having pushed all summer with no thought about recovery. So let's get into it.
If there's one thing to academics, that's even more seductive than new year's energy. That belief that starting on January 1st, we're going to be a whole new person. It's the idea, belief, traditional system, near religion that almost all academics at some point have subscribed to. That as soon as the semester ends, as soon as the term is done.
You're going to be a whole new person. You're going to write in the morning, you're going to meal prep. You're going to get on top of your reading. You're going to finish all of those journal article drafts that have been languishing. Just everything about you is going to change. And what was hard will be easy again.
Now I have seen that happen. And psychologically speaking, we do know that anytime that you have a big schedule change, For example, like teaching full time during the semester, and then suddenly not teaching once the term ends.
Anytime that you have a big schedule change like that the conditions are ripe for some behavior modifications. It makes sense, right? If your schedule changes, then it means that you have new time cues during the day, perhaps new body cues, maybe new family routines, or rhythms that are going to help you support changes.
When one thing changes, it's easier to change other things too. But I am here to caution you as someone who has gone into many as summer believing that I would be radically different person. The instant that I walked out of class that last day before grades were due. I do have to counsel you that, unless you're really intentional about it, I've seen one or two things happen over the course of the summer.
Option one, that's pretty common and I'm here to normalize it in case it's ever happened to you is: you submit your final grades, yours schedule changes, and you take a well-deserved break. Maybe it lasts for a week, maybe it lasts for a little bit longer. You catch up with all of those friends, you take that family trip and I'm not here to knock any of that.
But very quickly, one week off, it turns into two and then the avoidance monster shows up. . And it starts to feel a little bit harder every day that goes by to get back into those routines and let's face it summer isn't going to throw you back into those routines. There will be places to go and pools to swim in, I hope! I'm an ex lifeguard, so I love pools.
Summer, isn't going to send you an engraved invitation that says, Hey, wouldn't it be great if you got back to your dissertation right now, it's just not in the nature of the season. If you come back, you're going to have to plan for it. So that's option one. Time drifts. And then all of the sudden it's maybe mid July or maybe even mid August, and you're really crunching to get everything done, including prep for the next semester.
Option two are people who hit the ground, running the instant that their final grades are in. They start their new schedule, their new exercise program. They have a rhythm for how, and when they check in with their friends, every moment is scheduled.
And they push, push, push. And in the beginning it feels amazing. Like those first couple of days of January where your resolutions feel really good and really supportive and you're like, yeah, I'm doing this.
What I see happening with these friends though in the option two category is that they push it a little bit hard, a little bit fast, and they ignore the fact that the school year is long.
That they are tired and they need a little bit of time to refresh and recharge and that just replacing one type of work, all consuming, overwhelming for another. Isn't going to get them that kind of sense of accomplishment and rest that they really need. Yeah, it does feel good to get that article draft submitted to get that syllabus done, to get back on top of your email or your reading list.
But all of those things in and of themselves, aren't going to make you any more rested or any less burned out. They're just going to mean that there are new things on your to-do list. Because if there's one academic truth that I know to be true, it's that doing things begets more things to do.
So whether or not you fallen into category a or category B in the past. Or maybe. A unique category. All of your own, here are my top three tips for planning a summer that's going to allow you to be flexible, to be spontaneous, but also give you enough structure so that you're not overwhelmed by all of the things that you could do.
Number one is to book your fun, your recovery, all of your human things in first. Most of us are drawn to this profession because in some way or another we're happier, we get a little bit more done. We enjoy the structure and the routine of the school year.
And while it can feel good initially to completely throw all of that routine and structure to the wind, eventually a little bit of structure can go a long way into making sure that you're the most supported, effective person that you can be. So why not build that structure in with things that are going to help you recharge recover, or maybe even dare? I say it have a little fun this summer.
Maybe you sign up for a yoga class that is a little bit earlier than you might want to, but it gets you out of the house two days a week and you then get to stay at your favorite library afterwards to work a little bit on your dissertation. Win-win it's a structure and it's a movement and it gets you out into the sunshine. We love to see it.
Maybe you set up time to visit your family and take that long lost vacation that you've been talking about. Maybe you set up a schedule where you don't work on Fridays, where you take every Monday off this summer. Work will expand to fit the container that you give it. And so the first step in summer planning that I've seen be really effective is to limit the container of time available for work. If you wait until the perfect moment presents itself, to go on that vacation, to go camping, to do any of your other COVID safe, public health friendly activities this summer, it's never really going to present itself.
There's always going to be something more that you could be doing. So book those things in first and let the rest of it settle in around those blocks of fun and care.
My tool number two is actually to break the summer down into smaller, more comprehensible parts. I'm a big fan of splitting it into two weeks sprints. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that at the end of this podcast, but splitting the summer up into chunks, whether that is an initial phase of recovery after a really tough term, it could be two weeks where every two weeks you focus on a different section of the chapter that's due.
Or maybe you structure it around something like Wendy, Belcher's how to write a journal article book. There's thousands of ways to structure it, but breaking it down so that it's not just summer one giant monolith can really help you because a, it means that you have smaller chunks to plan for. And planning is always more effective and more accurate the smaller the chunk and the closer we are in time to it, just by nature of the unpredictability of life. So go ahead and break it down. This also has the added benefit of giving you a lot of different chances to restart. Say you have one, two weeks sprint this summer that doesn't really work out as planned.
Okay. You've still got a bunch more that you can try, but if you don't really break that summer plan down into different pieces, it's really hard to find that natural reset and evaluation point because it's not built in. You're going to have to wait until there's some sort of anxiety manifested crisis, like a late deadline or a meeting that you didn't expect to force that evaluation.
Better the evaluation, you know about and can do willingly, then the stuff that comes at the bottom of the oh man. I'm so behind valley.
And the third tool that I'm going to suggest is having a tiered system for your goals. It is really easy to say that you're going to do everything this summer and maybe you personally will get everything done this summer. In that case, I applaud you. I'm excited for you. Please tell us all how you did it.
But most of us will anxiety dump a huge long list of things that we even under the best of conditions don't have time and energy to do. At least not in the sport. At least not in the space of that ever shortening time between terms so. Rank that list, maybe it's most important to you that you get this dissertation chapter done so that you can apply for fellowships in the fall.
Second tier of importance is getting a syllabus. Prepped and third tier is starting to work on that collaboration that isn't really doing until the end of the year. Meaning December, but could be helpful if you get a jumpstart on it this summer. It's not that all of those things aren't important. They are. It's just that if you are finding yourself in the middle of a summer push and you know that you've only got two hours, it's going to be so much more beneficial for you to work on the top tier goals. Than it is to sort of spend the first couple of weeks, maybe even months. Either straight up avoiding your work or working on all of the things that are great, but they're ultimately nice to haves. They're not going to be those real powerhouses that make a difference and move you forward in a tangible way.
As I mentioned up top, these tips are coming from my multiple summers of experience where I have really great intentions and it just don't have the structure to support me in making all of those dreams come true. At least not at the expense of my own rest and recovery, that almost all of us need after long draining academic years.
If any of this sounds good to you. I invite you to click the link in the show notes and check out summer camp because summer camp is built on these three and a couple more of my key summer tenets.. There's two weeks sprints so that you can sign up for the weeks that you're going to be working and not feel like you have to pay for the weeks that you aren't.
There's sprint planning and check-in and evaluation courses that you can do on your own time to help you get clear about your goals, small groups, that we're calling cabins, that you can meet friends, hang out with and all of the fun and silliness, that's tied to the theme, which changes every camp session. I would love to have you there. So please use the code podcast for 10% off. You can book a four pack of sessions and get one free. Maybe you book for the whole summer and get two free or just sign up week by week as you feel like you need it.
I'm offering summer camp on a sliding scale, and you can learn all about it at the link in the show notes. Don't forget to use the code podcast for 10% off. Thank you so much. And I can't wait to see you next week. Bye.
📍 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!
2.10 shape the future - outlines as a writing tool
outlines can be frustrating - how do i know how to structure an argument that i haven't written yet? this week's episode talks about the two things i think an outline ACTUALLY does for a scholarly writer, and how to use them alongside drafting for more support. these aren't your high school roman numeral outlines!!
resources:
workshop with dr. henry on may 10
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast!
I am so excited to be hosting Structure as a Path to Sustainability with Dr. Kate Henry on May 10 - a one stop shop for overcoming overwhelm and lighting the way towards completing your next self-directed writing project. Enrollment is open now! My newsletter subscribers are the first to hear about all the new stuff (and the sales) so hop on the list here!
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But Katy. How can I write an outline if I don't know what I'm going to say yet? And other existential thoughts on this week's episode of
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you rate and review this podcast, by the end of the month, you'll be entered to win a free session from me. More details at the end of the episode. Now let's get into the good stuff. .
There are so many things in graduate school that I find people just gloss right over. Of course, you know how to do an outline. Of course, you know how to build out your citation manager.
But what's the point of this podcast. If I don't go deep on some of the things that people assume, you know, and you might not.
And an underrated tool in that stable is the outline. An outline is simply put a roadmap of a piece of writing that you make at some stage during the writing process. Now to be clear. This isn't something that I think you have to do. But it can be an excellent scaffold around which to build a longer writing project.
Most of us are familiar with outlines that we take from writing that's already been done. So you might've been taught to outline as a reading and notation tool in primary or secondary school. You know, the really formal thing with the Roman numerals and the different subheadings, they look really impressive.
And there are a way to sort of organize information. And to many. Writers. Or are given the advice to make an outline for a piece of writing that they're working on to help them see the structure. The content ahead of time. Now. This is great advice, but it's only great advice. If you really think about what the outline is doing for you inside of the writing process.
And that's going to be a different job than the outline that you did of your AP us history textbook in high school.
So to my mind, an outline is a tool that helps you do two things.
Number one, it helps you decide what content is going to be included and crucially what content is going to be excluded. At least on a tentative basis. This is harder than it sounds. Many of us have so many ideas. And when we sit down to do things like draft a chapter, work on a conference paper more often than not, you have more ideas than you can explain fully in the container that you have.
It is more common than I can tell you that people sit down to start to write a dissertation chapter. And that first chapter one of five planned turns out to be the whole thing, because the information is so rich and you have so much to say, and you just don't know how much content fills a dissertation chapter until you start to write it.
So an outline is a preliminary step. Where you say, okay, here's what I think I'm going to cover. I am going to include this part of my experiment, but not this. I'm going to focus on these tables, but not those I'm going to use these two case studies and leave those for a future project.
The first step of an outline is that it helps you decide what's in and what's out of the current writing project. And the second function of an outline is to give you a sense, again, a tentative sense, but a sense of the structure and ordering of the ideas inside of set writing container.
Once you figure out what content is in and what content is out, an outline will also help you make some choices about what things to introduce. First, second, and third. For many of us, the writing process isn't particularly linear. We don't start at the beginning and we don't stop at the end. So an outline can help you see.
Like a quick map. Where you are in the space of the overall writing project to help you keep your bearings.
If you like me have trouble starting at the beginning of a document, then an outline can be really helpful because you can start where it feels the easiest. Maybe the first case study is something that you already typed up for a guest lecture that you gave. Great. An outline will help you see, okay. Here are the things that need to go before it, and here are the things that need to go after it.
Now that you've pitched you on the concept of outlines. I want to introduce a couple of ideas. About how you might be able to use them that aren't quite as formal and as detailed. Because the real problem with an outline is how do I know how to structure the chapter when I don't know what I'm going to say in it yet?
And I also just want to normalize that as we write, many of us do change our minds. We go on tangents, we bring things down. And an outline can also help you see where you've deviated and decide. This is good enough to make it into the overall plan, or is this something that I want to set aside for another project?
Your outline might be as simple and schematic as five key themes on post-it notes that are up on the wall that you shuffled the order of as you start to write. It might be as detailed as a multi page document with headings, subheadings, and the quotes from your literature and research sources embedded right in so that when you sit down to write, all you really have to do is fill in the prepositions around all of that information.
But no matter how detailed or not the outline is, hanging on to those two criteria, --that it's a tool that helps you decide what's in and what's out. And what order things can go in-- helps you see the outline doesn't need to sit at the beginning of the process only. In fact, I often like to think about outlines as sitting, if not literally, but metaphorically in a separate dual window with your writing. So that even if you've zoomed in to a specific section, you have the zoomed out version to help you stay oriented.
Outlines actually act a lot more like a living document. They are something that you keep updated so that you can tell how the writing process is going. For example. Maybe you made a really detailed outline and you sat down to write out the first section of it in a first draft. Amazing. In your head, you thought that section of the outline would take you two to three pages to write on paper.
And by the time you're done drafting, you actually have 10 pages. That's an excellent point at which you can check in with your outline and say, okay, If this has 10 pages of content in it. And I have five more sections. Then I'm going to have a 60 page chapter. And maybe that's totally okay for you and your advisor.
Or maybe they're expecting something along the lines of 30 pages. That outlines going to help you say, okay, which of these parts do I need to stay together? How can I rearrange the structure? Can I move some of this to chapter two or chapter three? It's like an architect's plans that are changing as you encounter the construction.
There are always bumps and hiccups. And having that updating blueprint can make it a lot easier to not lose your footing and make sure that you're keeping an eye on your time and energy budget.
If this is the kind of advice that's demystifying some of the writing process for you, then I really encourage you to click on the link in the show notes about the workshop that I'm doing with Dr. Kate Henry, next week, May 10th. 2023. I am really excited because one of the things that we're going to be doing is going into the process of making template documents.
And roadmaps for the specific thing that you're trying to write. These are skills that don't get taught very often. And I find that tools like this make a huge difference when you're working on longterm independently, guided writing projects. But whether you join us or not, I hope that this gave you a few ideas for thinking about. Maybe brushing off those Roman numerals, get your post-it notes out and start thinking about an outline as a responsive, Rather than predictive, Tool.
📍 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!
2.9 don't let the title fool you: my fave book on academic writing
if there was a pantheon of academic how to books, this one would be at the top - but the reasons i love it so much might not be the ones you think! tune into this week's episode to hear which book basically acted as the seminar in academic writing i never got in graduate school!
resources:
the book i recommend (no spoilers!)
my colleague dr. lisa munro teaches a seminar based on the book that's enrolling for this summer!
downloadable guide to running your own writing group
join the community for just $5 a month!
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast!
I am so excited to be hosting Structure as a Path to Sustainability with Dr. Kate Henry on May 10 - a one stop shop for overcoming overwhelm and lighting the way towards completing your next self-directed writing project. Enrollment is open now! My newsletter subscribers are the first to hear about all the new stuff (and the sales) so hop on the list here!
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Part workbook, part writing seminar, part demystifying the academic publishing process. Let's talk about the one book that I recommend to most scholars in this week's episode.
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you rate and review this podcast, by the end of the month, you'll be entered to win a free session from me. More details at the end of the episode. Now let's get into the good stuff. .
I imagine that if you are listening to this podcast, some part of you likes to read books. One of the genres of books that I can not get enough of are the kind of, how to manuals of whatever thing I'm into. So if I am into knitting, I want to read every book about how to do knitting. Gardening you name it. But this interest was really kicked up a notch when I was in grad school, partially because I was one of the first people in my family to go to graduate school. Therefore I didn't understand a lot about it.
And the book that more than anything gave me the foundation to better understand the academic writing and the academic publishing process. And that book..dun dun dun dun... Is: Writing your Journal Article in 12 weeks: a Guide to Academic Publishing Success by Dr. Wendy Laura Belcher.
If there's a Pantheon of academic, how to books, this one sits right at the top level. Most people have heard about it. And that's one of the reasons why I'm recommending it, because I try to mostly talk about things that are free or easy to get your hands on. And the writing your journal article book has been come out in a couple of different editions. It was revised recently. There are copies a plenty in libraries in your fellow graduate students, bookcases. So I'm very confident that you'll be able to get your hands on this, if not for free than for very close to it. So that's step one. This is a popular book.
I want to dispel a misconception, but at least I had, when I was going into this book,
I looked at the title and I thought, cool, this is a book that will let me write a journal article. From zero, no research done to published or sent off to a journal in 12 weeks.
Actually this book starts from the premise that you already have a draft of a journal article. So in case you were thinking that you would be able to research, outline, edit, revise, and then submit an article in 12 weeks, you might be able to, but this book walks you through it. At a slower pace.
And that's one of the biggest misconceptions about this book. It's not a start from zero to publishable article in 12 weeks. It start from draft, but that isn't to say that it's not really useful because it is. So if you're an early career graduate student, then this might be a book that you use to take a seminar paper into your first article draft or a conference paper, or maybe parts of your master's thesis or an undergraduate thesis. Any draft that you have laying around is going to be useful for this book, but make sure you have that draft before you start.
Other things to know about this book, you can do it by yourself. It's also written and gives you tips for doing this book with a group. I know lots of groups of graduate students that have met over the summer and worked through this book together. A group accountability, definitely aids in the process, but there's nothing that you can't do by yourself.
And it has different chapters. So it starts with things like setting up your writing schedule, figuring out the time maybe going through and selecting the presses that you want to submit to. It walks you through all of the steps that you would need to take that draft of rough writing and get it ready to submit to her journal.
Including the choosing of the journal, the submission process, writing a letter to the editor response letters. Et cetera.
So you will have to make some adjustments for various disciplines. The book is probably best geared toward people who are writing in the humanities or social science disciplines. And a lot of the examples draw from that. It's a little bit harder with some of the STEM disciplines.
That isn't to say that there aren't useful things in this book for scholars of any type, just that other disciplines that aren't fitting as neatly into the kind of example, pool might have to work a little bit harder to adapt it. Now.
I want to share with you. What I actually think is the real magic of this book, which is the fact that it is for my money. Some of the most concise. Actionable. Practical writing advice that you can get about academic argumentation anywhere.
And that is a hill that I'm more than happy to defend.
I never took a graduate seminar on academic writing. And it seemed like something that everyone just assumed that I had had before I arrived at my PhD program. And so when people were saying things like, oh, you know, this needs to be restructured, or I wish that the argument were a little bit clear, a baby PhD me had no idea what that meant. And this book was the first and most important step in me learning what people meant.
It has excellent chapters around revising, thinking through various structures. Editing on a sentence level, working with the literature, sharpening up your argument. All things that were talked about around me and I never fully understood until I read this book.
It's also a really useful starting point for understanding the academic writing process. If you come in with less background knowledge about how say a journal article is born, then this book has really useful practical strategies, exercises, and explanations of what it means to actually be peer reviewed or how you pick a journal or what things you need to prepare in order to submit to the journal or how you find out what their requirements for publishing are.
There are so many things that are hidden in the academic graduate school curriculum. We just assume that you know, what a peer reviewed article is, how to find a top journal and how to get published in it.
And this book has a lot of easy to read. Easier to understand, plain-spoken explanations about the academic writing process.
I think anyone who likes a little bit of structure to move projects forward would absolutely benefit from at least leafing through this book. Even if they don't necessarily follow the exact strict 12 week model. I know that one of the things that I miss the most when I started working on my dissertation was the fact that I didn't have like a syllabus like this week do this, this week, do this. And this book gave me a syllabus of sorts that I could follow. And I ended up adapting a lot of it as I worked on the longer pieces, like my dissertation.
So if you've been missing that kind of weekly assignment energy from your seminars, This book can be a good replacement for it.
So many of us actually need structure. And it's really hard. To know how to, for example, break things down into smaller steps if you've never done those steps before. And what I appreciate the most about a book, like writing your journal article in 12 weeks is that it gives you a template for figuring out what the various steps are in a project that can be as abstract and difficult and intimidating as writing an academic article.
And if the idea of making sustainable repeatable structures for long-term writing projects sounds like something that you could use some support in. Then please check out the workshop that I am running with dr. Kate Henry in early may. All of the details are in the show notes, and I would love to have you consider it.
But either way. I hope that you have a great week and thank you so much for listening.
📍 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!
2.8 decision fatigue will get you: menus for planning with flexibility
making decisions can be really hard - and when you're a scholar, a lot of your choices are important, and they all have the same level of urgency. menus are one of the best ways i have found to reduce overwhelm, and provide structure with flexibility - learn all about how i use them in this week's episode!
resources:
a blog post on menus
information about decision fatigue
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast!
I am so excited to be hosting Structure as a Path to Sustainability with Dr. Kate Henry on May 10 - a one stop shop for overcoming overwhelm and lighting the way towards completing your next self-directed writing project. Enrollment opens soon, and my newsletter subscribers are the first to hear about all the new stuff (and the sales) so hop on the list here!
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If you're on team decision fatigue, if you can't figure out what to do. If you default to the easiest or most urgent thing, today's episode has strategies just for you.
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you rate and review this podcast, by the end of the month, you'll be entered to win a free session from me. More details at the end of the episode. Now let's get into the good stuff. .
Today's episode is focused on a tool that I myself use every single day. And I have found that it is one of the most flexible and dare I say fun things that I or my clients have introduced into their day-to-day workflow. As you might've guessed from the title, it's about creating menus. So first let's talk about what a menu is and how you might implement it.
If you have ever. I had that feeling at the end of the day. Where you were like, I don't know what to make for dinner. My fridge is full of just raw ingredients and the amount of effort that it would take for me to decide and implement dinner is simply overwhelming then, you know the power of a menu.
Where instead of standing in front of that refrigerator, wondering. , Questioning, second guessing yourself. You walk into a restaurant, you look at the menu and you pick from those preselected options.
It is imperfect. Obviously, if you really want pizza and it's a diner, you might not be able to get what you want if it's not on the menu, but it does take away that stress of trying to figure out what your options are, ranking those options, and then choosing from them. The options are preselected and you then simply choose from between them.
I also love that menus have categories and here's why. The categories of different types of food. And obviously these categories were vary from restaurant to restaurant, but the categories help separate out the options by their qualities: could be by size, it could be by main protein. It could be by the role that it plays in the meal. But when you look at those different categories, say, at a diner. For instance, you might have omelets and sweet treats sides, combos.
That categorization helps you be a little bit more intentional. If you want something sweet, you immediately jump to that category. No need to go looking through the omelettes. If you know that you want pancakes, for example, And also it helps you bring a little bit more awareness into the kinds of things you're selecting and why.
So if you go through and you only ever eat from the sides menu, Then you know that, Hey, I'm going to either have to eat a few of these and be pretty conscious about what they contain or I'm going to need to add something more substantial to get a full meal.
Okay, now that everybody's hungry for pancakes. Let's talk about how we can use the concept of menus and the way that they shape and make our choices more intentional in our day-to-day work lives. Here are some ways that you can use menus. And all of these have been tested and approved by me and clients all around the world. So I really stand by these.
You might create a menu of work tasks for the day. Maybe you have different categories for teaching research, administration, life stuff, and you list out all of the options that you could work on during the day. And then when you sit down at your desk, you say, okay, what do I feel like teaching tasks, research tasks, and all of those options are laid out for you.
This can be particularly effective if you are working in a state where everything is important, but the urgency level is about the same across all of those categories. If you're in a state of it all needs to get done, a menu can help you see which things feel more possible and reduce a little bit of that decision fatigue so that you don't default into whatever tasks are in your email, which is what I normally do without a menu.
You could also use them for rest tasks almost even more effectively. Maybe you have, as I often do a menu of things that you could do on the weekend. And there are cleaning tasks. There are books you could read, there are shows you could catch up on, you have a list of things that might feel good to move your body. You maybe have a list of people that you want to text or catch up with. Maybe you even have a section of just pure fun.
Dance party, nap, whatever feels fun to you, but listing out all of those things is more flexible than saying, okay, from Saturday, I will do all of these cleaning things. And then I will do these work things. Instead of scheduling them out, it's more like walking into a brunch place and saying, oh, what feels good for me today?
It won't guarantee that you pick things that you might otherwise avoid. Just like you might not pick arugula on a menu if you absolutely hate it, but at least you offered yourself the chance.
The third way to use menus that I find is really, really effective is to think about menu-izing. If that's a word, making a menu out of various routines during your day. So I am a person who aspires to a morning routine. I think they look so good on Instagram. I want mine to be aesthetic A F, but the reality is that I have a chronic illness. My schedule is very variable and I'm just not going to do the same seven things every morning, every day. It's just not going to happen for me.
So instead I have a morning routine menu where I know that broadly speaking, I want to do something that settles my mind. I want to eat some food and I want to do something that moves my body a little bit. So in my menu, I have things for my mind, which could be a meditation. It could be journaling, it could be doing morning pages. It could be sitting down with my planner and I don't need to commit in advance to which one of those I'm going to do.
I just pick one from one of those categories. And the same goes with breakfast ideas and with the moving my body, it could be a walk around the block. It could be a 15 minute dance workout. It could be a lot of different things, but I know that I want to hit each one of those three categories and having a menu means that my routine might look different every single day, because there are so many different combinations.
But I'm going to hit my three main food groups, so to speak. Now. If you're listening and wondering will menus work for me? I'm not sure, but here are the patterns that I have noticed in when these are particularly effective tools for people.
If you're a person with decision fatigue, then I really have seen menus work wonders. All of us have to make literally thousands of decisions every single day. And one of the hardest things about being a PhD student. Is that there are so many things that you could be doing. And often we only keep say five or six of them, right at the top of our mind. And even though you might like to read that book, that's been on your shelf or go through and clean out your downloads folder or reach out to that person after a conference.
If it's not one of your like main six go-to tasks, it's going to be harder for you to remember to do it. So decision fatigue. Makes it so much easier for us to default into those top six or so tasks. And it really makes it difficult to even remember what the other tasks are. So a menu is a place where all of those options are written out. You might not remember that you liked this thing or that you wanted to do it until you see it written out.
If you find yourself staring at your desk at your planner, completely overwhelmed, and then you can definitely show you your choices and make it easier to pick.
As I mentioned before, I think that people underneath the broad umbrella of variable energy also really benefit from menus. I know that as a person with chronic illness, I'm never sure which energy version of myself is going to show up at any given hour of the day,
And so a menu lets me pick which things sounds the best to the brain and body that I have in that moment. It doesn't guarantee that I'm going to do the hard stuff, but if I'm in a situation where I say, okay, I need to do this incredibly difficult thing. And either I do that, or I don't a menu helps me see that. Yes, I could do that thing, but if I don't have the energy or the stamina for it, or I'm in too much pain or it just, isn't what I feel like in that particular moment, there are also five other things that I could do that would move me forward.
These menus can really help people who want a plan and want some sort of structure, but need some flexibility in it. And if you're a variable energy person or a variable attention, variable focus, if there's some variation and this is most of us, most of the time. Then menus can help you give yourself that structure, reduce some of the decisions and also allow for some flexibility from day to day, and hour to hour.
If you think that the idea of menus or something more flexible than just a, to do list that you must execute every single day sounds really appealing, then I have a workshop for you. I'm so excited to be collaborating with Dr. Kate Henry of The Tending Year on a workshop about structuring in a sustainable way. More details are available in the show notes and registration is going to be opening at the end of April. Thank you so much for joining me today. And I hope that whatever your menu contains, it has tasks that feel tasty for you and your future self. 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!
2.7 it doesn't have to be cute! - dance parties, and other body-focused breaks
in no universe do i want to be perceived while i do this, but....my dance party breaks are one of my best kept secrets. and if you tend to live brain first, and not notice until much too late that your body could use some care, body focused breaks might just be the tool for you! listen to this week's episode for more on this fun way to break up your day.
mentioned in this week's podcast:
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast!
Thrive PhD Summer Camp is coming - and if you want to learn more about it, sign up for the waitlist here! My newsletter subscribers are the first to hear about all the new stuff (and the sales) so hop on the list here!
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Grab your favorite playlist, put on your comfiest dancing shoes and let's get into the most fun tool I've talked about yet on this podcast.
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you rate and review this podcast, by the end of the month, you'll be entered to win a free session from me. More details at the end of the episode. Now let's get into the good stuff. .
As the title of this episode suggests today, I'm here to talk about dance parties. Or more generally speaking, a break that you take during the day that moves your body. Dance parties just happen to be my favorite version of this. So in case you have never heard of a dance party, let's be clear about what I mean when I talk about them.
It's just, you put on your favorite song. And you move your body. You don't have to dance or dance well, it can look more like a wiggle or a shake, but the idea is that this is a time that's boundaried, you know, the start of the song, the end of the song. And you get up out of your chair? You loosen up your hands, you move your body as a way of taking a break. The reason that I feel so strongly about body focused breaks. Or because we as scholars spend so much time in our heads.
For me, I can sit down at my desk at eight 30 or nine o'clock and literal hours can go by. I'm talking five, six hours before I realize that I might be thirsty or hungry. Or maybe I need a break or use the bathroom. For example, I live most of my scholarly life and let's be honest, some of my human life too, very much brain focused. It's hard for me to remember that I have a body when I am in the middle of a juicy research question.
Or if I'm in the middle of an anxiety fueled writing session. It's really hard for me to zoom out of whatever it is that I'm focused on and pay attention to my body. But the problem with that is that eventually my body will make its needs known. And it's really hard for me to get back to whatever I was doing after I do that.
When I'm in these really intense brain heavy sessions, the likelihood that I'm going to crash out of them and need some recovery time, very high. Body focused breaks are my way of helping forestall that a little bit so that I have a little bit more control over how and when my focus sessions end instead of just having them end whenever I collapsed at my desk.
So if you're going to try using a body focused break, Let's talk about when and how you might employ them during your day. I especially love them as a transition point. . If you are switching between teaching and writing or research and outlining, or your emails and something else, a dance party in between that can really help loosen up the energy and give your brain and body a chance to sync back up again.
I often will have a dance party before or after I eat lunch during the day. Depending on how big the lunch was, of course. But that also helps me mark that transition. It's a way of kind of getting my body involved so that it's not just next task, next task, next task, all up in my head.
This also is an extremely effective energy bump during the day. If you like me have a lull at various points in the day, I have one around 11 o'clock and another one, probably between three and four. A dance party is a perfect insertion inside of that lull to get some energy back. You wiggle it out, you shake it out, you dance it, you pump it up. And you don't get sure, full energy stores back after that, but you might get the five or 10% back that you need in order to focus just a little bit more effectively and get one or two more things checked off your list.
There is absolutely no way to do this kind of a break incorrectly as long as your body's involved. The way that you can compare it is take, for example, a standard Twitter break. I know that when I first started using Pomodoros and see last week's episode for more about how Pomodoro has worked for me.
I'm gonna be like, great, okay. 25 minutes of focus and then five minutes of Twitter. And those five minutes would be really stimulating for my brain, but the timer would start again and it would feel like my body was stuck in the same position sometimes for two, three, even more hours at a time that would make me sore, cranky, tired, hungry, . It would be really difficult to feel the sense of the time passing when my breaks were having my body stay in the same position that it was during my focus sessions.
The people that I find who especially benefit from body first breaks are what I lovingly refer to as brain in a jar folks. I once told a therapist that it was my most sincere desire to become a brain in a jar that somehow was able to type so that I wouldn't need to sleep or eat or rest or do anything. I would just be a brain offloading all of my intellectual capacity into the computer. Things would be great.
And she was like, well, brains in a jar can't really go for hikes or enjoy the sunshine or a really good piece of cake. And I was like, touché Dr. Nancy, there are some benefits to a body. But those people who are focused and really have a hard time getting into their bodies can really benefit from breaks like this because it's a chance to sync back up again.
If you think about your body and your brain being on two separate tracks during the day, sometimes they're pretty far apart and a body focused break is a chance for them to sync back up again and be like, oh, Hey body. Oh, Hey brain, are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Do you need to switch gears? Do you want to go outside for a second?
It's a chance to sync up and ask those questions. When if those two pieces of you, your body and your brain are on separate tracks all day long, it's really hard to tune in and see what you might need.
I also think the breaks like this are especially good for people who have the, just one more thing, tendency. The just one more thing tendency is that voice in your head- it's like, okay, I will take a break or I'll eat lunch or I'll get some water as soon as I finish this next thing. Just one more thing before I'm done for the day. Just one more thing. Just one more thing.
A, body focused break gives you a chance to say, okay. Do I still want to do that thing? Is it important, is it better for me to switch? Is it better for me to change gears? If you tend to hyper-focus or just be really relentless, getting your to-do list done no matter what. These breaks can give you a chance to kind of back away from the computer or the laptop or wherever it is that you're working. And wait for the body and brain to sync up and decide if just one more thing is what you actually need.
These don't need to be dance party breaks.
Although for my money, that's the most fun and a fun way to, you know, really shake it up and get in some of that music listening that you might not have otherwise done. You can also take body focused breaks by starting your laundry. There's nothing better than going down to the basement where your laundry machines are getting some laundry going during a break. It gives you a chance to kind of catch back up on some household chores and also move your body.
This doesn't need to look like dancing either. I would generously call what I do during dance parties as a "Wiggle plus." It's not dancing in any way that I would perhaps want to broadcast on the internet. So just shaking my arms and my legs, moving my feet around a little bit. It could also be stimming if you're a person who has a lot of stimming behaviors these breaks to physically do those, maybe you jump up and down. Maybe you move your arms in a certain way. Maybe you pace in circles. These can be an excellent way to kind of get some of that tension out during the day during those sessions and check back in with your body at the same time.
The only thing to think about is, is more of my body moving than not moving during these breaks. So is more of me wiggling moving, going up and down the stairs, going outside, going for a walk around the block, maybe doing a couple of forward folds or some sideways stretches. There's no way to do it wrong.
Like I said, as long as your body and brain are kind of giving a chance to stop working, even if it's just for two and a half or three minutes, but maybe a little bit longer. It gives you a chance to say, okay, Let's sync back in. Let's get the parts of me back together and make sure that I'm moving forward with intention.
And if you're the kind of person who really benefits from periodic reminders to move your body, just as much as you're moving your mind during the day. You might want to check out my community for just $5 a month. You can join us, have access to weekly coaching calls, daily accountability threads, and lots and lots of reminders that you are human and a scholar too..
More in the show notes. Thank you so much and 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!
2.6 a controversial classic - pomodoro timers
everyone loves to recommend a pomodoro timer (including me!) but this deceptively simple tool actually does NOT work for a lot of people, tasks, and brains. let's get into this controversial classic - and some alternatives - in this week's episode!
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If you've got a phone. If you've got a clock. If you've got a microwave, you can use this week's tool. Let's talk about timers.
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you rate and review this podcast, by the end of the month, you'll be entered to win a free session from me. More details at the end of the episode. Now let's get into the good stuff. .
Timers are some of the most frequent advice given to anyone who's looking to manage their time a little bit more effectively. But in my experience, they're also some of the most nuanced tools. And some of the ways that many of our neurodivergent brethren also get left behind. So let's talk today about timers: when they work, how they work, how you might want to use them. And a couple of variations because having a sense of how much time is passing and what you're spending your time on can be really helpful.
And just because the first thing you try doesn't work for you doesn't mean that nothing will.
So first a definition. You might have, if you've ever hung out with me in the community or read any time management blog ever been introduced to something called the Pomodoro timer. The Pomodoro timer, which I'll link to it's full history in the show notes. It's basically a time management system where you have a timer that goes off for a set amount of time.
This usually is 25 minutes. You set a timer for 25 minutes, you've work in a focused way. Then you break, you have five minutes to do whatever you want, then you repeat it three or four times with a 15 minute break at the end of the sequence. This came into being, because somebody was trying to keep themselves on task in their kitchen. All they had was a tomato shaped timer that went up to 25 minutes. So the legend goes anyway. And so that's what they used. They would work for 25, break for five and then come back.
So Pomodoro timer is, are great. And the idea of a focus time, and then a break from that time, can be really effective. But if you think about the idea that this was invented in a kitchen, and the only reason that it's 25 minutes is because that's how long the timer was. Well, then you can kind of see why this maybe isn't an all purpose tool for everybody to use.
The traditional pom is 25 minutes. And I will be honest with you and say that I find that most of the time, 25 minutes is too short for me. And I often will do what I call long poms or long Pomodoros, which are 50 minutes of time to work. And then a longer break, a 10 minute break. These are great for writing.
I use them to record this podcast for instance, but I think that if you have experimented with poms and felt that the time was too short, try going longer. I don't recommend going much longer than 50 minutes because every hour you're going to want to rest your eyes. Get a sip of water, maybe walk around a little bit.
But something longer than 25 minutes, will help you get a little bit more into the flow for a deep focus task.
But I also want to share that Pomodoros don't work for me all of the time. I love them in the community. They are often a tool that I use to help myself get started during the day. There are certain tasks that truly would not get done without Pomodoros like admin tasks or scheduling appointments. They're a great container which is why I do continue to recommend them. But I do get burned out on them, just like everybody else. I have seasons where they're really helpful for me. And I have seasons whether or not. And that's a good note for all of the tools in this podcast. Sometimes they work for you and sometimes they don't.
And it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you or anything wrong with the tool. It's just like, sometimes you need a flat head screwdriver and sometimes you need a Phillips head. It might be the right solution for the task at hand, but it also might not be.
But I also want to be clear that there are definitely some patterns about what clients I noticed really do respond to Pomodoros and which ones really don't.
So let's talk about who I find the Pomodoros usually do not work for. I will be honest and say that the idea for this episode came from a thread that I saw on Twitter somewhere. That was like, what is the one piece of advice that has just never worked for you?
And it was just streams and streams of people in the comments saying Pomodoro timers have never worked for me. And you know what? I get it. If you are a person who is neurodivergent and I'm speaking, especially here to anyone who drops into flow. Or has trouble or challenges managing their attention.
This is my ADHD folks. This could be my AuDHD folks, my autistic folks. There are all kinds of brains that once they get stuck into a task, really respond negatively to being dragged back out of it. And there's perhaps nothing more arbitrary than a 25 minute timer going off and dragging you out of whatever it is that you've managed to be focused on.
So if you find that you really don't like being interrupted, pomodoro timers might not be for you. And in that situation, I would suggest that you experiment with something called FlowMadoro instead which has you set the timer more like a stopwatch instead of a countdown clock. You start at 0.0 seconds. And then you notice how long it takes you until you've either finished the task where you've gotten distracted. It could be 10 minutes. It could be five minutes, but you divide that by four and then you take that length of break. So maybe you work on your paper for an hour. You notice that you've drifted off into Twitter. You say, okay, I've reached the edge of my attention cliff. I'm going to take a break for 15 minutes and then come right back to it.
Repeating that same setting the timer and then taking a quarter long break again. This is a great way to notice how your attention waxes and wanes over the course of the day. And it's a great way to not artificially stop yourself in the middle of a thought just because the timer said t o.
But you might be a person that a Pomodoro timer could be really effective for. If you notice that you have a really hard time getting started. This could be getting started in the morning or after a lunch break or after teaching. A timer can be an excellent tool. Especially if you respond really well to time to based appointments. So if you are feeling relatively good at getting up, getting to your teaching, getting to your appointments on time, but then once you have some unstructured time, everything sort of goes to pot. Then I would recommend experimenting with a timer.
If not a traditional 25 minute, five minute Pomodoro, you experiment with at a smaller or longer piece of time as needed. But the idea is that you set a timer and that timer acts almost like a little mini appointment where you say, okay,
For the next 25 minutes, I'm going to try and work on this. And I find that that brain tantrum that's like, Ugh, I am so tired from teaching. And now I have to write for the next four hours that setting a smaller timer. Lets you say, I don't have to write for the next four hours. I just have to try writing for the next 25 minutes.
And it adds that time-based activation energy that'll help get you a little bit over the hump of I don't want to do this, or, oh, I'm tired. And into the flow. My brain is a championship tantrum-er, or it does not like to get started, but I find that even my most epic tantrums don't last longer than 25 minutes.
So if I set a timer for 25 minutes, and even if I free write my little heart out and I'm like, I hate writing. Writing is terrible. I never want to do it. My brain eventually gets that out of its system. And by the time that 25 minutes is up, I've either gotten stuck into the writing amazing or. Or I've pivoted to something else that probably also needs to get done. And that timer acts as a chance for me to check in and say, okay, is this actually what I want to be focusing on right now? Or do I want to move on and do something else?
The timer is just another tool to help you work intentionally. So, whether you're having it count up to measure how much you are actually focusing, noticing your trends and making sure that you take breaks to have food and drink and have water. Or you're using it to help you get started to help you jump into that cold pool timers, add boundaries around what can be a really overwhelming unstructured sense of responsibility and time and tasks for scholars everywhere. We all have too much to do and not enough time to do it. And a timer is just a concrete way to take that too muchness. And move it into smaller and smaller containers. To help you see which tasks might fit into the containers that you have.
And last but not least a special shout out to our review leaver. rmeaso. So which I will put into the show notes. You have won this months free session. So make sure that you email me or contact me on my website and we'll get that all set up for you. Thank you so much, everybody for listening, and I'm going to keep this giveaway going. Everybody who's already reviewed will still be entered. And thank you so much for spreading the word about this podcast.
📍 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!
2.5 email your advisor more?? - regular email updates
okay before you flee this podcast, hear me out: emailing your supervisor more regularly actually reduces anxiety most of the time. listen on for my best tips on how, when, and why you would want to do such a thing!
and if you want to answer those kinds of questions in a community of people who get it AND will cheer you on (plus lots lots more) for $5 a month, check out the community!
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast!
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Today's episode has a tool that has helped more people finish with the less structure and costs $0. Let's talk about sending regular update emails!
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you rate and review this podcast, by the end of the month, you'll be entered to win a free session for me. More details at the end of the episode. Now let's get into the good stuff. .
Now not everything from the business world is worth emulating. I don't think we need to have required work hours or complex organizational structures or. Mid-year confusing performance review cycles, but there are a couple of things that can be really useful for you, especially if you're in a place where you feel like you are throwing your day-to-day work into a void. No one sees it. No one cares.
Sending a regular update email is basically a mechanism that lets you quickly update your status to in business, speak your stakeholders. But in reality, your advisors, maybe your co-authors. Now. Why would I recommend an email when so many people are like, I love the fact that I can hide from my supervisor for months at a time?
Or I love the fact that my coauthors don't bother me until I've passed a deadline. Yeah, for sure. It can be a benefit to have so much autonomy and flexibility, but after years and years of coaching, and also seeing this behavior in myself, I know that sending those regular update emails actually reduces anxiety in most cases, rather than adding to it.
So let's talk about how to use this magical tool or email updates, how often to use it, who can really benefit from it and what you can do if sending these emails to supervisors, it feels a little bit out of reach.
So the first thing to decide is how often you'd like to send your update emails. There is a type of meeting in some companies called a standup meeting where everyone gathers around and updates the rest of the team on their progress. These happen usually every day, sometimes a little bit less frequently. In no universe am I suggesting that you send a email to your advisor every day to let them know what you've done and what you're going to do the next day.
It would be a lot of email for you to send and a lot of email for your supervisor to receive. But sending an email like that on a regular basis can help for a variety of reasons. I think that sending an email every two weeks is the sweet spot for most people. Two weeks is enough time to kind of smooth the edges of the really high highs and the really low lows. It's not so long that you can close your eyes, wake up and wow. A whole semester has gone.
Every two weeks, you know, twice a month is an excellent cadence. And since it's not tied to the term deadline, It can make it feel a little bit less stressful because you're updating sometime other than the first week of classes or the last week of classes, which is when I find that most supervisors remember that they have advisees and email them in some state of panic, low to high about where their progress is, which can be some of the worst weeks to get those emails as a student, because you're either really busy kicking off your class or winding it down.
Or having some sort of feeling about the next term beginning or ending.
If you wait for your advisor to email you, you don't get to control the timing. If you email them with the updates, then you get to control it. So two weeks works really well for most people. You might want to speed it up and do once a week on Fridays or on Mondays if you are in a really high production season, like say getting close to your defense or prospectus defense. And you might slow it down if you are say in the field and really busy, and there aren't that many updates, but the first step is to pick that cadence.
The second step is to pick the format. So I really enjoy having a format for these emails so that you don't have to sit down and create a whole new document every single time. I like these questions, which I have borrowed from the standup meeting that inspired this particular tool.
Here's what I've done since the last time that you've updated is the first question. It's basically your done list. Here are all of my accomplishments, big and small. It's also a place to put anything that you've done that was maybe unexpected. Like, oh, I dropped everything to get a CFP ready that I just found out about, or my revisions came back from the journal and I did those. Great time to say, here's what I've actually done.
Second question is here's where I'm blocked. This can be a really powerful question to share with your advisor because it helps you name what feels so sticky right now. Like I'm blocked because I feel like there's so much reading that I need to do before I can get done, or I'm blocked because this important piece of lab equipment broke and now I'm two weeks behind on my experimental schedule. Or I'm blocked because I'm having some health issues or mental health issues.
You can be as honest or as transparent as you'd like to be, but naming those things helps you. And it also gives your advisor more of a clear picture so that they don't think that the reason that you're not working is just because you chose not to. I've never seen any graduate student who is repeatedly just choosing not to work and ignoring the stakes. It just doesn't happen.
So you might as well share the reasons if you know them and if you feel comfortable.
And then the last, the third question that I love to include in these updates is what you plan to do next. I plan to finish the outline or I plan to have the first section drafted by my next check-in. It gives that sense of kind of moving forward accountability. It's a little bit of a deadline.
Those three questions. Here's what I've done. Here's where I'm blocked. And here's what I'm going to do next are simple enough that you can remember them, but you could also put them in a document if you want. I know people who make Gmail templates and then just fill them out. But that formula, it means that you aren't sort of inventing what to share. You just open up the email, you answer your three questions, you send it off. That gives your advisor the information that they need to know. And it forces you into a little bit of a moment of reflection and adjustment, which is so helpful, especially if you're doing it regularly.
So the last tip that I have about the actual email itself is that to the extent to which you feel comfortable and supported in doing so: be honest. So many supervisors are wanting to help, but not really having transparency into the workflow of their advisees. Most supervisors, most of the time, want you to finish and want you to finish well and they want you to do so in a supported way. But the more information that you give them about what's actually happening day to day, the more that they can support you. There's less that they can do when they chase you down after a draft is overdue by two or three months, right?
That would be a difficult situation for anyone. So if you share with them more regularly, What you're getting done, what things are easy and what things are hard. You might have more access to their expertise and their mentorship than you might've otherwise had. So. If you can, if you feel supported and if it feels safe, be honest.
And because you send them regularly, it smooths out over time. Here's one email where I didn't get anything done, but next two weeks. I did. And that can help you feel a little bit more confident, too.
I find that people who have what I call set it and forget it, advisors or collaborators really benefit from this. So if you have an advisor who's extremely hands-off or they kind of meet with you once a term, and then they say, go forth and do it. They might not offer this tool to you, but if you ask them like, Hey, I think it would really benefit me if I sent this email, even if you don't reply.
That can be really helpful. Just so that they have a little bit more visibility into your process. They can intervene when they want to, but you get what is the second and honestly, most important benefit of this tool, which is that you get that sense of like a mini deadline.
So every two weeks, when it's your Friday email day, it forces you to kind of like push to get to that next level. Or it gives you a gentle bit of encouragement. So when you get close to email day, knowing that you have to report your progress gives you the opportunity to do a little bit of a mini deadline push, which can feel really motivating for a lot of us. Deadlines work for a reason. So giving yourself a lower stakes, but regularly occurring deadline to update on your progress can be really helpful. It increases communication and increases for you the sense that somebody cares about your work, which honestly is so much more motivating.
Last idea. If it sounds too intense or your advisor is on sabbatical or there's a variety of other reasons why your official supervisor or chair or advisor isn't open to, or isn't a great place to send these updates.
There's lots of other people that you can send them to instead. I love sending them to friends or to colleagues or to other peer supports, maybe other people in your lab you could do this with. I know people who have been emailing their accountability buddies every day or every week for years.
There's a reason why so many coaching communities are built on this kind of update structure. And there are a lot of people that you can email if your advisor or supervisor isn't the best fit for this tool.
We talk a lot about accountability in the coaching world, in the grad student world. Like you must be accountable to your own deadlines. And if it's helpful, this is my definition of accountability. I define accountability, not as doing what you said you were going to do, when you said you were going to do it, no matter what.
I actually define it is making your work and the decisions that shape your work, what you did when you did and how visible. First to yourself and then to other people.
Accountability means bringing that visibility for yourself and for other people. And the more that you know, what you're doing and why more regularly, instead of waiting until a crisis point, like a missed deadline or a funding crunch to do that sort of reflection, only benefits you. Whether you send it to your advisor, your friends, or just out into the void, like Bella sent those emails to Edward in the second Twilight movie. So thanks so much for listening. I am so excited about a couple of the things that are upcoming.
Please make sure that you have signed up for the toolkit at the bottom of these posts. That's going to get you on my newsletter and I'm about to announce some really cool things for summer that you won't want to miss. If you like summer camp, you're going to like what we're doing this summer. Thanks so much and see you next week.
Bye.
📍 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!
2.4 the default need not be work: cut off times
a tool that costs zero money, but is rarely encouraged, and can have radical benefits if you implement it....it's a cut off time at the end of the day. this was one of the hardest things i did as a grad student, and it can still be a tricky thing, but nothing has made a bigger difference for my sustainability. listen to learn all about it!
and if you're looking for a routine to help support your cut off time, i have your back on the blog!
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On today's episode, a tool that will cost you zero money, but might take a little bit of practice. Let's talk about why I think most people need to cut off time.
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you rate and review this podcast, by the end of the month, you'll be entered to win a free session for me. More details at the end of the episode. Now let's get into the good stuff. .
In this season of grad school is hard, but I'm presenting various different tools that I think could really help you with some of the things that you guessed. It are so hard about grad school. And in today's episode, I am going to introduce you to the single biggest thing that I did as a grad student that changed the way that I worked and the way that I lived, and it was designating a hard stop at the end of the day. You might call it a cutoff time or you might celebrate it by ringing a dinner bell, but this is basically just a time of the day where you say, okay, No matter what I'm going to be done by X time.
And if things are undone, they're undone. If things have to get moved to tomorrow, they get moved to tomorrow, but I am officially done working for the day at this specific time. I encourage you to set this time for weekdays. And at least take some time off on the weekends. But here's some of the reasons why I think that this is such a useful tool.
Number one. It creates a boundary. For so many of us, especially if you are still working in a hybrid situation or are not fully comfortable being back completely in the world. I get it. Me too. Your work life spaces are probably a little bit confused. Even me, I have full control over my time and my schedule. I have a dedicated office to work.
And I still work on the couch. I still work sometimes in bed and I still do life things in my office. So for me, even though there's some sense of a boundary spatially, the cutoff time is what really makes a difference for me switching between work and the rest of my life. Yeah.
If you have never had a cutoff time before. Then this can be a bit of a revolutionary concept. And this is one of those ideas that comes from me from the folder of life experience I like to call being partners with a person who has a quote, regular job. In this person's regular job, there were certain hours where they were expected to be there. And then at the end of the day, they were done. They left the office. And I felt like I was never done as a grad student. There were always more emails to check more grading to do, more books that I could be reading and it really started to bleed into the rest of the time.
So having somebody that lived in the house with me that had a hard cutoff time made me think: wow, I could do that too. And when I did it made such a difference.
Now, maybe you've already tried to do this, and you've said, Katy. For the last couple of weeks, I have tried to stop at 7:00 PM or 5:00 PM if you're really a go getter and it really has not worked. Maybe I have told myself that I was stopping, but I kept going and I stayed on my computer and I scrolled through things or I checked my email a million times on my phone and I never felt like I was done, even though I said the word done.
And for those of us on team busy brain. I'm the captain, of course. You might need to get your body involved to make this boundary stick.
I know that I physically have to leave a certain area. I have to leave my desk in my office. At various other times, I've had to leave campus. I've needed to switch from the working side of my couch, to the relaxing side of my couch, but getting my body involved sometimes even with a shower or a workout or a walk or a meal has really helped me get that sense that there was work time and then there was other time and there was a boundary between them.
And this is so useful because it teaches you that the default for time doesn't have to be work. I know that whether I was conscious of it or not, I felt that any hour that I was awake, I needed to be working. And even if I wasn't working at the same intensity, they didn't all need to be writing, but they needed to at least be thinking about my project or able to think about my project or at the barest of minimums, able to respond to an email that might be sent to me at any day or time.
I "didn't feel like I had the professional standing or quite honestly the amount of clout to be able to take time off and say, Hey. I did not respond to that email because it was sent to me at 10:00 PM. And I responded to it when I got into the morning." That was an unthinkable boundary for me. And by not having that boundary, I really taught myself and my body that it needed to be ready for working no matter what.
When I switched to a model, aided by this cutoff time where I worked on purpose, and then I stopped on purpose, things got a lot easier. Because even though it didn't happen immediately - it took me a couple of weeks to settle into this new routine - once it felt a little bit more solid. I realized that I was not only working on purpose and feeling like, the end of the day felt like mini deadline energy, where I was doing my best to catch up with all of those loose ends to be done at the end of the clock. I've never been a basketball player, but you know, those real good buzzer beater shots where you've finished that last email and shut it down, felt great.
I was working on purpose and I was stopping on purpose. I was watching TV and my computer wasn't open. I was cooking dinner and actually talking to said person who had a real job catching up about our days without having my phone, literally in my hand. That rest at the end of the day felt so much more satisfying and I didn't know how much it was going to help my focus, my relationships, my ability to get laundry done by just having a cutoff time.
Your brain is always going to probably creep in. So I know that even in my best and most beautifully tended boundaries between work and other things, I still will get ideas for projects I want to do. I'll get flashes about that sticky thing I was working on in the draft. So, you know, keep, keep a notebook and bring yourself back if you've noticed that you've drifted into work during that work time. But that cutoff time, once it really feels habitual can absolutely help your brain sort of flip that switch between. Okay. in certain times I'm working in certain times, I'm not.
This tool is going to be really good for anyone who is flirting with, or maybe already in burnout. I reached for this tool for the first time when I was absolutely burned out, I was working a bunch of jobs, couldn't focus, and I felt like I was working all day and getting nothing done. Working for less hours and resting more intentionally at the end of the day. It wasn't an immediate fix for burnout, but it absolutely set me on the path.
Paradoxically. If you're a person who feels like they're not getting enough done, I encourage you to set a cutoff time. Because, like I mentioned a little bit earlier that deadline of, okay, it's almost five o'clock or it's almost seven o'clock can really help you give a little bit more momentum to the tasks that you're working on. And I find that that little bit of extra focus absolutely makes a difference.
Plus, if you are getting a little bit more rest, a little bit more recovery, I can make a solid bet that you might have more improved focus during the hours that you do work, which might help you get enough done.
And the last, but not least if you're in a deadline season and you're listening to this thinking, Katy, I have to work every minute of every day. And that's the only way that my dissertation is going to be submitted on time. I first of all applaud you. Way to go for getting so close. But I am going to double down and say you more than almost anyone needed a cutoff time. The tendency that we all have when we're getting close to big projects is to clear the schedule and work every single minute.
And while that can feel really productive for the first couple of days, you might get a lot of things done. Eventually your body will need a break. And if you're not taking those breaks intentionally, your body will decide when to take those breaks for you. So if you've really been pushing in the last couple of weeks, or maybe months, I encourage you to check in with, reimplement or maybe implement for the first time a cutoff time. All of us deserve to do something else during the day, whether that is for your body or your brain or your family, or a book or a silly show on Netflix or a great podcast. You choose the other thing, but if you have a cut off time, it makes it so much easier to give yourself permission to do whatever that other thing is. Maybe even a couple of other things. Thanks so much and I will see you next. 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!
2.3 help out your short term memory: task managers
whether you put all your tasks in a notebook, app, or on the back of various receipts, many of us want some sort of system to capture all that we need to do. task managers will do you one better by storing that information, and sending it back to you when you can actually take action on it. simply put, your brain cannot hold it all - so why not give it some help??
learn all about task managers in this week's episode!
mentioned in the show:
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Whether you scribble them on a notebook, whether you shout reminders into your phone or invest in a piece of software to help you manage it. I think that there is one thing that can save so much brain power and energy, and that is a system for containing your tasks. So in this week's episode, let's talk about task managers.
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
March madness is a month of free writing resources, trackers, dash boards, and prizes. Sign up for free at the link in the show notes.
The task manager is exactly what it sounds like. It's a system that helps you manage what things you need to do. And the secret about a task manager is that while it also tells you what things you need to do, and when, it really helps you get into the habit of estimating your time and energy and various other resources that you need in order to do those tasks.
It's when everything's in one place -and it doesn't really matter what that place is, but we'll talk about some of the pros and cons of various different ones in a minute - but when everything's in one place, you can start to see, okay, this is too much for one day or, I have a little bit of space here. What can I do? It's the first step in gaining some visibility into how you're working and then maybe making some changes that might be more sustainable in the long run.
So a task manager can be very simple. It can be a notebook. The bullet journal is a task management system, for example, which is just a notebook that you keep a running list of moving tasks from day to day, as you need to, or want to. It can be a system that's even more chaotic than that, which is various notepads or receipts, and jotted down notes in your phone.
But it can also be a very complicated system that you invest a lot of time and maybe even some money in setting up. Something like Asana or Trello or click up, which has projects and boards and recurring features that help you do a little bit more advanced things, but no matter which tool you use to do it, I do think that test managers have a lot of benefits.
And here are the ways that I think you can think about using them. And if any of these appeal to you, then it might be time for you to invest in a task manager. So the first is maybe the most simple, but can be the most revolutionary: it's capturing tasks. I don't know about you, but my brain likes to spit up reminders of things that I need to do or could do or should do at the most inconvenient times. I'll be in the shower and thinking about how it's somebody's birthday next week. I could be writing, thinking about how I need to schedule that dentist appointment.
But if I have a task manager, then I have a central place to send all of those random brain injections of things I need to do. And I can deal with them in a time and place of my choosing. So that might look like quickly opening up my task manager or yelling into my phone "buy birthday present" or "go to the dentist" and then dealing with it afterwards.
But capturing tasks as a regular part of your workflow really starts to pay off, not just for the random life things that you also need to keep doing while you are a grad student, but for the things that are so easy to slip your mind. You see a CFP in your email. And so you send it into your task manager and say, okay, remind me to work on this in three weeks when I'm going to have a little bit more time and then boom.
You remember it and not just because they send you a 12 hours left to submit email. So if all of your tasks are going to the same place, it's easier to see them and then have a system for scheduling them in a way that makes sense for your rhythm.
You can also remind yourself to do the tasks that might not occur to you. So in my task manager, every Friday, it reminds me to clean up my office and especially clean out my downloads folder because I am notorious for leaving everything in my downloads folder. So every task manager that I set up has this recurring task on Friday, that reminds me to do this thing that's important, but would honestly never occur to me. And honestly, doesn't seem that fun most of the time, but if it's there, I can sometimes snooze it. I can move it to Monday or I can do it on Thursday if I'm feeling really motivated, but it regularly reminds me to do these kinds of tasks that would have otherwise slipped my mind.
Task managers are really great for the non urgent, but important tasks that really never seem to rise to the top of your anxiety stack. So. If you know that you have to grade five papers by tomorrow or else there will be severe consequences. You probably don't need a task manager to remind you of that. But if you have things like, don't forget to double check that my paperwork was submitted on time. That's the kind of task that a task manager is really going to excel at because it wouldn't have otherwise occurred to you, but it's still really important to do.
So I think that most people, most of the time are going to benefit from some sort of a task management system. I don't think that everyone needs a piece of software. I don't think that everyone needs a special app on their phone. A notebook can be just fine for some people. But if you do have a little bit more capacity in your workflow points, like if you have a little bit of an interest using a piece of software, especially one that links with your phone can be really useful.
So ToDoIst is one of my favorites. It has a pretty generous free plan, but it's basically just a to-do list. You can separate things out into categories, but it's just a running to-do list. There aren't a lot of bells and whistles, so you can't create too complicated a system. If you're working on a team, something like a sauna can be great because you can have shared work boards. You can collaborate, you can assign tasks to different people. It might be a little bit high-powered for one person, but if you've liked the way it looks and the way it functions also has a group, a great free program.
Trello is along the same lines, especially a great for people who like a Kanban style board of task managers, where you have categories for not started, in progress and done, which can be really motivating. And you can get as fancy as something like ClickUp or monday.com, which has all kinds of automations and trigger functions that are cool to play with, but maybe a little bit high powered for what you need to do.
But no matter what task manager you pick, I do think that having some sort of integration between your phone and your computer can be really helpful if only because your brain will spit out reminders about your dissertation and vice versa. When you're at your desk or when you're not. So a phone integration, whether that's an app or a web clipper can be really useful to help you integrate those things no matter where you are at your desk or not.
The bottom line is that a task manager saves you, brainpower. Your short-term memory can't hold all of this information at once. So outsource a little bit of that work to a task manager, so that the entire responsibility of remembering to do all of the details for all of your jobs and all of your human responsibilities, every single day has a backup plan. Thank you so much and I'll 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!
2.2 - there are so many pdfs: citation managers save lives
i make very few recommendations about things i think all scholars should be doing.......but citation managers are one. listen to this episode to find out my reasons why - and learn my favorite piece of software to use (hint, it's free!!) for this. you truly cannot imagine the amount of information you will need to keep organized as a scholar - citation managers are a key part in dealing with that, and can really help you out!
resources mentioned:
step by step tutorial for zotero
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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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
March madness is a month of free writing resources, trackers, dash boards, and prizes. Sign up for free at the link in the show notes.
All I have is anecdotal evidence, but I'm pretty sure that one of the main sources of guilt for academics when it comes to their workflow is how they are or are not using the citation manager.
In fact, the angst goes so deep that I have often joked about making a t-shirt that says the best time to start a citation manager was birth. And the second best time is today. Because so many people feel so locked up about how they are using the software, how they're not using it to its full potential or maybe how they're not using it at all. So let's get into citation managers, how and why you might want to use them. And some of the lesser known features that I think are even more valuable.
Now I make very few universal recommendations as a coach, as in, I think that most people, if not everyone should be using this tool or doing this technique. But citation managers come pretty close. I think that most people, most of the time should be using a citation manager simply because you will encounter so much literature, pieces of research, primary sources, all sorts of things. The material that you accumulate as an academic scholar is mountainous. You can't, you truly can not conceive of how many PDFs you will encounter over the course of a PhD program, or goodness knows a multi-year multi-decade academic career.
So citation manager is simply put a piece of software that stores all of the citeable information about the pieces of information that you have, like title and DOI, And publisher in one place so that you can find them. It's like a list of everything you've checked out from the library, although you control it and you put it in and you don't have to read everything that's in there .
The other thing that citation managers do really well and their first and primary function was to export and automate your citations. So you will interface this piece of software and the most common ones are Zotero, Mendeley, and Endnote. You'll interface a piece of software with your word processor, like Word.
You'll click a button and then it'll automatically insert a properly formatted citation, whether that's a footnote or a work cited, whatever the style demands. Super useful, Right? If all you ever use a citation manager for is to help format your citations, and even if you're inconsistent about what you put into the citation manager, I still think they're a good use of time. They are not perfect for sure. You do often have to adjust a few things. You might have to double check the formatting. But it really helps save both the records of all of the pieces of information that you've come into contact with. And saves you a lot of time when it comes to the actual formatting work.
But there are so many other features of these citation managers that I think deserve some consideration in your reading and research and maybe even writing workflows.
I love the ability to create collections inside of a citation manager. You might create a collection that you share with your department called best texts to teach this topic with, and everybody can update it and it automatically syncs between devices.
I love creating collections for special interests or reading groups or keeping things organized. I love nothing more than organizing bits of information on my computer. Please don't ask me to organize anything in my real physical life. I won't do it, but I will noodle around in my citation manager, making collections.
But the fact that you can share some of these create libraries and keep them updated. So, so useful.
I have what many people would refer to as shiny object syndrome. So I need to keep as much of the information about whatever I'm doing in one program, because the instant that I click out of said program, the more likely it is that I'm going to end up in some wild corner of the internet, where I didn't intend to be.
And I love that citation managers will let me store my notes with them. It's sometimes we'll let you append PDFs. Although the storage of that can get tricky. Storage management is a whole other episode of this podcast, but you can keep your notes right with the citation. So you can remember, oh, that was this edition of the book that had these page numbers, or it was this publication that I was encountering at a conference or whatever.
Your notes can be as detailed or as scant as you want, but having them right by the citation information makes it so much easier to trace your steps back later on. You can also in many of these software programs, Create tags, which can really increase searchability. So I have tags in my citation manager for actually read this or skimmed this, or decided not to read this.
I have tags that refer to different methodologies. I have tags about the decade that something was published in and I have tags about clusters of researchers that published together. So I can see the different schools and it's so useful to then go through and filter and say, okay, show me all of the things that were published in the eighties with this method that came out of this lab.
Boom. It's so hard to do that in any other piece of software and that ability to sort of keep things, add information, add rich metadata can really pay off the more you invest inside of that citation manager, and the bigger that collection is.
This can help you keep track of all of the things that you could and have already read. And as any academic will tell you, managing your reading pile is one of the most daunting and ongoing tasks. You literally never finish it. So having a piece of software that helps you keep track of what you've read, what you've cited, that thing that somebody mentioned to you down the hallway, all really helpful because you can't keep it all in your brain.
Some of it will escape. So the more of it that lands in the citation manager, the more likely it is that you won't have to duplicate that work when you have to go back and say, what was the name of that paper that somebody mentioned in our symposium last week or two weeks ago, or that I taught with a year ago? It'll all be right there.
So I recommend that you store literally everything in your citation manager, the things that you teach with tag them with the syllabis tag them with the semester that you taught at, or the institution that you did. The things that you read in your own courses, the things you read for exams web sources that you come across, book reviews, put it all in there.
It doesn't mean you're going to read it all, but it means it's a central place to go looking when you're trying to piece back your research path.
I really recommend that people use a citation manager, especially if you have a lot of sources, if you are someone who really only has a handful of things and you can keep them all easy in your finger tips, and you really enjoy the process of constructing a citation, go for it. But I really recommend that if you're going to be working with say more than 25 or 30 sources over the course of your scholarly lifetime - And spoiler alert, you will be! - Use the citation manager. Help yourself keep track of some of it.
Now a question that I often get is Katy. I haven't really used my citation manager or I started using it. Do I need to stop everything that I'm doing and spend the next two weeks, putting everything in there and tagging it and note taking it so that it's all there. And my answer is as fun as that sounds, it's actually probably not a good use of your time.
The best thing that I have found is to build it organically, as opposed to trying to create a very elaborate schema. And then putting everything into that citation manager. All of the big three come with a web clipper which goes right into your internet browser. It lets you push a button when you're surfing on a page that, you know, Google scholar or J STOR or wherever you're getting your information and it automatically sends it to your citation manager. You might have to do a little bit of cleanup and tagging to make sure that it's good, but you can with a click of a button automatically import those things. So wherever you are right now, get in the habit of starting to do that. Tag, when you need to use tags, add folders when you need to use folders, but start to build it wherever you are. Because like I said up top the best time to have done this is when you were born and just kept track of everything that you've ever read for your entire life Always. But the second best time is to start investing in it now.
Last, but not least, a software recommendation. I recommend Zotero to everybody because it's free. You don't pay for it. It's a piece of open-source software. It is regularly updated. There's a very robust online support community. I've linked to a bunch of things in the show notes to help you out there.
I also think Zotero is the easiest to use. And I think it's one of the ones that has the most flexibility with what things it pairs with, what word processors, it plays the nicest with other pieces of software that you might use. But you can also check your university library and software showcase because oftentimes they have resources, guides and discounts on software. So it might be that your university really supports EndNote and they give you a great discount on it. That's a good reason to start using it, if that's what makes sense to you.
But definitely look for something that has a web clipper, that has the ability to tag and sort, and you'll be well on your way to having more organized citations . Not just when you're ready to press publish on that paper, but also you're organizing the work and the material of the research process across your many, many projects.
Thanks so much for listening and I will 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!
2.1 - get a tool actually built for drafting: non-linear word processors
Welcome to Season 2 of Grad School is Hard, But...where I give you all my best tools to make things a little less hard. To kick things off, we're talking about non-linear word processors. If you've ever done any of the following: completely lost where you were in the document; scrolled up and down for seeming minutes, trying to find where you left off; got completely confused; duplicated text; moved things around that you shouldn't have; gotten really overwhelmed, trying to start at the beginning; mixed up versions; mixed up drafts; then maybe a non-linear word processor is the way to go.
Mentioned in the episode:
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If you want to spend March making sustainable progress on your writing, with the added excitement of challenges, fun, and prizes, then March Madness is for you! Sign up for FREE here, and you'll also be on my newsletter list for weekly pep talks and all the latest news in the Thrive PhD universe!
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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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
March madness is a month of free writing resources, trackers, dash boards, and prizes. Sign up for free at the link in the show notes.
In this week's episode, I am going to let you in on one of the biggest secrets that I have about writing long, complicated academic projects. Don't do it in Word. Or Pages or Libre Office or any of your more standard word processors. Now, if it's working for you and you feel like it's fine. There's no bumps at all. Feel free to skip the rest of this episode, and catch me back next week.
But if you have ever done any of the following: completely lost where you were in the document; scrolled up and down for seeming minutes, trying to find where you left off; got completely confused; duplicated text; moved things around that you shouldn't have; gotten really overwhelmed, trying to start at the beginning; Mixed up versions; mixed up drafts; then maybe a non-linear word processor is the way to go. Now by nonlinear word processor, what I mean is a piece of software that makes it easy for you to create collections of smaller bits of text that you then assemble into a longer, more linear draft.
Word and all of its other competitors are pieces of software that in my opinion are really great for things like formatting, sharing your work back and forth, once you have a draft that's all in a straight line. That has a beginning, a middle and an end. And you feel like the order is more or less locked in.
Other pieces of software can help you so much in the earlier drafting phases. Because they let you do things like create smaller documents that you remix and shuffle around to create new organizational schema. It might let you see more than one document open at a time so that you can compare or write directly from your notes or your outline. They might let you put all of your notes, outlines, research, sources, everything all in one place to minimize, clicking out, and therefore getting stuck in whatever sticky parts of the internet or your computer you tend to get stuck in.
These tools are meant to support the earlier messier non-linear phases of drafting. Where you might have a project that could turn into a conference paper and also a dissertation chapter and maybe a guest lecture. And instead of having 15 different word documents labeled: early draft, crappy draft, final draft, final, final draft, final draft for lecture. You get what I mean! You have everything all in one place that you can export and move around as you want to.
The first and most popular version of this software is something called Scrivener, which is definitely paid software. You do have to pay to use it. However it has some of the most generous trial policies that I've ever seen. But other pieces of software that would fall under this umbrella of non-linear word processors are Evernote, Notion, Obsidian could be used this way. Even Google docs has some pretty cool hyperlink functions and folder structures that you can use to replicate.
These tools are good for a couple of things, and I'm going to list them out now. Number one, I think they're good for projects that have a lot of possible formats. Whether that's possible organizational structures, whether you're going to start with this case study or that case study.
Or, you know, this is a body of research that might have four or five different related, but distinct outputs, like a conference paper, a chapter, so on and so forth. It lets you shuffle and see all of these things, keep them together and keep them with the research that they belong to so that you're not trying to manage a thousand different files with slight but meaningful differences.
Number two. I think that this kind of software is particularly awesome for people who want to create really dense links between their research notes, outlines, primary sources to help them see and work with these things more completely. So if you're a scientist and you have A paper that you're supposed to be doing. And it has the same seven sections every time - this might not be necessary for you.
But if you are an anthropologist or historian or an archivist or a person who works with interviews that you're coding, it can be really helpful to have a piece of software that organizes itself around all of the different things that feed into your writing for those early draft stages. So for example, when I was using Scrivener, I would have four panes open at any one time, all within the same document window.
I would have the draft I was actually working on. A scratch pad so that I could capture any notes and things that come up because my brain is very busy while I'm writing. It would have the original source that I was thinking about. And also the long outline that I was working from. And I didn't have to have those in four different Word documents. They were all there in one thing so that I could see them and bounce between them.
This is great. If you, like I mentioned, tend to get stuck when you click out of a document and then suddenly you're in the rest of your life and not doing your writing.
The other function that these are really, really good for are when you are feeling completely overwhelmed about where to start.
The worst thing about opening up a blank document, calling it dissertation proposal, and then trying to start writing is that naturally you're going to start writing at the beginning. And beginnings are some of the hardest parts. I never recommend that people start with the beginning unless they have a really good reason to, I always say write from whatever feels the clearest to you.
It might be the subsection three quarters of the way into the chapter, or it could be the conclusion, or it could be, you know, the second paragraph or the 15th. But nonlinear word processors, let you open up a file easily quickly say, Hey, this is this case study. I write it out there and then shuffle or reshuffle it, depending on how your structure and organization end up being through various revision processes.
Okay, last bit a caveat. If you try one of these pieces of software, whether it's Scrivener or Evernote or Notion, any of these nonlinear word processors, and immediately you feel overwhelmed, discombobulated if it doesn't really click with your brain, it feel free to bounce on out of there.
There is no need to use a non-linear word processor. If it doesn't immediately strike you as something that would be really beneficial. But if you've been really struggling to keep track of various drafts, and want a little bit more flexibility and support and options to play in the earlier drafting stages. There's no better place to do it than a non-linear word processor.
Thanks so much for being here and I will 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!