5.9 everything changes - when what worked before doesn't work now
few things can be scarier than the feeling of "wait, this used to work....why doesn't it work now?" if you've always studied, written, read, or scheduled in a certain way, it is easy to jump to shame-filled conclusion when you aren't getting the same results. this episode talks about that moment, and what you can do when you find yourself in a new season.
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
this week's episode is called Everything Changes or What Worked Before Might Not Work Now, and Why? That's okay. This is one of the biggest hurdles that I see my clients go through. They turn to things that have worked for them in the past. Certain tools, programs, habits, routines, you name it, they've used it in the past.
It worked in the past, and then when they try and use it, now it doesn't, and that causes a spiral. Because What do you mean it doesn't work? What do you mean? That the scheduling tricks I've always used, or this habit or this routine that have always gotten me through aren't doing the trick right now. I first see this hurdle show up.
A lot of times when people are starting to prepare for their first like big end of semester push in grad school, they turn to what worked for them in undergrad, and obviously it worked because they're in grad school and so they turn to all of their tools, whether that is scheduling or time blocking or what have you, and then they find that.
It just doesn't work the way that it used to. Maybe they needed more time to work on those papers. Maybe they needed less. Maybe they were over focusing on readings. Maybe they weren't spending enough time managing their to-do list across all of their different responsibilities. It doesn't really matter what happens, but when what worked before doesn't work, now, it can cause panic because you're like, okay, I've always been able to do this and now I can't.
I must not be ready for grad school. I must not be able to do this, and I assure you that that is not the case. What worked before might not work now, but that doesn't mean that it won't ever work. It just might mean that you need new tools. The problem is that our lives, especially in grad school, especially as you get older, they change and they change in different ways than you're maybe used to.
You might have a different set of demands semester to semester, or honestly even week to week, depending on what your life looks like. Maybe there are seasons where you need to do a lot of research. What you need. The tools that will help you thrive in a season like that, most likely won't be the same tools that really support you through a teaching heavy semester.
You might also have changing resources. Resources like time or energy or childcare or access to research funds. Those things all fluctuate. And as they fluctuate, the tools that you need to manage and account for them are probably gonna change too. Now, you might also be of a brain flavor that sometimes just needs a little novelty.
So sometimes I work with clients and they are mystified because what was working before doesn't work anymore, and it's because it's gotten a little stale. It's gotten a little boring. Their brain needs that hit of dopamine, and they've gotta change things up purely for the sake of novelty.
Any of those changes don't mean that you're broken or that you're never gonna be able to figure it out. They just mean that new methods are needed to cope with new conditions. I think a lot of times when the tools that have worked before don't work anymore, we can feel like we're backsliding, like we are not able to handle challenges that we felt like we had under control.
It can be a really bewildering feeling to be like, man, I used to be so good at getting everything checked off on my to-do list, and now I'm terrible at it. Or to be like, I really knew how to write a paper and now I don't know how to write a paper. That feeling of this isn't working in the way that it used to.
Can feel like a personal failing, like I used to be good at this and now I'm not. I'll never be able to be good at it. And I just want to assure you again that that's not necessarily true. It often means that you're either at a new level working with a new set of conditions, or maybe you're just doing something new.
And when you're doing something new, you often need new tools and new support. The most important question to ask is not, can I do this? But is what I'm doing now, working in the way that I need it to, and I'll say that again because it's an important question, is what I'm doing now to support myself working in the way that I need it to.
And if not, that's okay. If yes, carry on. Feel free to skip the rest of this episode. If no, the answer to that question isn't a value judgment. It doesn't mean anything about you or your work habits or your dedication or your discipline. It just means that you need to change things up.
I'll run you through a short example so that you know what this might look like for you when it's not working, and what you can do to pivot. One of the tools that I have the most up and down binary relationship with is time blocking. Now, there are certain seasons in my life where time blocking is the most important tool in my arsenal for getting things done. It was essential for me in seasons and semesters where I had a really heavy teaching load because I had these irregular time patterns. My classes didn't always meet at the same time, and I had immovable commitments.
My class met whether I was there. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So I had to be there Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and there wasn't any, eh, I'll move this to Tuesday. I'll switch this around to to Thursday. It had to be what it had to be. So the only way for me to get my resources aligned when in these seasons, it often was like quiet time away from campus, away from my students who, bless them, always wanted more from me, more answers, more office hours, time.
I needed time. To myself with all of the supplies that I needed for my writing, which was often access to my research, access to my notes, different drafts, a computer that was pleasant to type on. I needed to get all of those resources aligned, and the best way to do that was to know ahead of time when I was gonna be writing.
So I would set up writing blocks often for the days that I wasn't on campus and wasn't teaching, and I protected them with a ferocity never before seen and probably not seen again. I was so committed to blocking off that time that it was the only way that I could get the writing done, and I knew it was in my schedule.
It was protected, and it made it easy for me to show up for those writing sessions and actually make progress even though my schedule was jam packed. Now, time blocking was beyond frustrating and almost useless when I was on fellowship because I had a much more open schedule and my phone would ring and it would say, okay, it's Tuesday at 10 time to do your writing.
And a voice in me would say, you're not the boss of me. And I would just straight up and not write. Not for any particular reason, not because I couldn't write, but because I didn't like my phone bossing me around and because there wasn't that intense time pressure around this or this or nothing at all, I just didn't do it.
And it actually became harder to make my writing happen in the beginning of my fellowship than it was when I was teaching and three times as scheduled. So I had to lean into other methods of making my writing feel inviting and actionable, which usually looked like a lot more detailed to-do lists. It looked like writing co-working sessions with friends that were scheduled, but had that.
Added hit of accountability and it looked like a lot more creativity, where if I wanted to spend the morning reading I did because it helped keep me in the world of the project. And as long as I did some writing, most days, I knew I was on track. It's not easy to switch tools. It's not easy to feel like there's no one magic routine or structure that's gonna work for you all the time.
But if you can give yourself permission to embrace the idea that everything changes, it can take some of that hit of shame and frustration. And I will never be able to do this out of these moments of reevaluation because I promise you, we all have them. Many of us switch up the ways that we work and live regularly for novelty reasons and because everything changes.
I hope that this gives you a little bit more permission to try something different. Try something new and give yourself a little bit of patience while you figure it out. 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!
5.8 momentum is fleeting - work for clarity instead
work every day! write every day! finish your dissertation in 15 minutes a day! there are endless variations of this writing advice, but they almost all depend on you being able to show up, and work effectively, as frequently as possible. but what if that isn't possible, for any number of reasons? what can you count on if momentum isn't going to be a sustainable fuel for you?
let's try clarity - and in this episode, i'll give you a bunch of ways to try and build it in!
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
Have you ever forced yourself back to your desk even though you weren't feeling well, you didn't have the time, or you had something else more important to do because you were worried about losing your momentum? Have you ever looked back at a good string of writing days and thought, yeah, that's it.
That was the momentum I had it. Have you been wishing for that momentum to visit you again and not really understanding why it hasn't? Well, this is the episode for you. I. Think that perhaps the most common piece of advice, especially for writing, is to do it every day, even for a minute, even for 15 minutes.
Some people will prescribe 15 minutes or a hundred words. It really depends, but everyone says, work every day. Show up every day. Build that consistency, make it a habit. A lot of the advice just pushes this idea that you have to keep going, that you have to have that momentum and. I have seen that be true for some people, but what I've really seen is that it makes it all feel very fragile because what happens when you can't make it back every day?
What if you have a teaching schedule or a caretaking schedule or a body or a brain that just doesn't want to, can't, can't access the everyday rhythm? What if momentum isn't really possible for you? If momentum is possible for you, feel free to turn this off. Keep going. You have other things to do with your day, but if you've been frustrated by that idea that if momentum isn't real or if momentum isn't something I can access, then how am I gonna make steady, measurable plannable process?
Then I have some good news for you because I think that at least 80% of the time when we say that we have momentum with a project, we actually mean that we have clarity. If you've been writing every day for two weeks, you probably have a lot of clarity about your argument, about your text. It all feels recent and alive.
And if you don't have detailed notes, it's not that much work to figure out where you left off because it was just a couple days ago, and you'll be able to quickly and effectively access what needs to come next. There's a clarity that comes from being in the head space of the project. When you know where you are and what needs to be done, it's so much easier to get started.
It's easier to stay in that flow and that rhythm because you're not using all of your energy to reorient or refamiliarize yourself. I know that one of the hardest things about getting started for me after some time away is that it takes so much time and energy to spin it back up. I know that I can have some real resistance.
To opening that document again, to finding my notes, hunting down where things are. I've even worked with clients that can't bring themselves to turn on the computer. I get it. That resistance is real. And a lot of times when people say they have momentum, they mean that that resistance is gone because they know where that next step is coming.
So if you are looking for momentum. And are finding that it's hard or maybe even feeling impossible to access. Here are some quick things that you can do to introduce some clarity so that you might still be able to feel that energy moving forward, even if a specific every day or very frequent rhythm isn't possible for you.
Step one, spend some time leaving good notes for yourself. Where to start the next day, what you were thinking about, what to read. You can do this in a couple of different ways. I like to use a task manager for this. I also am a big fan of post-it notes and scribbled down notes everywhere. I even know someone who used to leave their writing in the middle of a sentence just to make it that much easier to pick back up again, but.
It might feel like wasted time to leave those notes, but I promise that future you will be grateful that past you left them some breadcrumbs to follow on the trail. Next, make your tasks as actionable, small and concrete as possible. If you are in the habit of having really big task things on your list, like write the method section instead, try and break that down into 15 or maybe even 20 tasks, like describe the lab equipment, describe the process for filling out those vials.
Write a sentence, introducing this citation. Make sure that your citations are formatted. These small concrete tasks are gonna help you feel like you know what the next steps are because they're clear as opposed to something as big and nebulous as write that section. You might wanna schedule some time to reread your writing or your notes to re-familiarize yourself with projects that are feeling dormant.
I sometimes like to think about this as taking an old project out for a coffee date where I get myself a nice treat, I make a good cup of coffee, and I just spend time reading through things to reorient myself. Not squeezing that in in the beginning of a session when I'm trying to quote unquote, make a lot of writing progress, helps me feel like I'm dipping my toe back in, in a way that feels useful and like I'm moving forward without adding extra pressure into my very precious writing time.
Or you could experiment with spending a few minutes, even two or three journaling about your work to ease into the head space on the days where it would feel hard or impossible to do more. I used to think about this like sending a voice note or a quick check-in text to a friend that I couldn't see. You know that there are some seasons in your life where you would love to spend hours on the phone with a good friend or maybe see them or go for a walk or a hike or whatever you do, but it's not possible.
So instead of just ignoring them and hoping that they're still there for you in a couple of weeks, why don't you send them a quick text and say, Hey thinking about you, hope you're doing well. How's this specific thing going? It's a much lower lift. It's definitely not gonna take the place of some really good quality time, but it's gonna help you feel connected.
Journaling about your work can be that way too. Spending two or three minutes in between classes or recording a voice note when you're in the pickup line. About your work is gonna help you maintain that connection, that feeling of clarity, so that when you do have a little bit more time or a few more resources, you're gonna feel that much more connected and that much less distant.
And then lastly, challenge this idea that momentum is something ineffable that you can't control. I know that when I was looking at sports teams growing up, there was this sense that like, momentum was something that visited a team, that you couldn't control it, that it just sort of arrived and that it was powerful but impossible to schedule.
I don't think this is exactly true for our writing for our academic process in general, start believing if you can, that you are in charge of clarity. Momentum might be something that you don't have as much control over, but clarity is something that you can create through practices, through habits, through tools that help you outsource a lot of that work that happens when you're working on something consistently to keep it fresh.
Gives you a little bit of a chance to access that when the rhythm itself isn't going to be doing that heavy lifting. I hope this has been helpful for you. It's always helpful for me to remember that even if one specific rhythm isn't accessible to me in a certain time or season of my life, that there are ways to feel how I wanna feel using different tools. 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!
5.7 gas will expand to fit the container - boundaries and time
if gas will expand to fit the size of the container, academia must be the most gaseous substance on earth. this week's episode is all about the way that grad school will expand to fit every second it can - and how to combat that with containers of your own so that you have space for your humanity and your scholarship.
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
today in further adventures of Katie drags up things she learned in earlier science classes to help you see and help herself see some of her behavior in a new light. Let's talk about how gases expand to fit the size of the container.
This is the idea that a gas will expand to fit the container, not that it has a stable. Size I regardless of the container. If you have a physical block and you put it inside of a cup, the block made of wood won't expand to fit the cup. But if you have a bunch of oxygen gas in that same cup, you will find that it expands to fill a drinking cup or the same amount of gas will fill a coffee mug or a gallon jug.
On and on and on. The gas will expand in a way that a physical wooden block just won't.
Okay, now this shows up for me and for a lot of the people I work with in the way that the task that they're working on seems to expand, to fit the time that's available to it. Now you might say, okay, I have what I estimate to be two hours of grading to do today, and if you have two hours and 15 minutes with tight boundaries on either side in which to do that grading.
Sometimes, chances are you might get it done. The grading fits in the container that you have to give it. Now, if you have eight hours open and available all day without any hard boundaries like needing to go somewhere or run errands or teach another class, then you might find that that two hours of grading magically expands to fit the eight hours that are available to it.
This is very common for me. It's common for a lot of people that without those containers to keep a task right sized, it's really easy for the task to expand. Now, academia is, to my knowledge, one of the most gaseous substances on earth. In that, I mean, academia will absolutely expand to fit all of the time that it has available.
Because so much of the work is self-directed and because there is always something that you could be doing in grad school, it's really easy for it to expand and take over every second that you give it, and a lot of seconds that you didn't mean to give it. This happens in one of two ways. I find. One is that the task will expand to fit the time that you have available because there isn't always something really pressing that makes it so that it needs to be finished and done.
Now there are some tasks that this isn't true for, like grading. Eventually your grades do have to be in, although sometimes you can find ways to really drag your feet on that too. But things like chapter drafts where you pick your own deadline. Or, you know, studying or reading that thing, there's a real sense that you should do it, that it would be helpful for you to do it, but there's no real firm boundary or container that forces that activity to have an end point.
So. If you are working on a chapter and your advisor doesn't notice that your September 1st deadline has flown by and you don't say anything, it can easily go until October or November or sometimes even later before anybody says, Hey, how's that chapter? And it's not that you haven't been working on it, it just means that it's been expanding and expanding and expanding to fit the time that it had available.
Okay, so if one problem is that tasks will expand because there's not as much external accountability, the kind of self-directed nature of a lot of this work. The other problem is that oftentimes no one is going to step in and make a boundary unless you do it yourself. So if you're looking for that container to be made in the way that external containers used to be made for you classes and semesters would end, papers would be due.
Professors would send you kind, but pushy emails, Hey this thing is due in 12 hours, or it was due a couple of days ago. People were on your case in a way that once you hit certain levels of grad school, they're just not anymore. So it is very rare almost. Unheard of to have somebody step in and say, Hey where's that chapter?
Or to even stop and say, Hey, I think you're letting the work writ large, take over more of your life than you should. It is very uncommon for an advisor to say, Hey, your teaching is really great, and I wonder what would happen if you took a little bit less time on teaching prep and shifted some of that energy into something like self-care.
Or spending time with your family. The reason that this is so hard in academia is because your advisor or your chair, whoever is responsible for your dissertation, often isn't responsible for your teaching. They are sometimes not responsible for your research. You might have three or four different people who are in theory, supervising various parts of your professional life, but no one of them usually has the whole picture.
And there is often a sense that they're just gonna let you cook, right? They're just going to assume that you have it unless you tell them otherwise. So they're not going to actively mentor you in the way where if you were working at a company and you had one direct supervisor, they might take more of an interest in helping you balance the various parts of your job, the various.
Ways that your job interacts with your life, one person is easier to do it. And when you have the aggressively hands-off nature of many supervisory relationships, coupled with the fact that different people supervise different parts of your life, no one's really gonna step in. And say, Hey, I think this is taking up too much space.
I don't think this is getting enough space. And if they do it, it often is in a reactionary. Things aren't going the way that we want to, and it feels like a really harsh criticism rather than an active mentoring step. So let this podcast episode be some of that active mentoring where I say, what things in your life are expanding to fit a container that's maybe too big for them?
For example, when I was in grad school, I loved to teach. Teaching lit me up. I think I've talked about that before on this podcast. But I could spend all day, all week, all month, all summer, working on my lesson plans. I loved to do reading, to fill out my syllabus. I loved to prep assignments and often. I spent more time on that to the exclusion of some of the other things that I also needed to get done.
So if the choice came between watching two new movies to see which one was going to be the better one for my lesson, and doing some research for my dissertation, I often picked prep for my class, or I picked grading, or I picked a meeting with a student for that extra office hour that they requested that I really shouldn't have scheduled during my writing time.
Teaching would expand to fit whatever time I gave it. So I had to be. Hard with myself and give myself the support I needed to sit through that uncomfortable moment of I'm switching from something that I really like, that I get immediate value from, into something that is hard for me, that is emotionally intensive and that makes me feel more of a beginner than I'd like to, which is how I felt about my writing.
So I had to be really conscious of the fact that I needed to make the teaching container smaller so that other space in my life. Was a little bit more available for you. You might notice that there are some things that no matter what happened, they just don't get enough space. . It could be aspects of your job. It could be aspects of your life. It could be your physical health, your relationships, your community, your commitments outside of academia, whatever it is. There usually is something that's not getting the attention that you need, and it might be because it doesn't have a designated container.
I have always struggled with moving my body. Enough, let's say, I love to think, I love to be at my desk. I can get stuck there, and so it's hard for me to be like, yeah, I should absolutely stop what I'm doing and go for a walk or go to a workout class. So in order to make that container for myself during my PhD program and for a long time afterward, I would sign up for exercise classes that made me pay a financial penalty if I skipped them.
Which is a very extreme way of creating a container. So I would create a container for the task, and then the task would be in it. And if I didn't fill that task, if I didn't go to that class I would lose 15 bucks, which was a lot of money, and it was enough to get me to stop what I was doing and switch and do something else.
So this week's episode is just a call to say that it's not that you are inherently bad at doing any of these self work life balance things. There is no real such thing. There is no. Real practical, stable sense of work life balance. At least not in my estimation. We're always changing. The work is always changing.
The life is always changing, so it makes sense that we're always trying to get to a place where we're monitoring the containers. Are we giving enough space to the tasks that we want to, are the things that aren't getting enough attention? Do they have containers to fill or are we hoping that they'll just squeeze in somewhere?
Miraculously, these are active skills to practice and they're also not a final destination. There's something to keep an eye on and something to work. So I hope that you this week can find a container or two that needs a little tweaking and see if that helps you feel a little bit more empowered to do what you wanna do as a scholar and a human.
📍 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!
5.6 show your work - complex problems need complex solutions
i used to HATE it when my teachers told me to show my work - why would i slow down and write down steps that are so obvious i could do them in my head? turns out that making physical records of your thinking - even if they're messy! even if you have to redo them! - is really helpful, especially as your work gets more complex. and what's more complex than the work you have to produce in grad school??
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
this week's episode is called Show Your Work, and this is advice that I give all of the time, despite being personally frustrated with it many, many times. If you were to zoom back in time and look at elementary or middle school or even high school, me, I would be sitting at my desk refusing to show my work.
Because why would I slow down and show all of the steps that I took to solve a math problem? If I could look at the paper and know what the answer was, why would I take extra time to write unnecessary thought processes down so that people could follow them after the fact? I don't like going slowly. You might not like going slowly, but as in math class and in the PhD, there are a lot of benefits to showing your work because even if you can do it in your head, there are so many reasons why it can help to write out your thought process.
One, it can trace your thinking after the fact. You might be able to, in the moment, in the middle of a calculus class, write down all of the, the answer to that derivative. But if you go back 10, 15, maybe more years later, it might be helpful for you to trace the steps back. You might not remember all of the things that you did in order to solve that derivative.
It was clear to you at the time, it might not be after the fact. Slowing down and showing your work helps you be more intentional. It gives you a chance to let your brain work at a different pace and see all of the places where you might be getting stuck and. As any person who maybe didn't do as well in math class knows you can get partial credit, right?
Like you can say, okay, I understood this part and not that part. The same benefits apply here. In your PhD or your grad school process because showing your work gives you a physical record of your thinking. I don't know about you, but I know that when I come back to my notes after a couple of weeks, maybe even months away from a project, I'm almost always grateful that past me took down some.
Because even if it felt really clear and fresh when I was in the middle of the project, sometimes I unexpectedly have to put things down and having a record of what I was thinking and why is more valuable than I can say. Next complex problems demand complex solutions. You might not need to show your work for simple arithmetic, but you definitely might for something more advanced like a calc proof.
So why wouldn't the same be true for your PhD? Why wouldn't it be true that there are simple things that you can do in your head, and there are other things that it is helpful to let yourself slow down and work through complex ideas on paper. This also can help you when you get stuck because you'll be able to see where exactly the wheels are coming off your particular thought process or problem.
I know that oftentimes I sit with clients and I say, okay, like let's walk this through step by step. First you did this and then you did this, and it often becomes clear when you start to write down those steps. That actually this is where I got stuck, or this is where I have a choice that I'm not sure I know how to make.
And when you're just sort of ruminating on it in your head and it's that constant ticker tape of anxiety just running through your brain at all times, it can be really hard to slow down and say, okay, this is actually what's feeling stuck. Instead of just being like, ah, I don't know how to do this. It also can let other people see your thinking in a more tangible way.
A math test is one thing. You might get it, start it, finish it all within the space of an hour, there are very, very few tasks in your grad school career while you will be given the task, and then you will sit down and finish and then get feedback right away within an hour. So it's helpful to have a physical work product that you can show other people, a writing group, an advisor, even your future self, so that you can make some of that internal work a little bit more external and make it easier to share.
Okay, how's this gonna look? Katie? I understand what it means to show my work in a math problem, but what does it mean for my PhD? This might mean that you take some notes during reading. Some of us are pen fiends and we really like to take notes because it's a chance to use our notebook or our fancy obsidian setup.
And the idea of taking notes is totally great. Others of us would like to just read. And get on with things. If you are a person who does not normally take notes, I encourage you to maybe develop a lightweight note taking system. It doesn't have to be fancy, it doesn't need to be extensive. You don't have to print things out, but a place where you can just sort of record the complex thoughts that I guarantee you are going through your head as you read other pieces of scholarly work or primary sources or secondary sources, or any of the things that you have to during your grad school process.
This might look like free writing. I am a big proponent of free writing because I think that it helps us practice the writing muscle outside of the higher stakes of, oh my gosh, I'm in a draft. So maybe showing your work is sitting down at your desk and trying to write maybe say, 300, 400 words about a specific problem.
I just wanna normalize the fact that your free writing could be messy and completely not for public consumption. Almost all of my free writing sessions start with at least two to three sentences up top about how much I hate free writing and how much I wish I weren't doing this. But often as I kind of get that muscle going, it's like the first couple of minutes of a group workout class where you're like, Ooh, I really wish I wasn't here.
But then after you're there and you're experiencing the structure, things flow a little bit easier. This might look like tentative outlines or physical tools like index cards to shuffle around and play with the structure of an argument that stuck. I can't tell you how many times when I was trying to draft or revise a chapter that I had to physically sit down and make my piles of books or write things down on pieces of paper and shuffle them around, have other people look at my outline.
Look at the blocks and say, yes, this makes sense, or no, this doesn't. Somehow using something tactile made it feel more real to me and it made it a little bit lower stakes. I'm just making an outline. I am just shuffling note cards around on a table, but it made it so that it wasn't just in my head, it existed somewhere else.
This could look like early drafts or writing an abstract for a paper that's not done yet, or drafting out some figures just so that you can see what that chart or that table might even look like. You know, it's not gonna be the final product, you know that there's gonna be four or five other versions of it probably, but it gives you something physical to look at your thinking from a more external place.
This might also look like on the kind of higher order scale of things, conference papers or journal articles or guest lectures where you know that you're working on a big multi-year project, like a dissertation or a book, and so you chunk off a little piece of it to teach to your undergrad. Or to present in a grad seminar for a friend or to present at a conference paper or to submit for that book chapter.
It's a way to take a smaller piece of that process and make it more real, more concrete so that you can keep moving forward. Showing your work is vulnerable. It's messy. It forces you to slow down. And a lot of us like to go fast because deep down, we all think we have to move fast all of the time because there's so much work and there's never enough time to do it all.
But I promise you that even some messy work, um, a. Outline in a notebook that you might never look at again, a series of note cards to help you shuffle through some big terminology or organize a a lit review. It is going to be messy. You might never show it to another soul. You might, uh, rip that page out of your notebook and start again.
But it helps you build a drafting mindset. And so many of us are in grad school and finding it difficult because for the first time, the tools that work for us. In earlier phases of our educational career aren't working as well anymore. You used to be able to sit down and write a pretty good first, or maybe even a pretty good final draft within a few days or maybe the night before something was due, and all of the sudden you're being asked to work on something that's multiple orders more complex than what you're used to.
It might be multiple orders, more length than you're used to. It is. In a style that's unfamiliar. It's so many reasons why grad school work can be hard. Giving yourself a chance to practice the idea that there is a lot of work that you create that isn't the final product only helps build that drafting mindset.
I know that the most prolific the most on time, the most comfortable writers. And that I know of are the ones that produce a lot of work for every word that ends up in a final draft. And that's not them wasting time. That is them externalizing all of this complex thinking that I promise you that you're already doing and making it so that it's tangible, it's measurable, and it'll help you move things forward just a little bit.
I hope this helps and I can't wait to 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!
5.5 objects in motion - ways to get moving
if you find yourself curled up like a shrimp in your desk chair, or stuck making ever more complicated plans and to do lists - this episode is for you. i take newton's first law of motion and use it to give you the permission you need to start - anywhere - because once you're moving, it's easier to stay moving. and moving is where the magic is.
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
This week we're talking about the phrase objects in motion, or the full phrase, objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Now, I'm not a scientist, but I believe this comes from physics, and it's the idea that it's a lot easier to keep something in motion once it's already been in motion, that there is a startup cost to getting started, like the friction between a ball.
The ground that you need to overcome with a push in order for it to stay in motion, but that once that energy has been applied, it usually tends to stay applied unless something else acts on it. Now, like I said, this isn't about physics. This is a metaphor like so many of my other ideas are, but this is a metaphor for how I notice a lot of clients' energy works throughout the day.
So how might this look for you? I personally can get a little bit stuck. Especially when I am in a season of overwhelm, or if time is short or if I feel any pressure whatsoever, I can do something that looks a lot like freezing or staying in place. Now, sometimes this looks. From the outside, very productive.
I'm planning, I'm making notes in my notebook. I'm reorganizing my to-dos. I might even be investing in a new to-do list manager, but I am not in motion. I'm not making much. I'm not. Doing much. I'm sort of stuck in that pre-launch phase of thinking things through and trying to figure out the best plan.
Sometimes this actually looks really physical for me, where I am stuck at my desk scrolling. I am stuck in bed scrolling. I might be sitting on the couch. You guessed it. Scrolling scrolling is my go-to stuck activity. Yours might look a little bit different. The idea is that I sometimes am stuck and I can get really in my head as a lot of us can about what the best thing the right thing is to start.
But the thing that always helps me get started is to remember that. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and that it often doesn't even really matter what I do. But if I start doing things often, I do things after those initial things. Once I get started, things keep going. So this does look different on everybody as I mentioned, but the, I'm going to talk about two different categories.
When the body feels stuck and when the brain feels stuck, because. It looks different for everyone and sometimes it helps to have strategies that are specific. So this is an episode that's almost a corollary to the what feels possible episode. What feels possible is the warmup question that I ask myself when I notice that I'm stuck.
But the theory behind it is that once I get going, it's easier to stay going. So start anywhere. What feels possible if you tend to be or are in a state of feeling body stuck, where you can't quite get up, you're feeling sticky, you are maybe scrolling or doing whatever your avoidant activity is, I invite you to physically move your body.
This, I say with full awareness is this can be one of the hardest things in the world. And then if it were as easy is me just saying, Hey, find a new place to work, or Why don't you try that coffee shop? Then I would make a million dollars because they would've fixed all of your problems. But I often feel a huge burst of energy.
If I do what I call, start moving the body first and let the brain catch up. I get up, I start doing the dishes, I pick things up off my desk. If I'm feeling really ambitious, it might look like going to a new location. Sometimes it's as big as just changing the position that my body is in. If I am like a cooked shrimp, I'll curled up in my desk.
I might try just starting to put my feet flat on the floor unhooking a little bit of that body curve that I'm normally in and putting some hands in a more stretched out position. I might actually stretch. Sometimes it's about just physically starting any task. I like to start with tidying because my brain gets overwhelmed pretty easily by clutter.
So I will just start picking stuff up. And now that I have a toddler, there's always stuff to pick up. But let's be real. I was a mess before that anyway. But the idea is that if your brain is feeling stuck, move the body first. I don't make any grand promises to myself. Like once I do the dishes, I'm gonna start writing.
It's just I'm gonna get started. And usually once I put a dish the sink, I usually then find it a little bit easier to put some dishes in the dishwasher. I might then move on to tidying some counters, and eventually I build up enough momentum. That is a little bit easier to get started on maybe my main priority tasks for the day.
But when in doubt, move the body first and then see if the brain wants to follow. And if not, at the very least, you've picked some mugs up. You've put some of your massive mug collection in the dishwasher, and that's not nothing. That means you'll have some clean mugs for tomorrow, and that's always gonna help.
If you are feeling just some intense brain stickiness now this can look a lot more subtle than the body things because like I said, it might look from the outside like you're doing stuff. I look quite on top of things when I am in my planner picking the perfect shade of blue pen to match this week's layout, looking at my tasks, copying them ever so beautifully into my preferred to-do list manager of choice.
But. It's not doing the things, it's getting the pre-launch stage is beautiful and as aesthetic as I can make it. . You might just wanna know for yourself what your treading water looks like. For me, it's definitely planning using my planners, using my pens, making the to-do list, perfecting the to-do list, prioritizing the to-do list just perfectly.
And that's what it looks like for me. But for you, it might look like reading yet another article. It might look like making sure that there isn't been anything published that you needed to be published. It might look like free writing for you, where you sit down and you draft and you draft and you draft.
It might look like revising. Like I said, it's gonna look a little bit different for everyone. So if you are a reader in your treading water stage, you might want to take a few notes. By, by hand can be a really great way to feel a little bit of motion that can kinetic sense of the pen on paper, but maybe it's about typing some notes in the same window just to keep the friction as low as possible.
If you are a planner and you really like to spend like me, then you pick a task, any task, and you just start it. You say, that is a beautiful enough plan for today, and you pick a task. But. The idea is that you start something that feels like it's moving more than what you're doing already because objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and what I find is that once you get kicked off into the sort of doing phase of whatever your day is, it's easier to stay in that phase. It is so hard to manage your time, especially if you, like all of us can't have a consistent writing schedule every day.
Maybe don't have a body or a brain that produces the same energetic or physical or emotional conditions every day. So these are some easy ways to kind of make it so that you can feel that motion, even if it's not the exact same set of conditions that you experienced the day before.
I hope that this has been helpful. It's certainly been helpful for me, and I can't wait to 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!