17 - Watch me do it: when making the podcast got hard (and what I did about it)
episode 17 - Watch me do it: when making the podcast got hard (and what I did about it)
Okay, okay - I've given you 16 episodes (so far) of things that are hard, questions to help you dig deeper, and experiments to try....but now, you can watch me walk the walk and actually take myself through the process.
That's right - this podcast has been feeling HARD for me the last few weeks - and I use my own system to get to the bottom of that stickiness, and do something about it. If you have ever wanted to see the tools in action, this is the episode for you. I get vulnerable, I get honest, and I talk about what I do when I start to avoid things, and how I have learned to stop before it goes full on shame spiral.
Plus I let you in on what this podcast will look like when I get back on February 28!
Mentioned:
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
If you liked AcWriMo, then you're going to love March madness. Sign up for a free month of writing resources, trackers, dashboards, and prizes at the link in the show notes.
All right. After 16 episodes of walking you through all of the things that can be really hard about grad school. I'm excited to offer this episode, which I'm calling "Watch me do it" as I walked through my own particular season of stickiness. I'll let you know how I use various tools. What's so hard about the sticky season that I'm feeling in. And a couple of experiments that I myself have done.
So that you can see not only what I'm suggesting that you do, but how I do it when I am feeling like something is really hard. Let's get into it.
So. I am here to admit to you that I have been feeling a little bit off about this podcast. Not about its mission, not about what it's doing. All of those things are working so well. I've met so many new people. I've had even a few new clients book through this podcast. And most importantly, I feel like it's really doing its job.
Which is to share some important, useful, valuable advice, strategies, and tools For grad school for free on the internet. Because grad school's hard enough without all of the good stuff being tucked behind various paywalls and expensive coaches and heaven forbid your advisors. So the podcast itself feels like it's been working really well.
But the format has been feeling sticky. So, how did I know it was feeling sticky? I will fess up to you that the first sign for me was that I was avoiding it. At first, it was a gentle avoidance. I really liked to record these on Thursday or at the latest on Friday, the week before they were supposed to go out so that I would have time to edit them and polish the transcripts and make sure that everything was ready to go so that I wasn't stressed about it. But that's been drifting a little bit. At first, I was just snoozing those tasks from Wednesday to Thursday to Friday. But the last couple of weeks. I'll be honest. I've been recording them Monday the day before they go live. But that is something that for me was different and it was a piece of data to notice.
The other piece of data that came in, that was very different from what I'd been experiencing before was I felt like I had no new ideas for the podcast. Now, when I got started on the podcast, I made a list of no joke, 40 different things that I could talk about. So I had 40 things on this list and I've only done 16 of them. But I looked at it and I just didn't feel inspired. All of that stuff that felt so important to share. I just felt like it wasn't exciting. It wasn't sparkly. I was really digging into the corners of the old brain purse to see if there was anything in there that got me a little bit more excited to record. And there just wasn't. I didn't feel like I had any ideas. And in fact, that's what I wrote in my journal this morning.
So when I am feeling sticky like this, as evidenced by my avoidance and some of my negative brain thoughts about it. There are two main questions that I consider before I jump to any conclusions about what that data could or should mean. And I'm going to share them with you now so that you get to see not just the questions, but how a real life human might answer them. So the first question that I ask myself that I ask clients that I ask anyone who's going through a sticky situation is I say, okay, is there something else that's going on that could be impacting?
And for me, 100%, the answer is yes. I've mentioned before that I have a chronic illness. I live with endometriosis, which depending on the day can cause me anything from back pain to brain fog, to fatigue, all sorts of fun and exciting symptoms that wax and wane throughout the month, but for the last two ish months, I've been taking a new medication for it. And that new medication it's been kicking my butt a little bit.
And the details of that aren't specifically important to this podcast. But the outcome is, and I'm in more pain than I usually am. My brain fog is more intense than it usually is. And it makes sense that if I feel like my brain isn't firing on all cylinders. Of course, a big project that I do by myself; that's creative and has high stakes. It feels more challenging than it might otherwise.
Now the reason, this question is so important for me is because it gives me a sense that it might not just be the podcast. There might be things about the podcast that feel a little bit sticky, but it could also be that just creative work in general feels harder than normal right now. And that's important to differentiate.
It's not that the podcast is a hundred percent broken or that my brain is a hundred percent broken, but the combination of the stickiness in the podcast and the pain that I'm in means that it feels harder on both sides.
The second question that I use when I'm feeling really sticky especially when I'm having strong negative thoughts that feel really true. Like "I have no new ideas" or "the podcast is over." The question that I use is, are you sure? It's a gentle question that I've inherited from Martha Beck. And her book, the way of integrity, and it's been really effective for me to be like, okay,
Brain says I have no new ideas. Question. Am I sure about that? And I'm actually not sure about that. Because I have all kinds of new ideas. I have new ideas for March madness, the free month of writing resources. I have ideas for new courses that I want to run a new download program that I want to start. I have ideas coming out of my ears.
It's just that none of them. And even the ideas that I had listed in my possible podcast topic list. Those ideas don't seem to fit as well into the format that I've used for the last couple of episodes where I talk about a little bit of an intro, I give you questions and then some experiments. So it's not that I don't have ideas. It's just that they don't fit as well into the formula that I've been using.
So, I'm not sure that I have no ideas and I'm not sure that the podcast is over and I should just hang it up. And this'll be a fun thing that I did for a couple of months. So.
What experiments did I try? Gentle listeners? I would love to tell you. I did three things this week to help me get to the bottom of what felt so sticky about the podcast.
The first thing I did was make a list of what works and what feels hard about it. Now. When I sat down to make this list, I expected that what I would write down in the, what works column was nothing and what feels hard about it, everything end of list. And actually lots of things feel like they're working about it. I mentioned a lot of them up top.
That I'm meeting new people, that I'm spreading information that doesn't have a good place to be found in other places, that it's a short, accessible format that people can listen to it on the go. There's lots of things that are working about it. And actually the thing that feels so hard about the podcast in specific is this format.
Which brings me to experiment number two, which is what I call blank page imagination. I use this experiment when I feel stuck. Because I've been doing something a certain way. Maybe I've been writing a chapter a certain way. I've used a certain task manager or planner system. I just feel stuck because what I'm doing, it works a little bit, but not all the way. And I can't imagine a new way forward using what I've been using before. There's no real clear pivot to me. So I get out a blank page of paper and I say, okay, if there was no podcast,
If there were no previous episodes, what would you do right now? What format would you use? There's no rules. What would it be if you had a blank page and all of the time and space and resources in the universe to do it? And when I did that blank page exercise, I had so many new ideas.
And you spoiler alert, might hear a little bit about them in a couple of minutes. But it really helped me see that. Okay. I do have ideas. I now just need to figure out how to move from point A where I'm at right now to point B or C or D or E. Any of the other places that I outlined on that blank page.
Now there's some work and this episode is part of that work, tracing that journey, but it's so much easier to say, okay, how do I get from point A to point E if you delineate them than it is to just sit in the stickiness and think, Ugh, I'm stuck. I'm stuck. I'm stuck on a loop. And. The third experiment.
Potentially the most important experiment. I'm just going to try it. Now. This one is very scary for me. Hi, I am recording this in the quiet of my office. I feel as supported as I possibly can. And I'm still terrified. My heart is beating like a lion is chasing me. And all because I'm announcing to you that Imma change the podcast a little bit.
It feels so scary because I feel like. You're going to be disappointed. You're going to be upset, maybe you'll stop listening and you know, maybe you will. But I think that if I pay attention to when things feel a little bit off, then I can avoid what I know is the end of this particular feelings, behavior cycle for me.
I know that if I don't pay attention in the beginning, when things feel sticky, what I start to do is I avoid it and I avoid it and I avoid it until I become so locked up that I don't do it at all. And I was really nervous that I would just not record this week's episode. And then feel so bad about missing a week that I would miss another week. And then all of a sudden there would be three or four weeks where the podcast went dark. And I just didn't tell you about it. And I would live in constant fear that someone would email me and say, Hey, what's happening with the podcast?
Or even worse that no one would notice. All of those outcomes are bad. All of those outcomes are things that I've done and lived through before. And that's why I know to pay attention to the data of, I feel a little bit sticky about this. I'm avoiding it a little.
So. The result of my, try it experiment is that I'm happy to announce that after a one week break, the podcast will be back for season two, starting on February 28th. And in season two, I'm going to introduce tools, books, thoughts, ideas, experiments, pieces of software, all kinds of things that I found in my journey --preference, for things that you can get free or very low cost or at your library-- and things that make grad school less hard.
Those things are important. I want to talk about them and I'm going to try doing it in a different format. I'm nervous about it, but I'm hopeful that you will stick around to see what season two feels like. And maybe season three or season four, when invariably I reach the end of that particular iteration, want a little bit of sparkle and shake things up again.
Now I feel very vulnerable having recorded this. I feel a little bit nervous about sending it out into the world, but my hope is that by watching me narrate, or I guess listening to me, narrate my way through some of these sticky patches. You can see, not just how you could do it, but what it looks like when somebody does it.
And my biggest deepest hope is that it gives you just a little bit more courage, a little bit more bravery to try a pivot yourself. Not because there's a crisis, not because you are locked up, but because it's important to notice your data as the patterns start to emerge. Thank you so much for listening.
I can't wait to see you back here on February 28th for season two. Grad school is hard, but. See you then.
📍 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. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
16 - Why can't we focus as long as we want?
episode 16 - Why can't we focus as long as we want?
One of the most common requests from new clients: Katy! Help me focus more! I want to be able to work for more hours a day!
This podcast episode is all about the hard truth around whether or not we have limits (spoiler: we do) and how to work with them, not against them. If you want to stave off burnout - this is the episode for you!
Mentioned:
historical context for time limited days
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
If you liked AcWriMo, then you're going to love March madness. Sign up for a free month of writing resources, trackers, dashboards, and prizes at the link in the show notes.
One of the most common things that people ask for my help with as a coach is focusing for more hours. They want to be able to do more work every day and they want my help to do it.
And while there are definitely some strategies, tools, and books, a lot of which I've already mentioned on this podcast that can help you focus. There is something that we're not always talking about. And that is that we have a limit for how much creative, deep focus work that we can do during the day.
Now close your eyes. And imagine how many hours do you feel that you should be able to do during the day? Do you think it's eight? Do you think generously it's a little bit less than that. But what do you assume that you'll be able to set as a baseline standard for how much work that you can get done on the deeply draining intellectual tasks, like writing or taking notes or synthesizing or processing data?
Now. How does it feel if I tell you that most people that I work with, that I know of and research supports that most people have a three to four hour hard limit for creative work during the day.
I'll link in the show notes to a great historical contextualization of that and why the three or four hours that say Charles Dickens has, might not be the same that you do. But the reason that I think that that three to four hour limit is so freeing to hear and also kind of scary is. Most of us are expecting ourselves to do a lot more than that.
We're expecting to do three to four hours of writing. Plus three to four hours of reading, plus, you know, Two hours of admin. Each and every day to get to that eight hour Workday. And we know that that's the standard. And I've mentioned on this podcast that that's as much of a historical Relic is it's an actual supported neuroscientific reality, but.
Knowing that there's, that limit both gives us some constraints to say, okay, my hardest thing, I can probably only do it for three or four hours and probably not all in a row. And also, how am I supposed to get everything done? If my brain has a tap out point that is much lower than I think it is.
I think this is important to discuss because a lot of us fall into routines and rhythms that we haven't really questioned. We work for eight hours because people work for eight hours or we get down and we start writing in the morning because that's what works for us. And the first few episodes of this podcast are dedicated to busting those myths with your own data.
But this limit one of the most pernicious. Longstanding hard to get rid of myths that we should be able to work on deeply draining creative work for more hours than we actually can.
So some questions to consider that might help you dig a little bit deeper. What does it feel like for you when you reach your personal brain limit? Do you even know what full or tired or drained or just at the end of the line feels like on your brain?
Question two. What does an ideal Workday look like? And where does that idea come from? Where does that fantasy originate? What are the parameters and limits that you've inherited or that you've put on yourself?
And last but not least what are the hard limits in your life? Maybe their schedules, maybe there's tasks. Maybe you're a parent, you know, that you have certain things that you have to do at a certain time. Maybe it's a full-time job. Maybe it's a fellowship that gives you huge amounts of free time, but very tight deadlines.
But it's useful to think about. Okay. Where do you have some flexibility? And where do you need to just work with what you have in terms of the balance between your time and your brain?
Now, of course, I'm not just going to tell you that everybody has three hours, hard-stop good luck with that without giving you some experiments to try. So let's dig into those.
First experiment. A bold one. A fun one. I call it. Stop before you're ready.
The way this looks is that for a week, maybe two weeks or maybe forever you stop before the point of collapse you stop before you are ready. To stop for the day. So I know that for myself, I have gotten to learn what like 80% done feels like and in moments where I'm trying to reset away from. You know, unsustainable work habits. I will stop at 80% rather than a hundred percent collapsed.
I will get out from my desk a little bit earlier. I'll go for a walk over for that, that workout, but I've stopped before. I'm ready to see if that help. Me run over. Some of that energy into the next day. It's a lot easier to get back to my desk on Tuesday morning. If I didn't end Monday completely.
Utterly face down at my desk. Tired exhausted. Still behind. So, if you are used to working until the very last minute that you have, based on your schedule or the very last ounce of brain energy that you have based on your to-do list. Experiment with what it feels like to stop before you're ready. Some of us don't even know that we have this limit because we're so used to working past it. We're so used to just barreling right through.
Limits suggestions from our body. Be damned. We're just going to get done what we need to get done. No questions asked. So this is an experiment to see. Okay. Maybe if I don't just assume. That I need to keep going, no matter what. I'll be able to get a more fine tuned sense of what feels good in terms of the balance between various tasks, various brain energies throughout the day or the week.
Experiment two is to keep a research journal or work log or done list to challenge your ideas about productivity. One of the things that blows my client's minds and blows my mind on the regular is that when I rest more and actually don't go through every limit and I stop when I'm ready. I stopped when my brain is gone. I actually get more down over the course of the week, but you could not have convinced me of that.
Based on what I feel during the day. I still have a voice that says, keep going, don't stop. You're not done yet. You said you would. And I know that if I don't listen to that voice and I actually stop. When I'm tired when I'm hungry, when I need a break that I get more done
because I don't get stuck in this cycle of push until I crash. And then crashed until I'm ready to start again. Or more accurately stay crashed until my anxiety builds back up. And then I have to start working. So, if you know that that voice in your head is pretty strong and it encourages you to do things like stay at that desk until way later, or skipped dinner with your family, cancel plans with your friends. Don't go on that workout.
It can be useful to keep a research journal or a work log and say, okay. Is it actually true that I don't get as much done when I stop at four. Rather than eight 30 or is it possible that my perception of the data and the actual data are two different things.
And the last experiment. Is one that can be a little bit tricky, but incredibly useful in terms of your discernment and scheduling, planning, all of it. This is one of those experiments that if you get good at it, you really see benefits all throughout. Your scholarly human ecosystem.
And this experiment, I want you to pay attention to what kinds of work needed, what kind of brainpower. So for example, I have what I lovingly refer to. Is it three to 5:00 PM. Brain? Between the hours of three to 5:00 PM, depending a little bit on my body, the rhythms, how much sun I've had, but it's a solid bet that 90% of the time from three to 5:00 PM. I'm not getting any solid work done. I can respond to some lightweight emails. I can sort things out. I can do research about the next face cream that I want to buy, but those three to 5:00 PM hours are not going to be good for drafting this podcast, recording it.
Making progress on my own writing, doing any deep focus things, really sort of getting into that creative work, that early projects demand. It's just not happening between three and five. Your times and rhythms might be body-based. They might be based on your kids' schedules. They might be based on your work schedule. But if you know that, Hey.
I don't do great work between three to 5:00 PM. If it's very intensive brain heavy work, then you can say, okay. What times are available for that? For me, there's a magic window between like 10 and noon, where all of a sudden the caffeine for my morning coffee kicks in and I'm ready to write. So what's important is for me not to spend those magic hours doing the things that I could do during my three to five window.
I try and spend my most sparkly brain hours on the tasks that really needed the most. Lots of people told me for years and years that I was going to be a great early morning writer. And please know that I am not, my brain will riot and tantrum if I ask it to do any of this creative, deep focus work before 10:00 AM.
So your hours might vary, but knowing what kinds of work on your to-do list need, what kind of brain power? Can unlock a level of scheduling that makes so much more sense. For your body, for your brain, for the rhythms that you're working with.
I feel like at the end of most of these episodes, I say this is so hard because there's only so much time in the day. And there are so many more things that you could possibly get done. Then you can actually achieve in any 1 24 hour period. And I stand by that. But one of the things that I do see almost all of my clients who are coming to me, working through burnout, just generally feeling tired, exhausted, dissatisfied, and like they can't focus enough.
They're regularly habitually, sometimes gleefully exceeding the limits of what their brain is really able to do in a sustainable supported way. And it could be a really hard thing. For me to say, Hey, stop. Before you're done. Experiment with changing up the times of the day that you work on different things.
I keep a journal and actually see if that extra effort that extra hour pays off. These are confronting truths, but if you can get just a little bit more comfortable with looking at the actual data, I promise you that it will point you in the direction of a more supported and sustainable workflow. And let's face it. Grad school is not a two week sprint.
It's a multi-year marathon people. So the more sustainable and supported, you can be the more you're going to be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it and not have to have those breakes put on by a bad case of burnout that will really make this even harder than it already is.
📍 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. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
15 - Why is staying on top of your to-do's so hard?
episode 15 - Why is staying on top of your to-do's so hard?
I used to live a nice, peaceful life where I made a cute little to-do list in the morning, and then I spent the day checking things off, and then once it was empty, I felt so good! Maybe I never had that - but it sounds great, doesn't it?? Staying on top of what you need to do and when is so hard as a grad student, but this episode has some comfort that you're not alone, and importantly, three things you could try today to help with that overwhelming feeling of a list that keeps getting longer, no matter what you do...
Mentioned:
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
You can get my free working more intentionally toolkit@thrive-phd.com or the link in the show notes. If you want to go even deeper with the work.
If there's one thing I know for certain it's that if you're listening to this right now, There are things on your to-do list. If I'm lucky listening to the new episode is right at the top, but I'm sure that there are important things, urgent things, things from two weeks ago. Things your boss put on there that all need to get done soon.
Now. Before. So why is it so hard to manage it, to do list? Let's talk about that. On today's episode.
One of the reasons that I think it's so hard to manage it, to do list both as a person, as a scholar and both of those things as a grad student, is that you truly can never get to the bottom. Just like we've talked about in other episodes, there's so much scope creep in academia. So even if you did theoretically finish everything that you wanted to do for the day,
You could work ahead. You could get started on something else. You could pick up a project from the not right now file. There's so many things to do that it's really hard to be like, yes, I'm caught up or yes, I have everything checked off. It also can be really hard as a grad student because other people can add to that, to do list.
Your students can add to it. The professor that you TA for can add to it. Your boss can add to it. Maybe your spouse or your colleagues or your co-authors. It's not as if we all go to our own special scholar room, we work on the tasks ahead of us, and then we leave that room.
We're working in busy, collaborative, interactive environments. And that means that sometimes other people put stuff on your list. Even if it's not the most important thing to you. I know that one thing that would drive me bananas as a grad student would be that I would have the whole day planned out.
I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I would sit down at my desk and suddenly there was an email from the professor I was TA for, or my advisor or a conference committee or someone, and all of the sudden. My to-do list completely changed everything that I thought I needed to get done that day. Everything that I needed to get done that day had to be put on hold.
You just don't have full control over your to-do list and that's just with your work stuff. Because you probably also have a few lists going. I know that if I look at my task manager right now, I have work tasks. I have home tasks. I have family tasks. I have things for my hobbies. I have things for my projects. It's wild. How many different things I have going.
And unfortunately, I don't also have different versions of myself with their own 24 hours and their own set of spoons and energy. To do all of those things. I wish that there was one version of me for every list that needed to get done. You probably have a few lists going, but you've only got one body, one brain.
1 24 hours to get things done.
Let's dig into some of those questions to consider, to see how you feel about your to-do lists. What's working, what isn't, before we get into those experiments, that might just help you get a little bit of a handle on what's going on. Let's get into it.
What feels good for you in terms of to-do lists, do you love checking everything off and being done at the end of the day?
Do you love estimating correctly and having a certain amount of time and energy that you can allocate, but what are the behaviors that really make that brain chemical sparkle explosion go off in your head? When it comes to getting things done?
A question to consider. Where do you keep your to-do list? Is it an app that syncs between all of your devices and you can access at any time. Is it an app plus also wherever you manage to jot things down when you're in the kitchen, whatever scrap of napkin or grocery list that is.
Is it in a bunch of different places. Do you have shared lists with other people? But where do you keep your to-do list?
And then last but not least. How do you manage tasks that are in the not right now category? You know, those things that, you know, you need to get done, but not in the next hour or maybe not in the next day.
In other words, how do you capture all of those to do's that you'll need to get to eventually, but you're definitely not going to be doing right now.
Okay. Let's dig into these experiments because if there are anything like me, you're constantly looking for new ways, new programs, new systems to help manage just the onslaught of things that you need to do.
The first experiment to try is to, if you never have experiment with the to-do list manager. So I'm not necessarily going to go on the record as to which to do list manager, I think is best. A dirty little secret that I have is I think that most of them share about 80% of the same functions. And the other 20 are things that you probably won't use anyway.
But. If you've never had a, to do list manager that allows you to separate tasks, set tasks to repeat. Or filter tasks out so that you can only see some at a certain time. Then you might be ready for a level up. One of the things that I love about task managers is being able to automate a certain number of the tasks, the things that I do regularly, but I can also forget to do like.
Sending a newsletter or cleaning out my downloads folder or the conference paper that needs to be submitted in three months. But I don't need to think about for three months minus one week. That to-do list manager can help you store some of those. To do's that you don't have the space or the energy to deal with right now and show them to you at a time and space where you might.
You can do this in to-do list, click up notion. There's all sorts of different apps, but if you are working in a place where it's basically a list and you hope that you've got everything. Then I'm sorry to tell you, or maybe I'm excited to tell you that grad school is hard enough without trying to keep all of those tasks all in your brain at the same time.
Offload a little bit of it into the computer. It might just help you.
Experiment number two comes to you by way of one of my darling dearest clients. This is something that they mentioned to me that is a tool that they used when they're feeling particularly overwhelmed.
I thought, Hey, that sounds great. And I've been using it ever since, just for myself and recommending it everywhere I can. It's pretty simple. You grab a post-it note or a piece of paper, if you're feeling particularly overwhelmed and you just write down one thing on it, one task, one post-it note.
I tend to write pretty small. So I'm a lot more like three tasks, one post-it note. But the idea is pretty simple. Everyone has too much to do too much to focus on. And if you're really drowning in that place where, oh, I can't pick, which is going to be the most efficient, I don't know what's going to be the most effective.
And this experiment might really help you just pick something.
Sure. There are some tasks that are dependent on each other. But usually, you know what those are and you know that you can't do one without starting the other. So this is for those moods. When you know that it might be a little bit more efficient, five, 10% maybe to start somewhere else, but you don't want to, you don't feel like it, or you simply can't decide this. You just pick three things, you put them on a post-it note. You do those three things. Repeat.
This is , a great experiment to use in conjunction with a task manager or a longer to do list. . It's a lot like zooming in. You focus the camera on just the first thing, maybe the second or third thing that you're going to do. And then you repeat, there's probably not going to be any end to the bucket of tasks that you're drawing from.
But this lets you just sort of say, yeah, there might be an infinite number of ways to do it, but I'm using this method. This post-it note to just do these one or two things.
And last, but not least might be a revolutionary experiment if you've never tried it. I challenge you in this experiment to clear out 10, 15, maybe even 20% of your tasks. This is a real stale task. Clean-out is what I call it. Basically it's about saying there are some things that I thought I was going to do.
But in the harsh light of today, I'm not doing them. Or it's no longer as useful for me to do them. Or it's just not what I want to do anymore. Uh, Two weeks ago, I thought I did. And now I don't a month ago. I thought I did. And now I don't. Part of what gets so overwhelming is that we have so many things that we could be doing that gets suggested things that we start and then life changes.
Our scholarship changes, our research changes, and we kind of have to say like, okay, This was a really good idea two months ago. And now I don't think it is anymore. I love a stale task clean-out because it helps you remember that you don't have to do everything just because you thought you might.
Of course. There are some tasks that you do need to do. There's some things. That you need to be accountable for. There are certainly some things that just saying, I'm not going to do this. We'll get you out of it. But for all of those things that are more in the should category, I should read that paper. I should catch up on this method. I should send that email. I should follow up on that connection.
put it in its own category and clean it out from time to time.
Like I said up top. There are only so many hours in a day and you don't have, as far as I know. Six different versions of yourself that are pursuing six different projects with six different to-do lists all simultaneously.
So, this is just acknowledging that you're allowed to change your mind. You're allowed to say this was a good idea. Back then. And now. It's not as good of an idea as these other 15 things that I want to do even more.
Unfortunately. We might never get to the place where we feel like everything is completely checked off. But that doesn't mean that you don't get to take a break. It doesn't mean that you don't get to stop for the night or stop for the weekend. And if you have a to-do list that lets you zoom in, zoom out, filter, no matter what the mechanism is, it can really help you get into the habit of saying I didn't do everything, but I did enough for today.
And that mindset switch is one of the things that's going to make grad school a lot less hard. 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. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
14 - Why is it so hard to know how long things will take?
episode 14 - Why is it so hard to know how long things will take?
The question on almost every mind I encounter is why is it so HARD to know how long things wil take? As a scholar, you'll be asked to do a LOT of self-directed work and it's really hard to plan and adjust if you can't estimate how long something we'll take. We'll talk about how this shows up, and why some of the most common advice (add in buffer time) can really backfire. Get into it!
Extra resources:
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
You can get my free working more intentionally toolkit@thrive-phd.com or the link in the show notes. If you want to go even deeper with the work.
You asked, I listen a viewer request episode of this podcast, all about how hard it is to know how long something will take. This is hard for everybody. I don't care if you're a scholar. I don't care if you have never written a long form project in your life. It is really hard to know how long things will take. Here are a couple of the reasons why.
Number one. Optimism. We truly believe - and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the more times that you do something, say, write a dissertation chapter or grade a final paper - that you get better and faster at it as you go along.
However. That sense that we're getting better at it can cause us to make optimistic deadlines for ourselves. Often, these are grounded less in the amount of time or the amount of energy a task will take and more in the, when we would like to be done ism of all of it.
I know that for me, I often say things like, ah, this should take me until the end of the day. Not because I know that there are X number of hours left in the day and I need X number of hours to do this project. But because I want to be done at the end of the day. So there's the sense of optimism and also a sense that we're building around when we'd like to be done versus when it will actually be done.
But it's also true that rarely are we focusing on one thing at a time, at least not over the course of a day or even a half day. So, yes, you may be objectively to getting faster at reading or writing, but if you are arriving to your appointed, writing time with, Hey. Real grading headache then. Yeah. It's going to take you longer because you have more things going on. So it's really hard to estimate because the way that you show up for the task is dependent on what things you did before, what things you'll do do later, and also the brain and body resources that for some of us really fluctuate.
As a person who has a chronic illness, I'm used to things really fluctuating in terms of what body shows up, what brain shows up. But, yeah, it's frustrating to not be able to know this'll take four hours, but four good hours four medium hours four I'm bundled up on the couch, but still theoretically working hours.
All of those different measurements are things that I work with, but they're also not the same.
The last thing is that specifically for scholars or people in academia? Things that are done don't tend to stay done. So you might be done grading for the semester, except for those two students that took an incomplete that you have to grade four or five months down the road. Things might feel really done and buttoned up with your manuscript. You sent it off to the journal and then it comes back for revise and resubmit. And you've got to find time in your schedule to do that. So estimating how long things will take is really hard because so many of these projects are overlapping happening at the same time.
And we don't have control over when actually they're done and acceptable to other people, because that's just the way that so many of these big complex projects work. It's not solely up to us.
Let's use these questions to drill down a little deeper into how and why, and for what reasons you're estimating your tasks and what goes into that. First question. What is your estimation pattern? Do you set a deadline? Do you tend to start with the task and break that into smaller pieces and assign deadlines for each of those?
Do you avoid a project until the anxiety becomes so intense that you have no choice, but to work on it. But what are your practices right now around estimating how long things will take and building that into your schedule?
Second question. How do people around you set time estimates? Are you working in a lab where not only are your deadlines pretty murky, but your PIs deadlines are pretty murky and the postdocs deadlines are pretty murky? Is your chair, somebody who says that they'll have something back for you on Friday or Monday, and then we'll also go dark for a couple of weeks when it's not done?
How are you seeing other people set these deadlines and what messages are you absorbing about that?
And last but not least. What data do you already have about what time it takes for you to do things? Do you have a planner that you can flip back on and see how long that you've worked on certain projects? Do you have a sense on your LMS, like canvas how long it takes for you to grade a paper or how many hours a week you're actually spending on a course site?
Maybe you have time logs, but what data do you have about how long things take you?
All right. The juicy stuff. Let's get into those experiments to try to see if we can't make estimating time just a little bit easier. So the first one is a suggestion that I have mentioned before, but in this case, I think it can be really helpful and it's keeping a time log. This can be as high-tech or low-tech as you needed to be.
I have done this with browser extensions, like toggle. I have set timers on my desk using a manual. flip timer that counts down for me. I've used pom trackers. I have used a printout to say start time, end time of various tasks, but you don't really know how long things are going to take you.
If you don't know how long it's already taken you to do a similar version of that task. So, yeah, it can be a little bit confronting to be like, wow. I thought that it took me 20 minutes to grade a paper and it actually takes me 40. But if you are spending 40 minutes and truly believing in your heart of hearts, that it's only taking you 20, that's never going to help you fix that estimation problem. And ultimately that's what we're trying to get at here. So the better data you have, the more realistic those deadlines can be.
It's all going to be based on optimism unless we base it on data. So even if it's a little bit sticky, Let's collect some data.
Number two. This experiment is for all of my out of sight, out of mind, people or out of this week's calendar out of mind, people. Where, if a deadline isn't in the zone where I call it sort of like immediately tangible for me, that zone is about 72 hours. I can hold about two and a half days in my brain at once. And then things start to get a little bit fuzzy. So if it's not due by the end of the week, or maybe even a little bit longer or shorter than that, but if it's not in that zone of tangibility, it doesn't make sense to me. So it really doesn't make a difference if it's due in a year or in six months or in three weeks, they're all in that "not now" time category, and I'm not focused on them. Your zone might be a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller, but if you have a zone where things are tangible or they don't exist, it can be really helpful to counter those disappearing deadlines. You can maybe have a scheduled countdown where it says, okay, two weeks until this happens three weeks until this happens, or maybe you have a monthly planning practice where you check in every week and say, okay,
These are the things that I'm doing here are the things I want to get done at the end of the month. How much time do I have to sort of do that?
Scheduling a weekly check-in can really help counter those disappearing deadlines. Sending update emails to your advisor can help counter those disappearing deadlines and even starting a practice where you keep a done log or a planner where you notice what things you've checked off, and also what things you're not working on can be really helpful to make those projects that just don't feel real to you because they're not in the right now time.
Feel a little bit more tangible. Of course, and there will be other episodes in there already been other episodes about breaking things down into smaller pieces or giving yourself little dopamine hits in terms of rewards to help you through those middle stages where you've planned it. And it's not quite due yet.
But anything in that zone is going to be useful.
Last bit, at least is an experiment that I personally love, but I know it can be a little bit tricky for people. So let's actually dig into when giving yourself some extra time before a deadline - when you're estimating, how long things will take- when that actually helps. And when it can be a little bit counterproductive,
So the first thing that anybody reads on the internet, if they Google, how to get better at estimating deadlines. Is the stock advice to add in some buffer time. If you think it's going to take you two weeks double it. That's common academic advice, however long you think it's going to take, make it two times that length that you actually expect to work on it.
I find that the math isn't that easy and different tasks in different people use different multiplication factors. But that sense of, yes, I do want some flexibility and if this plan will only work. If every day is perfect and every day has the exact right amount of hours and there are no snags and no difficulties. Well then it's not a very robust or resilient plan.
So I like to add in buffer points around my check-ins. So if I'm working on a project that I expect will take me two or three months. I might have check-ins every two weeks and I might schedule a buffer day at the end of every two week period to. To catch up where I don't schedule anything. I don't have anything on the calendar, but I, you know, work on all of the things that got left by the wayside in the intervening 13 days before.
You might want to schedule a buffer day. Regularly. I can sometimes have seasons where I have them on Wednesday afternoons and Friday afternoons where I just catch up. You might want to have a whole week or maybe two weeks of buffer time before you submit a really big draft or before a big conference where you're traveling so that you're not working right up until the last minute.
But thinking about that buffer time as time that helps you surf the unpredictability of it. So whenever you're doing those estimations, make the estimation based on the results of your first experiment, the actual data, and then add buffer to that to help you prepare for the unexpected.
The thing that actually really hurts people when they add in this extra time is that they assume that they can spend it. It's sort of like having a flexible budget. Where, you know, if it's the beginning of the month and you're feeling flush and you know that you have X number of dollars in sort of like your fun money, you might spend that a couple of times early on in the month because you're like, yeah, you know, it's early! I have fun. I'll get it from other places.
And I find that buffer time and flexible deadlines can be like that too. That the earlier you are in the process, the harder it is to spend that time responsibly, so to speak. So I like to add in a lot of support in the beginning and middle of the projects, like I mentioned at other episodes, so that I'm not spending that buffer time before I actually need it.
Of course, if you wake up and you feel like trash, or you have the completely unexpected thing happen and you lose two weeks of it, then yeah, go ahead and spend your buffer time. That's what it's there for. But having more regular, check-ins seeing what things you can do. Moving in smaller pieces more frequently can help you not spend it right away, especially if it's burning a hole in your metaphorical pocket.
But let's reiterate that this will be hard probably for the rest of your life until you figure out how to control time. And if you figure out how to do that, please let me know because I'm in the market to control some time. But. All jokes aside. This is one of the things that is most difficult. And I find that so much of the anxiety comes from the idea that, oh, I can't be accountable. I never meet my deadlines.
When in reality, the most severe consequences, the ones that feel really awful, come from us not communicating about our changing deadlines, not the fact that the deadlines changed at all. So I hope that a couple of these experiments might help you make more accurate estimations in the first place.
Might help you adjust when you notice that they're starting to drift, but most of all, they help you to build in some compassion so that if, and when you do get off track, because we all do, you know who to reach out for, who can help you and what things will be useful as you get back to where you wanted to be.
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. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
13 - Why is it so hard to manage our nervous systems?
episode 13 - Why is it so hard to manage our nervous systems?
After nearly three decades of actively attempting to think my way out of anxiety and other nervous system concerns, I am here to report that it is hard! And it is especially hard to manage our nervous systems in a world where there's never enough time to do it, and we all believe that we'll feel better ONCE the work is done. This episode is about going body first to support our scholarship - because sometimes, our brains can't do it all.
Resources mentioned:
How to complete the stress cycle
Burnout book
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
You can get my free working more intentionally toolkit@thrive-phd.com or the link in the show notes. If you want to go even deeper with the work.
In this week's episode, we're going to talk about something that I consider one of the secrets of scholarly work, at least sustainable scholarly work. And it's not your task manager. It's not your citation manager. It's not even the way that you outline your work. It's how you take care of your nervous system. The reason that this is so important is because it's one of those things that we're just not really encouraged to take a look at much less take care of throughout The day
and when those days the scholars could be filled with literally more work than you could ever complete in a lifetime, it makes sense that it doesn't always shoot to the top of our to-do list to check in with our nervous system, see how we're feeling and see if we could be feeling better.
Another reason that this can be really difficult is because so many of us have been conditioned to think that if we just finish our to-do list, if we just finished writing that chapter, if we just get that draft off our desk, If we just finish we'll feel better. And so I don't need to deal with my anxiety or the fact that I feel really shut down or lethargic because if I just work harder, I'll feel better.
But working through nervous system events often leads us to working less effectively. And most importantly it can cause some pretty serious short and long-term consequences. When I start working with a new client, one of the immediate first things that I do with them is I ask them to check in, okay.
How are you feeling? Not just today, but over time. And I am going to take you through the questions that I asked them and the experiments that I try with them. These are all things that I've used myself as a person. There are things I use with my clients, and I think that they're a really good set of tools and questions to help us get at what's happening with our bodies. When our brains are doing so much important work.
So let's hop right into those questions to consider. Number one. What does your body feel like when you're working? Do you have a protocol for monitoring how your body feels when you're working? It could be an app or a journal, or maybe it's just a little bit of a check-in before you stop or start a work session.
But what is your body doing while you're working? Do you even know. And it's okay if you don't. I hardly ever do. It's something I have to physically. Will myself to check in on. So. Question number two. Do you notice any trends in how your body feels. Maybe before or after work. The beginning or the end of the week, different points in the year.
Not just, how is your body feeling right now? Although that's a great place to start, but how does it change?
And lastly. The third question. If you have a list of activities that make you feel better. Exercise sleep walks meditation, a breathwork practice journaling. All sorts of things can be on this list, but do you consider those activities to be contingent on work? Do you put them in the category of great. If I get to it, it's a bonus.
Are they part of your literal workflow? how do these categories, the ways that you think about things like exercise or sleep or taking care of your mental health? How do the ways that you categorize them as things that you do at the end of the day, things that you do, if you get to them, make it easier or harder to do those things.
I've left a lot of time this week for the experiments to try, because there's a little bit of explanation needed, but I really hopeful that there'll be just as powerful for you as they have been for the people that I work with. And for me too. So the first experiment is called tracking your window of tolerance.
The window of tolerance is an idea that was coined by UCLA. Researchers early in the 2010s. I believe I'll have the exact dates of facts and figures in the show notes for you. But there's this idea that we all have a window, an optimal window that inside of it, when our nervous system is in this window, when our bodies are in this window, we're able to feel centered.
We feel grounded, things are easier. We're AB able to function to regulate. Great to self-regulate and be present. And what I mean. Our nervous system. I'm talking about that system in your body, that controls basically your response to external stimuli. So I have lots of resources in the show notes to help you get to know your nervous system a little bit better, but it's the.
The adrenaline part, the brain part, the anxiety part, the calm part, that whole. What is my body doing in response to the external sometimes internal stimuli. But if we all have this window where we're at our best, this optimal window. There's also nervous. System states above and below it. So if you're above it,
That's what we would call hyper arousal. And the waste that this can look and feel are high energy, anxiety overwhelm. It can feel a little bit chaotic for me in my body. This often feels like I'm bouncing between 15 tabs. I don't know what I'm working on. I can't stay focused. I'm really fidgety. I'm pulling on my thumbs. I'm not hungry. I haven't eaten in days. You know, hyper arousal is just like, everything is at an 11.
And obviously when everything's at an 11, we're not in that window of optimal function. But you can also be below the window. And this is a state that we would call hype. Oh, arousal. This can feel like being shut down or frozen or withdrawn. This is all a sort of feeling of, I just can't get myself to do the things I want to for me this often feels like I'm moving through quicksand or through mud.
Or I often describe it as like working on 10 X difficulty. That normally, if it's only one X difficult for me to get out of bed, if I'm hypo aroused, it can feel like 10 X it's just like, everything takes more out of me. So in this experiment, I would love for you to track your window of tolerance and how you feel above it, below it, write in it, moving closer to one edge or the other throughout the day.
I'm obviously not a medical doctor and nothing that I'm giving here is medical advice, but I found that if you can kind of dial into and collect some data, you know, my favorite about how you're feeling in regards to that window of tolerance, it can give you some really useful insight. Into what kind of conditions you're asking yourself to work through.
So everyone's window looks and feels a little bit different. There are a lot of reasons why some people have a little bit more resilience and are able to bounce. Within that window a little bit more effectively, there are lots of. KA neurophysical reasons and chemical reasons and history reasons why you might jump more easily than somebody else into hyper or hypo arousal, or why you might even get stuck in one of those spaces. But the first step, like any good thrive PhD experiment is to just notice it.
Okay. The second experiment is to, if you notice that you're outside of that window of tolerance to bring yourself or invite yourself back into it. Going through the motion, not as something that you'll do when you finish, but literally is part of the work. This is something that I often refer to as dealing with your nervous system body first, rather than brain first.
I know that when I first started paying attention to my nervous system, I would try very hard to think my way into a better zone. Right. I'd be like, okay, I'm going to set my timer. I'm going to think to myself, it's time to get focused now. And my body would keep doing whatever it was already doing because my brain wasn't powerful enough.
No one's is to completely interrupt the complex system of chemicals and hormones that anxiety or hyper arousal can feel like in the body. So in this experiment, I would love to invite you. To think about some of these techniques as something that you can do. As part of the work, it counts as part of your writing time or part of your teaching time.
But paying attention to which of these actually help you get back into a place where your work is more effective and it feels more supportive. So if you tend to be on the hype arousal side of the window this can look again like anxiety or overwhelm or just sort of that feeling of being amped up. Here's some things that can be really helpful.
First square breathing. So deep breaths that involve the diaphragm. I will put a link in the show notes about how to do this kind of breathing, but any kind of deep breathing can work, but hopefully one that is a little bit slower than your normal breath pattern. Brisk walking can be really great for this any exercise, but especially anything that uses both sides of your body.
Like jumping jacks or yoga poses or warm water can be really, really helpful. So, including any of those things, when you notice. That you're a little bit above, a little bit hyper aroused to try and bring yourself back down. If you find it that you're hypo aroused, you're underneath a little bit, shut down a little bit, slow a little bit quick, Sandy.
Here's some things to try smaller movements turning into bigger ones. So wiggling your toes and maybe moving that into a slightly bigger gesture where you shake your legs or kind of bounce them up and down on the floor. Anything that stimulates the senses can be really good for this. So lighting a candle, smelling it.
A strongly scented thing. Chewy or crunchy food can be really effective. Cold water can be really effective and anything that sort of like bounces your body. So if you're hyper aroused, it's a lot more vigorous because you're trying to let out some of that extra arousal and hypoarousal is sort of introducing a little bit into the system to kind of warm you back off.
So one is going down and one is warming up. But. Experiment with it and see what happened. What helps maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but it's worth a try. And most importantly, thinking about this as something that you are fully permissioned and allowed to do as part of your workflow. A lot of these things are things that I do throughout the Workday. So I include them as part of the poms. I think about my time when I go for a walk around the park, that's near my house, or get up and get a glass of water or do a couple of jumping jacks as part of my work and not something that I have to wait to do until I hit a certain point.
And that should do list. It's that integration into the workflow. That's really the magic here.
And last but not least. The final experiment is something that a couple of researchers who I'll talk about more in a minute call completing the stress cycle. So this is an experiment that's been derived from a book that I really enjoyed called burnout.
Dr. Emily Nagoski and Dr. Amelia Nagoski they're twins. They wrote this book about a variety of research and compelling studies around how modern people deal with stress. And why so many of us. Find ourselves in a state of chronic stress, sometimes even burnout. As the book title suggests. So the way they describe it is thus.
If a lion was chasing you. You would have an immediate reaction in your body. Your nervous system would kick in. You'd get a huge burst of adrenaline and you'd feel a lot of stress because a lion is chasing you. But you would also use that nervous system response to respond to the fact that the line is chasing you. So you might run away from the lion. You might freeze, you might hide, but.
Either way your whole body is getting involved in responding to the stressor that created a body event for you. So once the threat of that lion is resolved, you ran away from it, you hid from it, it left, you would feel a huge sort of burst of release. And this is something that we see in. In all sorts of mammals. If you see a zebra that's been chasing and it manages to get away.
It will literally kind of like shake on the ground to sort of release all of that extra stress. So that's the way that physiologically the stress cycle has evolved to work. However, if you're an academic and you submit a manuscript, which to our bodies can feel exactly the same. I have this thing it's so important. I have to get it done. It's due at five, but when you submit it, when you're done.
With it, you, you click the button. You really don't have that same sense of, wow. I survived a lion. Because you don't have a lot of sensory reinforcement that the threat is gone. It was just a couple of clicks and an email. And then all of a sudden, your body's just supposed to know that this thing you've been working on for months, or maybe years is completed.
So you really have to go out of your way to complete the stress cycle because we're not getting enough sensory inputs to know that it's done on our own. So some ways to complete the stress cycle.
Physical activity is one of the most effective and time efficient ones. So anything that raises your heart rate, but you can also use laughter. Deep breathing patterns can do it positive social interactions with friends, or even with strangers. Affection of all types, crying can be an effective release of the stress cycle and creativity.
So all of these things will help your body be like, okay, there was a wave of adrenaline and now I can release it. It completes that stress cycle. Instead of leaving you at that aroused state, even if the threat or the accomplishment has been completed. So in this experiment, think about building in some of those things to your natural workflow, whether that's daily or weekly, maybe it's twice daily, depending on how things are going.
But to regularly build in a release valve for this kind of stress cycle that we're all in, just because of what we do. And who we are and the world that we live in.
So in this experiment, you add one in, you see if anything changes, if it helps to kind of bring you back down into a place where you're closer to, if not in that optimum window, that window of tolerance.
I know this is a little bit different than some of the other. More scholarly focused episodes, but I thought it was really important to bring up because I've had just so many different clients come to me in the last couple of weeks saying, you know, I really wanted to feel more rested after break. I thought I was going to feel so much better. My anxiety is back. I am so shut down. It's I'm avoiding everything. And sometimes we can't think or use our, our scholarly tools out of that. We kind of have to go body first.
So I am right there with you incorporating a bunch of things to help support my nervous system. As I work through this bananas thing that we all call life, and I'm hoping that this week feels just a tiny bit more supportive. 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. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
12 - Why is it so hard to stop for the day?
episode 12 - Why is it so hard to stop for the day?
Why is it so hard to stop for the day (or the week)? One of the big benefits of academia is setting your own schedule so.....why do so many of us end up with a "feel like I should be working all the time, crash on the couch" schedule? This week's episode is all about figuring out how to stop for the day so that you can break (or at least, soften) the push/crash cycle that we all get caught in sometimes! Enjoy!
Mentioned:
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
You can get my free working more intentionally toolkit@thrive-phd.com or the link in the show notes. If you want to go even deeper with the work.
But first a special announcement. My writing groups are some of the most popular things that I do all year long. And if you're looking for a supportive place where you can both learn how to write more efficiently, more effectively and more persuasively as a scholar and also keep your projects on track, then my writing groups are for you.
Enrollment is open now and the groups are starting to fill in advance of our kickoff on January 11th.
If you'd like more information, especially about our payment plans or sliding scale, please check the link in the show notes. We'd love to have you join us for some of the most powerful work that you can do all year.
Welcome back to another episode of grad school is hard. And one thing that I know for certain is hard. Actually stopping, stopping at the end of the day, stopping at the end of the week, maybe at the end of the semester or the end of the year. But stopping is harder than it sounds like because most of the time grad school encourages you to crash. And a crash is not really a choice. A crash is something that happens when your body decides that you're ready to take a break.
So, what would it look like to stop before? The crash. Let's get into it.
So one of the reasons that the crash is so normalized, not just in grad school, but everywhere. Is because there's always more to do. Every episode of his podcast could be a critique of grind culture, but grad school is one of those places where grind culture runs rampant. Because there is something legitimately more that you always could be doing.
You could get ahead on your grading. You could read that extra article that came out. You could. Procrast to clean your apartment. You could answer those emails. You could send those networking requests. The list goes on and on because there are so many things that we're encouraged to do to get ahead. It's really hard to know when to stop for the day because there's no natural. Uh, yes, I finished my to-do list. It's time to take a break. And kick back.
It's also then really hard to know. What needs to get done today? What things would be great to get done today? And what are just some things that you should do? I don't know about you, but nobody sat me down in my first year of grad school or in any of my seminars and said, okay, here's how you manage your time.
Here's how you make it to do list. Here's how you parcel out projects. They just sort of assume that you know how to do that already, that wherever you came from before your PhD or M a program taught you how to do that. And let's be real many places. Didn't so it's so easy to not really know how to manage your time or manage long-term multi-month multi-year projects because nobody ever showed you how to do it, or even how they do it.
And it's really easy to get off of a normal nine to five or work five days a week and two days off or a work four days and three days rhythm. It's really easy to get off some of the more traditional work schedules. Because one of the things that actually is really valuable about academic life is the flexibility.
But with that flexibility means that there can really be a tendency to switch into a push push push, and then crash cycle. It happens to all of us. And in some ways it's baked in. What is the end of semester finals and grading crush, if not a push and then a crash. And when so much of our work actually ends up being deadline driven.
And it makes sense that there is a place and a reason that we're culturally called to push and then crash. But it does mean that if you happen to be an academic with a non-academic partner or children who are not yet in academia, or. Anyone in your life. Who's not necessarily an academic. There can be the sense that everyone else is stopping for the day and you don't get to because there's so much else that you need to do.
So let's dig into. Some of the questions that might make this a little bit more specific for you and give you a sense of where you might want to experiment with the strategies that are coming up.
First question. What is your normal sign that it's time to stop at the end of the day? Do you have a time in absolute cutoff time? Does it go by your to-do list? Does it go by one, you fall asleep on your desk or when you have a yoga class?
What's the normal reason that you stopped working for the day. If you do.
What stories do you tell yourself, or are you hearing out in about, in the world about how long other people are working? If I had to have you guess, how many hours do you think the other people in your cohort are doing? What about that random person on Twitter that you look up to? How about your professors? How about your colleagues? How much do you think other people are working?
And then lastly, what stories do you have floating around about rest at the end of the day or the week? Or the, between semesters. Do you have to earn rest? Or is it that your brain tells you that if I just get more stuff done, my break will be better. So it's worth it to cut into the end of the night routine to get just that little bit extra done. What stories do you have that are floating around about rest? What activates it and how you earn it?
Now the good stuff, let's get into three different experiments that you can try in the next week, two weeks. These are all, some pretty clear data-driven strategies that might give you a sense of what it would look like to incorporate a stop sign into your days or your weeks, both in an effort to get more rest, but also in an effort to counteract the narrative that any minute where you're not legitimately crashed out asleep on the couch.
There is a minute that you should be working on your grad school stuff.
Okay, first experiment. Attempt to set an end of the day quitting time. No, I don't have time to get into the historical and cultural context between the nine to five day. And I'm not even suggesting that you've worked eight hours, but instead of having a regular schedule, you set a quitting time where. Unless there is the world is literally on fire or my dissertation is due tomorrow. I stopped working. Or I put my computer away or however you want to define it to yourself. At say 8:00 PM. For many times in my PhD program, my quitting time was actually seven o'clock. It didn't matter. What wasn't done. It didn't matter what things were off track. I stopped at seven o'clock and I either went to yoga or I made dinner. Yes. I eat dinner really late. It's a problem. We're working on it.
But having that stopping time was helpful for my non-academic partner to know that I would eventually be stopped doing things for the end of the day, but it was also really helpful for me because when I thought about what I was going to get done in a day or a week, it wasn't that I thought I had 18 available hours. I just had, you know, until seven o'clock.
It made it easier to schedule things with friends to call my parents, to get workouts in, to go to the grocery store, to do laundry because I had a quitting time. That was more or less non-negotiable. You can experiment with it and it doesn't need to be seven o'clock or eight o'clock. Maybe you try it for just one night or two nights a week or the nights before you're teaching.
Or the days where you have a really bad pain flare experiment with it, but see what happens when you set a definite quitting time.
Experiment number two. Use an ABC list to get a clearer sense about what you must do on any given day.
I love it to do list. I'm always going to love it to do list, but what can be really difficult about it is that. There are some things that are really small start laundry, make a dentist appointment, read an article. Maybe now there are some things that are very big. Like great. All of the papers or write that chapter or revise.
Where it's not really clear if you're going to finish it today. Or tomorrow and setting up a task list that has more manageable tasks is a subject of a whole other podcast episode. But if you have just one long list with really big things, really urgent things, things that are coming up, things aren't due for months.
It can be really frustrating because you literally never get to the bottom of it. And that sense of crossing things off is multiplied when it's the last thing that you're crossing off for the day. An ABC list is a tool that actually gives you a way to parcel out the various different tasks into the, a column things that you must do in order.
To avoid serious and immediate consequences. Say your grades are due from the university tomorrow. You have finished your grades and get them processed. There will be severe and immediate consequences. If you don't get that done. But that consequences bit really could help an anxious brain determine the difference between this really does need to happen tomorrow. And.
That would be great if this could happen today, but it's not going to completely collapse my world. If it doesn't.
That second category. The bees are exactly that latter type of task. It would be really great to get the stone today. It would open up some flexibility for me. I would feel really good about it, but if it doesn't happen, the world won't collapse. It might graduate to an, a task tomorrow, but for right now, I have a little bit of flexibility.
And then the C task column. Is. Everything that you know, you need to do, but you are giving yourself a pass right there right then to not do it today. I talk extensively about how to manage this in a YouTube video that I will link, but why I like it and why I've included it here. It's because if you have all of your AI tasks, all of those things with severe and immediate consequences checked off.
You can stop for the day. Yeah, sure. Maybe if you have a couple of hours before your quitting time, you do a couple of BS or a couple of T C tasks. But if everything that has immediate consequences is checked off, then it helps give that little bit of an anxious brain. A chance to say. Yeah. Okay. All of the immediate stuff has done.
I can take a deep breath. I can watch some Riverdale. Get myself a little bit of rest.
And last, but not least is one of the things that I think is an underrated tool and strategy for anyone, but especially people who are working on ongoing projects. It's creating a shutdown routine. Now. The whole world, the internet is a blaze with techniques and different things that you can do in a start up routine.
Start with your morning pages, get your coffee, sit down with your journal, sit down with your planner, clean your desk. There's a thousand things that you can do. And morning routines definitely have a place, but shutdown routine can really, really make a difference. And it's something that a lot of us aren't really coached into doing.
I know that for me, my brain, as soon as I can feel the sort of like. Oh, cliff coming at the end of the day, I want to slam my laptop closed and run out the door and it doesn't matter. What mess I've left for myself. There could be a million different coffee mugs on my desk. It doesn't matter when I'm done, I'm done and I just quit. So what has been really helpful for me is instituting a shutdown routine.
Were about 15 or 20 minutes before I want to stop for the day. I do some of the following things. I get all of the coffee mugs. And I've been building up over the day. And I take them down to the sink. I check my emails for any last things that have come in that I want to address. I take a look at my task manager and make sure it's set up for the next day.
I cleaned my desk off of all of the sort of extraneous papers. Sometimes I unload the trash can not always, sometimes I fold up the blanket in my office, but not always, basically I try and reset everything to where I want it to be when I arrived the next morning. This gives my brain a chance to kind of decompress. I don't have a commute. Right.
And you maybe don't have a commute. and even if you do have a commute, those couple of extra minutes before you leave. Whatever your workspace, whether that's physical or mental before you leave for the day makes a signal to your body that says, okay, we're winding down. It's time to transition.
It's okay to stop working. And it also does future you a favor because when you get back to your desk or wherever that workspace is, It's not going to be covered with crusty old coffee mugs. A ton of post-it notes that don't make any sense to you anymore. And whole bunch of fires that you pretended didn't exist so that you could run out of the office.
It's really hard to stop. But in my experience, clients that learn how to stop well, Stop before they crash or at least stop before they crash some of the time. Have a shutdown routine that helps make it easier to not avoid their desk, have a lot more success working in a sustainable way. And like I mentioned up top, there's always going to be a little bit of a push and crash in academia. That's the nature of self-paced flexible work schedules that are majority deadline driven.
But if you can soften some of those pushes and especially softened some of those crashes, so that every time you come into the office, it's not an absolute sprint until your body collapses. And every time you sit down to work, you know that, yes, you're going to sit down and you're going to show up, but there will be an end.
It really helps ease some of that Sisyphean feeling of pushing that rock up the hill and never quite getting to the top. I hope that this episode finds you well and finds you stopping well, and I'll 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. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
11 - Why is it so hard to set goals as a scholar?
episode 11 - Why is it so hard to set goals as a scholar?
Oh wow - the first and only podcast episode about goals to be released in January! But, for real - scholarly goals are NOT like other, more concrete goals. Learn more about why, reflect on how goals have helped (or NOT) you in the past, and then stay tuned for three of my most popular strategies for setting goals that actually move you forward without destroying your will to live.
Mentioned in the episode:
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
You can get my free working more intentionally toolkit@thrive-phd.com or the link in the show notes. If you want to go even deeper with the work.
But first a special announcement. My writing groups are some of the most popular things that I do all year long. And if you're looking for a supportive place where you can both learn how to write more efficiently, more effectively and more persuasively as a scholar and also keep your projects on track, then my writing groups are for you.
Enrollment is open now and the groups are starting to fill in advance of our kickoff on January 11th.
If you'd like more information, especially about our payment plans or sliding scale, please check the link in the show notes. We'd love to have you join us for some of the most powerful work that you can do all year.
I'm just going to get this out of the way right now. I'm a little basic and I also love new year energy. I love a fresh start. I love a new month and I especially love January. So I make no apologies for this episode about goals, setting goals, experimenting with your goals and figuring out what kinds of goals actually work for you as a scholar, because 'tis the season for goals, people so buckle up and let's get into why setting goals can be so difficult.
First off, there are a lot of goals that you could set and time is a finite resource. I made a draft, dump it out list of all of the things that I wanted to accomplish in 2023. And when I hit the bottom of page three, I thought, Hmm, I probably need a better system. Because I simply do not have enough time to do all of the things that I want to do that I could do that other people think I should do.
And goal setting can really feed into that "must do all the things. If it's important to you set a goal" frenzy that so many of us can feel at this time of the year or at the beginning of the semester, or any time that you kind of decide to make a fresh start. But as a grad student specifically, So much of the work of being a scholar is what I would call a vaguely defined output.
Sure you want towrite. So you set a goal that says, I want to write more this year, but what does that mean? Do you want to write more blog posts? Do you want to write more lesson plans? Do you want to write more chapters? Do you want to write more notes? Do you want to do more conference papers? What does it mean to write more? How much were you already writing?
So on and so forth. It is less clear than a goal like run a 5k in under 45 minutes, I have no idea if that's fast or not, but you know what I mean? It's a vaguely defined output. And so these goals can feel less achievable, less measurable. And let's be honest, a lot of things in academia do not stay done. So you might have a goal for the week or for the year to finish all of your grading on time.
Great you do that. You do it once. It feels good. And then like clockwork, more grading arrives. Or you have a goal to finish a chapter. You send it maybe even exactly on time to your advisor and they say, this is great, but now it's time for you to completely redo everything based on instructions that I should've given you the first time. So what you thought was an accomplished goal is actually just stage one in a potentially infinite number of steps.
So it's a little bit more difficult than I want to read 55 books this year, which is a noble and important goal. If that's what calls to you, but some of the tasks in academia just don't suit themselves. To the same kind of goal setting that you might see on an Instagram meme. So let's dig into some of your previous history with goals.
First question in our questions to consider section. What kinds of goals do you find most motivating? Are they external ones? Internal ones. Do you like to accomplish goals in a group? Do you like to do them all by yourself? Do you like personal goals or hobby goals or professional goals? What kinds of goals naturally?
Draw you in. Which ones have that sparkle right off the shelf.
Second question. What is one goal that you recently achieved? What helped you achieve it?
What did it cost you to do it? Did you have to spend all of your time and energy and maybe even a little bit of money. To get that done on time. Or was it relatively easeful. And what would you do differently if you had to repeat the process of accomplishing that goal over again?
And our third question, which for my money is the most important one, because it can give us some of the most clear data. What is one goal that you recently abandoned, changed or avoided altogether? Once you S you said it. How do you feel about it now? What benefits did you gain from changing your mind about accomplishing that goal?
And what did you learn about the goals that you might make in the process?
So hopefully that gave you some food for journaling food, for your walk food for thinking. Now let's dive in to what you're all here for some actual practical strategies that I find to be really useful when it comes to making goals, especially in the scholarly sphere. These are three things that you can experiment with.
To see if they make your process of setting goals a little bit more easeful, a little bit more practical, a little bit more actionable.
The first is to focus on what I call good, better, best spread for goals rather than an all or nothing goal. So here's an example of what I mean by this. It good, better, best goal spread could look something like, okay, I want to write every day that I am not teaching this semester. And so, instead of saying, I want to write for hours every day.
Okay. You instead say, okay, baseline. I want to write for one pom 25 minutes. A better case scenario. I write for two poms. And a best case scenario. I write for four poms. Instead of, I write for two hours either I do it or I don't do it. For all of my perfectionistic, all our, nothing thinkers out there. You know who you are. This can be such a powerful tool because if you're anything like me, You might have this goal, like, Ooh, I want to write two hours a day. And then you arrive on the first Thursday where a magical two hour block. It does not appear. You're busy. You have a dentist appointment.
You know, a myriad of things eat into your time. And you're like, well, if I can't write for two hours, I might as well not write at all. Boom. And then you've already kind of lost this every day goal. This big time structure. If you can define the spread. And instead say, okay, anywhere between one pom and four poms is going to be great for me to do today.
Then it makes it a lot easier to say, okay. woof. Today. I do not have two uninterrupted hours to write. So instead, I'm going to focus on just getting this one block in and it's going to be a good pom. I'm going to show up for it. I'm going to do what I can. I'm going to keep my chain. I love doing this and you don't need to use the good, better, best language. I sometimes use baseline stretch or challenge or best case scenario to worst case scenario. Your language can really shift around.
But the idea is that anywhere in that zone is good, as opposed to I either do the hard thing or I do nothing at all.
The second experiment that I would love to offer you. If you are looking for a new way forward with your goals is a time limited goal or challenge. I have long been using this idea that I got from Sarah Faith Gottesdiener about instead of setting goals for the entire year setting goals for a season.
I love this because I honestly have no idea what's going to happen in three weeks, much less in eight months. And so it's a much more manageable chunk of time for me to wrap my head around. Okay. These are the goals for the first three months of the year. This is what I'm going to focus on. This is what I'm going to practice.
This is what I'm going to experiment with. And I'll reevaluate when the next season comes, but for now, these are my resolutions. Maybe your way of time limiting your goals is to say, okay, for 30 days, I am going to try and write at least one Pomodoro on my dissertation chapter, no matter what. Just like a 30 day yoga challenge, all of the rage right now in January.
Or maybe you say, okay, for the next two weeks, I am going to set a goal of trying to walk for 10 minutes before I sit down and write, because it helps my brain. Focused so much better. If I get some of those wiggles out. And I'm not committing to do that forever, but for the next two weeks, when the weather is relatively reasonable, that's what I'm going to do.
These time limited challenges can really help you get out of this sense of, well, I set a goal for the year and it didn't happen by January 15th. Therefore I just have to wait the rest of the year to figure it out. It gives you natural places to reset. And it also acknowledges that lots can change in a day.
Much less than a year. So these regular check-in points give you a chance to experiment with adjust, adapt based on the data of what's happening and how things are actually going.
And last but not least. You could try and focus your goals on a practice or a habit or a routine, something that you do versus an achievement.
Here's what I mean by this. I have long desired to run a 5k. It's one of those things that I think I heard about it when I was 12 and I was like, Ooh, that sounds like something. That fun people, sporty people do and I want to do it. And so every so often I set a goal. That's like, okay, I'm going to run a 5k. And I download the apps and I start the training program.
And invariably by week two or three, I remember that I hate running and my body hates running. And we just never get there. So despite having this goal for more than half of my life, I have never accomplished it. But when I rearranged how I was thinking about that goal away from the achievement of running a 5k and into a practice, I instead had so much more success with a goal that said, I want to get at least 30 minutes of moving my body in no matter how that looks.
Every day that I work or every day that's possible or every day, that makes sense for me. And sometimes that 30 minutes was a yoga class and sometimes it was a nice long walk in the park. Sometimes it was a quick run on the treadmill. Sometimes it was a bounce on my trampoline and sometimes it was just gentle, stretching.
I did it in three, 10 minute bursts throughout the rest of the day, because I was too overwhelmed or sore or in pain to do anything else. But focusing on the practice, the thing that I consistently did and not so much the achievement got me, what I actually wanted to accomplish by running a 5k, which was moving my body more often for all of the physical and mental benefits that, that brings me.
It might look like for you that you, instead of saying, okay, I want to write a chapter every three months this year. You instead say, okay, I want to make writing a priority. And I want to write for at least 25 minutes before I do anything else during the day. Or I want to write for at least an hour on the days where I have childcare or I'm not teaching.
This could look like saying I want to read for 25% of the overall time that I allocate to my writing versus I want to finish all of the books in my, to read pile this year. It's about focusing on the practice. And letting that ground you, as opposed to the achievement, because the practice often gets you the achievement through showing up regularly and being committed to it.
There is so much pressure. And if you are like me gentle listener, you're arriving at this threshold of 2023. Excited for some new energy, but also a little trepidatious about all the things you want to do and how much pressure that can feel like.
I encourage you, no matter what experiment you try, or if you add a couple of your own that you approach, however, you structure your goals less as an evaluation of who you are as a person or as a scholar, but more a container to help you do more of what you want to do on purpose. I'm wishing you the happiest of new years and thank you so much for listening.
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. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
10 - Why can it be so hard to take a break?
episode 10 - Why can it be so hard to take a break?
What can be so hard about a break between terms, vacation, or other kinds of time off? You'd be surprised! Let's get into what can make these times so hard, and how to plan for a break that is both restful AND useful!
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
You can get my free working more intentionally toolkit@thrive-phd.com or the link in the show notes. If you want to go even deeper with the work.
There are some topics for this podcast that I feel like are completely expected. Of course, it is hard to ask for feedback on your writing or find a strategy to manage your focus that works for you. Those are high level intellectual tasks. This episode all about why it can be hard to take a break can seem, you know, not that hard.
It's not hard to go on vacation. It's not hard to take a break. It's not hard to figure out what to do with yourself when you have no schedule. Right? In my experience taking a break as a grad student can be extremely difficult for a variety of reasons. The first is that it's not like other school breaks.
When you're going home from elementary school, or even from undergrad. In between semesters, you don't have any work to do. Sure. There might be some things that you can do to get ready or some stuff you need to do to catch up. But if you're off, you're off. In grad school. The break in between semesters or time off during the year, usually is time off from one of your jobs like teaching or being in the lab.
A break as a grad student also doesn't function exactly like paid time off or PTO for short. Of course, if you have access to annual leave, feel free to skip ahead 30 seconds. But if you don't. It can be difficult to take a break over the end of the year, for example, because it might be a break from teaching.
But it might not be a break from everything else. There's no standard cultural script that says I'm taking a vacation. I accrued this many days of time off, I'm spending them all to do this thing during this specific time. I know that when I headed off for the end of the year break, my supervisor would be like, well, I am traveling to see my family, but I expect that you will finish this chapter. At the end of the year. And I was like, well, what if I want to travel with, see my family, or just watch new girl on the couch. What happens then? It can be really hard because there is this sense that you have a magical container.
That you can fill with all of the kinds of work that are really hard to do during more standard schedules. If you have an intense teaching load, then the break yes. Is time off, away from your students and maybe your email or grading, but there's also the sense that you need to do everything else. That's really hard to do when you're actively teaching such a heavy load.
There's some of the only people I know to head off for break. With literal suitcases, full of books and reading material and journals to catch up on a computer full of things to write and process. And they expect that they will both be able to emerge after that break completely rested. Like they just spent two weeks on the beach.
And also they have produced an enormous amount of work that otherwise would have been difficult for them.
So how do we thread that needle? Of both recognizing that during time off, we do need to rest. We need to rest in different ways, more complete ways than we might be able to access after work on a Tuesday night or. Through a weekend where we also have a bunch of other things to do. I am here and fully supporting anyone who wants to take a break and be with family or celebrate traditions, or simply be alone in a quiet room.
And think thoughts to themselves without any expectation of those thoughts becoming the next journal article or conference paper. So, how do we balance that need for rest? And also the reality that this might be some of your best time for writing. If you are a parent, if you are a person who teaches a heavy load, if you have a full-time job.
Then it's really easy to treat any time that you have a way from some of those main responsibilities as perfect writing time. And you're not wrong. There are a lot of things that make the end of the year break a great time to do some deeper focus work. So let's dig into some questions to help you see what expectations you're setting up for yourself for the break.
And use those answers to design a break. That's going to do what you need it to do.
First question. What is on your quote? "I'll do it over break" mental list?
Do you have writing to catch up on house things to do, family to see, friends to visit? You might as well, dump it all out. And then check it for completeness. Is there anything you're missing? It's kind of like reorganizing your closet. In order to know what you want to save and what you want to keep. Sometimes you just have to dump it all out so that you can see it in one place.
Question two.
What break behaviors are modeled for you and your department in your field? With your colleagues, maybe even in your family, with your partner. Or your parents or your siblings, what do breaks mean to them? Does your advisor make a huge show of taking several suitcases full of books away from the office to catch up on that reading?
It matters what we see. So what behaviors are you seeing? Are you getting the message that breaks are meant to be spent in a certain way when you're an academic.
And last question. If I could wave a magic wand and pause time for two weeks, what do you imagine for yourself in that time? Do you see yourself in a mountain cabin with fiction books in a fire? Do you picture a black void that is just empty of any inputs? What do you picture and what can you learn from that fantasy? What does it suggest to you that you're actually really looking for in this break?
Okay. Let's now move into the experiments, which this week are three different strategies that you can use to both plan and move through your break, to make sure that you're getting as much of what you want. And as little of what you don't. Throughout that whole time period. My first experiment or strategy to try is to schedule the rest that you need first.
I don't know about you, but when I was teaching, I often would run through December. Like my pants were on fire. I would do all of the courses or do all of the planning or do all of the holiday prep. And then immediately, as soon as the semester was over and my grades returned in, I would get wickedly sick.
My immune system, which is give up. And I would be stuck on the couch. So that always said to me, I really need a fair bit of rest. I'm tired. I might be having a little bit of burnout. There's a variety of things that are happening. But if I also have a plan, that's like, okay, the instant that my grades are in, I'm going to start working on that chapter. Then it can be really difficult to know where, and when you're going to even have time to get that rest, if you feel like every minute should also be.
Occupied by some sort of other higher productive purpose. So in this experiment, go through your calendar and block off all of the times that you do not want to be writing. That you do not want to be working, that you do want to be actively resting. Maybe over the break. You only work from nine until noon, and only on specific days, maybe you take every weekend off.
Maybe you block the minute. That your grades are in until the time that you get back from your holiday as absolutely no work time. But whatever you sort of decide to block off schedule that first, it can be really helpful to then communicate that to people who are invested in seeing you over the break or invested in your plans.
It makes it easier if you schedule the rest first to draw some of those boundaries know when you're going to be available for other people to see you. And also start to counter that idea, right? From the jump that every minute of break is meant to be serving your productive. End of the year goals.
Schedule the rest first and then let the work take up. What's left after that.
Experiment two.. Communicating your boundaries. Dovetails very nicely. If I do say so myself with experiment one. So once you decide what time you're going to be available, what time is available for work and what time is available for rest, then you can start to tell that information to the stakeholders.
The people who are interested in it. I know that when I was living in California and traveling back for break. I would say to my parents. Okay. I am going to be working in the mornings from nine until noon. But anytime after that, and obviously any of these special holiday times, I'm going to be a hundred percent available to you. I'm not going to have my phone out. I won't be trying to do this reading. And that really made it easier for people to a respect my work time, because they did have things that needed to get done, but also know that I was there to see them.
I was making a commitment to see them and it was important to me and I scheduled it. Like it was an important thing for me. Maybe these boundaries need to be mostly communicated to yourself where you say, okay, self. I am not going to expect that every minute I'm need to be working. I will rest. If I'm tired, I will sleep in as late as I need to. I will spend time making foods that really nourish me. I will spend time watching my favorite holiday movies, whatever those boundaries are, communicating them, whether it's to yourself or to other people can really help add a little.
A bit of accountability around the fact that you do have multiple things that you want to get done and multiple things to balance.
And last but not least a strategy that I have implemented more recently, but has really, really helped me is to plan for a break check-in. By this, I mean, pick a point, maybe even multiple points. So if you have two weeks off at the end of the year, maybe in that intermediate weekend, You schedule a 15 minute check-in with yourself and say, okay, how did that go?
And what things have I learned? What plan do I want to make for the second half of this break, knowing what I know about how I'm feeling and how these boundaries are working and what happened in the first week. I really love this strategy, especially for people who say have some unexpected things happen.
If for instance, your immune system, like mine likes to give up the minute that your grades are in, it might be useful to set this break check-in and say, okay, that first week of break, I was absolutely zonked. There was no way I was going to be able to do anything. And my very ambitious plan for two weeks of balancing rest and deep focus work is off the table a little bit, but what can I do in this one week? That'll make me feel like I showed up for myself and got the most important things done.
Using that break check-in as a way to say, okay, I did some of the things, but not all of them. Here's what I want to do on purpose with the time and resources I have left. Is another way of setting a reset for yourself where it's not just, okay, I'm going to let this break ride. And then on January 3rd, I am going to check back in with myself and hope I got some things done.
It's knowing that what you need and what you want to do probably will evolve, especially if you're resting in your energy might be variable. And there's a lot of other people in places invested in your break as well. That break check-in can help you reset and realign with the resources that you have and the things that you want to do.
And to practice what I preach. I too will be taking a break at the end of this year. So this is if you're listening live or shortly after the release, the last episode for the year 2022, I will be back early in January to talk about coming back from break and resettling into a new rhythm. But thank you so much for being with me for this new project for this year. And in any of the other spaces that we connect.
I really appreciate it. And I'm wishing you an end of the year that is filled with all that you want it to be. And as little of what you don't. Happy new year.
📍 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. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
9 - Why is it so hard to reset when your day gets off track?
episode 9 - Why is it so hard to reset when your day gets off track?
Has your day ever been completely off the rails by 10 am? Do you have a tendency to abandon ship at the first sign of distraction, or stick with a task that's going nowhere way longer than you should? Resetting when we lose focus is so hard - but this week, I'll share all my best strategies for getting to the bottom of why it's hard for you, and things you can try to rescue some of that time back and work on purpose.
Video on pom timers here - and episode on gamifying the middle here!
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
The biggest and only sale of the year is happening at thrive-phd.com. Check the link in the show notes for more information.
Who among us hasn't said. I'll do that tomorrow. Or put something off until next week when the feeling of freshness is back or maybe started to plan earlier than maybe is necessary for a new here where everything is going to be fresh and clean, and we'll be the best versions of ourselves. One of the reasons that all of those coping mechanisms are so powerful and common, I have them, you have them, lots of people have them.
It's because we all on some level really like a reset. We love a new chance. We love a chance to start again. We love a clean and fresh slate. So let's talk about resetting as a grad student this week. What makes it hard and things that you can do to make it easier so that you don't need to wait for a new year, a new month or even a new day to make some progress.
Let's get into it.
Okay. So part of what makes resetting so hard to accomplish is that a lot of us have what is known. As the all or nothing, cognitive distortion. Now, I'm not going to get into CBT here, but I think this concept is really useful. And it's one that I see in myself and my clients all the time. If we can't do all of it, we're going to do none of it.
If we can't have a perfect eight hour Workday, what's the point of even starting to work at all? You know that feeling where unless we're going to do it, do it all and maybe even do it perfectly. We might as well just sit on the couch and watch Netflix.
I'm not knocking Netflix here. Goodness knows. I've watched my fair share of it in the last few weeks, but this sense of all or nothing becomes so tricky because if one little thing gets off track. If we lose focus, if we get distracted, if an unexpected task comes up, then there can be this really loud, blaring alarm in our brain that says, ah, you're off track. You're un- focused.
Better wait until you can start again.
Some of us hear this alarm more loudly than other people. But many of us have it. And that's what drives us to, to that sense of, I'll try this again tomorrow. Tomorrow's a , new day. It's not bad. It's just one of the patterns.
Another thing that makes resetting so difficult, especially for grad students, is that there's never enough time to do everything that we want to do. And so if there's never enough time, why would we spend even a minute of it restarting, refocusing, resetting, or caring for ourselves in a way that makes us get a fresh start?
We should just keep pushing. So if your habit isn't to abandoned ship at the first sign of distraction, maybe your habit is to chain yourself to your desk and say, okay, no matter what, I'm going to push through this. Even if my focus is dropping off, if I'm getting distracted, if I'm bouncing between task to task, I'm going to keep staying here because I don't have enough time to do this as it is. And every second that goes by, I'm wasting it. So I don't have the time to stop and start again. I only had the time to keep going.
Some brains have more trouble with transitions than others. , let's be real. This is one of those hard things that shows up differently and has different degrees of difficulty, depending on who you are. What your brain is doing and what your life circumstances look like. If you are a neuro-typical person who works in an office and loves the gentle accountability of everybody else working when you were also working.
Then maybe resetting or staying on task in the first place isn't one of your problems. Feel free to skip the rest of this episode and come back next week. But if you are a person who really struggles with transitions, maybe you have some executive focus, challenges that make it difficult for you to pick something to work on in the first place.
Then. Resetting can feel like adding more transitions, a notoriously difficult spot in the day for you. Into your schedule on purpose, which like many of these strategies can feel really counterintuitive.
No matter how this difficulty is showing up for you. Whether you need resets often or only occasionally. Let's dig into the questions that help you narrow down how this is showing up for you and what you might want to do about it.
Question one. What does distraction look like on you? How does it show up in your behaviors? Your emotions, your patterns, your habits, maybe your browsing history. What does distraction look like? And how do you know when it's happening?
Question two. What do you imagine that focus looks like. How close does that come to what your data suggests about what focus looks like on you? This is another way of asking, what are you expecting focused to look or feel like? And what does it actually feel like for you in your body? I know many people who feel that focus should look like working on one task at a time hand for their brains and bodies. They get a lot done bouncing between three projects at once. So what's the difference between what you imagine and what you actually experience?
And lastly, what is your most common reset interval? Are you a new day person, maybe a new week, a new term, a new year. What do you consider the marker of freshness where you get an automatic chance to try again?
For our experiments this week, I am sharing three of my favorite things that you can try that might help making that reset during the day, a little bit easier to accomplish. Experiment number one. It's something that I call a soft reset.
Soft resets happen naturally throughout the course of your day. All of the time. If you think about what a schedule for a kindergarten class looks like, there are usually different activities. They last a certain amount of time, and there's some chance for the students to transition between them. Maybe it's a clapping of the teacher's hand. Maybe it's a cleanup song, but each one of those moments of transition offer our young kindergartners, a chance to transition between tasks on purpose. You can make a soft reset, work in your life by doing that same thing, marking the transition between one task and another. This could look like a pom timer and check the show notes for a whole video about Pomodoro timers. They could look like timed work sessions.
Or simply switching tasks on purpose.
A soft reset is a great tool to use anytime that you catch yourself doing something that you didn't mean to. Some people call this task, drift. Some people call this getting distracted, but the goal of a soft reset as gentle as it is, is to give yourself a mental pause and say, okay, that's what I was doing.
This is what I'm doing now. A chance to try to do something else on purpose.
Experiment number two is the slightly more involved version of a soft reset. Something that I call a hard reset. These are for those days when you really, really need a chance to try again. Maybe you got up and by 10 o'clock your whole day is off the rails. You aren't doing what you meant to. You're completely distracted. You're getting really down on yourself. Perfect conditions for a hard reset.
Now there are two main rules. I think that make a hard reset. So successful.
The first feature of a hard reset is to get your body involved. I don't know about you, but if I just sit at my desk and say, okay, I'm going to look at Twitter for three minutes, and then I'm going to start my day again. The chances that something different will happen are very small. But if I get my body involved, if I go for a walk around the block or maybe take a break to do a workout or a yoga video,
Sometimes I even go full throttle and take a shower and put on a new pair of clothes. That signals to my body that a change has happened, a break between whatever happened before that I needed to reset from. And day attempt number two is real. I can feel it. I can feel it. From my head down to my tippy tippy toes.
And the second part that makes a hard reset so successful is giving your brain the full permission that it needs to do something different. For some people, this looks like getting a new page of their planner out. And planning the day what's left of it from scratch. I know people who use this technique and reset their task manager for the day.
Maybe they pull out a post-it note and write top three tasks that they want to accomplish in the reset, but whatever it is, you give your brain permission to work on something. Again. To make a barrier between what happened and what is going to happen.
Hard reset can be so successful because it takes whatever is left of that Workday, that work session, maybe that week.
And instead of saying, I'll try it again. Whatever the next reset interval is, you give yourself that time back, you take it back from the loss column and you say, what could I do with this? It isn't perfect. You know, you can't accomplish what you can in eight hours in three hours, but getting three hours and proving to yourself that you can reset that you can refocus that you can give yourself a chance to try again.
And move forward. That self-trust is so important and the more that you can build it and practice it the easier and the gentler it can be to reset multiple times throughout the day, whenever and wherever you need it.
And last but not least experiment three is for anyone who is finding the whole concept of resetting really sticky or difficult, like it means that they're giving into their distraction or it's something that they just feel. You know, I'm pretty sticky about in general, whether that's shame or guilt or whatever your soup of the day is.
Counting your resets. Can be an excellent experiment. This builds on some of the gamification techniques that we talked about in a previous episode linked in show notes, but the idea is that rather than tracking your poms or giving yourself a sticker for every 50 words that you write. You track the number of times that you reset over the course of the day or the week.
It sounds counterintuitive to say, why would I track this thing that in general, I would like to avoid.
But the idea is that you give yourself points and that little bit of a dopamine hit for the behavior that you want to encourage. So you want to encourage the idea that you can reset at any time that you need to, that no days wasted that no hour is so distracted that you can't bring yourself back and work on purpose. So you count the number of resets you aim for 50.
If you aim for 50 and you only hit 20 well that's 20 times that you brought yourself back from a place that you didn't want to be in, worked on something on purpose. That's 20 times that you didn't give up, that you restarted, that you gave yourself a chance to try again. You're counting the behavior that you want to encourage, which both makes it less shameful to do it and makes it easier and more fun to hit that reset button, to hit it quickly and gently.
So much of the way that I talk to myself and the way that I work with my clients changed when I stopped thinking about the goal of all of these strategies as never getting distracted or always staying focused or having these perfect. Perfectly consistent workdays. When I instead switch the goal to noticing when I'm off track and bringing myself back to what I wanted to be working on and doing that on purpose. So many things got easier because I wasn't afraid of getting distracted. I accepted that as part of the deal.
That was just going to be happening. So my job switched from being disciplining myself into focus and into supporting myself. When I noticed that I'm not.
And if this podcast makes it even 1% easier to switch from disciplining yourself to supporting yourself, then it's all been worth it. Yeah. See you next week. Oh,
📍 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. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
8 - Why is working with feedback so hard?
episode 8 - Why is working with feedback so hard?
So, you got up your nerve and asked for feedback on your work...now what?? It can be so hard to process someone else's thoughts on how, where, when, and why your work should change, and balance their suggestions with your own vision. This episode has strategies to help you move through that a little more efficiently, a little more gently, and hopefully with just a dash more empowerment.
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
The biggest and only sale of the year is happening at thrive-phd.com. Check the link in the show notes for more information.
If asking for feedback is one of the more vulnerable things that you can do as a grad student, receiving and processing and moving your work forward based on that feedback? Well, that's even harder. So this week, let's talk about some strategies, some experiments to try some places to reflect around what your process is for taking other people's ideas on how you should do your work and incorporating them into your own scholarship.
One of the things that's so hard about processing feedback is that most of us push toward some sort of submission. We use that to monitor our energy. We say, okay, I'm going to get this chapter ready to send to my advisor by the end of the month. You push you get that chapter ready.
And then you're it feels done. You feel like you can take a break and switch to other projects, but then the feedback comes back and then you are very much undone. You have things to address and it can really sort of make you feel like you're going backwards. Processing feedback can be really uncomfortable because what you thought was up to a certain point is not at that point anymore through no fault of your own.
And a lot of the changes in that feedback can be more substantial than you're used to. I know that when I started grad school, I was really only used to copy editing my paper, checking things over for spelling mistakes, maybe a grammar mistake here or there. I'd never actually changed much of anything that was more substantial than that. I definitely hadn't done any major restructurings.
I hadn't paid attention to citations. I hadn't thought about my voice really in any substantial way. So the kind of feedback that I was used to was much more quickly addressed than the kind of feedback that I was now working with. And that made me feel like I just wasn't a good writer which may into processing that feedback even harder.
One of the things that's really hard for scholars in grad school and even further along in the field is that the feedback are based on what other people think that you should do with your work. And it can be really difficult to balance what you envisioned for the project, the directions you want to take it in, the way you want to write it, the way you want to research it, with all of the people who have more or less power depending on the situation to make you do it their way. Some suggestions are really great and you're excited because they move the project forward into a way that you couldn't have imagined and it feels even better than what you could have pictured. And then some things really don't feel like they're in line with the kind of work, the kind of scholarship you want to do.
So processing feedback can be this very tricky dance where you're trying to balance your own voice and vision for the project with the feedback from people who have the power to get your dissertation passed or get that article published or give you a book contract. It's certainly not as straightforward as checking for any typos.
This is a sensitive topic. So put your feet on the floor, take a deep breath and think about these questions. You might want to get a journal. You might want to go for a walk and think about them, but let's dive into what feels salient about the way that you already interact with feedback.
Question one. If you were to write out the steps of how you process feedback - so you get a draft back it's covered in feedback - what would you do? What are the steps?
What is the order? Sometimes we don't have a good understanding of our own system, or we've never really done that before. So it can be hard to imagine a different way.
Question two. What role does feedback play in your professional ecosystem? Is it given regularly and constructively? Infrequently or less than generously? What are the constraints that you're working with? Does your advisor take forever to get feedback back to you? And then you're really in a rush to integrate it? Do they want to see a draft every single week? And then every single week you have things to change and you feel like you're revising the same 10 pages over and over again? What are the constraints that you maybe feel like you can't change? You might not be able to reach into your advisor's brain and make them better at feedback. And what are the things that you could imagine working differently?
And then lastly, how does feedback work with your brain and emotional landscape? Are you working with rejection sensitivity? Or do you seek out a lot of extra feedback for validation that you're on the right track? So often our human stuff comes out to play during activities that feel tied to our worth and performance and feedback on your writing is nothing but one of the most intense versions of that kind of experience. So it's worth looking at what your overall relationship is to things like feedback or criticism or suggestions that you could or need to change.
But let's get into some of the experiments that you can try now that you've received some feedback.
The first one I'm calling, working big to small. I know that the first couple of times I got substantial feedback on a piece of writing. I opened it up and I started to address the comments from the top of the draft to the bottom. Unfortunately, this often meant that I changed the introduction of a chapter or an article so substantially that I almost lost track of what the chapter was supposed to do, what things I was changing. And it got really frustrating and confusing in the middle, trying to change things at all of these different levels at once.
So I really recommend that you work through all the feedback and decide what are the really big changes that you need to make on down to the smaller ones. So if there is a suggestion that you might want to restructure things, it's better to do that big restructuring and then work with all of your transition sentences. Otherwise you're going to be polishing transition sentences for transitions that no longer exist.
You get the drift, but this can be counter, intuitive. Especially, if you are used to a more copy editing style of feedback, where you kind of go through and you address the typos, you address the changes one by one. If your doing something that's much closer to revision, which almost all of us are that strategy can really backfire. So work from big to small and see what happens with your overall sense of flow and understanding of that piece as it changes.
Experiment two is categorizing and sorting feedback into three different categories. I love a three column list. If you hang out on this podcast long enough, I'm sure I will suggest. Uh, other three column lists that you can do. But this one is one of my favorites. Especially if you're processing feedback from someone who gives you a lot of feedback, they write down every thought, or this can be really helpful if you're revising a substantial amount of writing, more than three or four pages.
You make a list of all the things that you're going to change or that are suggested that you can change. And you sort those items one by one into three different categories. The first category are the things that you're definitely going to fix. They're good suggestions. You think they need it? They make the piece stronger. Automatic Yes From you. Those all go in column one.
Column two are the things that you might do, but you're not really sure. They could be a good idea, but it may be depends on a restructuring or if you've changed some of the literature. There are things that you want to come back to later. You haven't ruled them in or ruled them out yet. And you've maybe guessed it, but column three are the things that you absolutely will not do.
I really like to empower grad students to make this third column, because many of us feel like we can't. Then, if our advisor says that we have to change something, then you have to change it no matter what. And to be clear, some advisers do expect you to implement every single one of their changes and that's a different situation.
But if you're getting feedback from somebody, maybe from a writing group member or a committee member that doesn't know the whole project or somebody that's dropping in and giving feedback without all of the context, then there can be a list that you make that's called, "these are great ideas, but not for me."
And then once you have your three columns, that's the order in which you do the revisions. You start with this stuff that you're definitely going to do. And then you move things in that middle column into, yes. This is a good suggestion in this new world. I'm going to work with that or, no, I don't think this one applies anymore.
I also love this strategy because it can help you get out of the mindset that every suggestion is one that you need to take. This way you have a list of the suggestions that you considered and the reasons why, whether you wrote them down or not, you decided not to use them which can help you feel really empowered as a writer that you don't need to do every single thing that every person on earth suggests because it's your project.
Experiment three is for all of my people out there who feel a lot of sensitivity and vulnerability around feedback. I count myself among you, by the way. One strategy that can be really effective that I suggest that you experiment with is having a friend, a colleague, this can even be a non-academic person read through the feedback and summarize it for you. So if you have a draft that's covered in red ink and you just can't bear to look at it and you have a friend in your corner.
Sometimes it can be really helpful to send it to them and say, Hey, can you summarize like the top five most important things that this person thinks I should change? And then you work off of a clean copy of your writing to make those revisions.
If you get the kind of archetypal. Reviewer two who just sort of slashes through your work in a way that's not helpful or constructive at all. This can be a really excellent way to kind of soften some of the blow of that. Have it be translated into more actionable language by a person that cares about you and cares about the work.
And then you work from the translation and not the unfiltered, deeply ungenerous reality. Or the unfiltered completely overwhelming reality. There is no rule that says that once somebody gives you feedback, that becomes the most important copy of your work.
Sit down with that list of things that you could do, the list of things that your friend has sort of summarized for you. And work from that version as opposed to the one that's covered in some useful, but a lot of not useful feedback. Whether that's overwhelming ungenerous or both.
I really want to encourage softness with this particular week of experiments and overall with the process of processing feedback. It can be really difficult on our nervous systems on our heart and even on our kind of scholarly identity to feel like somebody thinks that this piece needs to actively change, but....
I'm here to tell you from the other side of that particular moat, that all academic writers revise their writing heavily. Many of us are moving through multiple rounds of feedback, multiple rounds of revision, different editors, different reviewers revises, and resubmits committee feedback. Start from the drawing board. That's all part of the kind of very complex writing that academic work generally tends to be.
So if you're finding it difficult, you are 100% not alone. And I hope that some of these strategies help make it feel a little bit more doable and less overwhelming. 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. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
7 - Why is it so hard to ask for feedback on your work?
episode 7 - Why is it so hard to ask for feedback on your work?
Why is it so hard to ask for feedback on your work? And why is it sometimes even harder to get the kind of feedback we WANT on your work, when and how you want it? This episode is all about one of the biggest (and hardest) skill jumps a grad student has to make - going from seeing feedback as a grade, to seeing it as a tool to develop work.
A few resources on reading and evaluating writing, in case they're useful!
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
There's still time to join us in AcWriMo. And there'll be more details about that at the end of this podcast.
When I started to plan for this podcast, I knew I had to have an episode about asking for feedback, because this is one of the hardest things that grad students do. And it's also one of the most mysterious things. We have a sort of narrative that people get feedback on their writing, but who really knows how much, what kind, at what frequency, from what people...
All of those questions are really idiosyncratic. They vary wildly from discipline to discipline from sometimes even supervisor to supervisor. So let's zoom out a little bit and think about why the process for asking for feedback can be so difficult. And what things you might want to do about it.
The first reason that asking for feedback is really hard is because we're not often used to feedback as development. We're used to feedback as evaluation. If I were to ask many young grad students in the beginning of their programs what feedback means to them - most of them, I have to bet would say, "oh, it's the comments at the end of the paper. It's the work that I get on my exams when I turn it in so that I can do better for next time."
Which is a model of feedback where your work is judged against a standard. And the feedback is meant to show you where you fallen short in some ways or what things you've done well so that you can take that knowledge into a new class, into a new project.
But often as a grad student, you're working on a complex project with many parts over the course of years often, and the feedback is meant to help you develop the project instead of evaluate it. The feedback helps you pick a better research question or narrow down the variables for your experiment. But if you're used to that feedback coming as a, "did I do a good enough job on this? Yes or no?" kind of frame, it can be really difficult to get that feedback. And ask for it because it feels like asking to be graded on purpose.
Another thing that can be really difficult about asking for feedback is that you might not know what's possible until you hear the range of feedback that's being offered to other grad students in your department, in your university, around the world. I sometimes hear from clients that they have one single source of feedback: that they can only share drafts in progress with a PI, or with a chair of a committee. And then I know other people who live in a department culture where the entire committee gathers to discuss a chapter in progress and you get a rich, robust, beautiful conversation with five or six or even seven people. Sometimes some departments have a culture of helping develop work in pro seminars or in colloquiums or in workshops for feedback. But other people really only work with one person. And if that one person isn't giving you the feedback that you want or need, it can be hard to imagine a world beyond what you've been given. Or to feel like you can ask for something different if it's not being offered to you.
And lastly let's be real, not all mentors or supervisors or the people giving you feedback are skilled at giving feedback. So one or more bad experiences - feedback that's not helpful, feedback that's really harsh - can really turn you off to the idea of like, yes, I volunteer as tribute for more of this criticism, please. And because we don't often train supervisors. Into the very difficult role of how do you see somebody else's work? How do you not push them exactly into the way that you would do it? And develop what's strong about what's already there - that's a high level skill that a lot of people aren't getting training in. So it both makes sense that people aren't great at it off the jump. And it also makes sense that lots of people are a little bit hesitant to ask for more.
So get your notebooks out, take a deep breath, and let's think about some questions that might help you figure out where your own stickiness is when it comes to asking for feedback.
What are the hardest parts of your writing process? Where do you tend to get stuck the most? Is it in the idea generation phase? Is it in the site citing other pieces of literature phase? Is it in the revision or the argumentation stages? But where do you tend to get stuck the most? Or what are the parts that you find to be the hardest?
What feedback experiences - for good or for bad - have stuck with you? How was that feedback given? How much time or space or support were you given in processing it? What is the model of feedback that you're applying to every one of these interactions moving forward as either the gold standard? Or the very much not gold standard?
And lastly, if you're a teacher. What kind of feedback do you offer your students? What do you notice about the process of giving feedback of grading, of evaluating of helping to develop works in progress that you can maybe use to think about what feedback is being offered to you? Because let's be real. You are also still a student.
Now some experiments to try, because I'm not just going to say, "wow, all of this is hard. Good luck out there, kiddos." The first one is getting specific about the kind of feedback that you're actually requesting. It's not nine times out of 10, but maybe five or six times out of 10. I see that people are able to get more of the feedback that they want by being able to more accurately name what they're looking for. So maybe imagine a rubric for graduate student writing. And if that's something that's hard for you to imagine, I've put some resources in the show notes for you. But think about what kinds of feedback we evaluate writing on? Is it structure, is it flow? Is it argument? Is it cohesiveness? Is it comprehensiveness?
And then I think about what level of feedback are you looking for? And how much time do you have to implement it? The kind of feedback that I'm looking for on a Friday when the chapter is due on Monday is very different than the kind of feedback that I want when I have maybe a few weeks or a couple of months to develop this paper or this chapter. And I'm actually looking for feedback about which ideas seems most promising. As opposed to what are two or three things that I can do today before the end of the day before I send this chapter off. So think about what kind of levels you're looking at, maybe what kind of levels of feedback you're lacking so that you can be more specific with the request that you ask for, whether that's with your supervisor.
Or. With the people that you identify in experiment two. Which is something that I'm calling, creating a feedback Rolodex. If you've never seen one before. Rolodex is an old fashioned way to keep track of people's phone numbers. It was a sat on desks. You maybe you've seen them in a variety of period television shows, but basically you would flip through it and it would help jog your memory of all of the people in your network. So this idea is for you to create a team, so to speak a feedback team.
And just like in any team, you're going to say, who is good at what? Maybe you have a friend who's an amazing copy editor. They're going to be a great person to help you proof a manuscript right before it needs to go to a journal.
Maybe you have a friend from a couple seminars ago that really loved the same things that you did, that are now the foundational texts of your work. And so you think about what they might help you with in terms of idea development or understanding of the literature or citing some of these authors.
You make this list and you say, okay, who are these people?
What are their superpowers? Who are these people on your feedback team? Who can you barter with? Maybe you set up a draft exchange with that really good friend who's great at using the same literature is you and you both agree to read drafts whenever the other person needs to, because that kind of foundational idea generation isn't really happening with your supervisors.
I really recommend that grad students create this team, not just of faculty members of mentors, but also their colleagues. Some of the best feedback that I got was from people who were underneath me in the program, because they were working in coursework with all of the foundational texts that I was drawing on. So it felt really fresh to them. So be creative and create that Rolodex so that you feel like your ability to get feedback doesn't hinge on just one person or just one specific group of people. And you have more places to go.
And our last experiment is to practice giving feedback yourself. I mentioned before that I think that a thriving economy of grad students supporting grad students is something really helpful. I think it's helpful to help people see that they're not alone. Writing groups for example, are really good for this.
Like writing, feedback is a skill. And the more you practice it, the better you get at delivering it. So you become a more valuable member of other people's feedback teams. Always something that's helpful to offer your scholarly community, but you also can be more adept at figuring out what kinds of feedback you're actually looking for.
The more you think about the process of giving feedback, the easier it becomes to specifically request the kinds and types and frequency of feedback that you're actually looking for. And if you don't have a scholarly community and let's be real pandemics have made a lot of that, a lot more challenging.
You can also think about your feedback process as you're grading, if you're in a process or a position where you teach people. I learned so much about what I was looking for in terms of feedback, by giving feedback to my students. It really helped me see, "oh, wow. It is really overwhelming if somebody gives you every thought in their head while they read a draft."
It is really frustrating if I tell my students two days before the deadline that, "oh yeah, this outline's not really going to work" . So giving more. Feedback, both as a reader and receiving it as a writer helps the whole ecosystem go round.
I am in no way here to undercut how sensitive it can be to put your work on the line and ask for people to look at it and tell you what's good about it and what things could be improved. But I think that it's one of the biggest skill jumps that grad students make - is this idea that when we ask other people for feedback, it's not because we want them to grade us.
It's because we want them to help us develop the work and that if you need help, developping a complex idea, then that's not a failure, that is making scholarship happen in a community. We all make scholarship happen in a community, whether that's asynchronously through sharing work, reading other people's writing, or in person or slightly more real time exchanging drafts.
Nobody does this alone. And the more that you can build a system of supportive feedback for yourself, the easier it is to see how and where other people are developing this work too. Until next time!
📍 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, where you can also sign up for AcWriMo 2022, a free month of writing support and resources. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
6 - Why is the middle of a big project so hard?
episode 6 - why is the middle of a big project so hard?
The middle of the project, well, it can be messy! But if you're in the middle - of a project, a term, a month like AcWriMo - well then this is the episode for you. I'm talking all about strategies for you to try to help bring a little sparkle into that mess!
Mentioned in the podcast is Duolingo!
sign up for AcWriMo 2022 - and get a whole month of free resources to support your writing during a time of year where it is SO easy not to write!
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
There's still time to join us in AcWriMo. And there'll be more details about that at the end of this podcast.
As I record this. I'm recording from the middle of the month of November. But you might be listening to it in the middle of a big project, the middle of a sprint, the middle of the semester, maybe the middle of the year. Whatever kind of middle you're in - Let's talk about why the middle, lovingly referred to as the messy middle, can feel just so hard.
Who doesn't love a fresh, shiny new beginning. I know that I definitely do. I love new year's Eve. I love new year's day. I love new notebooks. I love the start of a month. I love a new moon. I love a fresh start. Because it hasn't been wrecked yet. There's sparkle. There's an excitement. It's the time that I am the most in touch with the version of myself that believes I can do it.
It's the part of me that knows that I am trying, and then it could be hard, but I'm giving it all I can. I love that feeling.
The beginning of AcWriMo could have felt that way for you or maybe at the beginning of a chapter or the beginning of a new semester. It's all to play for. So to speak.
And then there's the end. It isn't as rested, usually as the beginning, but it has its own set of sparkles about it. It's the ability to see the finish line, the fact that you can cross things off your to-do list and they stay crossed off. You can do whatever you need to because the end is in sight and you know that it won't last forever.
The end might be tiring. It might be exhausting, but it has an end. And that can make it a little bit more tolerable for sure.
So if we have the sparkle of the beginning and the promise of the end. What does the middle have? Well, Nothing. Unless you add it. And that's, what's so hard, it's that the middle in order to have that sparkle or that sense of engagement often needs things to be added to it. It doesn't come as naturally. So many of us can feel like the middle of projects are wandering. We get distracted. We go down rabbit holes or we just simply clock in clock out, put our silly little words in our silly little document and hope that eventually we'll have the degree.
If all of that is resonating with you, take a minute. Take a deep breath, grab your notebook and let's get into what you associate with the middle, what it looks like for you, what behaviors are associated with this week's reflection questions.
Number one: What happens to you in the middle? Do you tend to push too hard, too fast, and then you absolutely crash after the first 20%?. Do you have a lot of trouble getting started? And then you pushed back, pushed back, pushed back, and the middle becomes a sort of dance between adrenaline and avoidance?
What are your patterns in the middle of big projects?
Question two. What chunks of time makes sense to you? What chunks are too big for you to really hold in your brain and what are too little for you to truly be involved in? For example for me, a week is the sweet spot. It's not so small that it feels really high stakes and that there isn't a chance to redo things, but it's not so long that I get absolutely lost in the sheer expanse of it..
You might feel that way about days versus hours or weeks versus months, but what chunks of time makes sense to you?
And then lastly, what is most sparkly to you? What really lights you up? Is it that sense of newness? Is it actually having constraints and limits and boundaries? Is it validation, the hit of feedback or that pat on the back that maybe you're looking for? Is it community that feels sparkly to you knowing that you're not doing it all by yourself?
Is it visibility that you can see it changing, even if it's changing slowly? But what feels sparkly to you? What feels motivating? What feels engaging?
All right. I've saved a lot of time in this week's episode for the experiments, because these are some really fun ones, but they take a little bit more explanation. They are absolutely inspired by the, not at all a sponsor of this podcast, but true love of my life. At least right now, Duolingo. If you've never used the app, Duolingo, it's a language learning app.
It's based right here in Pittsburgh, which is where I am also based. So it's a hometown app for me, but I love that I get points. I love that I can see my progress and the reason that Duolingo works so well is that it gamifies learning a language. And by that I mean, it makes it fun. It makes it rewarding. It gives you clear sets of instructions for clear outcomes and clear benefits. Learning a language, much like a dissertation, is a project that has a start, a middle and an end and some measurable deliverables, but also can be lifelong. It's ongoing like the work of scholarship. So it's a good place to look and see what they're doing to make the middle a little bit more exciting.
Okay. The first experiment to try is additive tracking. This is my term for any set of tracking that you do that measures the time that you showed up. A very clear example of this in Duolingo and in a lot of other places, are your streaks. Right now, as of recording, I have a 154 day streak of learning French on my Duolingo app. I'm really proud of that. The fact that I can recall that without looking at my phone or even preparing for that particular stat means that it means something to me that I've done it for a hundred fifty four days.
That streak is rewarding. It doesn't tell you how many new words I've learned or whether or not I played the same amount every day, or if I did the same number of lessons, it's just the sheer satisfaction of watching that number build up over time. For any set of skill-building things, whether that's learning a language or learning to write in an academic way, having a streak can be really motivating because it can help you see that yes, the milestone might still be far away, but you've showed up 50 times, 20 times a hundred times! And that's really rewarding. That is a sense that you're doing it. You're putting your butt in the chair. You're showing up.
It's the same principle that we talked about last week with toilet training charts, it's taking those mini sessions that might not in themselves be totally rewarding and linking them together so that they become more than the sum of their parts.
Okay. Experiment number two: Restrict one variable.
In the middle, there can be a sense of deja vu that every week is the same. Every writing session is the same. You sit down, you show up, you write your silly little words in your silly little document, and that's the end of it. So in a restrict one variable experiment, you do just that. You add an artificial sometimes completely arbitrary limit to your process, To see what that changes about the experience of it.
Going back to our example Duolingo uses that by timed challenges. Every week you compete against people in a specific league. There is a sense that yes, learning a language is lifelong, but in this week I am actively trying to get into the obsidian league, and so I have to beat these random people in my league. And make sure that I'm doing as much or more of my lesson learning than they are. You can do this in your own writing or your own projects too. Maybe you set aside a sprint week with a baseline, a stretch, and a challenge goal of how many articles you want to get through for your comps. And you say, okay, for this week I'm going to try as hard as I can to do this. I'm going to set up different structures.
Awesome. This is my sprint week. I won't do this all the time, but it's going to feel really good. Maybe you do a time challenge, like AcWriMo that's the exact same principle. You take a month, you set it aside. You really push to make November feel different than October or December.
And last but not least our third experiment is to add in even more accountability in between those milestones. This is something that Duolingo does with the reminders. Hey, have you checked in today? Those reminders are so persistent that they're their own meme, but they do work.
It does work to have this little green owl text me at eight o'clock and remind me that I have a streak that I'm going to lose if I don't get my butt into my Duolingo doing chair.
So this accountability might feel a little bit strange because most of the time we want accountability for the finished product: the end goal, the submission. Did I do this on time? But adding in some accountability in between can be really helpful. If your advisor is game for it, one of the most powerful tools I've seen, some of my clients use is sending an update email to their advisor every other Friday or so. Maybe once a month, maybe adding in a status report during team check-in meetings... the mode can really vary, but adding a quick accountability update: "this is what I did. This is where I'm stuck. This is what's going well, and this is what I'm going to do next time" can really add a little bit of that accountability, that visibility that we're all looking for. In-between the , now go do it. And the turn it in stage. This can also work really well with friends in a group chat, with people on Twitter. You can join a community, maybe like the thrive PhD community and have daily check-ins or weekly check-ins if you want.
I've seen people do really great things with the hundred days of dissertation writing on Instagram challenge where you post a picture every day.
The method really doesn't matter. The science does, which is adding that little bit of accountability.
And like our Duolingo app, the importance is that we're building a habit through the changes. Through the ups and downs, the weeks where you only could do one lesson, to the weeks where you won your whole league The point of these messy middle support strategies is that it helps keep us on track in between the exciting beginning and the satisfying finale, where we need a lot of support. And we often don't think to give it to ourselves. So. May your messy middle be a little bit more sparkly, a little bit more visible and give you a little bit of the boost that you need to make it just that much closer to the finish line. 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, where you can also sign up for AcWriMo 2022, a free month of writing support and resources. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5 - Why is it so hard to push for a deadline?
episode 5 - Why is it so hard to push for a deadline?
If you're anything like me, you used to be great at deadlines! Undergrad you might have waited a little long to get that paper started, but you always clicked into gear and got things in on time....and then you hit grad school. I get into why it's really hard to get the energy to push for a big deadline - any why the tools you've used before may not work like they used to, but most importantly, what you can do about it to push in a sustainable way. Enjoy!
sign up for AcWriMo 2022 - and get a whole month of free resources to support your writing during a time of year where it is SO easy not to write!
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
There's still time to join us in AcWriMo. And there'll be more details about that at the end of this podcast.
But for now, let's get into something else that's really hard about grad school: deadlines; and specifically finding enough energy to push when we have them. So if you're anything like me, you're probably in grad school, because some part of you was good at handling deadlines. At least when they're school-related.
Maybe you were good at studying at the last minute or spreading it out, but we got good at doing our work and producing it under time pressure. So why does it suddenly get so hard when it's a dissertation chapter? Or a conference paper or a journal article, or any of the other things that we have going on in grad school that in theory should feel pretty close to what we've done before, but in practice feel pretty far away.
So I think that pushing for deadlines is hard for a couple of reasons, but one of the big ones is that pushing hard toward a deadline when you're already working pretty hard is ...it's hard. It takes a lot of effort to keep pushing and pushing, because there's so much in grad school that you could be doing.
Even if there isn't a specific deadline, many of us walk around with this sense that we should be working on that journal article. We should be turning that seminar paper into something we can publish. There's something in a couple of weeks that we should really get ready for. The work is constant.
And it's not like it was on a semester or a term schedule where there were lulls built into the syllabus. If you want more work to do during grad school, you can always find it. So if you're already feeling that sense of "I should be working all of the time," a deadline isn't going to make that feel any easier.
Another reason that deadlines can really add some stress and pressure is because they reset the baseline for what we expect of ourselves during any given work week. Raise your hand (or don't, you know, it's a podcast,) but raise your hand if you've ever had a really gigantic Workday. You know, you were stressed out about something that was due the next day you got up, you worked for 10 hours, you finished it.
And you're like, "wow!. First of all, that was terrible. Let's never do it again, but also I just proved to myself that I can focus for 10 hours straight. So why aren't I doing that every other day?" When there isn't a deadline?" That's what I mean by resetting the baseline. A lot of us will pull out these kinds of magnificent feats of adrenaline-fueled achievement and then say, "well, I did it once. That's what I should be able to do every day no matter the condition." So we don't really get the sense that a push is anything special. A push becomes something that we expect of ourselves.
And lastly. I think that pushing for deadlines can be really hard because we don't always get a chance to take a break afterwards.
Or at least not a substantial one. There's always something else to do. You might be pushing for your own deadline and then have to turn around and get all of the grading done. You're working toward the end of the year, all of the deadlines tend to coalesce. And unless you really plan and advocate for a break afterward, there's always something that you could be doing that make it feel really hard to completely disconnect and get back to a place of feeling rested after a deadline push. So to go a little bit deeper into why deadline pushes might be a little bit tricky for you, why your expectations might be a little bit shifted, let's get into our questions to consider.
As always feel free to pause this recording, get your journal out. Maybe talk about it with a trusted processor or a friend, but here we go.
Question one. What reasons feel good enough for a push? Is planning a big push for yourself a special occurrence, or is it something that you do regularly? Put another way. How big does the deadline have to be in order for you to push?
Question two. What do you rhythms of work look like overall? Are you a push crash push person where you work 10, 12, even longer hour days for a couple of days in a row? And then you crash for as long as you need to? Are you a person who goes steady, steady, steady and then a push? Maybe you are an avoider who has other flavors of busy until the panic about something specific sets in, and then it's a mad dash to the finish. But what do your rhythms of work look like overall and how to pushes fit into that?
And our last question. How much room do you have or would you have for a push? Are you at capacity right now? Are you at capacity time-wise? energy-wise? support wise? How about your body? Your brain? Are you at capacity or how much do you realistically have to put toward an over the top, beyond your normal efforts, push toward a deadline or some other piece of important work?
So now that you have that own personal data about what pushes look like for you -- what you expect of yourself when you do them -- let's figure out how to push in a little bit more of a sustainable way. How do we experiment with what it feels like to push? Not as a matter of course, and not as something that we only do when we're panicked, but a tool in our toolbox that we can use with intention.
So experiment one. Define the duration of your push. So putting this another way - make a rule for yourself that you will not push without an ending. So the way that this might look for you is saying, "okay, I will push until this deadline, but then no further. I will stop doing my bananas hours, days, I will stop eating lunch at my desk after this push has done."
How will you define it? Is it toward a deadline? Is it a milestone of completion? I will stop pushing like this once I get a rough draft done. But as a side note to this experiment, I also encourage you to build a backup plan. So if you're experimenting with a time limited push, a duration limited push, it might be useful to make a backup plan. So what happens if the deadline's passed and you're not ready? How long will you go before you give yourself a break? If you don't hit your milestone for the rough draft, how much more will you keep pushing in order to get that milestone before you let yourself rest and recalibrate?
Of course, we're all aiming for best case scenarios, but it can be very useful to have a backup plan.
Okay. Experiment two. Change one variable for your push, but not all of them. Lots of people will sweep everything off the table for a big push. It can often be really counterproductive to stop exercising, canceling all your plans. You stop grocery shopping, you don't do the laundry. It can be counterproductive to do nothing but work during that season because suddenly all of your rhythms are different. Everything is new and you're making a million decisions a day!
Not just in your work life, but in all of the routines that you've kind of pushed off the table for this very specific season. So the next time you have a push. Try changing one thing at a time. Maybe you change when you write. Maybe you add a little bit of extra duration for those writing sessions. Maybe you add in more exercise before or after a work session, but rather than making a push about changing your schedules, your routines and your habits all at once, you pick one thing to help you get the most of what you need for that specific push..
So if you need more time, you add more time. If you need more energy, you add more energy, but you're changing one thing to see what the outcome of that experiment is rather than changing everything all at once.
And for your last experiment. Try and create a little bit of visibility. One of the hardest things, about a push -- especially a push in the sort of academic world where it seems like everyone is pushing all of the time on everything -- one of the hardest things about it is that it feels like a lot of effort and no one really notices, but you. And that that effort can be really hard to sustain without that external validation of getting that grant in, having somebody notice how much you're working.
So create a little bit of visibility for yourself. Maybe you make a sticker tracker and you add one for every 50 words that you write so that you can see the stickers fill up the page. Maybe you color in a square of an Excel spreadsheet for every pom that you do so that you know how many hours you've spent and you can celebrate it when you get to a hundred cells.
There are reasons that toilet training charts work right? We see the progress. We see the rewards. Getting in the habit of noticing and celebrating our own achievement can really help us get out of that loop of "this will feel real once it's accepted or once I get to this big external milestone," this is about cheering yourself on during the push, because the effort is what you want to reward and not necessarily, or not only the outcome.
This is a time of year when lots of people are pushing. So I am hopeful that at least some of the strategies that I've shared or the questions to consider will be useful to you. And otherwise, I hope that your work continues in a way that feels just a little bit more sustainable. Until next time!
📍 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, where you can also sign up for AcWriMo 2022, a free month of writing support and resources. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
4 - Why is it so hard to stay excited about your work?
episode 4 - why is it so hard to stay excited about your work?
Has your project lost that sparkle? Are you just not excited about your work the way you used to be? Do you worry that everyone else is passionately in love with their research and you're the only one who has to bribe yourself to get to the desk?
You are definitely not the only one - and this episode goes into why it is so hard to stay excited about your work, and some things you can do to bring that spark back!
sign up for AcWriMo 2022 - and get a whole month of free resources to support your writing during a time of year where it is SO easy not to write! it’s not too late to sign up - you can join us at any point in november!
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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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
And stay tuned for more details about some free writing resources coming your way in November. But for now let's get into it!
All right this week, let's talk about why it is so hard to stay in love with your project. And to be clear, I'm using love here as a shorthand for staying curious about your project, feeling engaged, feeling that sparkle of, "oh my gosh! I can't wait to know what's going to happen next." It's just a little bit easier and faster for me to stay under 10 minutes if I call that love.
But let's talk about why it can be so hard to keep that feeling going with your PhD work.
First thing that I think makes it really hard is that these projects take so long. It's really easy to stay invested and curious about a paper that you work on for two weeks or a book that you pick up to read over the weekend. But when we're talking about projects that can last for months, years, (and even longer, I won't scare any of us anymore by saying anything longer than years) but when they last that long, it can be really hard to stay engaged, just like it can be really hard in any longterm relationship. To find that newness, that spark. That little bit of something extra.
As we know the butterflies, they wear off! The first day of dissertation writing feels amazing and day 342 feels a little bit less amazing.
And if you ever get in your head about the idea that maybe it feels this amazing for everyone else, or maybe everybody else is engaged in and passionate about their work. And that must mean that theirs is better than mine! Then, yeah, this can feel really hard to feel like "I used to be so excited and now I'm not feeling that anymore."
And while I want to acknowledge that things like burnout exist -- and that's probably a subject for a whole season of these podcast episodes. -- There is also just that emotional change from "this is an amazing paper that I'm so excited to work on" into "this is a project that's going on over years, that in some ways I'm getting paid for" however little that might be. And it's just as much a job as it is anything else.
But even that pressure to have a dream job can really feel intense some days. I don't know about you, but I was raised to believe that jobs, like a dream job were the goal for me. I needed to find a job that it didn't feel like I was working a day in my life. Because if you love it, then it never feels like work. It always feels amazing.
Add in the academic extra flavor of "This is my calling. I was made to do this. This research was born for me." Then that can be a lot of pressure too! What happens when you wake up and you're calling feels like just something else that you're doing on another random Tuesday in your life.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with being passionate and many of these experiments as we'll talk about in a minute are geared to help you sort of rekindle that spark a little bit, but I'm saying that pressure to have a dream job, to feel passionate about it can make it even harder when we are going through the natural ups and downs, the closeness, the distance that -- spoiler alert -- many people feel with their projects all of the time. So, if you were listening to this wondering, "am I the only one who feels like this is a project that I'm bored with? This is a piece of scholarship that I am sick of." I absolutely want to assure you that you are not.
And that part of the project of being a scholar is figuring out how to believe in that project, on those random Tuesdays, the good days, the hard days, the boring days in the middle, how to keep that relationship between you and your research, active enough to help you get done what you need to get done.
So now that we've acknowledged that no one is head-over-heels passionate about their project every single day of every single year of their entire scholarly life, let's get into how this feeling or lack thereof might be showing up for you right now. Because I think that there's a lot of data to help you figure out how you can feel a little bit closer to your project by digging into how you feel about it right now.
So grab your notebooks, maybe take a deep breath. Let's get in to those questions.
Question number one. Describe a spark between you and your research. Where were you? What did it feel like? What happened to make that spark of, Ooh, this is interesting, or I can't wait to know more about this or wouldn't this be great for X project? How did that spark happen? Bonus points if you have a sense of what you did to keep that spark going, if you did.
Question two. How close do you feel to your research right now? Do you feel like two people writing love letters back and forth, and half of them get lost in the ocean? Do you feel like the project is a friend or relationship of yore that you've totally outgrown, but don't know how to break up with? There's all sorts of stories that we can tell about our relationship to our work, but the story and language that you reach for to tell this story are significant.
What does the choice of narrative frame that you apply to tell that story, tell you about how you feel about it or how you feel you're acting in that two part relationship between you and your work.
and third:
What parts of your work light you up the most? How does it feel when you do those things that really set your heart on fire? How long does that feeling last? And what does that feeling of being lit up by your work make possible? In your day-to-day routines - does it make it easier to get through some of the hard stuff?
But what is working between you and your work in the relationship this moment? What are the parts that light you up the most?
Alright! You've got your data. You've maybe gone a little bit deeper into this relationship between you and your work. And now let's try some experiments to bring you and your work just a little bit closer, some of the time. And maybe even more than that.
Experiment number one. I'm calling this , as gently as possible, change your attitude.
When I was little and - unfortunately I lost him when I was five - but my papa used to say, "that's why they call it work and not play time." And while he's not around to repeat that back to me, when I'm complaining about how hard work feels anymore, that phrase pops into my head all of the time, because there's a certain amount of truth in it.
And especially as graduate students, what used to be some of the best and most exciting parts of our lives, the school, the classes. Uh, the excitement, the discussions, the feeling alive with the possibility and knowledge of it all!!!! Well, that's kind of translated into picking up books from the library, emailing people back and forth, trying to deal with all the administrative things that come along with publishing and research.
And it's just not as fun as it used to be anymore. But that's part of the transition from this is what it was like to do it as a student; and this is what it's like to do it as a professional. So as this experiment goes on. Be able to kind of check in with what expectations you're setting for yourself about how it should feel.
Do you think it should feel more exciting than that? Do you think that you should love every single part of it or else you don't deserve to do the research? But take a look at your attitude, as gently and as supportive as you possibly can, and see if you're setting expectations for yourself that are really hard to meet, especially with work that's as difficult and challenging and rewarding as this.
Experiment number two is to widen your perspective. I often use the metaphor that any scholarly project is sort of like climbing up a mountain. You maybe have someone who's climbed up a mountain before, maybe you have a map. Maybe there's a series of base camps. But no matter where you are on that mountain: It's hard. It's steep. It's challenging.
And if you are looking up every two seconds or if you're keeping your eyes on the peak of that mountain, well, it's really easy to trip, right? Take this from the world's most clumsy hiker that there's a certain benefit in keeping your eyes on your feet. Not all the time! Obviously you need to see what's coming sometimes, and it can be helpful to look back and notice how far you've gone already.
But if you're finding yourself really overwhelmed by the project and just how much of it there is to go - which can often be one of the roots of these feelings - then take a moment to look down at your feet. What would it look like for the next week or maybe two to zoom as far in, as you possibly can? What are the next five tasks that you can do? What are the smallest pieces that you can put on your list?
It's not that the rest of the mountain goes away when you do that, you're still going to be climbing. It just means that you're shifting your perspective to the pieces that feel achievable in the rhythm that you're actually living, which is the day-to-day.
And the third experiment to try is one of my favorites.
Take your writing your project, your research out for a date night. I don't mean that as romantic, like I said, but it can really help to change your surroundings. So maybe you take your work and you print it out and you sit outside on that wonderful coffee shop patio that has been open since the pandemic.
And you reread your draft. You reread it away from your email, away from your notes, away from that stack of books that need to go back to the library, and you just sit with it. What do you like about it? What is exciting? What sparks do you feel when you get there?
Maybe you change your surroundings by joining a writing club or you start a seminar series in your department, or you meet with a friend every so often to catch up on some of the coolest, you know, research that you're doing. But find a way to kind of shake up that surrounding just a little bit. If you like, so many of us have been stuck at a desk on your couch doing the same thing over and over again, find a way that feels safe and protected and doesn't endanger anybody else to shake it up a little bit. You might be surprised how different your work feels when you do it.
No matter what you find or what you try in the course of this little relationship refresh between you and your research, I hope that you remember that part of what makes this so hard is that this is a long term relationship. And like any long-term relationship between siblings or friends or partners, it takes some effort to maintain it.
It takes some effort to make sure that the two of you are growing and supporting each other as you are now, and not just as you were in the beginning, or as you hope that you were going to feel. So I hope this brings you a little bit closer and I can't wait to see you next time!
📍 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, where you can also sign up for AcWriMo 2022, a free month of writing support and resources. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
2 - Why is collecting data about how you work so hard?
In our second episode, we talk about one of the most important pieces of the way I work: collecting data about what works, and what doesn't in your work life. If you've ever thought "maybe I'd like to know where my time goes during the day?", or "what hours actually do tend to be easier for me to focus?" but stopped because that sounded really hard and vulnerable, then this is the episode for you.
sign up for AcWriMo 2022 - and get a whole month of free resources to support your writing during a time of year where it is SO easy not to write!
-
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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
And stay tuned for more details about some free writing resources coming your way in November. But for now let's get into it!
A cornerstone of the Thrive PhD process is experimentation. I think it's really important that everyone figure out what works for them and under what conditions. To try things and see: does it actually work for you to get up early and write first thing in the morning, or does that experiment not work with the conditions of your specific life?
But one of the things that's really hard about experimentation is that it requires you to collect data. And I assume that some of you, if not, most of you listening to this podcast have some experience with the topsy turvy, never straightforward process of collecting data for your own experiments and research.
And I'm sorry to say that it's no more of a straightforward process when you're collecting data on yourself. So let's get into why this is so hard, and some things that might make it a little bit easier to notice and adjust when your own data suggests that it might be a good thing to do.
One thing that can be really hard about collecting data about yourself and the way that you work, especially, is It can be really hard to think about your own work habits without guilt or shame. I know that I carry -- even to this day as a coach who works with this stuff and other people all of the time --, a lot of guilt and shame about how hard it is for me to get started. See episode one.
And so if we already feel a little bit or a lot of guilt and shame about how we work, then it can be even harder to look at that directly, square in the face. So if I said, "Hey! spend the next week tracking where exactly your time goes every time you sit down to the desk. And I want to know how many minutes you spend on Twitter."
Well, if you already feel a little bit of background guilt about how much time you spend on social media, I guarantee that getting an exact number won't make that feeling any better. So it can be really hard to gear yourself up for collecting data about stuff that you're already feel pretty vulnerable about.
It also can be really difficult to do this sort of self-evaluation in a world where we're taught that it's important to be optimized all of the time.
It's good, of course, to spend time trying to improve the things that are tough for you or build skills where you don't have them, but so much of the wellness, support and coaching industries, quite frankly, are built on the idea that you're not doing it right. And you could be doing it a lot better.
We are all conditioned to spend a lot of time and energy improving ourselves and so if that's already just floating around in the soup, it can be really intense to spend even more energy noticing things about ourselves. -- especially if those things are related to behaviors that we might want to change.
If we're already feeling vulnerable about taking a deeper look, collecting our own data, it can also be a huge barrier and definitely a hard thing T M to actually find the time and space and energy to do it during the day. It can often feel like one more thing on the to-do list. Not only do I have to do my work, but I have to figure out how I'm doing it and how much time it takes and what my mood is doing?
No thank you! And of course it can really disrupt your workflow to start to do things like integrate a time tracker or record your mood. Or find a way to quantify your focus. But our felt sense of how those things are going, can really diverge from the actual reality of how those things are going. You might think that every day you sit down to write is the worst day of your life. And that might be how it feels in aggregate, but collecting the data and noticing that, "Hey! Actually, I feel pretty good when I'm working in my outline, but it's really revision that makes me feel like trash." Well, that's the kind of data that you can't really get, unless you're looking for it.
And so if you're on board with the fact that it could be hard, but valuable to collect some data, here are a couple of questions to consider about how you might go about that, and where you might want to start looking for data first.
Question One: what parts of your day, do you have the least visibility into? What are the projects, tasks or times where you just aren't sure what happens or at least you're not sure what happens with any amount of detail.
Question Two: If I could wave a magic wand, what is the one thing you wish you knew about your day? Where your time goes? What your writing pace is? How fast you read? Maybe it's how work shifts your mood. If there isn't just one thing that you want to know, maybe make a list and then rank it. What's the first thing that you'd like to know?
And lastly, what kinds of data do you already have? Do you use a step counter? Do you have a journal? What about a planner? What methods -- digital, analog, wearable -- work the best for you when it comes to collecting any kind of data?
The answers to those questions will help you know what kind of role data is already playing in your life and maybe what role you'd like it to have in the future. So, let's move on to a couple of experiments to try in the next coming week, maybe two, or whenever you hear this, that might make it a little bit easier to collect some data about you and your work.
Experiment one: pick a thing to notice. Before you start to track, download an app, get a new journal. (Although we'll get to all of that in a second.) Before you start to actually collect the data, practice step one, which is simply, and so complicatedly, noticing. Just practice, noticing. Maybe you notice how many times a day you click on Twitter?
Or you notice when you're on Twitter. Maybe you notice the difference between how your writing focus feels in the morning versus the afternoon. You don't necessarily need to write it down or capture it in any way. The skill of noticing is at the foundation of collecting data which is at the foundation of this experimental method so practicing that first step can only serve you well. And it's a great place to start if you're new to this world of real time self evaluation
Experiment Two:. Track one thing. And one thing only. This is, as you might've guessed a further step in the collecting data process. I find that it's really overwhelming to start tracking every single thing all at once. It's really big "January 1st. I'm a whole new person, time to totally redo my life" kind of energy.
So instead of embarking on a new chapter where you track your sleep and your focus and your mood and your water content, and how many steps and how many emails a day you answer and how much time you spend on social media.... you take a deep breath. And you pause, maybe you go back to that list of the things that you really want to know about your day and the way that you work and you pick just one thing to track.
I find that easier is better here. So jot things down on a post-it note. Maybe get a phone app if you're a big phone person. There are browser extensions that can help . Maybe you print out a tracker. But you track one thing and one thing only. And you not only get the data about that one thing, you also get some data about what ways are easier for you to track and which ones are harder to keep up with.
And experiment three. Potentially the hardest, one of all: practice -- and please know that, I mean, practice and its fullest sense of the word -- practice disentangling data from judgment. This is so hard, everybody.. I find it hard. My therapists have found it hard. People on earth find it hard to notice things about themselves without jumping to what it means. "I never get up before 11:00 AM. So that means I am a sloth pretending to be a human in grad school."
"I have trouble staying off Twitter. That means I'm the most weak minded, least disciplined person on the ole internet." It is so easy for us to not only notice things about ourselves, but wrap them into the bigger story of who we think we are, how our work feels and what we feel like we need to improve.
So for this experiment, practice noticing the data and seeing what stories come up. It is probably impossible - or at least it is for me - to completely disentangle the data that I gather about myself, from the stories that I tell about myself. But the more that I practice being an objective observer and noticing the time I spend on Twitter, just as I would notice how many times a certain word comes up in my archival research, the easier it gets to see when I'm not doing that, catch myself and release that narrative a little bit quicker than the last time. So definitely a hard experiment to try, but a worthwhile one, not just for grad school, but for life too.
I think data is really important. And lucky for you. I have a whole month where the data that you collect in the next couple of weeks is really going to serve you well, So part of what I do during AcWriMo, which is that month of free writing resources that I do almost every November, is we use your personal data to help build and strengthen a writing practice that actually works for you.
So if you have data that says that your brain really doesn't click into deep focus until after lunch, well, AcWriMo is going to be a place for you to test out what it means to do all of your admin work in the morning and really protect those afternoons so that you can use your deep focus time when your actual deep focus brain is in the building.
So get a jumpstart on an excellent at AcWriMo and practice collecting some data this week, maybe in the next couple of weeks. I promise that you'll be glad that you did 📍
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, where you can also sign up for AcWriMo 2022, a free month of writing support and resources. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
1 - Why is getting started so hard?
episode 1 - why is getting started so hard?
In our first episode, we go with the obvious - how hard it is to get started. If you've ever been frustrated by how long it takes you to get going in the morning, or after a transition, or you start to tune out when people suggest that you start with the hard things, this is the episode for you!
sign up for AcWriMo 2022 - and get a whole month of free resources to support your writing during a time of year where it is SO easy not to write!
-
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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
And stay tuned for more details about some free writing resources coming your way in November. But for now let's get into it!
Forgive me the cliche, but I thought we would use episode one to talk about something that I personally find really hard getting started. There are a few reasons why getting started can be so difficult, but one of them is that I think there's this expectation that we'll be able to drop into flow. Like immediately.
You sit down, you flip a switch, and boom, you're generating new knowledge. That is not in my experience, how it works for most people. Most of the time, scholars are constantly transitioning between all different kinds of jobs. One minute you're a teacher, then you're an administrator, then you're on a committee, then you're reading, then you're an editor, then you're a writer, and back again.
Add in any of your human roles and who wouldn't be overwhelmed? But all of those transitions come at a cost. Every time you switch context, you need to, again, switch all of the resources that you're using for your brain, and that can leave even the best of us totally exhausted by lunchtime.
Another thing that's really hard about getting started is the flexibility of it all. One of the perks of academic life, no doubt, is the flexibility that you can start a little bit later on a Tuesday so that you can go to the dentist or do something even more fun or, you know, work really hard during the summer so that you have a little bit more flexibility in the fall.
But all of that flexibility comes at a cost because there's no external structure like a boss or an office or a bunch of coworkers around, that really pressure you into being at a certain place at a certain time . So that flexibility means that you are the one in charge of when to get started, when to stop, and all of that costs valuable executive functioning points.
And lastly, one of the things that I find really hard about getting started is all of the advice about how we should do it. Raise your hand -- I mean, you can if you want to, it's a podcast, so I can't tell -- but raise your hand if you've ever been told to eat the frog. In case you've never heard that before, that's the advice that says, do the hardest thing that you can first thing in the morning. The equivalent of eating a frog, the most disgusting thing on your plate before you eat the good stuff like cookies or potato chips. This, for many people, leads to the notion that we should all sit down at our desks and immediately launch into the hardest thing on our plate, whether that's writing or reading or revising, it can be different for different people.
But the problem with eating the frog is that sometimes it turns into a game of chicken between you and your project. How long can I stay in bed playing Duolingo if my other option is getting to my desk and writing my research paper? I know for me that's a battle that I lose more often than I care to admit.
Part of the advice about working with the hard things, starting early writing at 6:00 AM before everybody else gets up, is that that advice works really well for some people. If you have a really busy schedule, if you're working full time, if you have kids that demand your attention, you know, as soon as they get up, then eating the frog or working early can be really helpful.
But if it doesn't work for you, then it really doesn't work for you.
And so if you're joining me in the legions of us that find getting started a little bit difficult, here are some questions to consider that will give you personalized data about why this might be difficult for you, and give you a few hints about where to start with some of the experiments that we'll talk about in just a few minutes.
So get your journals out. Maybe just go for a walk and think about these questions, but give yourself a chance to reflect. Your answers might surprise you.
First question, How does your body know that it's time to start working? How about your brain, or are you operating under the impression and giving your body the sense that it can be asked to work at any time, in any place, in any condition?
How many times a day do you "start"? Does it vary by the day of the week or by the season or what ever else might be going on in your brain? Your brain weather, your anxiety? How many times a day are you starting and restarting?
And then lastly, what cues you into starting? Is it the time of day, the location? Anxiety? Deadlines and deadlines only? But what is the thing that more often than not, flips the switch into "it's time to start now"?
And now that you have your personalized, shiny, new data about what does and doesn't work for you in terms of starting here are a few experiments to try. Every week, I'll share with you some strategies or tools or simply experiments - a condition to change - that I found to be useful for me or maybe one of my clients. And more than that, I'll tell you why I think that they work and what kinds of situations, people, brains, lives I've seen them be successful in. So try one, try two, try all but do it in a spirit of experimentation. So let's get our Bill Nye on and do some experimenting.
Option one, make a sensory startup ritual. Pick two or three senses to combine into a lightweight ritual to help cure your body into starting. I like to put my feet on the floor, chew a piece of mint gum, and put on a heavy, bass drop laden playlist that I only listen to while writing.
This is a holdover from my graduate student days when I was trying to steal writing sessions away from any place I could. I was writing in between classes, in between my job and work all sorts of times, but because they didn't have temporal consistency, I needed something else. So I would throw gum in my mouth, I would put my playlist on and I would get to work. So I found that this works really well for people who like a sense of routine, they maybe do well with structure, but they're finding that hard temporally. So if time isn't going to be the constant, maybe your sense of smell, your hearing, your sight, the way that you position your body, those could all be anchors.
Experiment number two. Pick no more than three things from your miles long to-do list and put them on a post-it note or another piece of paper. Start there and then repeat as necessary. I find that this strategy works really well for people who get easily overwhelmed. As far as I know, no academic that's being honest, completes their to-do list every single day.
We all have more that we could be doing. So if you are in the habit of dumping out your brain periodically into to do lists that fill notebooks, then this might be helpful for you. You pick two or three things, hopefully ones that line up with your priorities for the day, but you pick them, you put them on a post-it note, you cross them off, you get a new post-it.
I find that this works really well after a meal break, like if you're struggling to get back into work after lunch or another kind of transition. Say you're trying to get into writing after a morning of teaching! But picking a few things and focusing just on those and then repeating as usual can be really helpful.
And experiment number three: set a warmup timer. Personally, I aspire to be a person who can get to deep focus work without checking my email, but I've literally been trying for a decade and I'm just not that girl. So I set a timer for 25 minutes and I warm up. I read the news, I check all of my feeds. I look at my emails. I sometimes make an extra cup of coffee. But knowing that I don't have to do something really hard the instant that I get to my desk makes it so much easier for me not to avoid going to my desk in the first place.
And I know that sometimes my day gets derailed by a little bit of email checking before I do that really hard thing. But for me, the anxiety of not knowing what's in my inbox, so. much. overwhelm when I do that. So I'd rather know what dangers are lurking just behind that Gmail tab, get a sense of what's there, and then plan my day with all of the facts.
And there we have it, a few reasons why getting started is hard, a few questions to help you dig deeper into how that looks for you, and a few things to try just in case they make it a tiny bit easier.
📍 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, where you can also sign up for AcWriMo 2022, a free month of writing support and resources. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!