2.6 a controversial classic - pomodoro timers
everyone loves to recommend a pomodoro timer (including me!) but this deceptively simple tool actually does NOT work for a lot of people, tasks, and brains. let's get into this controversial classic - and some alternatives - in this week's episode!
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If you've got a phone. If you've got a clock. If you've got a microwave, you can use this week's tool. Let's talk about timers.
📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you rate and review this podcast, by the end of the month, you'll be entered to win a free session from me. More details at the end of the episode. Now let's get into the good stuff. .
Timers are some of the most frequent advice given to anyone who's looking to manage their time a little bit more effectively. But in my experience, they're also some of the most nuanced tools. And some of the ways that many of our neurodivergent brethren also get left behind. So let's talk today about timers: when they work, how they work, how you might want to use them. And a couple of variations because having a sense of how much time is passing and what you're spending your time on can be really helpful.
And just because the first thing you try doesn't work for you doesn't mean that nothing will.
So first a definition. You might have, if you've ever hung out with me in the community or read any time management blog ever been introduced to something called the Pomodoro timer. The Pomodoro timer, which I'll link to it's full history in the show notes. It's basically a time management system where you have a timer that goes off for a set amount of time.
This usually is 25 minutes. You set a timer for 25 minutes, you've work in a focused way. Then you break, you have five minutes to do whatever you want, then you repeat it three or four times with a 15 minute break at the end of the sequence. This came into being, because somebody was trying to keep themselves on task in their kitchen. All they had was a tomato shaped timer that went up to 25 minutes. So the legend goes anyway. And so that's what they used. They would work for 25, break for five and then come back.
So Pomodoro timer is, are great. And the idea of a focus time, and then a break from that time, can be really effective. But if you think about the idea that this was invented in a kitchen, and the only reason that it's 25 minutes is because that's how long the timer was. Well, then you can kind of see why this maybe isn't an all purpose tool for everybody to use.
The traditional pom is 25 minutes. And I will be honest with you and say that I find that most of the time, 25 minutes is too short for me. And I often will do what I call long poms or long Pomodoros, which are 50 minutes of time to work. And then a longer break, a 10 minute break. These are great for writing.
I use them to record this podcast for instance, but I think that if you have experimented with poms and felt that the time was too short, try going longer. I don't recommend going much longer than 50 minutes because every hour you're going to want to rest your eyes. Get a sip of water, maybe walk around a little bit.
But something longer than 25 minutes, will help you get a little bit more into the flow for a deep focus task.
But I also want to share that Pomodoros don't work for me all of the time. I love them in the community. They are often a tool that I use to help myself get started during the day. There are certain tasks that truly would not get done without Pomodoros like admin tasks or scheduling appointments. They're a great container which is why I do continue to recommend them. But I do get burned out on them, just like everybody else. I have seasons where they're really helpful for me. And I have seasons whether or not. And that's a good note for all of the tools in this podcast. Sometimes they work for you and sometimes they don't.
And it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you or anything wrong with the tool. It's just like, sometimes you need a flat head screwdriver and sometimes you need a Phillips head. It might be the right solution for the task at hand, but it also might not be.
But I also want to be clear that there are definitely some patterns about what clients I noticed really do respond to Pomodoros and which ones really don't.
So let's talk about who I find the Pomodoros usually do not work for. I will be honest and say that the idea for this episode came from a thread that I saw on Twitter somewhere. That was like, what is the one piece of advice that has just never worked for you?
And it was just streams and streams of people in the comments saying Pomodoro timers have never worked for me. And you know what? I get it. If you are a person who is neurodivergent and I'm speaking, especially here to anyone who drops into flow. Or has trouble or challenges managing their attention.
This is my ADHD folks. This could be my AuDHD folks, my autistic folks. There are all kinds of brains that once they get stuck into a task, really respond negatively to being dragged back out of it. And there's perhaps nothing more arbitrary than a 25 minute timer going off and dragging you out of whatever it is that you've managed to be focused on.
So if you find that you really don't like being interrupted, pomodoro timers might not be for you. And in that situation, I would suggest that you experiment with something called FlowMadoro instead which has you set the timer more like a stopwatch instead of a countdown clock. You start at 0.0 seconds. And then you notice how long it takes you until you've either finished the task where you've gotten distracted. It could be 10 minutes. It could be five minutes, but you divide that by four and then you take that length of break. So maybe you work on your paper for an hour. You notice that you've drifted off into Twitter. You say, okay, I've reached the edge of my attention cliff. I'm going to take a break for 15 minutes and then come right back to it.
Repeating that same setting the timer and then taking a quarter long break again. This is a great way to notice how your attention waxes and wanes over the course of the day. And it's a great way to not artificially stop yourself in the middle of a thought just because the timer said t o.
But you might be a person that a Pomodoro timer could be really effective for. If you notice that you have a really hard time getting started. This could be getting started in the morning or after a lunch break or after teaching. A timer can be an excellent tool. Especially if you respond really well to time to based appointments. So if you are feeling relatively good at getting up, getting to your teaching, getting to your appointments on time, but then once you have some unstructured time, everything sort of goes to pot. Then I would recommend experimenting with a timer.
If not a traditional 25 minute, five minute Pomodoro, you experiment with at a smaller or longer piece of time as needed. But the idea is that you set a timer and that timer acts almost like a little mini appointment where you say, okay,
For the next 25 minutes, I'm going to try and work on this. And I find that that brain tantrum that's like, Ugh, I am so tired from teaching. And now I have to write for the next four hours that setting a smaller timer. Lets you say, I don't have to write for the next four hours. I just have to try writing for the next 25 minutes.
And it adds that time-based activation energy that'll help get you a little bit over the hump of I don't want to do this, or, oh, I'm tired. And into the flow. My brain is a championship tantrum-er, or it does not like to get started, but I find that even my most epic tantrums don't last longer than 25 minutes.
So if I set a timer for 25 minutes, and even if I free write my little heart out and I'm like, I hate writing. Writing is terrible. I never want to do it. My brain eventually gets that out of its system. And by the time that 25 minutes is up, I've either gotten stuck into the writing amazing or. Or I've pivoted to something else that probably also needs to get done. And that timer acts as a chance for me to check in and say, okay, is this actually what I want to be focusing on right now? Or do I want to move on and do something else?
The timer is just another tool to help you work intentionally. So, whether you're having it count up to measure how much you are actually focusing, noticing your trends and making sure that you take breaks to have food and drink and have water. Or you're using it to help you get started to help you jump into that cold pool timers, add boundaries around what can be a really overwhelming unstructured sense of responsibility and time and tasks for scholars everywhere. We all have too much to do and not enough time to do it. And a timer is just a concrete way to take that too muchness. And move it into smaller and smaller containers. To help you see which tasks might fit into the containers that you have.
And last but not least a special shout out to our review leaver. rmeaso. So which I will put into the show notes. You have won this months free session. So make sure that you email me or contact me on my website and we'll get that all set up for you. Thank you so much, everybody for listening, and I'm going to keep this giveaway going. Everybody who's already reviewed will still be entered. And thank you so much for spreading the word about this podcast.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
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!
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!