2.8 decision fatigue will get you: menus for planning with flexibility
making decisions can be really hard - and when you're a scholar, a lot of your choices are important, and they all have the same level of urgency. menus are one of the best ways i have found to reduce overwhelm, and provide structure with flexibility - learn all about how i use them in this week's episode!
resources:
a blog post on menus
information about decision fatigue
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If you're on team decision fatigue, if you can't figure out what to do. If you default to the easiest or most urgent thing, today's episode has strategies just for you.
📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you rate and review this podcast, by the end of the month, you'll be entered to win a free session from me. More details at the end of the episode. Now let's get into the good stuff. .
Today's episode is focused on a tool that I myself use every single day. And I have found that it is one of the most flexible and dare I say fun things that I or my clients have introduced into their day-to-day workflow. As you might've guessed from the title, it's about creating menus. So first let's talk about what a menu is and how you might implement it.
If you have ever. I had that feeling at the end of the day. Where you were like, I don't know what to make for dinner. My fridge is full of just raw ingredients and the amount of effort that it would take for me to decide and implement dinner is simply overwhelming then, you know the power of a menu.
Where instead of standing in front of that refrigerator, wondering. , Questioning, second guessing yourself. You walk into a restaurant, you look at the menu and you pick from those preselected options.
It is imperfect. Obviously, if you really want pizza and it's a diner, you might not be able to get what you want if it's not on the menu, but it does take away that stress of trying to figure out what your options are, ranking those options, and then choosing from them. The options are preselected and you then simply choose from between them.
I also love that menus have categories and here's why. The categories of different types of food. And obviously these categories were vary from restaurant to restaurant, but the categories help separate out the options by their qualities: could be by size, it could be by main protein. It could be by the role that it plays in the meal. But when you look at those different categories, say, at a diner. For instance, you might have omelets and sweet treats sides, combos.
That categorization helps you be a little bit more intentional. If you want something sweet, you immediately jump to that category. No need to go looking through the omelettes. If you know that you want pancakes, for example, And also it helps you bring a little bit more awareness into the kinds of things you're selecting and why.
So if you go through and you only ever eat from the sides menu, Then you know that, Hey, I'm going to either have to eat a few of these and be pretty conscious about what they contain or I'm going to need to add something more substantial to get a full meal.
Okay, now that everybody's hungry for pancakes. Let's talk about how we can use the concept of menus and the way that they shape and make our choices more intentional in our day-to-day work lives. Here are some ways that you can use menus. And all of these have been tested and approved by me and clients all around the world. So I really stand by these.
You might create a menu of work tasks for the day. Maybe you have different categories for teaching research, administration, life stuff, and you list out all of the options that you could work on during the day. And then when you sit down at your desk, you say, okay, what do I feel like teaching tasks, research tasks, and all of those options are laid out for you.
This can be particularly effective if you are working in a state where everything is important, but the urgency level is about the same across all of those categories. If you're in a state of it all needs to get done, a menu can help you see which things feel more possible and reduce a little bit of that decision fatigue so that you don't default into whatever tasks are in your email, which is what I normally do without a menu.
You could also use them for rest tasks almost even more effectively. Maybe you have, as I often do a menu of things that you could do on the weekend. And there are cleaning tasks. There are books you could read, there are shows you could catch up on, you have a list of things that might feel good to move your body. You maybe have a list of people that you want to text or catch up with. Maybe you even have a section of just pure fun.
Dance party, nap, whatever feels fun to you, but listing out all of those things is more flexible than saying, okay, from Saturday, I will do all of these cleaning things. And then I will do these work things. Instead of scheduling them out, it's more like walking into a brunch place and saying, oh, what feels good for me today?
It won't guarantee that you pick things that you might otherwise avoid. Just like you might not pick arugula on a menu if you absolutely hate it, but at least you offered yourself the chance.
The third way to use menus that I find is really, really effective is to think about menu-izing. If that's a word, making a menu out of various routines during your day. So I am a person who aspires to a morning routine. I think they look so good on Instagram. I want mine to be aesthetic A F, but the reality is that I have a chronic illness. My schedule is very variable and I'm just not going to do the same seven things every morning, every day. It's just not going to happen for me.
So instead I have a morning routine menu where I know that broadly speaking, I want to do something that settles my mind. I want to eat some food and I want to do something that moves my body a little bit. So in my menu, I have things for my mind, which could be a meditation. It could be journaling, it could be doing morning pages. It could be sitting down with my planner and I don't need to commit in advance to which one of those I'm going to do.
I just pick one from one of those categories. And the same goes with breakfast ideas and with the moving my body, it could be a walk around the block. It could be a 15 minute dance workout. It could be a lot of different things, but I know that I want to hit each one of those three categories and having a menu means that my routine might look different every single day, because there are so many different combinations.
But I'm going to hit my three main food groups, so to speak. Now. If you're listening and wondering will menus work for me? I'm not sure, but here are the patterns that I have noticed in when these are particularly effective tools for people.
If you're a person with decision fatigue, then I really have seen menus work wonders. All of us have to make literally thousands of decisions every single day. And one of the hardest things about being a PhD student. Is that there are so many things that you could be doing. And often we only keep say five or six of them, right at the top of our mind. And even though you might like to read that book, that's been on your shelf or go through and clean out your downloads folder or reach out to that person after a conference.
If it's not one of your like main six go-to tasks, it's going to be harder for you to remember to do it. So decision fatigue. Makes it so much easier for us to default into those top six or so tasks. And it really makes it difficult to even remember what the other tasks are. So a menu is a place where all of those options are written out. You might not remember that you liked this thing or that you wanted to do it until you see it written out.
If you find yourself staring at your desk at your planner, completely overwhelmed, and then you can definitely show you your choices and make it easier to pick.
As I mentioned before, I think that people underneath the broad umbrella of variable energy also really benefit from menus. I know that as a person with chronic illness, I'm never sure which energy version of myself is going to show up at any given hour of the day,
And so a menu lets me pick which things sounds the best to the brain and body that I have in that moment. It doesn't guarantee that I'm going to do the hard stuff, but if I'm in a situation where I say, okay, I need to do this incredibly difficult thing. And either I do that, or I don't a menu helps me see that. Yes, I could do that thing, but if I don't have the energy or the stamina for it, or I'm in too much pain or it just, isn't what I feel like in that particular moment, there are also five other things that I could do that would move me forward.
These menus can really help people who want a plan and want some sort of structure, but need some flexibility in it. And if you're a variable energy person or a variable attention, variable focus, if there's some variation and this is most of us, most of the time. Then menus can help you give yourself that structure, reduce some of the decisions and also allow for some flexibility from day to day, and hour to hour.
If you think that the idea of menus or something more flexible than just a, to do list that you must execute every single day sounds really appealing, then I have a workshop for you. I'm so excited to be collaborating with Dr. Kate Henry of The Tending Year on a workshop about structuring in a sustainable way. More details are available in the show notes and registration is going to be opening at the end of April. Thank you so much for joining me today. And I hope that whatever your menu contains, it has tasks that feel tasty for you and your future self. See you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!