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!
3 - Why is it so hard to find strategies that work for you?
If ever taken the advice of your advisor, that productivity book that everyone raves about, or even from a coach like me and it straight up didn't work - this is the episode for you. I'm talking all about why it can be so hard to figure out how other scholars are working, and why what works for them might not work for you. Plus three experiments to help you find some strategies that do work 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!
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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!
And this week, we're going to talk about the mother of all. "Why is grad school hard?" Questions, which is: why is it so hard to find a strategy or a schedule or a tool or a routine that actually it works for me?
In order to answer this question I think we actually have to talk about where we get the idea to try some of these strategies in the first place. Or put another way, where does most academic advice come from?
And here comes my personal pet theory!
Most academic advice follows this format: this is how I did it, therefore, this is how it's done.
So this might be advice that you get from your advisor, where they say to you, "I always write before I start in the morning. So that's what you should do." It could be about how to use a citation manager or sort of any advice area, but the general formula is "this is what worked for me therefore this is how you do it."
But what happens if it doesn't work for you? Does that mean that it just will never work for you? If you can't write in the morning, you'll never be able to have a productive writing practice? It is so easy to make the jump from "this strategy didn't work for me" to, "I will never be able to do this thing.
And when you add in the fact that most academics are pretty private about their workflows, the tools that they're using and how long it takes for them to write an article. Then we're often left in a situation where everyone's developing their own workflow. Nobody's really sharing or talking about what's actually working and even less about what's not working.
When you add in the source of a lot of this advice, things get even harder. Because unfortunately, quite a lot of the advice for grad students is handed from the top-down. Your advisor shares what works for them. And if you're a PhD student in a university, the people who are sharing the advice that's working for them are probably tenure track faculty.
And then let me be clear. I do think that advisors should share strategies and be open about their workflow with their advisees. I think that's a really helpful way to professionally develop the people that you're supervising. And it makes sense as a PhD student, that that's your first place that you go when you're stuck. That's your first point of contact with the university! It's the person who's overseeing your research. It makes a lot of sense that you ask them!
But if they're sharing with you the advice that's working for them currently at this moment, then it's worth taking a pause because their conditions are a lot different than yours. Tenured faculty member versus PhD student.
And if the strategies that they're sharing are what did work for them when they were a student? Well, that was probably at least pre pandemic. Maybe it was pre adjunctification crisis. Maybe it was pre inflation cost of living increases or the push for so many of us to go to grad school for job security...
All of those changing conditions mean that what worked for them in say the early nineties - no shade - might not be as practical for you a graduate student living and working in the year 2022, or whenever you're listening to this.
So, yeah, it's hard to find strategies that work for you when the advice network is pretty hidden or specific to your advisor. When the source of that advice is perhaps not as good of a match for your particular living situation and when there's a culture of not problem-solving in public. Of course it's really hard to figure out what things are going to work for you
But if you undertook any of the experiments from last week's collecting your own data episode. Or just in general, you have a sense of what works for you and what doesn't. Then you're in a pretty good spot for figuring out what strategies will and won't work for you.
So. Take a minute. Take a deep breath. Maybe grab your notebook. Here come your reflection questions to help figure out why the selecting, and experimenting, and even trying something new with your PhD grad student workflow might feel so sticky for you in particular.
Question one: where do you find your experiments? And by that, I mean, the strategies, the tools, the resources, the apps, the things that you try to help improve your PhD workflow, where do you find out about them? What do you try? And what sources do they normally originate from?
Question Two: what kinds of people are giving you advice, suggestions of things to try, or being open about their own process with you? Does your life share elements in common with theirs? As far as, you know.
We of course can never truly know the conditions of someone else's life. But if you're taking advice from people whose lives look radically different from yours - at least in the data that you can access - then that's something to think about.
And lastly question three: what stories do you tell yourself about the strategies that don't work for you? What does it mean to you when you try to do something and it doesn't work?
So maybe you've sat with those questions. You've evaluated your advice, strategy, experiment, pipeline. You've thought about what kind of stories you tell yourself when those experiments don't work out. Now let's try - ha ha ha - a couple of experiments of our own this week to get a little bit more clarity about why it's just so hard for us to find strategies that work for us.
Experiment number one. Try not to argue with your data. Um, this is one that I'm laughing to myself because this is one that is perpetually difficult for me. And almost everyone I know. But it's really hard to take one fact about And accept it as a premise rather than a problem. So for instance, maybe this week, you experiment with not arguing with the data that you have that writing before you check your email, look at your planner, have some breakfast, maybe have a cup of coffee or two. Maybe you just accept the fact that your morning routine lasts about 35 minutes. And then you start after
What happens when you just accept that is the way that you like to work in the morning, as opposed to trying to push yourself into getting to your desk at 6:00 AM. And writing in that perfect idealized. Every writing book, we'll recommend it kind of way. What happens when you accept some of those things as premises and not problems
Experiment number one. Try not to argue with your data. Yeah, this one is so hard for me and almost everyone I know. Because it's really hard to take a fact about ourselves - probably one that we don't like - and accept it as a premise, rather than a problem. For instance, maybe this week you experiment with not arguing with the data that you have, that you are not a morning writing person.
You instead accept the fact that your morning routine lasts, however long it lasts, and then you start your writing afterwards. What happens when you just accept that this is the way that it is, the way that you like to work in the morning, as opposed to pushing yourself into getting to your desk at 6:00 AM just because that's what works for someone else or that's how somebody told you to do it.
What happens when you accept some of the things that you don't like about the way that you work as a premise and not a problem to solve?
Experiment number two: look at some of the strategies that haven't worked. . This is a really good place to look back at your data that you may be collected over the last couple of weeks after our collecting your own data episode. Look at it. Are there any patterns? Is there a seasonality? What information does that give you to help you find other strategies? So this might look for you like identifying the fact that it's really only possible for you to write, or to write in a satisfying, deep, focused, juicy kind on the days where you have more than half an hour to get into it.
Okay. That's a good pattern. Is that always true? Is it true only on the days in which you don't have childcare. You know figure out the variables as much as you can. What does your data tell you? What does it suggest?
And then lastly, experiment number three. Seek out a new source, whether that's a book, a podcast, a Twitter theme thread, maybe it's a conversation. Seek out a new source of strategies or advice or tools to try. Bonus points if you pick a source that is more applicable to the way that your life is currently at this particular moment.
Maybe you check out some of the sources of advice that are for PhDs with kids. If you are a person who has a PhD that they're working on and also kids that they need to get up. Maybe you find and seek out a podcast, all for ADHD and academics to see what strategies they suggest in case they're different than ones maybe your neuro-typical advisor has pushed on you.
The idea here is to look for a new source, potentially a new strategy because running a new experiment is going to give you new data. And new data either will help you confirm a hypothesis. Yay! Great! Or help you refine the next hypothesis that you'll use to run for that next experiment.
It is so easy to think that if a strategy doesn't work for you, then you're sunk. Then whatever's hard for you right now will never get any easier because the way to make it easier, didn't work. My hope is that through some of the strategies this week, these experiments to try, you can examine where you're getting your advice.
And what kinds of new data do you want to incorporate as you start to look for strategies that will help. Just because the first one didn't work doesn't mean that none of them will. 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!
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!
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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!
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!
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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!
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!
Grad School Is Hard, But.....a new podcast from Thrive PhD!
Grad School is Hard, but….is a podcast for everyone who is doing the hard work of being a human AND a scholar. On this show, I share questions to dive deeper into how YOUR brain and body work best, and experiments to try to help you find YOUR way through the hard work of generating new knowledge.
The first episode releases October 11, 2022 - but until then, get your free How to Work (and NOT Work) More Intentionally Toolkit at: https://tinyurl.com/ThriveToolkit
See you soon!
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... a Thrive PhD podcast.
I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and I've spent the last five years helping grad students all around the world figure out how to be humans and scholars. And the reason that I do that, and built Thrive PhD in the first place is because grad school was hard for me and I had to work really hard to do my work and live my life.
On this podcast, we'll talk not just about how hard grad school is -and it is- but things that you can experiment with. Grad school is hard, but there are things that you can try. Grad school is hard, but there is support. Grad school is hard, but you can do this. In these short and sweet episodes. I'll present you with reasons why this stuff is so hard, questions to help you explore how that difficulty shows up for you, and two or three things that you can try that might help.
A cornerstone of the Thrive PhD philosophy is that no one thing works for everyone in every situation. So the only way to know if something is working the way you want it to is to experiment.
I promise that nothing here will be framed as you have to do this or never do that. I'm just gonna give you some options and crucially, I'm gonna give you the information that I have about when they tend to work and when those options really don't. I do all of that so that you can make a call about what you wanna try and what you think might work..
This show might not be for you if you don't like to experiment, because I can't promise that anyone's strategy or tool will work for everyone. You do have to try things out on yourself to see if they work.
If you want strictly academic life hacks, this might not be the show for you. I believe strongly that yes, our scholarship is important. But so are the human bodies and human lives that hold that scholarship. So some of the strategies will be about writing that journal article or figuring out how to store your references, but they'll invariably cross into some of the human things too.
And this show might not be for you if you're looking for a very serious, very academic podcast, I promise you that I will make comparisons to all sorts of things. I'll give you metaphors, pop culture references, and maybe a story or two about my cats. So if any or all of that is a problem, no need to listen a second further.
But this is a show for you if you feel like everyone tells you the same three pieces of advice: protect your time! get up early to write! limit your emails until you're done with all of the hard, deep focus work! If you feel like those pieces of advice get thrown at you every time you ask for support, this is a show for you because we're gonna go a little bit deeper.
This is a show for you if you feel like all of the strategies and advice that you're given are predicated on the assumption that you're able bodied, that you have a neurotypical brain and unlimited time and resources to get through your grad work. If you've felt left out by some of the strategies before, this is the show for you.
And this is the show for you if you wanna try new. Because in order to feel something different, you often have to do something different. And believe me, graduate work is different than any other kind of school that you've done before.
So the first episode drops October 11th, 2022, and in the meantime, you can check me out at thrive-phd.com where you can also get your free working more intentionally toolkit with some of my best strategies and experiments to see how you can work and not work with a little bit more clarity. I'm so excited to have you on this journey.
Hit subscribe so that you know the instant the first episode is out. See you soon !