Vikki: Before this episode starts, I want to share some exciting news. Today's episode is with Jo VanEvery, who is an expert in academic writing, and we are going to be talking about some stuff that is relevant to all of you about planning your writing. But we also have an announcement to make, which is that Jo and I are going to be running a workshop in the middle of May, 16th of May, for any academic who is taking on a new leadership role. If that's not you, don't worry, keep listening because you might be able to share this with somebody it is relevant for. The workshop is going to focus on getting ready to start any of these major administrative roles. So anybody taking on head of department, head of education, director of a research centre, director of postgraduate studies, whatever it might be. Anyone who's starting one of those roles, this webinar will help you to get ready, to figure out what your strengths are and how you bring them. That's the part I'm providing. And how and when you want research and writing to fit within this new administrative load that you have. That's the bit that Jo's providing. If you think this might be useful for you, make sure you check the show notes, or if you're on my email list, you're going to get this anyway. And you will find out exactly how to sign up. It's a 90 minute webinar, it's 25, it's going to be amazing. Make sure you're there. SIGN UP HERE! If you're a PhD student or you're an academic who isn't in that position at the moment, who can you send this to? Who do you know that might find this useful? Is your supervisor taking on a new academic role? Do you have colleagues in this position? Please do share this with them so that we can get this out to as many people as possible. As I say, the episode today is more generally for everybody, all about planning your academic writing, so I hope you will find that useful too. TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT GETTING SUPPORT FROM JO, CHECK OUT WWW.JOVANEVERY.CO.UK . Hello and welcome to episode 32 of Series 2 of the PhD Life Coach, and we have another guest with us this week. I am very excited to introduce Jo VanEvery, who is going to be helping us think about how to plan our academic writing. So, hi Jo! Jo: Hello, Vikki. Nice to be here. Vikki: It's fantastic to have you here. So tell everyone a little bit about yourself, and then we will get thinking about all different aspects of planning your academic writing. Jo: Right. Yeah. So, I do individual coaching, and I also have a group program called the Academic Writing Studio, which started out with me, running some co working sessions for academic writers. Over 10 years ago I started that. Uh, so it's been going for longer than 10 years and it's now become more than that and we'll probably talk about that a little bit as we go along. Uh, so, I do some group coaching in there. I do some planning classes and I generally help people, find time for their writing and get their writing done. I started that because previously I had been helping Canadian social science and humanities academics with grant applications to the main government funding agency there. And I found that especially people from smaller universities with heavier teaching loads were often very frustrated at the fact that your ability to publish from the research you do goes into the kind of adjudication process. And they're like, well, I'm always at a disadvantage because I have this higher teaching load. I just can't publish enough. There's no time for writing. There's no time for writing in term time. So that was kind of how I started a meeting with your writing, which is the coworking session I run. And it kind of just expanded from there. Uh, so I've got over 10 years experience of helping academics basically juggle their writing with other things that they do, so that they can publish and do the things they really want and need to do as academics. Vikki: And I always like to get to know our guests a little bit. So what do you do when you're not helping other people write? Jo: Oh, so, um, I, I am a knitter, and actually that's part of the origin story of having an online business because I, in about 2003, I joined like an email list. For knitters and I met somebody there that got me blogging from about 2005 and so I used to blog about knitting and then through the blogging , I ended up meeting some other people doing online business, people that were involved with WordPress and that kind of thing. And it just gave me this like, Oh, I could do things this way I could write. And so it just, that was sort of part of how I expanded. So I'm a knitter. I quilt. I do, uh, dressmaking, like sewing. I made this, and I sing in a choir. Vikki: I love it. And I love the crossover there. I think so often people can see their work life and their private life as just completely distinct. And I always love hearing when people have had experiences in their private life that have somehow sort of changed directions for them in their careers and things. Jo: That's really neat. Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. Some of the people I met on that, Nidhi, I mean, they're, I'm still really good friends with them, you know. Uh, 20 years later. And I can see direct links into, you know, what I'm doing now and some of the other choices that we've made. So it's been, it's been good. Yeah. Vikki: Perfect. So I guess a good place to start, just so that everyone's clear on the sorts of things that we're going to talk about today is what do you mean by planning your academic writing? Because when we've chatted about this before, there's sort of been different elements to that. Jo: Right. So for me. There's two main pieces to planning your academic writing, and I see a lot of people talking about wanting to be able to plan their writing project, right? So they're planning a project and they're trying to estimate how long it's going to take. And what the different phases of writing something are so that they can kind of think about like, when am I going to be finished? Right? Or am I going fast enough or slow enough? There's a lot of concerns about speed or efficiency or that kind of thing, but I start from a different place, which is planning your time. And as I said in the introduction, this started because I was working with people who were saying, but I can't write and publish more because I don't have time. My teaching load's too high, or, you know, my workload is too high. And that was, that was 10, 15 years ago. And even, you know, when I was working as an academic and I left academia in 2002, so I was, from 94 to 2002, I was full-time , a sociologist. Uh, and I remember even then, people, you know, that I worked with saying, you know, you couldn't do the job in five days and whatever, and then 20 years since then, it's only gotten worse. So, I think it's one thing to say, well, looking at this project in isolation, here's what I would do, and here's how long it would take, and here's when I would finish. And then, but the more important thing is, how much time do you actually have to spend on your writing? And if your writing is important to you, for any reason, it could be personally important to you as, you know, this is part of the reason I wanted to do this kind of work. It can also just be, I have to do this, or I'm not going to have this type of work anymore, or some combination of those things. But if it's important to you, then you do have to find a way to protect time to do it. And if you're not protecting time to do it, it doesn't matter how many plans you make about the project, it's not, it's not gonna work. I mean, there are also some issues about how we plan the project, but my focus, you know, for a lot of my work has been on how we find the time. Vikki: Perfect. And as you know, the listeners to this podcast go all the way from beginning PhD students all the way through to senior professors. So often the reasons they think they haven't got time are different from each other, but I hear the same stories amongst my clients. I hear the same thing about not having time, either that their deadlines are too tight and that even though they're working on this full time, there's no way they can get it done by X with PhD students all the way through to, I can't start writing until the summer because you know, when we're in the academic year, it's there's just too much of it from my sort of faculty and academic clients. So I see, I hear this across the board. So I think this is going to be super useful for lots of people. Jo: And I do as well, like I have people across, I mean, maybe not so much beginning PhD students, but there's definitely PhD students. I have had a couple times master's students usually at the point where they're writing up their master's dissertation. But all the way through to full professors I have someone in my group right now is working on her 7th academic book. So it's like, you know, we've got, we've got people at all levels stages of career. I remember one person who I talked to. The first time she came to my, one of my planning classes, which are about planning your time and your next semester, your next three months afterwards. She said to me, she said, it just, as soon as I heard other people talk about what was going on for them, I just felt relieved that it isn't just me. Right. Because I think it's so easy to feel like, oh, I should be able to do this. And to imagine that other people are managing it better and somehow there's something wrong with you personally, and there's not, there's probably not, there's not, there's nothing wrong with you, you're actually trying to do something incredibly difficult. The other part of it is, and this came up in the class I ran last week, is that sometimes, and this can happen, especially when you're early in your career, like a PhD student talking to your supervisor or an early career scholar and thinking, talking to some of your senior colleagues, is that sometimes you get directly told that you have to do things a particular way, right? And that you just need to be working more intensely or like people will just tell you, well, you just can't do that other thing. Or, you know, you just can't write during term time. And it sounds like, oh, this person is further advanced than I am and they know what they're doing and they're telling me the way that I have to proceed in order to be successful and I'm struggling to do that. And if you can't do it the way they do it, you're not broken either. It just might be you need another way. Vikki: No, definitely. So let's start then with, I guess, planning at a kind of looking ahead and planning what you might get done this term or this year. What timescale do you recommend people start with and how do they go about it? Jo: So the longer the timescale, the more likely that you're not going to achieve what you set out to do. Because, you know, just like, with, forecasting the weather, right? The further away it is, the more likely it is to be wrong because we just can't predict everything that's going to happen and we don't have control. So that the first thing I want to say is that the purpose of a plan is to inspire action, right? It's to help you get started, help you like, be able to take action and do the things you want to do. And, and then the other purpose of a plan is to make sure that the things that are important to you are in that action plan that you're taking action on the important things, and especially when you're juggling what is objectively an unreasonable workload, which the vast majority of academics are currently doing, planning as a practice is a way of saying, if I can't do all of this, I'm going to be very deliberate about which bits I don't do and which bits I do do, right. And that's really frightening and it's what makes it hard, but the purpose of a plan is not to be like, well, I have to do all of this, time is finite, how do I jam all this in here and then the whole thing falls apart. The purpose of a plan is also not to give you some sort of whip to beat yourself with at the end of whatever time period you chose for not achieving what you planned. Um, it's perfectly normal not to be able to predict exactly what you can get done or to have ended up doing other things. Other stuff comes up. Things will come up that you had not planned for, but you do have to address. And sometimes that's something as simple as, you know, you'll get ill and not be able to work, or, you know, somebody might give you an urgent thing you have to do, and you have to rearrange your plans for that, or, uh, you know, the writing won't go the way you expect it, and it'll just take longer to do this particular portion of the project than you thought, and that's okay. The point is the plan helps you get started. So in the studio, I do an annual, like, planning your year class to give a big overview of what you'd like to do and what's going on at different points of the year and to really help people kind of look at what their year looks like, because we all have a slightly different 1 and where, you know, what's going to be an issue at different points of the year. It's partly about setting big kind of big picture goals, but also just really getting a sense of what really realistically might be possible. And then we plan on a quarterly basis, so every 3 months. We, I usually we start our year on the 1st of July, and there's a couple reasons for that. One is it's actually 6 months exactly later than the normal calendar beginning of the year, but for most people in North America, Europe, you know, it's not, it doesn't make sense to kind of think about a full year starting in January because you're right in the middle of your institutional year, it doesn't really feel like the beginning and I discourage you from starting it when the kind of students come back, because then it's really driven by what other people need you to do. Whereas July, it's kind of the part of the year where you personally have the most control over your time and what you allocate it to and where you have the least number of scheduled things, right? So you can, if you like writing for full days, it's a time of year when you can probably do that. At least some of the time, right? So we start in July and we think, you know, 3 months at a time, but each of those 3 month chunks, we look at things like, where are the transitions, right? At what point in here? Because transitions take energy and extra cognitive capacity just to move from 1 thing to the other. Where are the crunch points? Where are the places in this quarter where it's going to be really hard to juggle all the things because there's just too much happening and it has hard deadlines, right? Where are the places, on the contrary, that could be more spacious? Where you have more possibility instead of thinking, oh, it's crunch, crunch, crunch all the time. Where could I make more space? How would I do that? So we kind of do that. And then with my newsletter, I send out some prompts every month. So that you can review, because like I said, planning is to help you take action and to make sure the important stuff's getting done. And so it's perfectly normal to have to revise your plans based on what's actually happening, based on the new information you have all of that kind of thing. So that's kind of where we go. But then it's like, you just need to get through week to week. What am I doing this week? What am I going to do? Right. And you get to start fresh. You don't have to roll everything over. Sometimes it's like, okay, I didn't get to that. But now there's some new urgent thing that's come in. So I can't just add this thing I didn't do last weekend. I might have to take a pause on that and bring it back later. Vikki: I think this is so, so important for people to hear because I have so many clients, and in fact, some of them have been on the podcast in the past. So many clients who avoid planning because they don't trust that they will stick to their plan. And so they see it as a waste of time. They spend their time making this plan, then they don't stick to it. And they quite rapidly decide they haven't stuck to it, whatever that means, and I know I fell foul of this in the past. I'm, I'm getting better now. You know, we decide that it, it hasn't worked and then it solely becomes one more thing we've messed up rather than recognizing that actually that's all part of the process. That realizing that once again, you may be put in a bit too much is fine and we get to readjust and then think about that when we do our next big plan. But this idea that a plan isn't there to be followed perfectly, I just think, frees us up to be a lot more kind of open and willing to try different approaches to planning. Jo: Yeah. So the key thing for me is that your plan is partly about identifying priorities, right? Like what are the important things? If you objectively have too much to do instead of just... like, I like, this is why I like this metaphor of juggling. Um, because, you know, balance we use balance a lot and people talk about work life balance and then they talk about the balance within their work between research and teaching. And part of the problem is balance gives you this kind of mental image of a seesaw, teeter totter, whatever you call it, where there's like two ends, and you're just trying to balance them. So the first problem with that is you've got more than two things you're trying to juggle, right? The second thing is balance doesn't necessarily mean, like, so many people go from there and that mental image to thinking, Oh, I have to spend as much time on each of these things, or they are all equally important. And they, they might not be. And you, so like, like your academic writing, if you think your academic writing is important, and say you're kind of mid career, you're teaching a couple of classes, you're on a couple of committees, you've got, you know, personal tutees or a couple of PhD students you're supervising, you've got a lot going on. To say that writing is important, you might still be like, well, there's no way that I can give it a lot of time. And so then you can decide either it's not important, or you can be like, well, if I can't give it lots of time, then it just sort of disappears. And so my approach is really to say, well, if it's a priority, and I actually looked this up in the dictionary once. One of the definitions of priority is that you allocate time and resources to it before you allocate time to other things. So even if you don't have a lot of time for writing, one of the principles that we use is, we're going to allocate time to writing first, even if it's only coming to Meeting With Your Writing once a week. And I have definitely members, there's like one member who writing is very important to her, she has said out loud to the group, I wish I could give more time to this than I can, but I work in an institution where I teach four classes each semester. I'm very busy, but I can make time to come to Meeting With Your Writing, which is my virtual co writing group, once a week, and that makes a difference, right? So the juggling part really as a metaphor is, you know, most jugglers, a lot of times they're juggling three things. Now they've got a whole bag of tricks, right? And they will switch which things they're juggling,. And sometimes they'll be able to do four, and sometimes they won't. And sometimes it's beanbags, and sometimes it's breakables, and sometimes it's flaming torches. And so it kind of is a, it's a much richer metaphor that helps you. And so one of the things I think about planning is that you're kind of deciding. Which things are you juggling and which things are you leaving in the box for later? And if things are going to drop instead of trying to juggle too many things and then have just random balls drop, and roll under the sofa where you forget about them and you don't see them for months, right? That you actually are like, I've got too many things. I need to put one of these down. And then you pick which one, right? That's different than, you know, something is going to drop, but you get to decide. Vikki: Definitely. And that deciding in advance can be uncomfortable. I think it's why we sometimes put off doing that. You know, my planning process back in the day, before I came across all this coaching stuff, my planning process was always, I have too many things, so how can I make a schedule where these things fit? And inevitably that meant starting too early, not having any breaks, kind of, you know, not allocating enough time to anything. And that's why I never then stuck to it. I always used to think I was bad at sticking to plans. Turns out I'm not bad at sticking to plans. Turns out I just spent a lot of years making stupid plans. Because I never wanted to concede the point that I couldn't do them all. And so I sort of made that future Vikki's problem. It's like, okay, this time we will do them all. We will. Of course we never could because it was an unreasonable amount of stuff. And I think one of my most important purposes of planning is confronting that uncomfortableness of accepting which things you're not going to do, which things you're going to do quickly and to a relatively mediocre level just to get them done, and which things you're actually giving time to, in advance, because when we're making that decision on the fly, we almost always pick the things that are easier, the things that are for other people, the things that are imminently urgent. And unless we've got collaborative deadlines, writing rarely comes into one of those things. Jo: Well, exactly. And I think that's one of the things that is particularly tricky because everybody struggles with planning, no matter what kind of job they do or what kind of life they lead. Everybody's trying to juggle a lot of different things. But some of the special things about academia, one is that you do have a lot of autonomy. And that's actually one of the attractions for many people. But the thing about autonomy is on the one hand, you get to choose right. When you're going to write or whatever and what you're going to write. On the other hand, that means nobody tells you right now, and nobody protects that time for you. You kind of have to do it yourself. Um, so that's kind of the downside to the autonomy. The other thing is that the kinds of things you're juggling are different in these really fundamental ways. So it's like if you spend this hour preparing to teach this class in two days or tomorrow or something, and if you don't do that work, you're going to walk into class unprepared and there's going to be an immediate thing. Whereas if you decided to spend this hour writing and you don't spend it writing, nobody's even going to notice other than you probably for ages and you get to the point where it just keeps going forward and forward until you get to a point which unfortunately happened to a colleague of mine, 25 years ago, and it was not great, where, you know, she needed to have published a certain amount of things in order for her contract to be made permanent, and she didn't. And the really terrible part about that is she didn't get any support for that. Basically, she got told by the more senior people, you really need to prioritize this and do this, but nobody ever or like, let us help you do that. And like you say, if you don't make a conscious plan to protect time for the longer term but important stuff, then it's the ball that gets dropped and rolls under the sofa. And then you just feel really bad about it, especially if it really is. Important so that idea of priority is about what's important and allocating resources to what's important before you allocate resources to other things. And I think one of the things about academics is many of them are people who were straight A students. You know, there's a lot of conversation about ungrading and the harm that grading does these days. And a lot of that is quite rightly focused on the harm it does to people who are traditionally excluded from higher education, but I have a very strong view that grading has harmed many of our clients. And many of the listeners, because it has given them this idea that you have to do everything at your best and that getting a B is kind of failing and that kind of thing. And it's, and it's not, right. It's okay to just do them and get them off your plate so that you can put. And, and to decide which things are going to get your a effort. Vikki: Definite. Empathize with that so hard. Jo: So part of it is also about thinking about your own capacity and thinking about what's important and what you want to do well, and how much time because your resources aren't just time. It's also cognitive capacity. And that's really important for writing because that's one of the reasons people say, I need these big chunks of time because parts of the writing process do actually require a certain kind of cognitive capacity that is objectively harder to find when you're busy with a lot of other things. The entire writing process doesn't need that, but certain parts of it absolutely do. And so the other thing we talk about when we talk about planning your writing is, what kind of time do I have for writing? What can I protect? How could I protect it? What support do I need to protect it? All of that. But then it's like, okay, what kind of time is that? And what kinds of writing related work can I do in the kind of time I have? And that's the other reason to kind of think about the year starting in the summer when you have a lot of control. And then think about your summer plans, not as I need to finish this article or whatever. But really about like, what's the best way I can use that those longer chunks of time and the ability to have a lot of stuff about my writing continually kind of there in the back of my mind and kind of mulling over like, there's more mulling possibility, you know, because sometimes you're thinking through some really difficult intellectual problems, right? And you, you know, it, you just kind of need them to be sort of in your head while you're doing things. And that's easier in the summer or other big, longer chunks of time. And so the real thing is how do I use that effectively to set myself up for the kind of time I might have later in the year? And so, for example, when we think about, what am I doing during that time? It's like, well, where are you in the process? What kinds of, instead of just like, I need to work on my book. It's like, well, what kind of work does my book really need right now? And some of that might be, I have this really tricky intellectual problem in chapter three, and I don't even really know what the argument is, you're not going to be able to fix that when you're really busy with other things, but that might be true. Really good focus for your summer, right? Like, what do I need to do to figure that out? Like, do I need to do some reading? Do I need to do some analysis of whatever source material I'm using? Do I need to write whatever? But then you might have another one where you've got a draft, where you've done the analysis, where you're really confident about the argument you could make and that you have the evidence to support it and the work that needs to be done next is really to make sure that you've got the right secondary literature in there, you've got the flow you need, you've got whatever. Well, you can make a little bit more detailed list of specific steps you can take. And then that kind of work can probably be done in like hour and a half sessions, which you can find during term time. And then there's the kind of stuff that you can probably do... one of my clients at one point she was editing a book, and it was very close to the end. And, you know, so she had everything in but there's all these really fiddly things you have to do at the end before you can submit it to the publisher, and she spent one session just writing this incredibly granular list of all the tiny tasks she needed to do. But they were very granular and they were the kinds of things where when she did have 15 minutes. She could look at that list and see something on the list that she could do in the time she had available. Now you don't want to use your big long chunks of summertime to do that necessarily if you don't have a strong deadline, because you can do that when you've got 15 minutes here and there. Or if you're doing it in the summer, you don't want to use the best part of your day for that. You want to use the best part of your day for the stuff that really requires heavy intellectual lifting. And then later when you're tired and can't really think anymore about that problem, you can be like, Oh, look here, I have a list of things I don't have to think very hard. Let's see how many I can do in half an hour. Vikki: I love that because One of the things I see is people saying that they have to be in a particular mode in order to write, which as you say, for certain elements of it can be absolutely true, but it can also be a form of procrastination in my view. Yeah. Sometimes it's like, Oh, I'll be in a better state of mind to do this next week, next month, in the summer, that magic summer. And then what happens is we get there and we're more tired than we thought we were going to be. And actually it's been a really long time since we've thought about this project. And we've got a lot of, you know, a lot of pressure on now it's the time for the heavy intellectual stuff. And it can be really easy to then get a bit intimidated. What I love about this notion of like breaking it up so that you think about the different types of work is that I think if you can use the time where you've got less cognitive capacity to do some of the smaller jobs, it does keep it more mulling over in your head for more of the time, so that when you get to a time period where you've got a bit longer, It's easier to jump into it because you can kind of remember the structure of it. You can remember the things you've been working on. Yes. And it's all been sort of percolating a little bit. Jo: And I like to think of that in terms of like when you're cooking. Um, so I don't know, Not everybody knows how to make risotto, and even those of us that do know how to make it, we often cheat a little bit, but the official way to make risotto is that you have stock, simmering, and you add it very gradually to the rice in the pan, and you stir continuously the whole time, and that's what gives it the sort of texture that you would expect from a really good risotto. And so you've got it sitting there, you brought it to the boil, and then you put it on this really low temperature so that it stays hot. And then when you add the hot broth into your rice, it doesn't cool down and then have to heat up again. It's just it stays at the same temperature. And I like that as a sort of analogy for what you can do with 15 minutes. It's not necessarily that you are going to accomplish a lot in 15 minutes. It is precisely that it is going to keep the project alive in your head. So that when you have an hour and a half, or when you have a full day, you are not having to bring it to the boil from cold. You are actually starting with warm and making it. And so it just means that you can be more effective and you're less frustrated about it. And I'm not saying don't give writing make writing the big thing for your summer, what I'm normally saying is how do you make that part of a practice that continues through the year and how does doing writing in other kinds of time in the rest of the year, make the summer writing more, dare I say it enjoyable, because that's the other thing we talk a lot about efficiency and effectiveness, but I really like to think about, you know, this is a thing you can enjoy, and and yes, it feels a bit weird. But, the fact is that you wouldn't have done a PhD and become an academic if you didn't find really ricky intellectual problems enjoyable, right? Like that challenge itself is part of what's enjoyable. So it's not fun in the way some other things you do are fun, but it is an enjoyable challenge. But it's not an enjoyable challenge if you feel like you're like under the gun all the time and if you're under pressure. So it's really about relieving enough pressure that you actually feel like you remember why you wanted to do this as for a living in the first place. Vikki: I love that. And I love, so one of the things as well that I think comes out from having to work out what are manageable chunks to do when you're busy with other things, is it can help us to develop a practice where we break everything into manageable chunks. Because the other thing I see people doing, is giving very large, you know, figure out structure of introduction or something as their to do list item. And it's really easy to pass over and be like, Oh, I haven't got brain space to think about that yet. When it's so big and fluffy, for want of a better word, as to exactly what you need to do. I have this theory that even the difficult bits, even the figuring out what the intellectual argument bit is, we need to work out what are the steps I need to go through that give me the best chance of being able to figure this out. Jo: They do. And I think one of the things I often say to people is you don't have to be able to break the whole thing down into those granular tasks, but your to do list always has to have two or three very concrete things that when you look at them, you immediately know what they involve, right? You don't want everything on your to do list to require you to do some kind of thinking before you can even really get started. And sometimes you can do that at the end of a previous session. Like when you finish, just take a moment to just give yourself some clues. You can say, uh, like, Oh, okay. I have to stop now cause I have to go do something else. But I was thinking this is what I would do next. And you can just write that. You can just write it right in the bloody document cause you can delete it when you get back there. You can also be like, Oh, I was thinking about this that I want to go read. And, and instead of trying to keep it in your head, write it down. So that is one thing, but also sometimes it's useful to know that sitting there and using your writing time to plan your writing project is something that will advance your project, right, deciding what would be the next thing to do, or what would be the most effective or what kinds of writing does this need. I was having a conversation with somebody the other day, who's an editor. And she said she thinks one of the real issues is that a lot of us, we don't really know much about what we mean by revision. And I think a lot of academics are actually trying to avoid revision. We're sort of like, Oh, we should be good enough to be able to write the whole thing and only need to do a little bit of copy editing before we submit it. And that's not true. That's not even a reasonable goal because you are always setting yourself new challenges. You're always learning new things. And also because it's too big, even an article is too big to hold everything in your head. And so one of the things that I talk about is how the first draft or you can call it a zero draft if you like at this point, but when you start writing, you are writing for yourself. Don't start by thinking about what you need to communicate to other people. Think about like that first draft is really about becoming confident in the argument, like figuring out the argument you can make. Figuring out the argument you want to make, making sure those things fit, like what evidence do I have can I say the thing I really want to say do I need to write, but really focused on the research you've done and the thing you can say, and not worrying so much about what other people will think about it when they read it. You're writing initially for that. And then revision is where you turn that into something that is communicating your argument to someone else. And revision might involve several passes, right? Like, it might actually make sense, not to just say, I need to revise chapter one, you might say, okay, I'm here. The next most important thing that needs to happen is I need to make sure that the structure and the flow of the argument, the evidence is right. And then you might be like, okay, once I've done that, I'm going to go through and think about what secondary literature do I need to discuss in this with my data? Like, not the introduction part, but the while I'm talking about this, where do I need to like, really say, talk about the theoretical framework or whatever, and put that through, right? And then you might be like, okay, I now know who the reader is. The introduction is really about how do I situate what I'm saying in the set of debates they're already familiar with? Which of those debates do I need to talk about? How much do I need to say? Whatever. Trying to do all three of those things at once just means you're switching tasks all the time, right? Because you're like, I only want to go through it one more time. No, allow yourself to go through it six, eight, 10 times. But with a very specific focus each time. And I think what you'll find is that it is more effective. And absolutely don't start with the pretty words, right? Don't worry about the transition sentences. Make notes, right? Need a transition here or, you know, I'm not sure this is the right word, but you don't want to make them pretty because sometimes what you're going to find is there's whole paragraphs there you don't need. And if you've already spent a lot of time making them beautiful, it's going to be so much harder to get rid of them. So keep them ugly. And then once you're really clear that, oh, I've got all the content, then you can be like, okay, let's go through really carefully and think about the language. Think about the sentence length and think about, you know, all of those things. And once I've done that, I'm going to go through and I'm going to copy edit and make sure I spelt everything correctly and all that kind of stuff. But I think that is really like thinking about the process and where you are in it can be really helpful for deciding what needs to be on your list, right? Like you can't structure a chapter until you really know what the argument is and what evidence you're using to make it. Vikki: What do you think gets in the way of people doing what you just said? Because I think most people know in theory that a first draft should be rough, that it didn't be perfect, and da da da. But People still battle with this. So why can't they just go, Oh yes, I'll do what Jo said., Jo: There's a couple of things. One is when you feel like you don't have a lot of time, you feel like that in an ideal world, that would be the best way to do it, but I don't have time for that. I need to do it more quickly. I would like to ban the word efficiency from our discussions of writing because I think trying to be efficient is the fastest route to writer's block that is there. Because you end up, if you want to do it the most efficient way, what you end up doing is spending a lot of your time and cognitive resources trying to work out the best thing to do rather than actually doing things. And the easiest way to stop doing that is if you catch yourself trying to be efficient, just switch from efficient to effective, right? So I think that's one thing, right? I think the other thing is that we, you know, because we teach these methods to our students and we get frustrated when our students don't do them right in terms of like writing drafts and revising them. So I think, you know, we know that they're good things, but I think we also feel like as you get better at writing, somehow the need for revision would be less. The other thing I've seen is that because you're constantly leveling up the challenge in what you're writing, You have more optimism about how easy it's going to be because you just did this other thing and it felt really easy and now this one's hard and you feel like, but I thought I was good at this. But what's happened is you have sneakily up up the challenge level as well. Like, you are often doing more challenging things. And, and that's normal. But it does mean that having a process where you allow yourself with the thing to be challenging. So, it's a bit like, um, music practice, right? You know, nobody really enjoys playing scales when they sit down to practice piano, the reason they want to practice piano, even people that are very good, like my kid or my father in law, right? They're very good pianists and they can play some really challenging music, but it does help to warm up by playing scales, right? It loosens up your fingers and your muscles. It reminds you, even just playing the scales of the key that your piece is in. You know, means that you just kind of reactivate some sort of muscle memory about playing in B flat major or whatever the heck you're doing. Right. But, you know, both of those people will tell you that they don't always do that and they don't because it's not fun like playing the actual music is the fun part. Um, but also when you're learning, I mean when, when, when my kid was younger and learning, they would sometimes get really frustrated and want to stop practicing all together and this is the other thing that comes into actually using the time you set aside for writing is sometimes when you sit down to write and it doesn't What you have to do is hard, right? You really are resistant and you start feeling like you can't do it and you end up not doing anything because you just feel like this is too hard. I can't do it. Right. One of the things that I suggested to them when they were younger was I, I reminded them that the pieces they could play that felt easy now were once as hard as the thing they're trying to learn, right? And that this new thing is a challenge. But they overcame challenges before and they will again, and it's difficult. So that's one thing to remind yourself. But the other thing I suggested to her was to alternate between, you know, when you get really frustrated, instead of quitting, go and remind yourself how much you love it, like do a part of the process that's easier. Do something right that's still writing that's still right, but that gives you that feeling that you really are capable and can do this. So you don't always have to do the hardest thing. If some days you're feeling really down on yourself and like you can't, then the thing you should pick for your writing time is the thing that feels easiest the thing that will make you feel competent. But I think the other thing that stops people from doing that is that what that process of a draft and revision might look like is very different for different people, right? So for some people, I'm, I'm a free write first drafter. I need to just kind of blurt it out and then I can figure out. And so if you, if that's the easiest way for you to get the ideas out of your head and onto paper, then you need a process where you allow yourself to do that and to go around in circles and be repetitive and do whatever you do. And then you need a process to actually look at your free write possibly use reverse outlining to like find a structure, put things new, whatever, right? There are other people who absolutely do not write like that, and you don't have to write like that. And one of the things, actually, those of us that like to blurt it out might have found that in school we might have been taught, no, no, no, don't do that, you need to outline. So there's also this thing about how you've been taught is the right order to do things in. For some of us, free writing to start is absolutely the right thing. For other people, writing an outline is a good thing. For other people, writing some sort of basic outline helps them get started and then they free and they go back and forth. For some people, if you find that when you look at a set of sentences you've written, you cannot see how you could write them any other way, then you don't want things in sentences until a fairly late revision draft. Like your first draft might not look like, like a draft at all. It might look like this super detailed outline. I have one client who drafted her entire book, multiple chapters in bullet points. She then did revision still in bullet points around structure around what needs to be here what doesn't all the rest of it. And then she had to go through really systematically and be like okay I'm giving each chapter a month and I'm turning it from bullet points into sentences right. And that's kind of how that worked for them. And if that's your process, and it works for you, then that's your process. And the difficulty is that you sometimes need to kind of experiment with things and that's where it's like, well, I have so little time to write and I've got so much pressure. I don't have time to experiment. But then what happens is you end up in this vicious circle where you're not writing anything. So sometimes you just have to take a risk. Vikki: Definitely. I definitely recognize the, I don't have time to do this badly thing amongst my clients a lot. And sometimes getting them to reflect on how much time they're using worrying about and feeling bad about the fact they're not writing. It's usually far in excess of the amount of time it would take to actually have a go at it. I'm a big fan of, you know, people have this notion of, you know, what, I don't know what the right structure is or the right argument. I do it both ways. Write it that way. Write it the other way. See which one you like. No, I haven't got time for that. It's like, Oh, you've got time to spend three weeks stressing about which one's the right option. Or we could spend two hours having to go at one of each. Jo: Absolutely. Like, and that's where the efficiency, right? It's like, that's inefficient. I don't, I don't have time to do that. And that's where it's like, but is what you're doing effective? Yeah. Yeah. Right. And if what you're doing looks inefficient, but is effective and you're getting things finished. then you can keep doing it and stop spending a lot of time looking for the perfect method that would be better for you and just really lean into what already works for you. And if what you're doing is not effective, then try something, even though you don't know whether that's going to be effective either, but the thing you're doing is not effective. So, you know, there's at least a 50, 50 chance that the thing you try is going to be more effective than what you're doing now, which is nothing. So, right. And, and, and I think it's not just, you know, and it's partly you want it to be effective. And I think we really are bad at understanding how much energy cognitive and emotional labor take, right? We think we have easy jobs, because we're not digging ditches. But actually, the cognitive labor takes. energy and if you've ever done a really big house move, which many academics have done because of the nature of the labor market, you will know, when you move house, uh, you end up being really, really tired. And the reason you're tired is that although all of the decisions you have to make feel small and, and trivial, and certainly nothing like the kind of work that you do intellectually, that there are just so many of them that you actually get a thing called decision fatigue, and you can't write like your cognitive capacity, you like, run it all up. All of that thinking and decision making and one of the things about making a plan is that you make all the decisions at once and then you're kind of working your plan and all you need to do is decide about the stuff that came up and the changes. Whereas if you're kind of working on the fly all the time you're just using a lot of cognitive energy. Weighing up options multiple times a day, right? And the transitions between things, that all takes a lot of cognitive energy because you can't have anything going on in your, like, the nice thing about routines is that things are subconscious and then they take less energy, right? But then the emotional energy, right? Like emotional work is real work and emotional work is about you managing your own emotions, feeling bad about how you're feeling, you know worrying like what people are going to think about you, all of that stuff Also takes real energy, the kind of energy we measure in calories and all of that kind of thing. And so just the fact that you're not out digging dishes doesn't mean you're not working hard. And part of the thing about planning is reducing the amount of energy you're spending on stuff that you don't need to be doing. It isn't even making you feel good, right? So that you have more energy for this stuff that you need and want to do. And for the stuff that makes you feel good, right? Plus leaves you time to be able to actually recharge properly, like sleep well, right? Because how many people are then have all of this spinning in their head and they go to bed and they can't get to sleep because of all the hamsters in their head. And so the people that I'm most angry with are the people that tell some of my, you know, more junior clients, like the PhD students and the junior people, that it's unreasonable for them to expect to sleep well and it's just like, You know, like what the job you just think the job is terrible and it's supposed to be terrible. And I don't know. I just don't believe that. I think you should be able to enjoy it. And you should be able to like, achieve things that you want to achieve. And no, you don't have control over all of that. And the conditions in which you're doing it are deteriorating daily. But pick the stuff that makes it meaningful because otherwise you could have gone to that career fair with all the other really smart final year undergraduates and got a job at a bank or a consulting firm or something and been paid loads more than you're earning now and there was a reason you didn't do that. And you need to remember that reason and you need to be like, this is why I'm still doing this job. And if the, if the big thing that is why you wanted to do this job and is still doing the job is not in your plan, then. I don't know. What's it worth to you? Vikki: Definitely, definitely. And I think these sorts of tips that you've given today, this advice you've given today, hopefully can help people see how they can take that element that they love and that they do want to be doing and put it in first. I love this notion that a priority doesn't have to be the only thing you're doing, but it's the thing that you put in first when you're structuring your time. Jo: It doesn't also have to be the thing you spend the most time on. Vikki: Yeah. Right? But you put it in first and guard it the most fiercely. I love that. Jo: And one of the things, so one of the things we do, so yeah, so the planning in the academic writing studio, we plan the year starting in June, or in July, so the planning class will actually be on the 31st of May this year, to think about the year, and then on the 14th of June we'll have one to think about the first quarter, July, August, and September, and get into a bit more detail about, okay, what's possible, what are you going to do, And, by doing that, you can put writing first in your year. You can start your year with writing instead of feeling like you're catching up by the time you get to the summer, right? And just Just that sense of is this the first thing I do like it's a circle right it comes around every year it could be either it is a thing we make up in our heads, but it makes a difference. The other thing we do is most of the sessions of meeting with your writing, I mean when I started there was only one a week, but we've really built on that are on Monday. Right. And the idea is that if you can manage to, to give a couple of hours to writing on Monday, even if that's the only writing time, it shifts how you feel about the whole week. So, so many people are like, Oh, Friday, right, I'll be able to write on Friday and then they get to Friday and one, all the things that came up in the week are now leaking into Friday and. feeling like they're more important than doing the writing. Uh, two, you're probably tired, right? And so it's harder. But also you're going through the week kind of thinking, I hope I get to write on Friday, right? I've planned, I hope I get to preserve that. Because if you write on Monday, even if it's for an hour, an hour and a half, right? On Monday, you are going through the week having already written, right? Even if that's all the writing you do in the week, you did some, you have already done it. You don't have to go through the week feeling like you're going to fail in your goal to write every week, right? Because you've already done it. The other thing is a lot of my clients over, I'm telling you more than 10 years have told me that. Having written on Monday, they often find that they can write again later in the week. So instead of it being this thing about how much time can I preserve at the end of the week after I've never done everything else, you do it first and then you realize, oh, I could fit it in here as well. And you actually do more than you planned, but you can't judge yourself based on how much you can't set a goal of how much can I do. You just need to be really realistic. Of like, how do I protect some time for this activity and how do I make it feel like this important activity is still part of my work, even if I have this really heavy teaching load and even if I'm still kind of worried, I might not meet these weird standards somebody else has set for finishing, publishing, whatever. Vikki: Amazing. So, if people want to know more about Studio and all the support mechanisms that you've mentioned, I know there are books as well, where do they find out more? Jo: So you can find out about me at joevannevery. co. uk and my last name is spelled just like those two everyday words, so it's van like a truck, every like every day. joevannevery. co. uk And that's where I have a, there's a blog on that, which we just call the library. Cause it's, there's over 500 posts in there. There's some spotlights that pull them together on themes. The current one is about confidence. And, it has links to the books and other things. if you want to join the academic writing studio and come along to the planning classes, we have several membership tiers now. So if you just want planning classes, you can just buy a package of planning classes and you get the annual and each of the 4 quarters and we remind you and you come along and make some plans. We now have a mid tier. Where you can get that plus all the group coaching we do so, there's sort of general office hours, where you can just get help with whatever you're struggling with, you know, whatever there's some that are specifically writing clinics for or journal article writers or for book writers, there are some PhD clinics and the structure of those is basically we kind of whoever turns up we're responsive. We're like, what are you working on? What's going well? How can we help you? That's basically the structure there. So you can have the planning plus all of that, right. Just for extra support when your plans are falling apart, right? Like if you're feeling like, Oh, but my plans are going to fall apart. It's great. Come to that, come to office hours. We'll help unfold them apart. And then there's the sort of really top membership, which is, which also includes all of that. Plus. A meeting with your writing and we have four sessions every week. There's two weeks over the Christmas break that we do not run them, but the rest of the year, even on bank holidays, four sessions a week, three of them are on Monday. One is on Thursday. There may not be four that are a sensible time in your time zone, but it's to mean that we can have people in different time zones, people with different teaching loads. So if you like that kind of coworking support, and it is coworking, um, Right. Silent. You get some prompts to start, whatever. So all of that you get at the academic writing studio. co. uk. So, um, that's basically it. However, if you only want to spend like a small amount, I've also got these short guides. So these two are really about the things we talked about today. Finding time for your scholarly writing talks about the different kinds of time and what you can do in different kinds of time. The scholarly writing process talks about that process going from, I'm figuring out what I want to say towards, I'm communicating it to somebody else. And in each of the little stages, there's questions and prompts to help you think about what has got me stuck and how, what could I do to get myself unstuck. So it's a very kind of coachy kind of book and there is in the ebook version, there is a kind of combined thing that has both of those together. Um, so you can just search on Amazon, wherever you buy books. The paperbacks, you'll have to order, and Amazon might tell you that they're out of stock, but you can still order them. They'll just take a little longer to come in, but you can also order them from your local bookshop and all of that. There's a page on my jovenevry. co. uk website that has all those details. Um, so, Vikki: and you have a free newsletter Jo: because I have a free newsletter. So jovenevry. co. uk slash newsletter. So yeah, whatever level of, you know, kind of encouragement and support you want. That's, you know, Vikki: you're there. That's perfect. Thank you so much. So much food for thought for everyone. Um, and hopefully lots of inspiration. I loved your point that you made before that planning is a way to inspire action. And I think that today's podcast will have really inspired action in a lot of people. So Thank you very much. Thank you everyone for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

I want you to think about your to do list right now. Have you got items on there that have been hanging around for ages? Have you got items on there where it's write introduction or read more and things like that? If so, don't worry, completely human, completely normal. But I bet those are the ones that you aren't ticking off. So many of my clients give themselves really vague instructions about what they need to do and what has to happen next, and then wonder why they're finding it hard to get on with things. And we're all given that advice, you need to break it down into manageable chunks. But no one really tells us how to do that. What is a manageable chunk anyway? How big should it be? What should that look like? What type of chunk will make it easier for us to get started? If any of this is resonating, and I'm pretty confident whether you're a PhD student or an academic, it will be, then you need today's episode because I'm going to help you figure out how to break down your work into easy, manageable chunks so that you can get on, get them ticked off, and enjoy your work again.They say in podcasting talk about what you know. Today, when I'm recording this, it is the 14th of April. I have just had the last week mostly off work, apart from a few group sessions. Um, my stepdaughters were here over the Easter break, which was wonderful and I start back at work properly again tomorrow, the day this podcast is due out. And I've just realized I hadn't recorded a podcast or posted it ready to go out. And so here I am, on a Sunday afternoon, recording you a podcast. And so I thought, what better to talk about than how to get back to work after a break, because I've got to do it right now. Hey everyone, and welcome to episode 31 of season 2 of the PhD Life Coach. I don't know about you, but I find the time after a break a really strange time. Because part of me has all these great ideas about how I'm going to be, you know, more organized and things I'm going to do and how, you know, new start, fresh beginnings, all that stuff. And part of me is a bit like, Oh, I really enjoyed not having quite as much work to do over the holidays. Now I don't have it quite as much now running my own business, but certainly in academia, when I had time off, that feeling that everything had been piling up while I was away and that I was now having to get back and face it and maybe do some of those things that I had put off till after the holidays, was often quite a big sort of, I won't go quite as far as dread for some of you it might feel like dread, but certainly feeling a bit ominous and a bit anticipating the struggles. So in this session, I really want to think about what makes coming back after a break feel more difficult and how we can navigate it with a little more ease and a little more fun. One of the biggest issues that I see in myself and in the clients that I worked with and a lot of the academics and PhD students I've spent time with over the years is all the stories we tell ourselves as we start coming back after a break. I am going to guess, whether you're coming back after a break now or whether you just had the Easter weekend or whatever it was, I'm gonna guess that you have a bunch of thoughts about you in the break itself. Maybe you're thinking that you hadn't intended to work and you ended up doing some work and you kind of feel like you wasted the break now. Maybe you had intended to do some work and you ended up doing more or less than you intended and you're frustrated you didn't stick to your plans. Maybe you'd set yourself a goal to get something really big done over the holidays and ended up not doing it and now you're annoyed that you are, in inverted commas, behind. What's true for you? Which of those do you recognize the most? I've experienced pretty much all of them at different times over the holidays, but one of the problems when we look back over things we've done with regret is it can be a really wasted emotion. There's nothing we can do about how we spent the holiday. Sure, we can spend some time reflecting and think about how we would want to learn from this experience in the future, and I will talk about that. But we can't change the amount of work that we did over the holidays. We can't change how much rest we had over the holidays, and the problem when we spend lots of time regretting it and beating ourselves up for the fact that we should have done it differently, we're now making the current time period difficult as well. So we've wasted time. if that's how we're going to conceptualize it during the holidays, either by working or by not working or whatever you think constitutes a waste of time. And now we're wasting time worrying about the things we should have done then, at a point where we can't do anything about it. By worrying about time wasted then, we end up wasting time now. And so I'd really encourage you to either get to positive. about your holidays, or at least to neutral. So whatever you did, I want you to find things you're grateful for. I'm really glad that I spent time doing X. I'm really glad that I kept Y ticking over. I'm really glad that I put Z down and didn't work on it, even though I had intended to. Actually, I think that was the right thing for me. I think that was what I needed. Being able to see and have gratitude for the things you did do puts you in a much better frame of mind to do the things you intend now. It also reinforces to ourselves that we know ourselves and that we're able to act from our best intentions. And again, that can really help when we're thinking about what we want to be doing in this first week, this first two weeks back at work. Now you might be struggling. You might be thinking, yeah, there's nothing I'm grateful that I did because I've now got this massive pile of marking, or I've now got a chapter due to my supervisor and I haven't done any of it. First, I'd encourage you to really look for the things that you're grateful for. There's usually small things, at least, that you're able to find in there. But if you're really struggling with feeling positive about your holiday, I'd like to encourage you to at least aim for neutral. A neutral thought might sound something like, Well, I did what I did, and we're where we are now. Okay? So it's not spending lots of time on regret. It's not faking a positive attitude about it, if you're really struggling to see anything positive in it at all. But it is accepting that it's in the past, and there's nothing we can do about it now. Well, I did what I did. That's it. I did what I did and now we move on. What do we do now? So really aim for at least neutral, if not positive. And you will find that from there, it's enormously easier to figure out what you want to do next. The same is true when we look back at the past us. The one that was before the holidays, the one that had all these good intentions and expectations for what we were going to do over the holiday and where we'd be at when we get back. It's probably also the past version of you that has put a bunch of stuff on your to do list now. Do you do that? I used to do that a lot and I still do to some extent. That idea that, oh yeah, I'll get to that after the holidays. When I've had a good break, I'll be much more on it. I'll be ready for it by then. I'll get to that after the holidays. And then you get to after the holidays and you're like, yeah, cheers to that. Thanks. Now I've actually got to do it. I want you to look back on that version of you with some compassion and understanding as well. Anyone working in academia at the end of the spring term is likely to be feeling completely exhausted, largely overwhelmed, mostly unappreciated, and desperately in need of some sort of break. Even if you're looking back and going, Oh my goodness, I should have done this earlier. I want you to have compassion for that version of you that didn't do it. They didn't not do it because they're lazy layabouts. They didn't do it because they were knackered and because they were doing 14 other things. And because maybe those times when they were lazing around wasting time, they were actually just emotionally and cognitively drained. It's okay. There were reasons you didn't do it before. Let's have some compassion for that version of ourselves, and focus instead on making it as easy as possible for this version, for present us, to do the things we need to do next. Now, if there are specific things that you've learned, either from looking back at the things that the past you from the end of term put off, or specific things you learned about how you managed your holidays, then you can spend a little bit of time jotting them down so that when we get to summer, so that when we get to Christmas, you can really take those things into account when you're planning what you want to do next holiday, i. e. things where we can actually change it, where we can learn from this experience and be different in the future, jot those things down. But mostly we want to just focus on how we can make it as easy as possible for the us that now needs to start work and get back into what we're doing, the next thing I want us to do is be really compassionate to the us that's coming back to work as well. So often we think we need to get back on track. We need to get back into it. And this really quite sort of. time urgent, dramatic sense that everything's chaos, we're really behind, and we need to get back on it again. I want you to really manage your expectations in this period. It's not easy to go from a time where things were more flexible, where you were maybe doing bits of work, but where you didn't have the fun full on sort of university experience and back into that more intense experience. And if we can manage our expectations about exactly how much we're going to get done and exactly how on top of things we're going to get in the time available, then we can actually end the day feeling pleased with what we've done rather than frustrated that we didn't do more. Your first day back, you are not going to be functioning completely at your peak. Your first day back, you probably are going to spend loads of time clearing emails, remembering where you were, organizing yourself again, and all that stuff counts as work. And that is okay. We don't have to expect ourselves to do everything in this first week. And to be honest, when we do expect ourselves to do everything in the first week back, it's often when we do less than if we'd had lower expectations of ourselves. Because when we put ourselves under pressure and we tell ourselves that nothing we do is good enough, that's when we end up procrastinating and that's when we end up sort of just doing faffy jobs rather than things that actually need doing. So I want you to really carefully manage your expectations, whether you started back last week or whether this is your first week back now, so that you can identify key priorities, work on those while breaking yourself gently back into the routine of working. I'm going to give you three tips about ways to do that. The first is to make sure that you're breaking any of your jobs down into really achievable chunks. So do not make Clear Inbox a to do list, especially if you're an academic. So PhD students, it might not be quite so crazy out there for you. Academics, do not make Clear Inbox a single item on your to do list. Because it's way more than just one job. You are likely to have hundreds of emails. Some leftover from the end of term, some that have come in during this holiday period, and that is a big lot of jobs. Break these things down into smaller chunks. I used to make myself like a little flow chart of, I'd write down how many emails I had at the moment. So it's like 542 emails. And then I'd make a little flow chart where it's like, I got down to 500. I got down to 470. I got down to 460 and then I'd tick them off as I went past them. So I could kind of keep track of where I was up to, and how I was clearing them. Another way to do it, especially if you use Outlook or something like that, you can cluster them by like last week or more than two weeks old or whatever. Be like, right, I'm going to clear the more than two weeks old emails. I'm going to clear the, this week emails. By the way, always clear the, this week emails first. Ones that are late, already late. There's only so much you can do about that. If you can get on top of the most recent ones, that'll get you back on track much more quickly. So, make sure you break your work down into chunks. And if you're never sure how to do that, particularly with some of the bigger tasks, like reading and writing, make sure you listen to last week's episode, because I talked about that in quite some detail last week. The second thing I want you to do is make sure you're looking at your diary now for the next couple of weeks. Often we get caught up in what's absolutely urgent this week, clearing our inboxes and things that have to be done. This week, have a look ahead at least two weeks. Because what we don't want is to get to Sunday next week, and realize that there are things that have crept up on you for the Monday afterwards. So have a look ahead couple of weeks and see what are the things that are absolutely crucial that have to be done this week and plot time into your diaries now to do those. So have that sneaky peek look ahead. The third tip is that now is not the time for detailed planning. Often people come back after the holidays, and I'm fighting this urge myself, to think ahead for the new academic year and what I want to be doing differently in my business and things like that. And there can be this real sort of urge, especially with spring coming here in the Northern Hemisphere and sort of really this sense of renewal, the evenings are getting lighter, it can really drive this sense that we want to plan ahead and get everything organised and stuff. Now that is really important work and it's work that we should be doing, but I would really encourage you not to try and do that work in your first week back. Partly, it's cognitively taxing work. It's stuff that really takes a lot of time and thought. And often we're not in that state of mind when we're coming back after a break, whether you've been working in your break or having a break break. planning can lead to procrastination and overwhelm. So sometimes we can spend so much time planning but what we're actually doing is putting off getting on with the things that we know we need to do. And once we've then got the plan, it can be really overwhelming, this idea of starting it. So a little bit like I talked about in one of my episodes about what to do when you have too much to do, is if you're feeling overwhelmed, if you're coming back after a break and feeling like there's a thousand things to do, instead of planning everything, just pick one thing that definitely needs doing and get that thing done and organized. Pick one item from your to do list where there's a clear tangible output that does need doing in the short term and get that done before you start planning when you're going to do everything else. That way, you've almost taken like a big bite out of your to do list already. You've already gone right, and I've got that done. Boom. Let's go. And it generates that sense of you being someone who gets things done. You being competent, autonomous. You're choosing, you're cracking on and getting things done. And that can really help with motivation. During all of this, I want you to be thinking about what I sometimes refer to as B plus work. The thing with academics, whether you're a PhD student or a full professor, is that we have been rewarded over the years for doing things really, really well. We like to go for the gold stars. We like everything shiny. We like to get complimented. You know, often people have perfectionist tendencies. I've had clients say, you know, Oh, I'll either do it properly or I'll not do it at all. Especially in this period where we are sort of trying to get back on top of the things we're doing, I want you to think where B plus work is good enough, where just getting it done, not even B plus, where passing is sufficient, where you just need to get things out to your system, where you just need to give quick feedback to somebody, where you just need to fill in a quick form, where there are things where you can just crack them out, get them off your desk. Is it the best, most insightful thing you've ever done? No. Is it gone and out of the way so somebody else can work on it? Yes, yes it is. Let's do that. So really question these, Oh, I don't have time to do that well. Oh, I need to do that perfectly. And see whether there's ways that you can do B plus work just to get things moving this week. When you're thinking about what to do, I also want you to be planning for your current energy levels. Now, the reality is that if we're coming back after a period away from work, we often don't have quite the same stamina for working all day that we normally do. And we have two ways that we can deal with that. Either, we can ignore it, pretend it's not true, and then have days where we get really frustrated about the fact that we haven't worked a full day the way we normally would be able to, or that we're more tired than usual in the afternoon and then beat ourselves up about it and be cross that we didn't get more done, or we can accept that we're probably not going to be on totally top form the first day we get back and maybe just lower our expectations slightly so that if you get four hours work done on your first day back - happy days!. Let's be grateful. Let's be proud of ourselves that we completed those four hours rather than beating ourselves up that we didn't do eight. So when you're looking ahead and planning, to the extent you have control, I accept sometimes if we're straight back into teaching or we're straight back into research commitments or whatever it is, then it might be different. But to the extent you have control, plan for the energy levels that you are likely to have getting back into work so that we set ourselves more achievable tasks, set ourselves a day that actually feels like a nice day back, a nice way to get back into the swing of things rather than setting ourselves up to fail right from the beginning. Another element that often gets overlooked at this point is communication. Now, what I mean here by communication is telling people if there's stuff you haven't done that you thought you were going to have done by now, telling people when they might expect it, asking people for things you need in order to get on with your next bit of work, following up stuff that you thought people would have given you, maybe comments on documents and things like that. So that communication piece that we all need at whatever stage of our academic career is going to be really important this week. And one of the reasons that this gets neglected is because often when we're telling ourselves that we should have done things before, or we should be further ahead by now, we start feeling emotions like shame and guilt. We start feeling bad about the fact that we are where we are, that we haven't made the progress that we've done. And one of the things that happens when you're feeling either shame or guilt is that you avoid other people because you don't want to tell them that you haven't done the thing. And you don't want them to think badly of you and all these stories we tell ourselves. And the problem is what that then leads to is a situation where they don't know what's going on. And they don't know when to expect the piece of work. And all those worries we were having that those people might have opinions about us, they probably still will have opinions about us, just about the fact that we haven't told them what's going on, rather than about the fact that we haven't done the piece of work. And so when that's another reason why these thoughts that create shame and guilt can really hold us back. What I want you to think instead is either I can still communicate whilst I'm feeling embarrassed about the fact I haven't done this, or to focus on thoughts that make you feel less embarrassed. It's understandable that I haven't done this yet. There was a lot on, those sorts of things. And use those thoughts and feelings to drive you to actually be in communication with people. Tell your supervisor where you're at with the pieces of work that you had intended to do over Easter. Tell your module teams where you're at with planning for the summer. Ask your supervisors for feedback. Tell your students you haven't gone through their manuscripts yet. Whatever it is. Ask for that marking extension. If you are three days out from the marking deadline and you haven't done it yet, ask for that extension. Ask for relief from something else so that you have time to do it. I know it's not always possible, but the worst thing you can do is to ask for these things after the deadline. I used to be a head of education, so I used to oversee all of this stuff. And members of staff would come to me sometimes a few days before the marking deadline and be like, I am not going to be able to make this deadline. And then I would be able to have a conversation with them about, do I need you to mark it quicker? You know, it's first year work, not too much feedback, just crack on. We just need to get it done. Or can I give you a bit of extension because actually the exam boards aren't for a while or whatever it is. We can actually have a conversation about how to prioritize, whether I can bring in more people to help you. The most frustrating were the ones that waited either until the day of the deadline or after the deadline to tell me they hadn't done it because by then there wasn't a lot I could do. There weren't many ways that I could help. There certainly weren't as many options. Options as had they discussed it with me sooner. So whatever it is that you feel you should have done by now and you're worried to tell somebody, try and have those conversations. Think about what thoughts would you need to have in order to have those conversations. For me, thoughts, like, it's understandable that I didn't get this done. It doesn't mean anything about me as an academic, that I haven't done this. The more neutral kind of, I mean, it's not ideal that I haven't done this, but in a year, no, one's going to remember things like that. So rather than these stories that we can whip up, that everyone's going to hate us, everyone's going to think we're useless, et cetera, et cetera, communicate where you're at now so that people know where they're at. They know when they're likely to get things and are able to kind of plan their work around you. There's nothing worse. I remember when I used to moderate scripts and the first marker would be late getting them to me. And I'd be like, I've, I've blocked time out of my diary to moderate these. And now you're telling me I'm not going to have them, but you didn't tell me in enough time for me to use that for something else. And you certainly didn't tell me in enough time for me to block other time out of my diary to do the moderation. Whereas if you tell people earlier, they can shift their plans to be like, Oh, okay. So I'm not going to be doing that this week. I can do something else. And I need to look ahead to next week and plan that in instead. Try. To communicate, even if it feels really uncomfortable. The final element I wanted to talk about today is the thoughts that you're having about this upcoming term. One way you can figure out what thoughts you're having is by doing a thought download. Just grab a piece of paper and a pen right at the top of it, when I think about this term, I am thinking, Dot, dot, dot. And then just finish those sentences. Write for five or ten minutes. Try and force yourself to keep going, even when you think you've run out of things to say because can never quite tell what will come out when you keep writing. And really notice the thoughts you're having about this upcoming term. Because when we're having thoughts that lead to feelings of dread or overwhelm or any of these sorts of negative emotions, again, it's really easy to then start procrastinating, to start avoiding work, taking on other things that feel more interesting than the boring things that you've got to do. And one of the best ways to work with that is to just know that those thoughts are there. So what are you thinking about this upcoming term? When you're looking at the thoughts you're having, I also want you to try and avoid bringing too much drama into the conversation. So sometimes we're thinking things like, I just wish I didn't have to go back. I never actually want to do this. What am I doing with my life? What on earth has happened? We bring all this kind of superlative drama into it that can sometimes just make us feel like there's a massive, massive problem here. And sometimes there can be. Sometimes we're genuinely doing a job or a PhD that we don't want to be doing anymore and that's something that we can look at in due course. But often, this stuff is pretty normal. If you've had some time away doing something different, even if that time was just time to focus on the work things that you wanted to focus on rather than actual holiday time, but either way, it's really understandable that that transition back into summer term feels hard and that you're having thoughts that stimulate feelings of dread or overwhelm or any of those other negative emotions. This doesn't necessarily mean anything about you or your job or having to change anything. Sometimes that can just be part of a transition from a holiday period back into a work period. And that's not to say that we want to be feeling dread every single time we come back after holidays for the rest of our career. I'm not saying that for a second. But sometimes when we get that in a fleeting way, we can turn it into a massive deal that it doesn't have to be. It's completely normal to have a fleeting sense of not wanting to go back to your job. A temporary sense that you want to run away and start a bookshop or whatever it is. That's okay. There's nothing wrong here. Does this mean that you should actually leave academia or leave your PhD, go and do something different? Maybe, perhaps some people, I mean, I did, you know, I had many of these fleeting moments until they became less fleeting and then decided that what it was that I wanted to do differently. So yeah, for some of you, it might mean something about your futures and the decisions that you need to make. But you don't need to make those decisions right now. Those are not decisions to make when you're in the midst of a transition from holiday back into term time. These are decisions to make when you're more back into the swing of things, when you can put aside time to think about it properly. It's something that I help individual clients with to help figure out what their academic story is, what their academic journey is and where they want it to go next, and I'd really encourage you to say to yourself, yeah, I will think about that stuff, but not right now. Let's get back into the swing and we'll think about it from there. Because often that's just what it is. It's that moment of resistance before we get back into the swing of things. I also want you to think about who you can seek support from this term. We're starting a new phase of the academic year, and often there are new challenges associated with that. Maybe it's things that you've been struggling with for the last term, maybe it's new things that are coming up now that you're not sure how to do. Whatever stage of your academic career you're at, there are people that can support you with those different challenges. And I want you to spend a little bit of time thinking about who those might be. If there are particular things that you're worried about, have a think about who could support you. It could be peers, it could be other people within your department, wider around the university, whether it's at the graduate school or whoever provides your staff development, for example. It could be outside of the department, it could be people you find on social media or through other academic networks that you have. There are always people that can support you. Obviously, if you're interested in coaching, hit me up. Beyond that, without spending any money, there are always people that can help you navigate some of these more challenging elements of academia. If you feel like you shouldn't need to, to ask for help, I want you to really sort of explore those thoughts and explore whether they're true and explore whether they're supporting you at the moment. I would argue that everyone who has ever succeeded in academia has received support, mentorship, patronage, however you want to describe it, and reaching out to others to help you with things that you're finding more challenging or to connect you to places that can make it all feel a little bit easier is a key part of building your own academic community and getting the support that you need to succeed. So please do put aside a little bit of time. to just ponder on what support you need this term and who might be able to provide that for you. While we're exploring our thoughts, the other thing I want you to think about is what thoughts will generate the emotions that you want to be feeling and that will enable you to take the actions that you want to take. Because often when I dig into it with my clients, there is a bunch of stuff that you love about your PhD. There is a bunch of stuff that you love about your academic work, your student work, your life at university. And I want you to take a minute to remind yourself of some of those things. Remind yourself what you're looking forward to doing, what you are excited about, because we don't always have to make all the negatives go away. There's a lot about academia to be frustrated and pressured about right now. But sometimes when we can spend a little bit more time remembering the reasons we're doing it, and remembering the things that we love about it, it's easier to get on with the things that we actually want to do. And once we start getting on with the things that we want to do, we can get that sense of momentum, that sense of competence that can really help us to enjoy this transition and enjoy getting back into the swing of work. So for me, what does that look like? Well, this week I have a couple of different supervisor trainings. I offer training sessions to universities for PhD supervisors. I've got a couple of those coming up this week. I am still running my, how to be your own best boss program, which is going really well. I have some sessions with that, I have sessions with my membership at Birmingham and I actually have a bunch of new individual clients as well. So it's a busy week in terms of sessions, which I'm excited about, slightly overwhelmed, but excited, looking forward to it. And I'm reminding myself how much I enjoy being in those, those live sessions. I have a whole bunch of admin tasks and I'm going to chip away at those in order of urgency. And I'm going to try and put some time in my diary for the week after next to really dig into some of those, rather than get all caught up on those this week and then feel bad that I'm not on top of everything. If they've waited this long, they can wait a while longer is my little mantra on those. And I'm really excited about the idea of starting to plan for academic year 24 25, but again, that is something that I've sort of mindfully decided to put back a couple of weeks, let myself get back into term, let's get this supervisor training done, let's get a little further along with my group program, and then the real planning for next year starts. I have some exciting things coming. You guys will be the first to hear about them as always. And I know me, I know that I get excited about the planning more than I do about the kind of administrative implementation of some things. And so I am quite mindfully telling my brain, yeah, jot down ideas, but we're going to think about this properly in a couple of weeks. Let's get on top of the things we're doing now. So if you are someone who's going to be in one of my sessions this week, I'm super excited to see you. If you're not, why not? I have a special offer on my PhD student workshops that I have running between the now, between now and the middle of June. So if you are somebody who works at university, or if you can tell your supervisors about this stuff, I have a special deal where you can get access to all my remaining workshops for a much reduced rate, do make sure that you get in contact if that might be of interest to you. I really hope today's podcast has been useful for you, whether you're making the transition last week and are still feeling a bit overwhelmed or whether you are not quite going back just yet, I hope that the transition can be as smooth as possible and that you can look after yourself during it so that we can all ease ourselves into this upcoming term, and all the exciting challenges that it will bring. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach. com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.

I want you to think about your to do list right now. Have you got items on there that have been hanging around for ages? Have you got items on there where it's write introduction or read more and things like that? If so, don't worry, completely human, completely normal. But I bet those are the ones that you aren't ticking off. So many of my clients give themselves really vague instructions about what they need to do and what has to happen next, and then wonder why they're finding it hard to get on with things. And we're all given that advice, you need to break it down into manageable chunks. But no one really tells us how to do that. What is a manageable chunk anyway? How big should it be? What should that look like? What type of chunk will make it easier for us to get started? If any of this is resonating, and I'm pretty confident whether you're a PhD student or an academic, it will be, then you need today's episode because I'm going to help you figure out how to break down your work into easy, manageable chunks so that you can get on, get them ticked off, and enjoy your work again. Hello and welcome to episode 30 of season 2 of the PhD Life Coach and we are going to be thinking about breaking your work down into easy, manageable chunks. This has come up with a few of my clients recently, both my one to ones and people in my university membership program, this idea that they give themselves really general instructions and when somebody says, break it down into manageable chunks, they don't even really know how to do that. And that's particularly true with some of the more complex and cognitive tasks that we as academics do. Things like reading, writing. We need to think about how we can actually turn those things into very actionable tasks so they can get on with them. In today's episode, I'm gonna talk about why we find it difficult to break things down into chunks, where that comes from, and then give you, as usual, some really specific tips about how you can break down your work more easily to make it all feel a lot more achievable. So why do we find it difficult? One of the reasons is that we often don't think we even have time to break it down. I've heard so many people say they don't have time to plan. They just need to get on with things or that when they spend time planning, they end up getting overwhelmed and it doesn't help anyway. So there's definitely something around not trusting ourselves to do this breaking down process effectively and not believing that it will make things easier. Hopefully the tools I give you today will help you to see how to do it in a way that avoids that sense of overwhelm, to do it in a way that really doesn't take that long and in a way that you can really clearly see why it's going to be easier to do it this way. The second thing is often we think that these tasks can't be chunked down. So often when we're doing something like review the literature or write your discussion or whatever it is, we think that these sorts of very highbrow intellectual academic tasks couldn't possibly be broken down into something systematic. And I think that belief really holds us back because ultimately, they are broken down into smaller tasks when you do them. You are chunking your tasks, eventually, you're just chunking them the moment you do it, rather than chunking them in advance. This is something that really helped me with food planning. I think I might have mentioned before. I was obsessed with the idea that I didn't plan my meals and then one day I realized I do plan my meals. I just often plan them immediately before I eat them. And so somehow it was a lot easier to think, Oh, I just need to plan them a little earlier, rather than think, I don't plan them currently and I need to start, because that kind of big jump feels much more intimidating. And it's the same with breaking down your tasks. You do already break down your tasks. And how do I know that? Because you don't do it all at once. None of you have written an introduction by simultaneously writing all the words. That's not how it works. It's just at the moment you decide as you go, I'll do this chunk, now I'll do that chunk, then I'll do this bit. You just decide it on the fly. All we're going to do is make those decisions that you're already making a little bit further in advance, so that it makes it easier for you to get started. Even complex intellectual tasks are completed in a series of steps. Now, I accept that sometimes we may not be able to plan out all of them at once. And that's one of the things I'm going to talk about in the tips. We may not be able to say, here are all 40 chunks that it's going to take to write this discussion section. I accept sometimes you read things and that changes what happens next, that changes what you need to read next, it's an iterative process. Absolutely. But that doesn't mean we can't chunk the first few bits. And then when we get to the next bit, chunk the next few bits. So I will talk about how we chunk even complex tasks in a second. Often I hear clients saying yeah but I don't know what the chunks should be. It's that magic 'should' word again. If you guys are watching me on YouTube you'll see me doing the little annoying finger, inverted commas thingies. Should. Because there is no should here. There is no specific way that you should chunk this down. Different people will do it in different ways. There are some tips, again, I'm going to give you to be more effective, but the belief that there's a right way can really hold you back, as usual, from doing it anyway. So let's try and put that to one side. Maybe you believe that there's a right way to break down your work into small sections. But if that belief isn't serving you, it isn't enabling you to do it because you feel like you don't know that mystery, then let's just put that to one side and think maybe there's a bunch of ways. Maybe I could try it this way. And if we can believe that we don't have to find the right way, we can just find a way, then suddenly it gets a lot easier to get into it. We also somehow manage to convince ourselves that we need to know all the chunks. If we're going to break this down, we need to know all of them. And as I've already touched on, with complex tasks, we almost certainly don't know all the chunks and what order they need to be done in. But even in a relatively simple task, sometimes breaking down all the chunks can be really overwhelming. And that's going to be particularly the case if you are neurodivergent, you have ADHD, anything like that. But for all of us trying to figure out every single step can be super overwhelming and can become a barrier to actually chunking things down anyway. I started reorganizing the garage with my husband at the weekend and if we had written down every single step we needed to go through in order to get to a finished garage, then I'm not sure we would have ever started. But we did figure out the first few steps and we did those. Which does, on reflection, mean that my garage is currently absolute chaos with stuff everywhere but, I know what the next steps are too. We just haven't done them yet. So, think about this belief. If you believe you need to know all of the chunks before you even start, then, perhaps again, we could put that to one side and think. I can just break down the next bit, and then when I get to the next step, I'll break down what comes after that. And then the final barrier that I see is people on some level not believing that small steps add up to a big task. So, we know that we're going to write our papers one word at a time. But somehow when we break things down into small tasks, it can feel like we're not doing enough. If I'm only doing this small task, then I'm not kind of making fast enough progress or big enough progress. I'm not taking big steps. And again, it's a belief that makes it really hard to start. If we're waiting for the day when we can do the whole massive amount, really immerse ourselves in everything, then hey, those days don't come very often, especially if you're an academic further through your career and you're balancing admin and teaching and leadership and all this stuff. But even as a PhD student, that pressure of, okay, today's the day I've got to do loads, is just really unhelpful. So again, if we can work on believing that one step at a time is the way that we get anything done, one chunk at a time is how we get our work completed, then it's much easier to believe that it's worth spending a little bit of time figuring this out. So, have a think about which of those beliefs you have that might be making it more difficult for you to break down your work at the moment, and just borrow my belief for the rest of this episode that breaking things down will make it an awful lot easier for you. Just borrow that belief, go with me, and then see whether the specific tips feel like something that you could try. What are my tips? First one is going back to this notion of separating out boss you from implementer you. The version of you that decides what needs to be done, strategizes, plans, prioritizes, and the version of you that does the stuff. Now you guys will have heard, especially my regulars or people who are on my email mailing list, will have heard me talking about the new program that has actually just started called Be Your Own Best Boss. It's for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers thinking about how to be a more effective boss for themselves. If you're listening to this in real time, when it comes out, it's started last week. My group are amazing. I am so excited. We had our first workshop last week. It went really, really well. I am taking late comers, maybe if any of you are interested and you get to me quickly, cause we don't want to get too far through the program but there is still a chance to jump in. If that sounds amazing for you, just get in contact, let me know, and we'll see what we can do. Depends on when you listen to this as to whether that's possible or not, but always reach out, there's always opportunities. And one of the things we're doing in that is really figuring out how we can be the sort of boss to ourselves that we need to get ourselves through whatever stage of academia we're in, in a way that's productive and enjoyable and fun. And some of that is about how we talk to ourselves, but a big chunk of it is also about how we manage our tasks and how we manage the time and energy we have to do those tasks. I did an episode a few weeks back about how to plan using boss mode. And I really recommend after this episode, you go back and listen to that one if you haven't already because boss mode is this notion that we put ourselves into like planning oversight mode for a while and make the decisions and then implementer goes away and does it. And breaking down tasks is one of the things that bosses do for the people they work for. Anyway, why am I going into this in so much detail now is because when we're thinking about ourselves as two separate people, the person who plans it and the person who does it, it can change the way we give instructions. So instead of writing down tasks as though you're going to do them -you know, a couple of words on a to do list- I want you to consider breaking down your tasks as though you were giving them to somebody else. As though the --implementer isn't you, they're a really able research assistant who just doesn't know how to do the things you're doing. So they're very bright, very capable, very able to follow instructions but they don't know how to do the thing. So you can't write, write introduction because they don't know what to do. So what's the next steps that you want them to take over the next day or two that start moving them towards writing the introduction? When you start separating it out like that, and you review your to do list, you're suddenly like 'Do reading'. Okay, that's not helpful. 'Tidy office' could be helpful, depending on whether it's clear where things go or not. You know, all the things we have to do, actually, are usually written in a way that assumes we know what we're on about. And sometimes that's true, and sometimes when we come to look at it, we're like, I don't even know how to do that. And then we skip over it. So if you write instructions as though it's for somebody else, it forces you to think through what the steps are. Another way of thinking about that is thinking, what instructions would I give AI if I wanted them to do this for me? Now, I have very mixed views about AI, whether it's a good thing, whether it's a bad thing, whether we're inevitably stuck with it or how it's going to go. I have a lot of views, might do a podcast about it at some point, but the one thing that I think is going to be really, really useful is actually learning how to do good prompts for AI. Because as with anything, AI is only going to be as good as its prompts. And if any of you have ever played around with it and written, 'Write an essay about stress management', or whatever, you'll see the absolute drivel that it comes out with. But if you write, write an essay about stress management. It needs to have five sections. The sections need to cover blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It needs to use up to date literature. Please only use real and existing articles. Apparently that's something you can write. Who knew? Um, and you give it much more detailed explanation than it does a much, much better job. Same as if you give much more detailed explanations and instructions to a real person as well. And I actually think there's an enormous skill in that. And that's where, and I don't want to go off into a big AI tangent, but that's where I believe that people who don't really understand their subjects are never going to be able to write a good essay or write a good piece of work with AI because they won't be able to give them the specific and helpful instructions that it needs in order to function effectively. So when you're writing your own to do list, imagine you are your AI, or you are your personal assistant, and write that level of specific instructions. So if your task, your overall task is write introduction, for example, what are the next few chunks for that? Is it Select six keywords that will form the basis of my searching, enter those certain keywords into X database and Y database in whatever combinations and find 10 articles that, use this particular methodology in that population or whatever. Okay? You get right down to that specifically what do I mean. In reading, rather than writing, read the Burns article, you write, read x article with the intention of finding x, y, z. Or, read the Burns article with the intention of writing two paragraphs of summary of what they did and found. Or read the Burns article and compare it to the Wright article, in terms of their methodology and find five points in which they differ in their approach, for example. Okay, and it can sound really pedantic but suddenly it becomes much more doable. Rather than just read we know exactly what we're doing. It also forces you to think about why am I doing this thing? If I've got read X on my list. Why am I reading it? By giving yourself specific instructions, not only are you more likely to get on with it, you're actually more likely to do it in a way that's going to be useful for you as well, because you will have pre thought about what you actually need to do. My second tip is all kind of mixed up with that, which is making it really tangible. So anything on your to do list that's about understand, figure out, decide, clear up, whatever, those sorts of fuzzy words. I want you to get really specific and tangible about what that means. I'm going to do this for myself. Cause I have a habit in my time blocking role. Task management systems of putting things like read X article in my CPD section. And that's great, but it never ever comes to the top of my to do list. So one of the things that I need to do to make that more tangible is read X paper and turn into podcast, read X paper and write blog for whoever. So I need to make those into things where there's an actual outcome so that it's much more likely to then get put onto my, I'm going to do this this week. And that's something that you can do. Make it really specific and really tangible so that it's clear and easy to start and so that you're more likely to prioritize it because you can see why you are doing it. The other way to sort of really make it clearer and really embrace this notion of giving instructions to somebody else and making it more specific is to write in paragraphs rather than a list. So instead of just having bullets, boom, boom, boom, boom, these are the things I'm doing, actually write a note to yourself. Hi Vicki, today we're going to be working on the introduction. What that specifically means is I want you to identify the the paragraph headings for the first page or so of the introduction. I want you to decide what order they could be in as a first draft and then start chucking bullet points into each of those paragraphs to see what they need to cover. We'll review the order tomorrow. For example, and when you actually write it out like that, it's a lot easier to test whether you are being specific and tangible. It's also a really good opportunity to practice your self talk, because it means you can practice writing it in a way that feels enthusiastic, that feels motivating, that feels open, nonjudgmental, compassionate, whatever sort of voice you need to hear at the moment, you can use in those instructions. So rather than just seeing write intro on your task list, you're actually getting a nice little motivational message from your boss, i. e. yourself, telling you exactly and specifically what you need next. Now, if all of this feels a little bit overwhelming, like I'm going to take more time writing instructions than I am doing it, A, not a bad thing. I want you to think about all the DIY projects that you've done. If you do that sort of thing and think about that notion of, you know, measure twice, cut once and all of that. I really believe with a lot of our work, we should plan twice, do once, which will make it a lot more effective and a lot more enjoyable. But also, I want you to just double check that you're not asking yourself to plan too much. So when we're talking about chunking stuff down and really giving ourselves specific instructions, that's not for everything. That only needs to be for the next thing we're doing. So we only need to really chunk down the bit that we're planning to do today and tomorrow, not every step of the entire thing. So when you feel yourself getting overwhelmed, you can just say, I'm just going to break down the next bit. And then I'm going to get going. That really manages any ideas that this is going to take too long, any notions that this is getting overwhelming. We just break down the specific steps of the very next bit and then we get going. Those of you who love my podcast and do all the activities and read my newsletters and come to my workshops and all of those things, I'm specifically talking to you here because some of you can get caught up in planning as fake action that actually making nice to do lists and doing my role based time planning and doing my self coaching and doing my this that and the other and suddenly you've used four hours doing that instead of doing your work. So if you're somebody who's at the opposite end of this, that you spend too much time because it feels all tidy and productive and kind of gets you going, I want you to really listen to this bit, that you can just plan the very next bit and get started. Set yourself the challenge that you're going to plan for five or ten minutes for the next task, and then we're getting started. Okay? Now some of you will be saying, I don't know what the next steps are. And if that's true, I get it. We've all been there. Don't worry. But that's also why you're not doing that task. That's also why it's sat on your to do list for as long as it has. And the fact is, you ain't gonna figure out how to do it unless we turn that bit into a task as well. It's going to wallow on your to do list until either you sheepishly delete it and accept you're not going to do it, or until a deadline hits enough that you panic and figure it out. So, really easy solution here. If you're not clear what the next steps are, your next task is not write the introduction. Your next task is figure out what next steps are or make decision about X. Because if the problem is you don't know what keywords you're going to search on, or the problem is you don't know which section you need to write, or the problem is you don't know what the argument you want to make is, then your next task is to decide. And so then what you do is you go through the same process, but this time you're not trying to break down how to do the thing, you're trying to break down the steps to deciding. So if you haven't decided what the central argument of the paper you're writing is, and trust me, this happens massively at every stage of a research project, I coach so many people on this, if you're not clear what your key argument is, what steps do you need to go through in order to decide? And I want you to notice me using the word decide. I'm using that very specifically. Often people use quite passive language like uncover or find or these sorts of things where it's kind of as though it's out there in the world waiting for you just to figure it out and find it. The reality is, you just get to decide. You get to decide what argument you're making. You get to decide what your central thesis is. You've got this option, this option, this option. Which one do you think feels the most justifiable, the most defensible, the most interesting, the most unique? Cool. Let's do that one. So what I want you to do is break down the process of going from, I'm confused, I don't know what my argument is, to, okay, we'll go with that argument. What steps do you need to go through? Let's write really specific instructions for that. Maybe it's identify what the different options are. Maybe it's spend an hour on each of those options, writing out what the justification of it will be, and then compare the strengths of those justifications. Maybe it's do that and then talk to your supervisor, your collaborator, about it. I don't know. You, you figure that out in your different disciplines. It's going to be very, very different. But writing down what are the steps I need to take in order to decide can keep you moving on that. We also always need to be aware of our thoughts and feelings when we are doing any actions because they're going to be driving what we do. I want you to notice any items on your to do list that make you feel confused, that make you feel overwhelmed, that make you feel guilty, that make you feel stressed. And I want you to remember, it's not those items that are that are causing those feelings. It's the thoughts you have about those items, but that also, we probably therefore need to address the thoughts we have about those items in order to turn them into something more useful. You're not going to want to do tasks that you're currently feeling guilty, stressed, unclear, about. So if you notice, don't judge yourself, that's okay, it's like, okay, that item's really stressing me out. Or, I've been avoiding that item because I should have done it before. And then we get to say, okay, we can work on our thoughts. Check out my self coaching episode if you want to do that. But we can also just turn it into something that we don't feel like that about. We can turn it into a much smaller task. So it's like, actually, I don't feel guilty about this anymore. I can just do that thing. Okay, so really pay attention to those ones and make sure that you give yourself some very specific instructions on those. All the way through this, remember, none of this has to be perfect. There's no right way to chunk these things down. I can hear, I don't think you'll be able to, but I can hear my dog snoring in the background as I record this. And it made me think about him when I'm making sandwiches in the mornings. Um, he always wants to have some of the cheese that I use in the sandwiches. We call it the cheese tax. I'm sure some of you with dogs also pay the cheese tax. Marley doesn't care how I chunk it. I give it to him a little bit at a time, so he has to do tricks and earn it a little bit. He doesn't care what the chunks are. He just wants to get that cheese down his face. And the same is true with you guys. You just want to get this task down your face. Doesn't matter what the chunks are. But let's just break it into chunks, whatever sort of chunks and get them done. Okay. Let's eat our tasks the same way that my Labrador eats cheese. My final tip. And again, a lot of this comes out of the advice that's online for people with neurodivergence, um, who find some of this stuff particularly challenging, but I think it's really useful for everybody because some of this stuff is not intuitive, even if you are neurotypical. So my final thing that I love about breaking down tasks is once you've broken it down to the ones you're doing today, hide the rest of it. Okay. There's nothing more soul destroying than a huge list of tasks. And you're like, I'm doing this one little thing, but look at all of that. Oh my goodness. It's soul destroying. We don't want to do that. That's, you know, why would we just keep chipping away at something that feels completely insurmountable and like we're never going to get through it? Whereas if you can break your tasks down as we've discussed into some really clear instructions, then you can put the rest of the list away. You can shut that program, put your notebook away, wherever you keep your list, make it go away. And you just have you and that thing. Now, one way that I manage that is having somewhere. This is mine, um, where I can write down, things that pop into my head when I'm doing this one thing. So at the moment for this couple of hours, my one thing was plan and record this podcast. But I thought of a few things that I needed to do for the students that have enrolled in my program. And so I scribbled them down over here and it's like, no, I don't need to go and do those now because my chunk down task is plan and record this podcast. But I didn't want to lose track of those and my brain keeps reminding me if it thinks I'm going to lose track. So I just scribble it down over there and then focus on the thing that I'm doing. So put away the big list. Have a place where you can jot down things that pop into your head. We can put them in the big list later. And then we focus on The one specific chunk of stuff that we've given ourselves for this chunk of time. Now I mentioned AI before and I'm not a massive fan. I don't really use it in my everyday workflow, but in researching this episode, I did come across something that frankly was a little bit genius. There's a website called goblin. tools and you can type in any task. Add it to the list and then you click the little magic wand that's there and it breaks it down into tasks. And as with all AI things, it's not perfect, but it was pretty amazing. And it gives you like breaks them down into like six or seven different tasks and then those all have a magic wand too. And you can click on those and it breaks it down even further. Cause if you are still like, Oh, that still feels quite big. Break it down further, still feels quite big, break it down further. And the thing I love about it is it gives you a starting point. So if breaking things down into tasks feels really overwhelming for you, you could try experimenting with that. And then if some of them you're like, Oh no, I don't need to do that one. Or actually that one's not clear. That one's repetitive. You're at least in a starting point that you can kind of edit from there. So check it out, have a little play. Let me know what you think. And let me know if there's other tools that have you found useful. I thought it was particularly good for some of our more mundane tasks. So if you put like clean bathroom in it, it was actually really good. All the different steps that you can go through. So check that out for different parts of your life. This isn't sponsored or anything like that. It was just something that I found on the internet that I thought you guys might like too. So I really hope that you found today useful thinking about why it's important for us to break tasks down into chunks, why it's okay that we find that difficult, that a lot of the things we tell ourselves make it harder for us to get on and actually even try to break it down. And hopefully I've given you some really actionable steps. What I want you to do after this episode is just pick one thing that feels like a bigger task, that has been on your task list for a while and experiment with breaking it down into a couple of the tasks that you need to start with. Write them as paragraphs, make them specific, tangible, and encouraging, and then block in some time in your diary to have a go at doing those tasks. See how you get on. Let me know. I always love to hear from people. If you ever have questions, just contact me through any of my social media channels, or make sure you're on my email list. In my email list, I always give my readers a summary of the podcast. They get some extra reflective questions that they can work on. They get specific actions to do, and they get to hear about all the products that I sell and the free community coaching that all of you have access to. So if you're not on that, make sure you get yourself to my website, get yourself signed up so that you don't miss out on any of that stuff. You can also then always reply to those emails. So if you're on my mailing list, you can reply direct into me. You can tell me what you thought of the podcast. You can ask for extra stuff. So if there are things that you particularly want podcasts on, let me know. I mean, I've got a billion ideas, always, but I love getting ideas from you guys. And I have several times in the past made episodes based on listeners suggestions, so get in contact. Let me know how all this lands with you, what difference it makes and what you'd like to hear me talk about in the future. And remember, if you liked the sound of that program, if you get to me quickly, I might be able to sneak you in. Check out the details on my website and I hope to hear from lots of you soon. Thank you everyone for listening and see you next week.

Everyone makes mistakes. It's inevitable that we're going to make mistakes. But one of the most important things is to be able to recognize what mistakes we're making, figure out why we're making them, and if appropriate, move away from that pattern of mistake. So in today's episode, I'm going to be telling you seven mistakes that I see lots of PhD students and academics making that I want you to check that you're not making too. Some of them are relevant to everybody. Some of them are a little more focused on people who are balancing teaching and research and all of those things as well. They are all things I want you to check that you're not doing. Hello and welcome to episode 29 of series 2 of the PhD Life Coach and we are going to be thinking about what mistakes you might be making. Now this isn't to pick you apart, this isn't to tell you you're doing all these things wrong. Things are hard in academia at the moment. It is a difficult environment and the last thing you need is someone like me telling you that you're also making a load of mistakes. I promise that is not my vibe here. I'm not telling you you're making mistakes in order to make you feel bad. I'm trying to help you see some of the things that you might be doing and what you could do instead so that it all feels a bit easier. They're all things that I've done. They're all things I saw my colleagues doing as I came through my academic career, at every level, pretty much. And they are certainly things that I see my clients experiencing now. So, I've got seven, unless I make up more as I go along, which, you know, sometimes happens if you're a regular listener. So, let's get started. The first mistake is one that I made for most of my career, which is trying to impress by doing it all. So sometimes we're so eager to demonstrate that we're good enough, so eager to demonstrate that we were a good appointment to our PhD or to our lectureship or whatever it is you're in at the moment, that we feel the need to do all the things, all the time, just to justify our existence. And sometimes we're justifying our existence to other people. Sometimes, actually, we're mostly justifying our existence to ourselves. If I do all the things, I will believe that I'm a good enough academic. I will believe that I'm a good enough PhD student. And the problem is, and like I say, it took me a really long time to accept this myself, when we try to do all the things, we end up not doing any of them enormously well and putting ourselves under much more pressure than we ever actually need to. Because the truth is, we don't need to do all the things all the time. Certainly not all the things all the time to the best of our ability. Now, those of you who are in academic jobs may feel like actually you are expected to do all the things all the time. That that is the impression that our institutions give us, you know. In the same newsletter or email or whatever you get around, they tell you about REF, they tell you about TEF. They tell you about the NSS. They tell you about all these things. If you're not in the UK, I'm aware that didn't make any sense For international listeners, uh, the REF and the TEF are ways that our research and our teaching are evaluated, respectively. NSS is our National Student Survey, which has given a lot of attention. You are told that you should be able to do all the things. It's just not true. And there's two ways you know it's not true. The first way is you look around at your colleagues. No one is doing all the things. Everyone is either struggling and exhausted and trying to do all the things, but barely coping, or they're just deciding there's some things they just don't put much effort into. We all know the people who've got huge grants, huge publication records, who don't worry about their student feedback and just crack on with their teaching roughly. We all know the people who never hand in their forms on time and all that kind of stuff. You know, there's lots of different ways that we're all letting different bits of it slide. So, first reason, we know you can't do it all because no one actually is doing it all. The second way we know you don't have to do it all, is because people get jobs and get promoted all the time who don't do it all. There's no clearer message from universities than when they promote somebody who's got great grant income or got great publications, but don't do any of the other things that you don't have to do it all perfectly, that is the strongest message that I can give. You know, they taught the talk, you have to do everything, but actually when it comes down to promotions and things like that, they don't usually actually walk that walk. They still promote people who only do some of the things. Now you might be sitting here thinking, well, yeah, but I like all the things. And that's how I've spent my career. I wanted to be what I called a balanced academic. I wanted to do all the things. But what we have to then accept is if we're going for that, and I think there's a lot of merit to that, we can't be as good as others as the solely research orientated professor, and as good as the National Teaching Fellow winning teacher, and as good as the incredible pastoral care, looks after all the student, knows everybody's name, person, and as good as the person that does outreach, and as good as the person that does all the admin and leadership and things. If our choice is to be someone who does all the things, we just get to accept that we're not competing with the specialists. We're competing by being balanced and finding that version that makes us a really valuable academic by doing all of the things good enough. The other way we can manage it is if you want to be someone who does all the things is you can do all the things, just not all the time. So I think I've mentioned on the podcast before, one of the best bits of advice I ever heard was you can do all the things, just not in the same year. So you can decide this year is the one where I really double down on getting a grant. This year is the one where I really dig into getting my teaching sorted, because I've gone into new modules and I need to get that sorted, and that needs to be the priority. And it doesn't mean everything else just stops, but it means that we have focused on one thing of the things as our main focus for that phase. And there'll be other stages of our career where the other things can come in. If you're telling yourself you have to do all the things and you have to do all the things perfectly, you're creating a recipe for overwhelm, probably procrastination, possibly burnout, and just not really enjoying this career that we've created for ourselves. It's not true and you don't have to do it. The second mistake that I see people making is believing that they're the only person that can do something right. And I always find this a really funny one because a lot of my clients tell me that they lack confidence. They tell me they're really unsure of themselves. They tell me that other people seem to be better at things than them. But at the same time, when it comes to getting things done, often we think we're the only one we can rely on. My stepdaughter's currently just started university and she's having the joy of group work. I'm sure all of those of you who've been involved in supervising group work before will know the challenges that she is experiencing at the moment. And often we think that we're the only one that will get the stuff done, we're the only one that will do it well enough, we're the only one that can fix that bit of kit, or the only one that will bother to do this. And again, that keeps us stuck in roles and tasks that aren't necessarily serving us anymore. Because what it means if we tell ourselves that we're the only one that can do this, or we're the only one that bothers to do it properly, then partly we build a sense of kind of resentment in ourselves that we're stuck doing this thing. And partly it makes it really hard to move on to other things. I remember experiencing this quite early in my academic career. I was wellbeing tutor, and this was way before universities had the kind of the big wellbeing services that most universities have now. And it really was something that was dealt with by the academics. And I was a very diligent wellbeing tutor and I looked after my students really well. And I'm sure I helped a lot of people. But when it came time for me to take on a different role, I was really reluctant to let it go. I probably stayed in it two years longer than I should have done because I didn't believe that other people would do it to the level that I did it. And when I finally did move on to a new role, other people didn't do it the same way I did it. Did they do it as well as me? Really depends on your definition of well. Because actually, whilst I was super helpful, I think I was also probably there too much for the students. I think I enabled some of their helplessness and I think I created a sort of impression of availability that probably wasn't exactly what they needed. And then regardless almost of whether they did it as well as me, has this department gone on and thrived? Yeah, absolutely. Has there been a whole series of well being officers now? Yeah, absolutely. And is it all fine? Yeah. And if I had allowed myself to believe that either other people would do it, if not as well as me, then good enough, then I could have moved on to other things much more readily and with less regret than I did at the time. So I want you to really ask yourself, are there things you're doing because you think no one else will do them as well as you and really question whether that's true or not, or whether it's time to move on. The third one, and I see this at every stage of the academic career, from newbie PhD students to senior professors, is prioritizing tasks for other people. And again, this makes you sound like a really nice person, doesn't it? You know, everyone loves the person that puts other people's needs before them and is always there to help if you need them and things like that. These things can make you sound like you're a really nice person. What I want to offer though, is that there's a bunch of people that need you to succeed in the things you're doing for yourself. Because when you're doing tasks for other people, you're not writing that big, exciting research grant that the world needs you to do. And you're not designing that new, amazing module that your students don't even know they want to do yet, but they're going to love. You're not doing the things that get you the recognition, but that also move forward your discipline and your research and your scholarliness in meaningful ways. Now, I think it's partly this notion that putting other people first makes you a really nice person that holds us in this mistake as well. Because I'm not saying be selfish, but what I'm saying is when we believe that in order to be a nice person, we have to put other people before ourselves, there's a lot of downsides. We don't get to achieve the things that we want to achieve. We set up an environment in which in order to be considered nice, you have to do all the things, which I don't think is a helpful environment. You might be willing, on the surface, at least, to do all the things for other people. But do you really want to tell the people that are five years behind you that this is what they need to do in order to succeed and in order to be liked? Probably not. It's probably not the sort of role model that you want to set. There were times towards the later part of my career where I started saying no to things, just to demonstrate to people more junior than me that you can say no and that that's okay. I started leaving at a sensible time to demonstrate to people that you can and should leave at a sensible time as a senior academic because otherwise we inadvertently tell people that this is what you have to do to be considered nice and to be considered a good academic. The other reason I think it's a mistake to always put other people's tasks before yours is I don't think it is just about being nice. And this is gonna sound harsh. I am now calling out all you people pleasers out there. It's not just about being nice. This is partly that you've been taught, you've been brought up that this is how you get people to like you and value you. But it's also because doing things for other people is way easier. I don't want to be harsh, but it's true. And it might not always feel like that, but when you do something for other people, they usually give you pretty clear instructions. There's usually a firm timeline on it, and there's usually a good chunk of praise and thanks at the end of it. And whether that praise and thanks comes from them, which it often will, or comes from yourself because you tell yourself you're a good person for having done this for them. Sometimes we're doing these things for other people because it's easier, because it's clearer, because it's time pressured, and because we'll get gratitude at the end of it. Not because we're just nice. These things are avoidance. Doing tasks for other people is a form of procrastination, if we're not doing it intentionally. Now, hear me, please, hear me when I say, I am not saying you shouldn't do things for other people. I want you to be amazing mentors. I want you to support your peers. I want you to be the ones that are collegiate and out there taking one for the team. A hundred percent, but not at your own expense. And not in some sort of misguided attempt to make people like you, and certainly not in some misguided attempt to avoid doing work that feels more difficult, less clear, or where there's less sort of certain gratitude at the end of it. Sometimes we need to put our things first in order to demonstrate that we can, and in order to stop avoiding the things that feel hard. The fourth mistake I see people making, and again, I made this a lot, is not believing yourself when you say you have too much to do. Now I have a whole workshop on this, but when we tell ourselves we have too much to do, that isn't inherently a problem. Having too much to do is not a problem. Having too much to do is only a problem when we also tell ourselves that we have to do it and that we can't possibly do it. It's that cognitive dissonance where we hold two different thoughts that are contradictory but we believe them both. There is too much. We have to do it. Those two things cannot be true. If you haven't listened to my episode, I have a whole episode on what to do when you've got too much to do. But here the mistake is not believing yourself that you do have too much to do. Sometimes we tell ourselves there's too much, but actually if we stop pressuring ourselves, we stopped like being a wuss about it, we can actually just get on and get it done and it's okay. Most of the time, for most of you, particularly anyone listening who's in sort of mid to senior academic positions, or junior academics, you all have too much to do. It's just the world we live in. You have too much to do. Don't mess up by not believing that you have too much to do. Because once we believe there's too much to do, we can start making decisions about which things we're not going to do. Or make decisions about which things we're going to do quickly and roughly and it's good enough. And which things we're going to give people warning that we're not going to do them till next year. I have a bunch of papers that I never wrote up. Collected the data in various different formats and I've never written them up as academic papers and I won't now. I am considering writing some of them up as more like little blog post type situations, so who knows, they may see the light of day, but I accepted there was too much to do. There was too much data, there was too many options, and I couldn't do them all. And I tell you what, it felt enormously better to just decide I wasn't going to, than it was to keep telling myself that there was too much but that I had to do it all, and then inevitably not doing it. Because there's no way to do it all if there genuinely is too much. So listen to yourself. Believe there's too much. Believe non judgmentally. Believe non dramatically. And just ask yourself, Okay, if there's too much, then what am I going to do? Because you're clever people. And we can come up with a plan. Mistake five really relates to that one. And that is believing that things have a fixed level of quality and a fixed scope. So one of the problems with telling ourselves that we have too much to do is that we think our only two options is do the thing or don't do the thing. Those are not our options. There are so many things we can do to a standard that is good enough, but not as good as our best, in order to have it done, but to have time to do the other things that matter too. Examples, beautiful PowerPoint slides. We can do just as good a presentation with very basic PowerPoint slides as we can with beautiful PowerPoint slides. We can fill in a module review form carefully, thoughtfully, and in lots of detail, or we can bung in some comments and it's good enough. We can send a first draft for our collaborators to look at that is beautiful and nuanced and sophisticatedly written and impressively referenced and all of these things. Or we can send them some notes in an outline to check that we're on the right page. There is a whole variety of scope and there is a whole variety of quality that we can perform all of these tasks to. One of the most common things that PhD students experience is the fact that their thesis never quite ends up being what they thought it was going to be at the beginning because at the beginning their scope was far too broad.,, They had far too high expectations of how much they were going to get done. And one of the things that that PhD students need to do is to sort of align their scope, quality, and time to do it, in order to enable themselves to fulfill the requirements of a thesis. When we tell ourselves that there is a fixed quality, that it is either acceptable or it is not, and there is a fixed scope that is decided and therefore set in stone, then the only thing that we have any control over is time, so the only things we can do is work more hours or allow it to carry on longer. Those things are not true. You can change the scope. You can change the quality. You can decide which things deserve the best of you and which things just need to be done. The sixth mistake that I see people making is making time for the wrong sort of work chatter. So we all want a vibrant academic community. We want somewhere where we feel excited to go to work and share the things we're doing. We have people that we can bounce ideas around with, where we can share our successes and lament our failures and get stuck into whatever disciplinary challenge it is that you're trying to answer at the moment. We all want that community. Most of us also tell ourselves that it doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't exist the way it used to, and that we don't have time for it anyway. The problem is that academic communities only exist if we participate in them. And if we tell ourselves they don't exist, then we won't participate in them and they won't exist. During the pandemic, I did not make enough time for that sort of bridge building, collaborative, positive discssions. And I thought that that was the right thing because I thought that I needed to focus on all the things I needed to sort out to keep our programs running during that difficult time. In reality, and I think I've mentioned this on past podcasts, in reality, what I did was make it very difficult to implement change because I didn't sort of have my finger on the pulse as to what was happening and what people were thinking. And I wasn't getting for myself that like nice sense of being part of a community that actually makes it easier to get work done. It was not true that I didn't have time to have those conversations. I just believed it was true. And so I didn't make them, when in reality I think they would have helped a lot if I had made time for them. On the flip side, what I do see people making time for is moaning about how terrible things are. You know, we don't, we say we haven't got time to have a conversation with somebody about our new research findings and what they might mean, but we do have time to spend 20 minutes in the corridor talking about how useless the latest university announcement is, why it shouldn't be like this, why we've got too much to do, why it's all crap, and why higher education is falling apart. And don't get me wrong, we all need to vent sometimes, I get it, but I want you to notice what this does to your emotions. Listening to all of this, participating in this sometimes, I want you to notice what it does to your emotions. Because there is a very big difference between venting in a way that helps you feel better once you've done it, and venting in a way that just feeds the beast, where the more you moan, the more you listen to everybody else moan, the worse it feels. This is not to say that there isn't a lot to moan about. I get it. I'm not sad that I'm no longer working in academia. There's a whole bunch of challenges that you guys are still managing. I get it. Just have a ponder on what types of talking about it make you feel better, make you feel like it was cathartic and got it out of your system, and which make you feel like the will to live is crawling out the door. Because you don't have to be involved in those conversations. Sometimes we feel like we do. You can just remove yourself. You can just say, oh well, I need to get on now. I do that now. If I found myself being like, oh, everything's rubbish, I just remove myself. And you don't have to tell people why, you can just remove yourself. Now, in time, as we learn to regulate our own emotions more, we may be able to listen to other people expressing their dissatisfaction with things without that having to impact our mood. But that does take a bit of emotional regulation skills. It takes some effort and energy and if you haven't got that right now, that's okay. You can remove yourself from the conversations. But remember, swap it for something else. Swap it for a different conversation. Swap it for a conversation where you tell somebody that you want to hear about what they're writing about now. Swap it for a conversation where you talk about something that you value that they did or ask their advice on something so that you can have a proper conversation. This isn't about entirely withdrawing, this is not making the mistake of allowing your only interactions being people being very negative about the current situation. And then finally, the biggest mistake I see people make, and I help academics with this, particularly academics, in some of my one to one coaching, is not having a narrative of their own against which to prioritize. Now what do I mean by that? If you are clear on who you are, who you want to be in your working life, and where you want to get to, so this doesn't have to be some grand ambitious plan, but just what type of academic you want to be and what's important to you. If you have a really clear narrative of that, it's enormously easier to choose what to prioritize. It's much easier to decide, I'm going to say yes to this but no to that. I've got enough of these things, so I'm going to do some of those things instead. It becomes a lot easier because you've got something to sense check it against. It's the same as, you know, I've never been somebody who's particularly into like fashion and style and things like that. And so I often found it hard to decide what clothes to buy because I didn't have a clear sense of like what my style is. I've worked on it. I've tried, but other people have a very clear sense of what their style is. So they'll be like, no, I don't go in that shop, that shop. I go in this shop and this shop. I wear these sorts of things and those sorts of things. And boom, it's easy, much easier. I did the same thing with my garden is I chose what colour flowers I wanted to have. And I just don't buy plants that aren't those colors because otherwise it was just massively overwhelming to choose. And It's the same here. If you have a clear narrative for your career, you can then make so much easier decisions about which things to care most about, which things to put most time into, which things to postpone and which things just to not do. If you have no idea what your narrative is at the moment, and particularly if you are in an academic job at the moment, so not PhD students, but people who are actually working in universities at the moment, then keep an eye out for my one to one coaching. So I'm usually on a wait list at the moment, but you can let me know what your situation is and where you're at and I can let you know how long it would be until I'm likely to have a space available. Because this is one of my favorite things to do. Help academics to figure out what their story is and how they can then use that to make decisions. If you're not ready to commit to coaching at the moment, but you think you'd like some more support on this, I do have three episodes of the podcast where I talk about how to figure out what your story is, why that's so important and how you can use it to move forward. So do make sure you check those out. So those are my seven mistakes. How many do you think you're making? I've definitely made all of them through my career. So trying to impress people by doing it all. Believing that you're the only one that can do certain things right, and so getting stuck doing those things. Prioritizing tasks for other people instead of prioritizing things that will help you move meaningful things forward. Not believing yourself when you think and know you have too much to do, and so trying to do it rather than actually accepting it and coming up with a plan. Believing that things have a fixed quality and a fixed scope, so that all you can do is put more time in or take longer over it. Only making time for chatter that brings you down rather than consciously putting in time for chatter that goes back to the things that you really love about academia and that you find nourishing and fulfilling. And finally, not having a narrative to check your prioritization against. If you are making any of those mistakes, and many of you will be making all of them, don't worry. It's okay. The vast majority of academics are making almost all of these. But I want you to pick one. I want you to pick one to have a little ponder on and to think, what would I need to believe in order to change the extent to which I'm making this mistake. So we're not going to stop entirely, but what would you need to believe in order to do something a little bit different? As usual, I will be sending some more details in my newsletter about these podcasts, so do make sure that you are signed up for that. Every week you get a little summary, you get some reflective questions and an activity to try. So if you're not on that, make sure you get to my website, the phdlifecoach. com and you can sign up for the newsletter there. If you're listening to this in real time on Easter Monday, and you're a PhD student or postdoc, you still have like 48 hours to get on my be your own best boss program. So check it out on my website. You will learn how to have positive self talk, how to organize yourself and plan your time, prioritize in ways that feel good and make you the boss that you need in your life. It's going to be amazing. At time of recording, I've got 10 people signed up already. I'm super excited. I would love a few more. So let me know if you want to hear more about it. If now is not the right time, make sure you're on the newsletter and you'll be the first to hear about. opportunities in the future too. The other thing that I wanted to do a shout out about is I do workshops for universities, and I'm doing a special end of year, like special discount bonus thing. Now it might not feel like the end of year at the end of March, but we've got one term left. I do these workshops April through July. And so I'm offering a really discounted rate for access to all of them. So there are 11 workshops left, if you're listening to this in real time, and I'm offering that package for 1, 500. This is incredibly cheaper than it is buying them one at a time. If you are an academic, please speak to your universities. There's usually a budget somewhere sitting around that needs to be spent before the end of the financial year. So I am here to help you with that. If you're a student, please send information on to your graduate schools requesting this stuff. You can find information about it on my website and on Twitter. So fish those out, send them to university, and hopefully you can get access to these workshops too. It is a whole variety of topics, how to write when you're struggling to write, how to overcome imposter syndrome, what to do when you have too much to do, what to do if you're feeling behind, how to make decisions and prioritize. And then in time, how to get ready for the summer. It's an amazing series of workshops. Make sure you're in. Let me know if you need more information. And I hope to see you all at those soon. Thank you so much for listening and see you next week.

One of the things that always amazes me is the similarities between the challenges that PhD students have and the challenges that people at every stage of academia, all the way up to a full professor, have. And never is that more true than in the challenge of comparing yourself to others. From all of my one to one coaching and group memberships, it's so apparent that at every stage of the academic tree, people are comparing themselves to those around them and doing it in ways that just doesn't help and where they end up feeling guilty, feeling frustrated, feeling hopeless. And it's just so sad that whether you're a first year PhD student looking at the rest of your cohort wondering if you're doing enough or whether you're some kick ass senior professor who's smashing their career, we're still looking across to other labs going, Oh, well, they, you know, they have still got more grant income than me. They still got more publications than me. It's so sad. And it doesn't have to be like that. So today we're going to be thinking about how to stop comparing yourself to others and what to do instead. Hello, and welcome to episode 28 of the PhD Life Coach. Do you find yourself comparing yourself to others, and somehow always coming up short? Always feeling like we're chasing down the next person who's doing the thing that we need to be doing, putting ourselves under pressure because of these comparisons. This originally came up because the PhD students in my membership program were experiencing this a lot. They were comparing themselves to their cohort. Some of them were writing up and feeling like the rest of their cohort had already left and making that mean something about them and their abilities. Others were closer to the beginning of their program and just feeling like other people were in the swing of it much more quickly than they were. And then I see later on when people are seeing how fast people get promoted or when they get their first big grant or when they start winning awards from their learned societies or whatever it is. At every stage we're sort of watching across to see what other people are doing and then using that comparison to mean something about us. And we dug into it in one of our coaching sessions. So we have these online group coaching sessions where we have discussions in the Zoom chat, first of all, and then we do coaching in front of each other. So people get to see each other being coached. And we realized that when I asked people what they compared, they also compared themselves on a bunch of different things. It wasn't just on the sort of usual academic metrics of publications and progress through your PhD. But they were also comparing themselves in terms of how much work other people did and how much energy other people put in. And the thing that was really cute, bless them, and I've seen this at every level, is that we compare ourselves in both ways. We worry if people are putting in more effort than us and we worry that they're working harder than us, but we also worry that there are people that never seem to work as hard as us but are still doing okay. So either way round, whether we work more or less hard, we can make it a problem. They also compared themselves in terms of how much experience they had, before and outside of their PhD. And in both directions too because I had PhD students who'd come straight in from their masters who felt that they were much less experienced than other people in their cohort and then I had people who were part time PhD students who had senior careers in other things who felt that yeah they had that experience but that wasn't the same as having recent academic experience and that actually these people that came straight from their masters were much more prepared for their PhDs. And again I see this with Full Academics as well. I see people who have come straight through, stayed in academia their whole lives, feel like they don't have the external experience that other people have, and then the people that do have external experience feeling like a bit of a fraud within academia because they feel their actual academic credentials aren't up to it. Either way round, somehow we still come out on the bottom every time. And then when you chuck in, all the quantitative things that we can measure in academia, whether that's grant income, or number of publications, or impact factor, or citation numbers, or awards from learned societies, or fellowships, or whatever it is, once we chuck in all that stuff. There's so many things that we can compare ourselves on, and none of it really helps. Even people that think that they really aspire to having a good work life balance can compare themselves to people who they think have a better work life balance than we do. So even when we're trying to actively not engage in some of this kind of one upmanship, we can sometimes feel that actually other people are better at the work life balance than us. Oh, so and so never works weekends, and I always have to catch up a bit on a Sunday night, even though I don't want to. And we start comparing ourselves on how well we're doing work life balance as well. So in today's episode we're going to think about why it's such a problem to compare yourself to others, and importantly, as usual, what you can do instead. Now, some of you might be thinking, I don't actually see this as a problem. By comparing myself to others, I give myself something to strive for. And, you know, many of my achievements have been attempting to beat my brother, or to beat my best friend, or whatever it might be. We hear sports people talking all the time about how their bitter rivalries drove them to better performances. So why is it even a problem? Well, I would argue that there's a bunch of reasons why it's a problem. Now, for most people, these sorts of rivalries only drive you to your best if you maintain a mindset where it is achievable to be as good as or better than these other people. So where you believe that they're really good, but you have capacity, i. e. it's a challenge rather than a threat, you have the resources to potentially be able to meet or exceed them then maybe you perceive it as a fun rivalry, maybe you perceive it as something that will drive you to achieve more. Unfortunately what happens for a lot of people is it doesn't feel achievable, they compare themselves to others in a way that either doesn't feel realistic or is not realistic for reasons we'll discuss in a minute and what happens then is usually something around guilt or frustration or even despair and despondency. We essentially give up or really struggle to keep going because when we look and compare ourselves to these other people and come up short, it doesn't feel plausible to meet them. And when something feels too difficult, it's really hard to then put in the hours and the effort to try and achieve the goal. Those of you who have listened to my previous podcast about procrastination will know that if we keep thinking thoughts that make us feel guilty or frustrated or despondent, we're likely to end up procrastinating or overworking one way or another, because we try and avoid these negative sensations. It can also be a poor motivational strategy because when we start doing things just in order to be better than somebody else, it shifts us away from a more intrinsic motivation where we're doing something because we enjoy it, because we value it, or because it's part of who we are. And more into a more extrinsic form of motivation where we're doing it in order to beat somebody else. i.e. Get some sort of external benefit that is separate from the benefit of the thing itself. Now I'm going to do an episode in the future, where we look at these different types of motivation and why it can be really important to understand them when we're thinking about motivating ourselves, but suffice to say here, when we're more intrinsically motivated, we're doing it because we value the thing itself, and because we enjoy it, and it's part of who we are. We're much more likely to be able to put in sustained effort, and to have good psychological health during that, than if we're doing something in order to beat somebody else, to get that reward of winning, or to avoid the punishment of losing, in inverted commas. So even if you feel like the rivalries are actually driving you to better performance, we need to look really carefully about whether that's actually helpful in the long run, or whether that is going to lead to situations where you lose your intrinsic motivation and have poorer psychological health because of it. The other thing that I think is different between rivalries that drive us on versus comparisons that hold us back is the extent to which they make us believe something about ourselves. What I see often in academia is people who find that the comparisons they're making just reinforce the stories that they tell about themselves. So if you believe that you're somebody who doesn't work enough, you will probably compare yourself to people who work more than you and end up sort of reinforcing that belief. If you believe you don't write quickly enough, you compare yourself to people who write quickly and publish a lot and make that mean something about your academic life. If you're doing this, don't worry. This is totally normal to do this. Our brains like to be right. And so if we're constantly telling ourselves that we're not good enough at something, we will look around us for evidence that that's true. And one place you can get evidence that that's true is by looking at people who are different to you and comparing yourself unfavorably to them. When we have brains that want to be right, unhelpful comparisons is one of the things that they will do. But it is also super problematic because if we reinforce the fact that we're not good enough at what we're doing or we reinforce the fact that we're not fast enough or that other people are doing better than us and we find evidence for those things being true, it's much harder for us to generate the sorts of emotions that are going to enable us to get on and do our work. We're going to find ourselves stuck much more in in that kind of hopeless, I can't quite get on with this, I'm overwhelmed mode rather than in the, okay, let's go. This is exciting. I'm capable of this, let's get this done, kind of mode that we know helps us achieve our goals and feels so much nicer. The other downside that my clients identified is that it can really waste energy. We put a lot of cognitive space in comparing ourselves to others, deciding whether it's true or not, what that means, spinning stories about how they're going to go much further than us or how it's not fair and they've had more advantages. We can use up a lot of cognitive space doing this. And as I talked about last week in my episode about how to manage your energy, cognitive energy is a really important resource for academics. It's something that we really need in order to be able to do the hard work. And if we find ourselves using up that cognitive space on spinning stories about why we're not good enough and why other people are doing better than us, it doesn't leave as much cognitive space for the other things that we need to do. Comparing ourselves to others also skews our decision making because if we're constantly telling ourselves that we should have more publications like she has and we should have more grants like she has and we should have a better work life balance like he does, then we start making decisions based on trying to be more like them, trying to achieve the things that they're achieving. Now that doesn't necessarily sound like a bad thing unless we're doing it from a frantic place and often we're doing it from a frantic place. So we take on that committee role because we should have more extracurricular activities and we volunteer to organize that conference because we should have more leadership things. And we then agree to do that extra publication because we need to have a longer publication list. And all of a sudden now we're over committed and overwhelmed and now instead of beating ourselves up, that we're not as good as other people, we're beating ourselves up because we can't stay on top of things the way everybody else does. And in reality, when we made those decisions, we were probably comparing ourselves to a bunch of different people. We were comparing ourselves to the one who's got lots of publications and the one who does lots of leadership and the one who does lots of other things. And somehow thinking that we should be better at all things than all of them. And making decisions. from that place is never going to go well. If we choose to do things simply to keep up with or beat other people, we don't then end up planning our lives around our values and our priorities and designing a life. that we actually like. So what can we do instead? Well, I'm going to argue that we can compare ourselves to people. I think in many cases, it can be really useful to compare ourselves to people. And at the end of this podcast, I'm going to tell you exactly how I want you to do that. But first I want to tell you why I think we're doing it badly at the moment. What is wrong with the way we're currently comparing ourselves to others and why it leads to all these problems. And then I will share with you what we should do instead. So the first reason is we do it inaccurately. We compare ourselves to what we know of other people. So we compare ourselves in terms of our grant income without knowing what support they've had in order to generate that grant income. We compare ourselves in terms of how many hours they're in the office or in the laboratory without knowing whether they're actually productive during that time, whether they work when they're at home. Or what it is, you know, sometimes you're like, Oh my God, they're always at work, but actually they're faffing about on Twitter or, you know, Oh my God, they get so much done and they're only in the office six hours a day, but actually they're working all weekend. We don't know the truth. Yet often we compare ourselves to these fictionalized versions of other people. One of the tips I often give clients is that you have to remember that you're comparing your insides with their outsides. You don't get to see the messy bits. You don't get to see the mistakes they've made, unless they're really public. You don't get to see all the things that they worry about, or the projects they didn't finish. You just get to see the announcement that so and so has got another grant and make it mean that you're not good enough. So we compare ourselves really inaccurately based on incomplete information. That's the first way that we get this wrong. The second way is that we compare ourselves selectively. We compare ourselves to one bit of that person. I wish I was as far through my data collection as that person without looking to see whether the other elements of their life, of their academic progress are actually something that we're jealous of at all. So I used to run the third year project module in my school. And one of the things that I always used to see was I had some students coming towards me going, Oh my God, my friends, they finished their data collection, and I haven't even started yet. And, and, you know, it's a nightmare. I don't know what to do. And then I would have the other students come to me saying, oh my God, my housemates finished their literature review already, and I haven't done any writing at all, because all I've been doing is data collecting, and I'm going to be so behind when it comes to the writing. And they were looking at each other. They were looking at each other selectively, and comparing themselves to the one bit that those other people were doing better than them at, and not looking at any of the other bits. Not looking at the ways that actually you're about the same as each other, or the ways that actually I'm a bit further ahead on this stuff than you are. The other way that we compare ourselves selectively is we don't take into account their whole situation. So often we compare ourselves to the grant income of one particular person, but that person is working in a highly fundable field, has a lot of senior mentorship, doesn't have a family, works really long hours, doesn't have other hobbies outside of work, all these other things. We don't take those into account because we're only comparing ourselves to their grant income. We compare ourselves selectively to the bits that we can see and the bits that reinforce our narratives about ourselves. So we compare ourselves. This person does that faster than me. This person does that better than me. Very rarely do we go actually, yeah, they do, but I don't like the rest of their life, or I don't like the rest of their choices, or actually this other part of academia I'm actually better at than them, I'm further along than them. We rarely do that bit, we just selectively compare ourselves to the bits that reinforce the negative sense that we have of ourselves. The third thing, we compare ourselves unproductively. And what I mean by unproductively is we compare ourselves about things that we can't change. So I see a lot, for example, people who have small children comparing themselves to people who don't and thinking how different things would be if they didn't have small children. That's what I would call an unproductive comparison, because it's not one that you can change your circumstance. You're comparing yourself to somebody who's in a fundamentally different position to you. I see it a lot with part time students comparing themselves to the progress made by full time students. It's not productive because unless you're going to change to being a full time student, it's not a fair comparison, and not one that you can actually learn from in any meaningful way. You know, it's a similar situation for people who have disabilities, who have physical or mental health problems. Comparing yourself to people who don't have the same challenges as you, it's a really unfair comparison and it's unproductive because you can't just decide, oh okay I won't have this anymore then. It's not how it works. Comparison is only productive if it leads to something that's useful and comparing yourself on something you can't change is never going to be useful. The fourth reason that we do comparisons in an unhelpful way is when we do it repeatedly without action. So we constantly feel like we're not as good as that other person, but we don't do anything about it. We constantly compare ourselves to somebody else who's, you know, just a bit further along than you, even though you started at the same time, whether that's your PhD or getting your senior lectureship or whatever it is. If we repeatedly compare ourselves to the same person without actually doing anything, again, we just reinforce our negative beliefs. We generate negative emotions and make it way harder to take the next steps. So what do we do instead? I promised I would give you an alternative here. What we do instead is that when we choose to compare ourselves, we compare ourselves compassionately and with intention. Now I have talked in the past about boss mode and student mode. And those of you who are signing up for my be your own best boss program will learn so much more about this. I'm super excited. Starts at the beginning of April. I've had my first few people register and it's going to be amazing. You will have heard me talk about being a boss to yourself where you're actually planning and being strategic and then being your student or worker self where you actually carry out those tasks and actually implement. My big rule for comparing yourself to others is you're only allowed to compare yourself to others when you're in boss mode, when you are thinking strategically, when you are thinking from a place of what do I actually want to do differently, or don't I? So when you're in boss mode, you can look at other people. Sometimes it is useful to compare your work patterns to others, to just reevaluate whether you're doing it the way you want to be doing it. You can compare your current publication record or current grant income record to other people, because that can be really useful information. But when we are being our best boss to ourselves, we do that compassionately. We don't do it to reinforce our negative beliefs of ourselves. We do it in a curious way. We do it in a way that goes, I wonder. We do it in a thorough way. So we don't only compare ourselves to the people that are doing. than us. We compare ourselves to a wide range of people so that we can really sort of muddle out where we sit in this pecking order. Are we about where we want to be? Are there ways that we could improve? We get to think about it intentionally. So we think, okay, they've got more publications than me. Why is that? Are they doing something that I'm not doing that I could and would like to choose to do? And if so, how can I figure that out and how can I start doing it? When we're in boss mode and particularly when we're in the kind of compassionate and curious boss mode that I'm going to be helping people generate in my new program, then we can really strategize based on some sensible and logical comparisons. What we don't want to be doing when we're in student mode, when we're in worker mode, where our job is to get on and implement the plan, we don't want our brain spinning with, I'm not good enough. She's better than me. He's got more than me. I'll never be able to, because it makes it enormously harder to get the work done, which is what we need to do in order to achieve our goals. And nothing intentional comes from spinning when you're in worker mode. When you've got things that you're meant to be doing and you're not doing them, if you're spending that time comparing yourself to it, it doesn't help you get the stuff done, and it doesn't help you make intentional change. So, next time you hear yourself comparing yourself to somebody, you don't have to tell yourself to shut up. You don't have to tell yourself that you're not allowed to do that anymore. Because there's a bit of your brain that's doing that just because it worries about you and it wants you to do as well as you can do within the situation that you're in. Okay, so we don't have to shut up that bit of brain. But we can say to that bit of brain, this isn't for now. Next time we're in boss mode, we can think about this properly. We can compare our publication record properly, decide exactly where we're at. Are there things we want to change? Are there things we love about where we are with our publication record? Are there people we are doing better at? Are there reasons we are where we are? And is there anything sensible and achievable that we can take from these comparisons? And we do that in boss mode. We then set those intentions and student mode or worker mode gets on and does those implementations. So you can compare yourself to other people, but let's do it in a way that is fair to you and in a way that enables you to use that information to get better at what you're doing and achieve your goals rather than in a way that just gives yourself another stick to beat yourself with. I really hope you found that useful. If you're listening to this in real time and you're a PhD student or a postdoc who wants to hear more about my Be Your Own Best Boss program, just find me on social media. I'm the PhD life coach and Dr Vikki Wright. You'll find me everywhere or get yourself on my mailing list. So go to my website, thephdlifecoach. com website, sign up for the email list. Contact me through that. Find out more details. I would love to have you in the program. It's three months. We've got workshops. We've got group coaching. There's an ebook. There's access to other workshops. All sorts of stuff. It's going to be a wonderful community. We're going to learn so much from each other, so do check that out. If you're a member of academic staff, remember I do one to one coaching, or tell your students about my program. I would love to support them too. Thank you all so much for listening and see you next week.

In this episode, you get to hear a live coaching session with Laura! Laura is a part time PhD student who has tried every planning and task management tool possible! She shares that she finds it stressful to even think about planning and is worried about how to manage the last couple of years of her research. I coach her as I would in a private coaching session and we reach some great insights about how Laura is already planning way more than she gives herself credit for and how she can keep developing her skills. Perfect for anyone who has ever been self critical, worried about planning or fed up of never finding the perfect system! Vikki: Hello and welcome to episode 27 of the PhD Life Coach. And this is going to be another of my special episodes where I have somebody on to be coached. So today I have Laura with me who has volunteered to be coached around a challenge that she's experiencing at the moment. So hi, Laura, how are you doing? Laura: Hi, yeah, no, I'm really good. It's really exciting, uh, to be doing this today. Vikki: It's amazing to have you here. So tell everyone a little bit about who you are, where you're at in your PhD journey. Laura: So yeah, so I'm a part time PhD student, so I'm in my fourth year. So that's like year two in equivalent full time years. I am in information studies. So, researching kind of how people use and experience information and I'm looking at it in the context of running as a sport and in my day job, I work part time as a librarian at a university. Vikki: Amazing. So good. I have a lot of part time students that listen to the podcast and who are part of my membership program and do one on one coaching with me. And often they feel like they're experiencing very different challenges. And one of the things that I think is so useful is regardless of whether when people listening, whether you're part time or full time, I think the things that part time students learn how to do are obviously useful for other part time students, but can be really useful for full time students as well, because you've almost got a more extreme version of this really long, drawn out project, which feels like that as full time, so even more so as part time. So, tell me a little bit about what is feeling challenging at the moment. Laura: I think it's very much, you know, four years of doing it, and for me, that feeling very much kind of like we've kind of crossing over that halfway point now, and yeah, you know, maybe a little bit of pressure around how much there's going to be left to do, but it is also very much that maintaining that momentum and that energy, you know. I've been doing this since 2020, we're now 2024 and that seems to be kind of rapidly moving on, but I feel like I've still got a really long way left to go. Um, and how do I, how do I keep myself, I mean, I love my research. I love my topic and you know, sometimes I can't imagine not having this in my life, but at the same time, it's like gotta keep, gotta keep going. Vikki: Perfect. So tell me more about how you're experiencing the momentum at the moment. Is that, does it ebb and flow? Is it always low and you're having to kick yourself into it? Does it come in spurts? How do you experience it? Laura: I think, I, I mean, so I had a really difficult year last year. I broke my ankle partway through the year, which, as someone who's researching running, was, you know, an even more incredibly difficult setback. And I got COVID, I just felt like it was like a real struggle of a year to keep going. So I do kind of feel like I'm coming into this, this second half of this new academic year with a bit more of like a renewed, like, finding my energy again but it's very much trying to get into that rhythm of, you know, balancing going to work, doing the PhD, how everything kind of slots together. And I think that can be, that can be really difficult. And if, you know, I've come home after a, a really long week at work and it's like right time to sit down and try and get myself back into this headspace of doing my research. Vikki: So I think one of the things that's really interesting when we're thinking about Finding things sort of difficult, looking kind of over a long period of time, sort of, oh, I need to keep momentum going. We could either focus on how you can look at that sort of timescale, the kind of now till the end of your PhD timescale, and think about that in a slightly different way than you are at the moment. Because I think sometimes when we tell ourselves, Oh my God, I've got to keep momentum for all this time. That can be an exhausting thought in itself. So we could think about that side of things. Alternatively, what can be useful is to actually draw the focus a bit closer to where we are and sort of almost train, train ourselves the right word, not sure, but to kind of encourage ourselves to think about how we can maintain momentum over a week or a month as our key focus with the belief that as long as we keep doing that, the rest will come together. So which feels like it might be more useful avenue for you to explore, do you think? Laura: Hmm, yeah, because I, yeah, because I tend to, I say if I was to really reflect on my working kind of habits, I'm much a get a burst of like, so I'm so hyper focused on this and it's all I can think about it's all I'm going to do. And then I kind of feel a bit burnt out and I can't, I'm like, I'm going to have to like, lie down for a week and I've drained myself of all my energy. So I'd say I don't, in the short kind of term, I don't work in a very sustainable way. But thinking about the big goals to me is quite often quite overwhelming and stressful, so I do, I'm, I, I'm good at thinking, okay, what am I going to do this week? Vikki: Okay. Laura: But I don't necessarily, you know, I'm not always very good at thinking, or what, what, what might I be working on in six months time. And how do I get to that point? If, does that make sense? Vikki: Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And again, I think it leaves us in a place where there's a couple of different things that we could think about. We could think about how you could look after yourself to work in a bit more of a sustainable way day to day, which might then help you feel like it's going to be easier to keep that going in the long term, or we could address the bit that feels a bit overwhelming and actually dive into how could you spend a small amount of time thinking about that longer term picture in a way that doesn't feel stressful and overwhelming or at least where we can handle and regulate that stress and overwhelm. Laura: Yeah. And that kind of, I suppose that kind of feels like a good thing to do because sometimes I wonder if the reason why I get into these, like, okay, right, all, all I'm going to do every night this week until like 11 o'clock at night is... all the words are going to pour out of me and I'm going to be so in the zone. And sometimes I think that comes from a place of, of panic. Like, oh, don't feel like I've made much progress for a while and now I'm going to go into like super, super panic writing mode and churn out a load of stuff. Vikki: But if you're not quite sure what direction you're going in and where you want to be at certain times, then that can be challenging, right? Because you're putting in all this effort, but you don't know whether it's going in the right direction at the pace you want it to be. Laura: Possibly, yes. But yeah, if, if someone said to me, right, sit down and, plan out what you want to be working on and when for the rest of 2024, I would probably like freeze up and go, Oh no, no, no, no, no. Vikki: Okay. Well that sounds, if you're willing, then that sounds, and I don't think we do a full year. If a full year feels like it would be a freeze, then one thing that can be really useful to do with that, and we'll think a bit more about why you feel like this, but one thing that can be really useful is to find a period of time that is beyond what you feel comfortable planning for easily, regularly, but is not as far as like completely panic inducing. And I think this is really useful for people because I think people often struggle to have these broader, perspectives. And often I find it's because people think that they need to know more detail than they actually do and so we avoid thinking about it at all. And so I think if we can go through some of that, then I think that will be really useful for people listening who are trying to do these sorts of longer term planning as well. So tell me what is it about planning ahead that feels stressful for looking further ahead than that? Laura: I think it's that indecisiveness and how do I, how do I know what I'm supposed to be doing in the future? Because I do, I even, you know, I just feel like sometimes I feel like I just about know what I'm doing now. So it is that, you know, the committing to the abstractness of and the potential. I don't. Yeah. It's I know some people seem to find it almost quite comforting to have things planned out, but I do not. And I think it probably must really frustrate my supervisors as well actually. And it's like, you know, what's Thinking about the bigger picture, um, and me being like, Oh, I'm, I'm not a planner. Vikki: Well, one thing I will reassure you and everybody with, and I do workshops on this is we are never responsible for other people's thoughts and feelings. So you show up how you want to show up and how you are with your supervisors. And then your supervisors are grownups who are allowed to have whatever thoughts and feelings they have. And everybody, in my experience, everybody stops acting quite so weird if we just accept that people will think and feel what they think and feel, and it's not our responsibility to micromanage it. Um, so, we'll leave your supervisor's frustrations over there. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, who knows. Your responsibility is for you to think about how you want to show up, okay? Laura: Exactly, exactly. Vikki: So, a question. Is it the idea of making a longer term plan? So that period of time where you're actually thinking about it and planning it that feels difficult, or is it the notion of having a longer term plan? So if your fairy godmother could come down and just say, here's your plan for the next six months. It's all stuff you really like and want to do. I'm magic. So I've taken into account absolutely everything you want, but it's realistic as well. Um, do you like the idea of having it or is there a challenge with that as well? Laura: Oh, what a, what a question. I think part of me does like the idea of, you know, the magic plan just appears for you. I think part of me would then be kind of like, but what if, what if it doesn't go to plan? Vikki: What would you like about it? So it's okay if you're having different sides of the coin, how you're feeling about it, and we'll explore both. But let's start with what would feel good about having a three month plan or a six month plan? Laura: The security of, like, here's a mapped out kind of direction that we can, we can kind of follow to help us feel less chaotic all the time. Vikki: Why do you think it would reduce the chaotic feeling? Laura: Because a lot less energy would like, and like mental energy would constantly be used. . Trying to work out, okay, where are we again? What are we doing right now? What, what should I be doing today? What's my priority today? I think I, I, you know, when you, especially when you're part time and you know, you've got one day a week that is your, your day to sit down. And, you know, you're not working, that's your PhD day and then you find yourself thinking, okay, well, what, what should I be doing today? You know, if I could be like, okay, it's, this is, this is the plan says we're doing this today. Let's just try and do this. Vikki: And how do you think that would affect your productivity and how you feel about your work? Laura: Again, it's, I suppose it's sometimes, you know, is there an element of needing that yeah that mental flexibility to be able to be like, sometimes I'm a bit like, well, what do I feel able to be doing right now? It's almost like needing like a little menu of these are the things that need to be done. Which one do I have the right brain space for right now? Cause of course you don't always, you know, you might be like, okay, I need to I should be writing, like, this findings chapter but actually, you know, there's stuff going on that means I, I don't feel I can get into it right now. It's, yeah, it's really, it's the, particularly kind of being in a, a bit of a writing. stage right now, although the way my, the way we've kind of structured my PhD is that I've done some data collection over the last year, I've spent the last few months doing analysis and writing it all up. And now I need to start moving back into another phase of data collection, which I think is not always how lots of not, not, it's not kind of the typical way you see PhD kind of timelines. Vikki: So you're sort of switching between some different things at the moment. Laura: Yeah, which was a deliberate strategy that we thought about that would be useful to help me with this issue of you know, the, I like novelty, I like to have fun new things to be thinking about. So that was a, a good strategy that me and my supervisors talked about. And I was like, actually, I think doing it like this would be much better for how my brain works than spending two years gathering a load of data and then having to sit down And all I've got left to do is write about it. Vikki: And that's something that's going to be different between different individuals, right? Because I coach people where their dream is just to have one thing that they can just immerse themselves in and do that. And the task switching between things, they find really difficult. Whereas other people, I'm a bit more like you, other people like to have a few different things. Um, what I want to notice though, is that you have said that you don't like and find it very difficult to plan for the future. But this bit of what project sits where and therefore what activities you're going, that sounds like you've been planning for the future. Laura: It's like, yeah, I've been planning for the future, but I've not been committed. Yeah, it's, I've not been, I suppose it's all. Yeah, it's. It's funny that isn't it actually, but yeah, the idea that do actually have actually been doing the planning. I just don't recognize it as planning, because it's maybe it's not what what I think other people think planning looks like. It's not in a Gantt chart. It's not in a big thing on the wall. It's not in like a anything it's just all in my head. Vikki: And this is so interesting. I want all of you listening to think about this in your own lives is often we have these pictures of ourselves, right? As to what person we are and what we do and what we don't do. You know, for a long time, I had a belief that I was someone who over committed and then didn't finish things. And that used to really hold me back because I really, really believed this and it almost made it true because when I believed I was somebody who overcommitted and then didn't finish things, I had, I, there was no real incentive to not overcommit because it's, oh, that's what I do. And it took quite a bit of coaching for me to be like, Yeah, I overcommit, and there's some things I don't finish, but there's a lot of things I've finished. There's a lot of things I have done successfully. And so this image of myself as being someone who didn't finish things was not only not helpful, it just wasn't true. And so I think recognizing that in some ways you are someone who plans for the future and who plans for the future with their own preferences in mind. So it's not that you've planned out a way of doing studies that's just the most efficient or whatever. You've planned out a broad structure, even if it's not written down in a Gantt chart or anything, but you've planned out a broad structure that takes into account what needs to be done and what might work for you. How does it help to think that you are already doing this a bit? Laura: It, it, that's such, yeah, to have that kind of reflected back to me as yeah, the, the idea that. You know, I'm not just aimlessly wandering through a PhD. I have really thought about, you know, made those decisions around when to do particular things, and where we are going to go with it next. I think part of my, part of my big like kind of block on this is often to do with the fact that I'm the type of person who will be like, Oh, a shiny new, like productivity tool. Oh, a new notebook, a new diary. I'm going to use this diary. This is going to be the system for me now. And I find it really hard to pick a system and stick to it because I kind of forget to use it. Laura: And so I've done all the different, you know, the, the websites with all the little to do doing done boards on the calendars, the spreadsheets, the bullet journals, I have literally tried every single system out there and I'll get all like super excited about it for like a week and I'll put all the stuff in it and I'll set it all up. And then I'll just completely forget to look at it. So I find planning stressful because I find it hard to. follow through with whatever, you know, with that system for planning things out. Vikki: If anyone's watching this on YouTube, so if you're on podcasts, just so you know, I post all of these on YouTube as well. Um, it's exactly the same. It's not like fancy YouTube videos, but if you prefer that format, you can just do it. Anybody watching on YouTube will see that I was grinning all the way through Laura's saying that then. And that was not because I was laughing at you, Laura. That was because I was empathizing with you so hard. In fact, I think my fourth ever podcast episode. It was called Why You Don't Need Another Planner. So if you haven't listened to that one yet, I would highly recommend you go back to that. Uh, exactly the same. And so many people experience this and we can think about why that really isn't a problem and it isn't, but we can also think about why we choose to do it. And we're going to go that way first. So why do you want to find the system that works? Laura: Because, well, so yeah, like, if, it's like, you know, I, you know, you can't, can't hold everything in your head when it comes to all the things that need to be done and when they need to be done by. I mean, I can try and hold them all in my head and, you know, you get told, don't you, like planning, having, you know, all the tasks mapped out and the deadlines and when you're going to do them by and keeping track of it all. But, you know, you get told that's a really important part of project management skills. And part of me still, um, maybe, yeah, that idea that surely there's gotta be, like, the perfect solution out there, I just haven't found it yet. Um, I know, I do know that that is probably not actually true. Vikki: Possibly not. How would you feel if you had the perfect system? What things would you say to yourself, and what emotions would you experience? Laura: You know, I just, I don't, I don't actually know the answer to that question. Like, because part of me does recognise that I don't, there isn't a perfect system out there for me, so I do find it quite hard to imagine. Vikki: But what thought and feeling are you chasing? Because when we're looking for a new solution for something, we're essentially chasing a thought and feeling combination. Laura: Reassurance that I'm doing it right. Vikki: If you had the perfect system, you'd tell yourself you're doing it right, and you'd feel reassured. Laura: Yeah, I'd be like, I feel so secure that, I'm, I'm doing everything I should be doing right now at the right time. That kind of relief that you're not going to drop any of all the things you're juggling. Vikki: I'm not going to drop any balls. And this is really interesting and it might sound to listeners like we've slightly gone off on a tangent away from planning. But one of the things that I've found with myself and with clients is that is that one of the biggest barriers to planning can be this belief that we won't follow through on our plan anyway and therefore it's a waste of time and it's a bit of a painful waste of time because we're going to beat ourselves up for not following through on our plan as well. So understanding this stuff is a really important step to feeling willing and able to plan so that that doesn't feel quite such a threatening thing to do. So I want you to notice that what you really want isn't the perfect notion template that's going to automate all your everything's or the perfect the perfect daily planner that's got gold edges. This is back from the days when I fell for all this stuff. I still do to some extent. You know, whether it's old school, whether it's the perfect technical solution, it's not the solution that we're looking for. It's that we want to feel secure and we want us to feel reassured and we want to believe that we're on top of things and we're doing the right things. But anyone who's familiar with the self coaching model that I teach knows that the system we're using is just a circumstance. Yeah, it's just a fact. I have a Notion template. I have an Excel file. I have a diary system. I have a bullet journal, whatever it is. And the rest of it comes from our thoughts. And so we don't actually need a new system in order to feel more reassured and more secure. We just need to change the things that we're saying to ourselves all the time. Because it's when we're telling ourselves, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't even, you know, I never plan ahead. I just wing it and work hard and burn out and all of these things. When we tell ourselves all of this stuff, that's what makes us feel insecure. That's what makes us feel like we're not in control of this last period of our PhD, is all these things we tell ourselves. Okay. So before we get into the practicalities of actually how we can plan, tell me things that you already believe about yourself that make you feel reassured or secure. So we're not going to, I'm the most organized person in the world, because that's, that's not helpful. Things you already believe that make you feel secure? Laura: Like, you know, I know that I'm good at getting things done when they need to get done. Vikki: Perfect. I'm good at getting things done when they need to get done. Perfect. What else? Laura: I think I actually quite, I enjoy the, the, the sense of achievement of finishing off a piece of work that, you know, has been hanging over me. And then, you know, all of, and you think, you think you're never going to get it done. But I really, you know, I, I enjoy that sense of like achievement and those little moments of, and I'm good at recording those little moments. Vikki: Okay. Amazing. Because lots of people aren't. So that's a real strength. Laura: I don't have to do lists, but I am good at two. I am good at things. I've done lists. I love that. Vikki: In fact, I have a whole episode about done lists as well. So if anybody's interested in that, it's called why you shouldn't have a to do list. Um, so yes, that can be enormously important because so many people rush from what I need to do next, but as soon as it's done, it's forgotten and they're on to the next thing. So that's a huge strength. So you're someone who gets stuff done and you're somebody who gives themselves credit and sort of recognizes those achievements of getting stuff done. Laura: Yeah, I like little milestones and I do, I, you know, I think I am good at recognizing the, you know, the fact that PhD, it's not all about the end result. It's about everything you do along the way. Vikki: So you're someone who has milestones? Laura: Yes, I suppose I am. I suppose I am. Vikki: You're starting to sound a lot like somebody who plans a little bit more than they give themselves credit for. Because you can't achieve a milestone if you haven't got a milestone. Laura: That's very true, isn't it? I'm a I'm a, I'm a planner that can't recognize the fact that they plan ahead. Vikki: Who at the moment doesn't believe that or doesn't spend time thinking those thoughts? It's not that you can't. At the moment, you don't spend time thinking about the times that you have planned. Laura: Um, and don't, I think, yeah, well, you know, those, if you, you know, to ask me What are you very good at believing about yourself that is a very negative, self limiting belief? It probably would be , you know, I'm terrible at planning. I'm disorganized, I'm chaotic. I, you know, and I probably do limit myself with, with that a lot 'cause I can't stick to a system. Vikki: I mean, I don't think the problem here is the, you can't stick to a system. I think the problem here is that you're telling yourself you should be able to stick to a system perfectly. Laura: Yeah. And I think. That, someone, I had that given to me as a piece of advice once from someone else, um, who was trying to give me some support with getting, you know, getting, getting into good like habits in the PhD, and their advice was, Just pick a system and stick to it, and all will be well. Vikki: Yeah, that's not what, that's not exactly what I'm saying. I, I sort of agree with that. Yeah. Rather than the kind of pursuit of the perfect system. I don't think there's actually anything wrong with switching systems. I mean, switching systems every couple of weeks and spending lots of time researching the perfect system and watching YouTube videos about how to do the perfect system and spending lots of money on planners you never use, yeah, that's probably not ideal. But switching up how you do it every now and again, not a problem, not a big deal. Laura: Or if you're like, if your system just kind of fizzles out, or morphs into something different, then maybe that's okay? Like, yeah, I think maybe I, you know, given myself a lot of, a lot of, of pressure to be like, be like the perfect, like, super organized phD student, because you kind of need to be super organized when you're working in such limited blocks of time. And yeah, that probably is a bit of a barrier to how I think about what planning is and whether I'm good at it and things like that. Vikki: Cause I think one of the biggest issues for want of a better word is the belief that if the planning system fizzles out, to use your phrase there, that the A, that that's a big problem and B, that that means you need a different system. I have stuck to, and I'm going to tell you in a minute what my definition of stuck to is, because it is definitely not the same as what most people's is at the moment. I have stuck to the same planning system now for probably 18 months, something like that, which for me is revolutionary. This is, you know, my previous best was about two weeks, genuinely two, three weeks. And the reason I've stuck to it this time, it's because I have completely changed my definition of what sticking to it means, okay? And when it fizzles out, I don't take that as a sign that this is the wrong system. I just notice that it's fizzled out and start doing it again. Laura: Yes, rather than thinking, oh, it fizzled out, therefore it can't have been working. Yes. I need to invent a whole brand new process for doing it. Vikki: Because when it fizzles out, the habit can be to make that mean something about the tool that you're using, i. e. that it's the wrong system, you haven't come up with the right way of doing it, or that it says something about you. That you can never stick to a system and that you are somehow flawed. Often, we make it mean both, which makes it a whole heap of fun. We have both the wrong system and the wrong brain and we're screwed and we'll never succeed. Laura: Yeah, that sounds so familiar. Like, it's me. I, um, I am not good enough to, you know, To do this planning, why, why am I not good enough to be a planner? And I think maybe one of the, I suppose one of the big fears might be that, you know, I'll get towards the real end of the PhD and find myself in a place where I'm thinking, Oh, if only you'd stuck to, if only you'd put more effort into following that Gantt chart, we might not be in a in a, in a mess right now. And of course, I don't know I'm going to be in a mess in like a year or so's time, but I have that fear that I might be, and it could be my fault for not planning well enough. Vikki: Do you know the best thing about that fear though? That fear is a fear of a thought that you might have in the future. You can decide that you're just not going to think that thought, or you're just not going to believe and give it lots of airtime. You can decide that no matter what happens between now and then, you're not going to spend lots of time telling yourself you should have done it differently, and you're going to choose instead to focus on things that are also true. That you've made progress that you've got through, you've got stuff done, et cetera, et cetera, you know, you've already said you're good at recognizing the things you've achieved. You can decide I'm just not going to, if my big fear is that I'm going to tell myself I should have sorted this out earlier, I could just not do that. And of course it will still come up. I'm not saying we can't just, that we can just delete these thoughts from our heads, but we can decide. One of the phrases I really like, that I use with myself a lot is the, We don't speak about ourselves like that. And I have to remind myself of that. I'm going to do a podcast episode. In fact, by the time this one comes out, it will have already come out. So check it out, guys. It's great. I haven't recorded it yet, but I'm sure it will be. About the things that I'm still doing wrong in inverted commas and how I've learned to be okay with it. And so I do still have these beating up thoughts that come up in my head. You should have done this. You should be further along. You should be more on top of this, dah, dah, dah. But I'm also increasingly better at reminding myself we don't, we don't talk to ourselves like that. We don't have to think those thoughts and if we can build that into a planning system where it doesn't matter if we stick to this plan perfectly or not. The point is that we make a plan from good intentions. We attempt to stick to the plan for good intentions. And when we notice it's not quite what we thought it was going to be, or we're not quite doing the things we thought we can be. We can either realign or compassionately nudge ourselves back, but that none of these things mean it was a big mistake or a waste of time or a huge failure. It just means we need to realign ourselves back to what we were talking about and what we were doing and that that's okay, because that readjustment is part of the planning process. Laura: Yeah. And kind of, you know, when you asked What are you good at? And again, I do think I am actually very good at responding to, to those difficult moments. Probably partly thanks to my kind of professional background and the amount of kind of reflective practice we do in teaching and in librarianship and things like that. I do feel I've got this really good skill of being a very reflective and reflexive practitioner, which I think of as a strength in other respects with the PhD, but perhaps I've never really thought about how it can be a strength when it comes to, when plans don't go to plan. Vikki: So tell me just briefly what you mean by reflective in this context. Laura: Um, so it's like, taking those moments to think, okay, what, what's been going on, what's happened, how did that make me feel, what could I do differently. So when we're teaching in my job, you know, if we've done a teaching session, it might not be a formal thing of, you know, sitting down and writing about it, but generally always taking those, you know, those moments to think, how did that go? What didn't work? What am I going to do differently next year when I teach this particular workshop or this particular class? Vikki: It's almost like you're planning. Laura: It's almost like you're planning, isn't it? Vikki: Yeah, I'm terrible at planning. I'm really good at reflective practice. I think about what I've been doing and I work out what I need to do next. But yeah, terrible at planning. Awful. Laura: Awful at planning, good at, good at thinking back on how things have gone. Vikki: Thinking about how it's gone and deciding what you're going to do differently next time is literally planning. So you are telling me at the moment that you have an overarching structure for your PhD where you know roughly when you'll be data collecting and what bits you'll be writing up during that and things. And you have well developed skills at being able to think about how things are going and decide how to do them differently next time. Laura: Yeah, yeah. I'm guessing my, uh, my actual problem is just, not, um, not being able to recognize a lot of this. Vikki: It's what happens is people think that someone who is good at planning makes a plan, does the plan, And then makes another plan. And that it's this very linear, I decide it all in advance, I just implement it exactly how I intended, and then I do it again. And people have this perspective, but that is not how planning goes for anybody. There are people who are much more highly structured. I get that. It used to, I was head of education in my old role, and so I'd oversee all the modules in my school. And it would baffle me sometimes where people were like, but I'm teaching this in six months, Vikki. I needed to know this two months ago, cause it's all planned out. I'm like, how is it all planned out eight months before you start? I don't understand. So some people are much more highly structured in how far ahead they do these things and stuff. But no one just plans it out, does it exactly as they say, and then goes on to the next one. It's an unrealistic level of perfection that we're asking of ourselves. When we can see that the process of planning helps us to make some decisions now rather than later. And then we get to kind of work through the plan and some bits of it we will do and other bits that we don't do, and then we can readjust. And if we see that readjustment as an intrinsic part of the planning process, then suddenly we haven't failed at our plan. We're just assessing where we are, we're retweaking and going again. And that doesn't mean, you know, I was the queen of remaking my revision timetables because I'd color coded them and then I hadn't stuck to it or whatever. It doesn't mean just cramming, cram more in. It, readjusting can be going. Oh, I'm planning too much, aren't I? I'm not actually putting a realistic amount of stuff in here. Um, I need to get rid of some of this or I need to postpone some of this or whatever it can be that. It can be noticing You know, you are constantly telling yourself. You need to start work at 7 30 a. m You never do so How about we just tell ourselves we're gonna start working at 8 and then we are sticking to what we wanted to do Let's not give ourselves sticks that we just never ever stick to So that readjustment is part of the planning process, whether that's a sort of three, six month planning process, or whether it's a what we do this week process, readjusting is part of it. Laura: Yeah, it really is, isn't it? That kind of, and yeah, I would say, you know, I'm, probably a good strength of mine, that reflection and on the flip side, not be afraid to deviate from what I thought I should be doing, because something is telling me that that's not the right thing to be doing right now. Vikki: You get to be reflective then and think about, do I like this thing that's telling me to deviate? Because sometimes our brains tell us to deviate because it feels hard, or, you know, we can't be bothered at the moment, or it sounds boring, or we don't think we're good enough, or those things. So sometimes we hear those gut feelings and we can listen and go, You know, I don't like those reasons for deviating from the plan. We need to just stick to the plan. Or we listen to them and go, they're actually telling us, you know what, you put too much in this section of time. Or, you know what, I'm not actually interested in that study we designed. I don't know how we ended up over there, but it's not what I want to be doing and so we readjust. And so, When we can take some of the emotion away where we're not telling ourselves that readjusting means that we're big failures and our plan was a failure and we're rubbish and our system's wrong. We just tell ourselves that, okay, that's interesting. I'm deviating from this a bit. I wonder why that is. Is this actually the wrong route? Have I set it up in a way that doesn't work for me? Or do I actually need to develop my, my sort of skills in doing the thing I intended to do a little bit more? And we can have a mixture of those things, yeah? We can, we can have a mixture of It's partly sometimes I just fap about on my phone when I should be starting work, and I just need to get on with it. But other times, if it's something that I'm constantly setting myself up for fail because I never do it, well, let's just I obviously don't want to right now, so let's just not plan it. Laura: You know, it's so interesting to hear somebody talk about Like planning as something that has that ongoing kind of reflection and questioning. What's going on here is, you know, rather than what you often hear when you go on course, you know, you get sent on all the courses, you know, project management courses and time management courses and it's all, you know, it is all very structured and if you do this, this, this and this, you'll get to the end. And I don't think, I, now when I think about it, I don't think I've heard as much kind of emphasis on That, you know, that importance of like reflection and thinking almost, you know, you know, on a regular basis, what's going on here? Does this, is this working? Do I need to change something? And I quite like thinking about planning from that perspective now. Vikki: Why does that feel better? Laura: Cause it, it kind of makes me think I can be in control of everything in a way that feels very comfortable and like natural to how I go, how my brain works and how I, how I approach things rather than planning being something that It's like something I've got to learn, like this brand new skill that I don't already have. Vikki: Yeah. I want to take you back. You said that if you had the right system, you would think, I'm doing it right. I'm doing what I should be doing. And I think what you just described, It's essentially you telling yourself that. that actually if I see planning more as a reflective process, more as something where I am going to wander off, but then I'll nudge myself back, or I'll choose a different way, or whatever it is, then I can be telling myself, I'm doing this right because I'm adjusting my plan. I'm sticking to the bits that I really want to and the bits that are really important. And I'm recognizing that some weeks are going to be different to others and some days are going to be different to others. But on the whole I'm, I'm doing this and, and that's so powerful because then if you want to be feeling secure and reassured, you can make yourself feel secure and reassured by knowing that you've got this iterative, messy sometimes, but ultimately kind of well intentioned system, where we, we figure it out. Laura: Yes. Yes. That's like, I do actually, just from having this, this conversation, I'm like, yeah, actually, like, maybe I do have a lot more control of this big unwieldy PhD thing than perhaps I give myself credit for sometimes. Vikki: You've done four years. You've done four years alongside another job and got yourself here as somebody who believed, you know, through all of that, believing that you couldn't do planning. But somehow getting here, so you were doing planning and you did all these things. And I just want you to think how much easier the rest of this could feel if you know that it's not reliant on you finding the perfect system and beating yourself into doing it perfectly. So I had a meeting yesterday with some people who were interested in doing my group program, which is called being your own best boss and we're going to cover loads of this stuff. And I was talking then about my experience with role based time blocking, which is one of the tools that I recommend. And I was explaining to them, you know, I stick to role based time blocking probably between 50 and 70 percent of what I intend each week, something like that. Um, you know, in better, in inverted commas, weeks, maybe a bit more than that, but there's always bits I shift and not for good reasons. There's always bits I shift because I've been procrastinating or bits because I'm tireder than I thought I would be, and I'm not managing it or whatever. But I've got enormously better at not beating myself up about that. And that makes it so much easier to then just tweak stuff. To then just go, Oh, look, today's felt a bit rubbish. And when I look at it, I didn't stick to any of the things that I put in it. Okay, well, what can I do in this next hour that'll make me feel like I've finished intentionally? And let's just have a look at tomorrow and see, am I being realistic or not? Because what I used to do, right, was just shove more in. It's like, well, I've been rubbish today, so tomorrow I need to do all of today's and all of tomorrow's, so let's just wedge it all in. Whereas now I'm so much better at being like, you know what, that's okay, you know, today went great. Things feel better when I do the things I intend, so let's just try that tomorrow. Let's see what barriers we can overcome. Do that tomorrow. And the response from the people in the group was like, Oh my God, you only stick to it 60 percent or whatever. I was like, yeah, but you teach this stuff. And I'm like, yeah, we know. And I teach it from that place of not doing it perfectly. And they were like, I think I could do this. I'm like, yeah, you definitely could. I think it makes so much difference to know that just because you're not doing it perfectly doesn't mean that it's not a good system. It's not that it's not a system you can make work and you're not someone who can keep this all on track. Laura: Yeah. And that's a really, really helpful, a really helpful reminder. Like, like you said. Before it's, you know, it's not necessarily the system doesn't work and you don't need to just completely get rid of that system just because you haven't been following it as you planned it out or as, as you said you were going to do, but kind of acknowledging that, you know, life gets in the way, you're not always going to remember or, you know, whatever happens. But the system can still be a useful system to come back to. So I think there's actually a system that I was kind of using and I haven't, I haven't opened the notebook for like a week, but I can kind of recognize that it does actually really work for me when I, when I need it to. Vikki: Absolutely. I want to pick up one thing you said. You said when life gets in the way and things, one thing that's really important with this is we're, we're super compassionate to the fact that things aren't going to go perfectly, but we also take responsibility for them. So life doesn't happen to you. You make decisions. Okay. So things happen and then you make the decision that I'm going to deal with that instead of the thing I intended. Okay? And that's not to, like, blame or anything like that, but the more we can recognize that even interruptions are decisions we make, because we decide whether we're going to engage with them or not. Even emergencies are, you know, there are people who would hear that a family member are in hospital and would continue working because that's the decision they make. Other people would go immediately, no questions asked. It's all just decisions we make. And so what we can then do is decide which of the decisions that we stand by, which of the decisions, actually, that was an interruption that was absolutely appropriate for me to drop what was on my plan and go do it. Actually, that was an interruption that just felt a lot easier to deal with than the thing I intended to do. So, yeah, next time I might need to think about that differently. So we just take that little bit of control, um, of it. The other thing I'd say, or two things, so one is I tend to have the same core system for deciding what I'm doing each quarter, what I'm doing each month, each week, and the same core system for how I manage what tasks I have, but I tweak Exactly how I'm doing it that week. And what I found enormously useful about that is I'm not reinventing. I'm not wasting time learning a whole brand new system. I'm not sort of having to move across all the tasks that I put in a Kanban board last week, but now we're going to be in an Excel file or whatever, um, but I do give myself little, Oh, Is it useful for me to put it on little post it notes? So I just have the one thing I'm doing now. This is what I'm experimenting with at the moment. Or would it be useful to take things that were in my electronic diary and put them into my bullet journal instead? Oh, do you know what I mean? These things. So I have these kinds of, I have cores and then I twiddle around the edges and that really helps because I'm not reinventing, I'm just slightly going, okay, would this help? I think this might help. This might make it feel easier. And that, that can be a really sort of positive thing, because I'm not wasting loads of time, but I am constantly just trying to iterate a little bit to make it feel nicer and easier to, to stick with. The final thing, as your like, reflective homework, is you've mentioned a couple of things where you have strengths in other areas of your life that you haven't really thought about. So the reflective practice is one example that you haven't really thought about applying to planning. I'd really encourage you to spend a little bit of time thinking about some of those other strengths. And this is true for all PhD students, but particularly for part time PhD students who've got this whole other bit of their life where often, you know, they're quite experienced, they're quite senior, and all of those things. Have a think about whether there's anything you do in your library life, in your teaching life, that you can take and apply over here. So have a ponder about what other skills you have in your librarian world that actually could be deployed over here really effectively. Laura: Yes, I like that. I like the sound of that. Some reflective, reflective homework. Vikki: Perfect. So what do you think you'll take from this session? Laura: I think the thing that's really kind of like light bulb moment almost is that idea of kind of planning is not necessarily like you say that fixed, like here's my plan and I'm going to do my very best to stick to it. And obviously, you know, whereas planning can be more of a, an iterative ongoing, like, you know, if you're always sitting down and thinking right, what do I want to achieve in this little block of time, that's still, that's still doing. Having the intention of planning something. I think if you use the word, kind of, the intention of it, I think that's something that's really important to actually recognise. You know, not just drifting through a PhD and just seeing what happens. There is a lot of intention there with what I want to achieve. I just haven't thought about it as, well actually this does make you somebody that is doing planning work and actually potentially being quite good at it. Vikki: Perfect. What a lovely thing to take. One thing I always encourage people after coaching sessions like this is definitely spend some time writing down some of the thoughts you've had during the session. Obviously you're going to get this recording of it too, so you'll be able to go back and listen to yourself anyway, but also have a think about what's one thing you could do today. that helps sort of move you forward from where you're at. Okay. So thinking of a sort of something that you can immediately act on, um, can be really useful too. I'm sure for lots of people listening, this will have been super useful. So thank you so much for coming on and being open and honest and willing to share all of these things. People really benefit from hearing other people getting coached. Everybody watching or listening, I want you to have a think, what are you going to take away from this? What are you going to do differently because of the stuff that we've talked about today? And if you're interested in being coached in the future on the podcast, do just drop me a message and let me know. I'm going to make this an ongoing series. So thank you everybody for listening and I will see you next week.

How many times have you seen or been on a time management course? How many books and podcasts and blogs and social media posts have you seen about time management? I want you to compare that to how many times you've seen courses and support for energy management. So much less. It's so rare to see people discussing energy management compared to how often we see people talking about time management, and it just doesn't make sense because time passes. We can organize our tasks within time, but we can never manage time itself. It's the one commodity we have very little control over. But that's okay. Because actually time management is rarely the issue. Our issues are usually around energy management and focus management, yet there's much less support out there for this. So that's why I'm recording this podcast. Hello and welcome to episode 26 of season two of the PhD life coach. And today we are talking energy management. Now this is, it's another personal one for me, really. So I, as most of you know, have some sort of, I don't know what, but undiagnosed ADHD type tendencies. I don't struggle too much with energy. I do struggle with being able to direct my energy towards the things that I intend to do. So my amount of energy, I would say, is somewhere between normal and higher than normal. But my, uh, my ability to direct it into the, um, things that I've sort of intended to do, that I've planned to do, I find quite challenging. I also have a sister that I love very dearly who has had chronic fatigue for 30 years ish, give or take, and it fundamentally affects every aspect of her life. For her, it's much more about the amount of energy she has. Between the two of us, we have learned an awful lot about how to manage your energy. Now you may have other reasons why energy management is so important to you. If you are a parent with young children or you are menopausal, or you are a part-time PhD student who's doing a PhD in your evenings and weekends, or you are an incredibly busy academic with 4,000 things going on and you don't feel like you've got the energy to do any of them, whatever the reason. Maybe you're older, maybe you have other health conditions, maybe you have other disabilities that I haven't mentioned. There's lots of reasons that energy management is important to all of us. And even if you're somebody who considers yourself pretty healthy, able bodied, no particular reason why you might be struggling with your energy, you may still not be able to kind of, control your energy, use it as you want to, direct it in the areas that you want to spend it. And that is what today's session is all about. Thinking about what do we mean by energy, how can we manage our energy, and what things do we have to be careful of in the process. Now one of the things my sister and I talk about a lot is there's different types of energy, and these aren't like distinctly defined in the scientific literature or whatever, but there's the physical energy that it takes to do physical tasks. There's emotional energy. You know what it's like when you've just got home from a day at work where everybody's been annoying and you haven't been able to say anything about it and you've had to kind of regulate your emotions and not get frustrated with them and deal with this and you come home and you're just exhausted and you haven't got any left so your partner says one thing to you and you just snap at them. We know what it's like. That's emotional energy. There's cognitive energy. The energy it needs to sit down and read that article or write that report But where our brains are really thinking lots about something that's difficult, and we're having to stay focused and put our attention on it. That's cognitive energy. There's also social energy. We vary quite a bit in our introversion, extroversion, and whether we get energy or lose energy from being with other people. But our social energy is another area for us just to be aware of when we're planning all of these things. A big type of energy that I've noticed is kind of creative energy as well. Sometimes we've got the energy to do clearly defined tasks, but we haven't got the energy to come up with ideas and be sort of generative in that sense. I'd love to know, you can let me know on social media or via my website, if you can think of other types of energy that I haven't covered today. So why is it useful to understand the different types of energy? Well, for me it's because when we say we're tired, that can mean a whole variety of different things. That can be a deficit in all of these forms of energy where we're just knackered, or it could mean we're low in any one or more of these forms of energy. But if we know what type of tired we are, it can help us to plan much more effectively what we actually need to do now. So as an example, often after a day at work, I feel cognitively tired. I sometimes feel socially tired. Whilst I'm a pretty extroverted person and I do get energy from having all of my coaching sessions and training sessions that I run, at the end of the day, when I've had lots of sessions in a day, I can just be very tired, socially speaking, but I'm not physically tired. And sometimes I can be sat on the sofa being like, I'm so tired. And then my husband suggests we go for a walk and I'm like, I can't, I'm too tired. And then it's like, no, this makes you feel better. And actually when I get out and walk, I'm not physically tired at all. And the walk becomes rejuvenating for me because I wasn't short of physical energy. I had plenty of physical energy. I was just short on cognitive energy and social energy. So a nice quiet walk where I'm just chatting to my husband or if you're really low on social battery, perhaps where you're not chatting at all, can be exactly what you need. So by understanding these different forms of energy, it can really help us to make decisions. If we understand these different types of energy, what we also need to understand is which tasks use the different energies. So, the example I just gave you there was pretty obvious. Walking takes physical energy. And if you go with somebody else, it maybe uses a little bit of social energy too. But other things, it's not quite so straightforward, depending on how you find that task, it may take more or less of different types of energy. So as an example, writing, once I get going on writing, I don't find writing particularly cognitively challenging. And so I can usually write even when I'm feeling relatively cognitively tired. Reading, much less so, unless it's just reading for fun, but reading of academic articles and things where I'm really having to kind of dissect what they mean, I need more cognitive energy to be able to stay focused and to direct my focus onto that reading process. We get to divide the different tasks we have in our lives into different forms of energy. These ones take physical energy. These ones take emotional energy. These ones take cognitive, social, creative. And we can then use this more nuanced understanding to plan in advance. So when we put ourselves in boss mode, if you don't know what I mean by moss mode, make sure you check out my podcast from two weeks ago, where I talk about boss mode, how we can use our kind of higher brain to plan and strategize and make decisions so that then student us, worker us, can just implement on that. We can use this knowledge when we're planning to make sure that we plan a nice mixture of different types of tasks, that we're not expecting our brains to do lots and lots and lots of different cognitive things in a row, for example. But we can also use it when we're making more spontaneous decisions. When we're thinking, I'm too tired to do this, we think, am I too tired to do anything? Or am I too tired to do this specific thing? Is there something different that actually I would feel better if I did as well? So we can kind of use it either in the planning process or in that more spontaneous process. I use this information to design my day. So I know that tasks that I might struggle to focus on where I need high levels of cognitive energy, I need to do earlier on in the day. I know that I can always plot more social things into the afternoon when I'm typically tired because I have a pretty big social battery and generally get more energy. I'm like a little dynamo. I get more energy from interacting with others. And so for me, I would always try to put coaching, put workshops, put individual meetings into the afternoon because I very rarely run out of social battery in the afternoons. I then also know- and this can be a strength and a weakness. So keep an eye out for this one in yourself. I also know that my creative energy is often replenished kind of early evening. Early evening when I'm just wrapping up the day, I've been doing lots of things is often when I get a new and exciting idea and get a kind of another burst of energy. Now, if I can direct that appropriately, then that can be amazing because sometimes I can just get a big chunk of something that's creative and important and valuable done in that last hour where actually I haven't got the brain space to do anything that's more organized, for example. Where I have to be careful, and this is probably the ADHD stuff coming out, is that because I know my creative energy is often boosted at that time of day, I also have to make sure that I don't get caught up in deciding that I definitely have to finish this thing today and therefore end up doing far too much going on into the evening and turning it into some massive project. So I use my knowledge of the different types of energy that different tasks take and my kind of baseline levels of those different sorts of energy to choose what tasks I do at different times a day. Doesn't always work. As I discussed in last week's podcast, I'm not perfect in any of this, but these are the things that I try to potter through. These are the things that I try to be mindful of when I'm doing my role based time blocking and deciding which chunks of tasks I do at which times of day. I want you to think about how that works for you. What times of day are best for you to be doing your cognitive tasks? What times of day do you need to get physical activity done? If I've been sitting all day, then I still have physical energy left in the evenings. Other people, regardless of what you've been doing during the day, struggle to summon up physical energy in the evenings and so if you want to get exercise done, you want to have it earlier on in the day. So knowing your own baselines, knowing the types of tasks you need to do and what type of energies you need can really help you plan this stuff out. Now, as with everything, We're never going to be perfect, and this can be an iterative process. You, if this is the first time you've thought about this like this, just try and watch it over this week. Don't change anything at the moment, but just watch what type of energy different tasks seem to need from you. Watch when you have more energy, when you don't get more energy and kind of just get to know it. Maybe make some notes of the different times of day, the different types of tasks and how you're feeling and just sort of use it as an opportunity to get to know yourself. Often when we learn something new like this, we start thinking, oh, that's another complication that I don't have time to think about, but actually, we can just do it really gently and really gradually. For people listening, especially if you are an academic or a PhD student who has another job, you might be thinking, well, I don't get to control my energy. I don't get to control what tasks I do at which times of day. I have meetings at all times of day and that's not ideal for me, but it is what I'm given. I have certain hours that I have to work. I have to teach whenever they tell me to teach. I have no control over this. That's fine too, but it's still useful to know because you then get to decide what you put in amongst those things. So if you know that your schedule, which let's say you don't have control over, has scheduled cognitive tasks in a time where you know that that's not going to be your strength. You can think with what do I need to do with the rest of the day so that I'm as ready and prepared as I could be for that. What do I need to plan in after that? So for example, if you know that you find teaching cognitively and socially tiring, then, what are we going to put in the slot immediately after teaching so that you can replenish as best as possible? We don't have to tell ourselves, I need to be different because this is the timetable they gave me and I've just got to suck it up. We get to think within the context of the immovable circumstances that I do have, how do I want to manage the rest of my tasks? How do I want to manage how I look after myself? How do I want to manage what I say to myself during all this time? Because even if you can't control it, even if you're like, yeah, but Vik, I'm straight out of my teaching into a quality assurance meeting and there's nothing I can do about it. Okay. We can at least decide that we're not going to sit in the quality assurance meeting going, I can't believe I can't concentrate. Everybody else can concentrate. I'm so stupid. I can't even do this. We're not going to beat ourselves up about it. Okay. Yeah. This is probably going to be a bit of a struggle because I'm pretty tired from teaching and I'm tired in the same sort of way that this takes, but I'm going to have a glass of water. I'm going to take my time. I'm going to be kind to myself. I'm going to contribute where I can. And I'm going to accept that this isn't my peak hours to be doing this but I can get it done. Okay. So regardless, if you have control over it, you can use this information to shape your time. And if you don't, you can use this information to shape how you treat yourself within that predetermined structure. One theory that I want all of you to be aware of, some of you will be already I know, is called spoon theory. Now this was designed by and for the disabled community and it refers to the notion that energy can be represented by spoons and that we are given a certain number of spoons per day and that number of spoons varies enormously between people and I would argue between different types of energy. How many spoons you have for the different types of energy. And the idea is by conceptualizing it like that, we can make decisions about how we prioritize how we use those spoons. Now, if you are somebody who has a severely limited number of spoons, then you're a real Olympian in this process. You know exactly how many spoons you have, how many spoons, even minor tasks, like having a shower or getting dressed or those sorts of things, how many spoons they take. And you are really the masters. I see it with my sister. You are the masters of knowing, if I do this, then I can't do that. If I do that, then I'll need to do this. And really being very sophisticated with your spoon management. It's like, I truly believe if you want to learn to budget, you need to speak to people who don't have much money because people without much money are absolutely skilled as anything at working out exactly what's going where, exactly what sacrifices they need to make on this in order to make that happen and so on. Don't budget from a rich person. It's easy to budget when you're rich. And similarly, learning to budget energy from people with limited energy can be a really useful tool. So however many spoons you think you have, we can conceptualize it like this and use it to make more intentional decisions about how we spend those spoons. So what can we learn from spoon theory? Firstly is accepting that everybody has limits on their numbers of spoons. Now, for some of you that will be absolutely obvious based on your health status, your age, all the things I discussed earlier. You might be really, really aware of your limitations. For others, you may never have thought about it like that. If you're generally healthy, got a decent amount of energy, you may never have thought about it like that. And you may still be stuck in the trap that I used to be stuck in of, I should be able to do everything. I did not accept that I had a limited number of spoons. I thought that I should be able to have an active social life and lots of hobbies and lots of family time and lots of work in lots of different directions and do all the extracurricular things I thought I should be able to do at all. And because I had probably more energy than most people, I didn't like to accept that there was any limit on that. And it was only actually when I accepted that even though my limit is pretty big compared to lots of people, there is a limit. And therefore, even though I've got quite a lot to go around, I still need to decide how I'm going to use it and how I'm going to spend it. Another lesson from spoon theory is don't judge yourself by your best days. So, sometimes, regardless of your health status, we have a good day, where we get loads more done than we normally do, within whatever context that means for you. And it can be really easy to judge every other day against that standard. That if I could get that much done in that day, imagine what I could do if I did that every day. And then when we have a normal day where we get a normal amount of stuff done, where we use a normal amount of spoons, it feels somehow inadequate compared to that perfect day, that one day where it all worked. In fact, one of my favorite questions to ask clients who say that they don't feel like they've done enough is what would constitute enough? What is enough hours done in a day? What is enough tasks done in a day? How much work do you have to do to declare it enough? And in most cases, they have never thought about it. They've never considered what would be enough. It's just a vague sense that they would know when it was enough. And the problem is, when we've only got a vague sense of what's enough, we spend most of our time thinking that it wasn't enough. So remember, best days are exceptions. They are not days against which to judge ourselves. Another lesson is that you can borrow spoons from the future, but only if you pay them back quickly. So what I mean by that is you can use more spoons in a day than you strictly speaking have. You know, we've all done it where we stay up late finishing something off or going out and having a good time, whatever it is. And then the next day we have to rest much more than we did in order to repay those spoons. And every now and again, for most of us, we can do that. We have to balance up the consequences of doing that. How big a deal is it to have to rest the next day? How easily replenished are your spoons? For some of you, particularly if you have ongoing health issues, we'll find that it's not easy to replenish your spoons. And so borrowing from the future leads to the next day not being worth what you gained by borrowing it, i. e. the amount of rest needed to replenish the spoon, the amount of pain you experienced, whatever it may be, makes it not worth it. But even if you're healthy and you're borrowing from the future, you're overusing your energy, be really mindful of when you are repaying this. Because sometimes, especially healthy people who don't have issues with their energy levels generally, think they can continue to borrow from the future indefinitely. They can keep pushing themselves. They can keep using more spoons than they actually got, and it will be okay. I'll muddle through. I'm always all right, really. And that's the path to burning out. That's the path to overwork and then actually having physical difficulties that will make it much harder for you to replenish those spoons in the long run. So, think about the consequences for you as an individual in your particular circumstances from borrowing for the future. And if you think it's worth it, make sure that you are also strategizing as to when and how you're going to be replenishing those spoons before the debt gets too big. I also want you to remember that even when we do a task, we can choose how many spoons we're giving to it, and which spoons we're giving to it. So, I've talked before about the joy of doing some tasks badly, just because they're not that important. Filling in a form? Don't mess about with the fonts. Just get it filled in. Don't tidy anything up. Right, good enough, happy days, off it goes. You can choose how many spoons you spend on something. Another example of that, outside of the kind of mindless tasks that don't feel important, is how many spoons you are going to give to the emotional side of it. So sometimes when we're at work whether you're a PhD student or an academic, we can get really caught up in all the stories, right? There's so many stories about, oh, it's not fair because this is happening, and it's not fair because that's happening, and they should be doing this, and they're not doing that. And all of those thoughts take emotional energy. They take from that store of spoons that we have to give things that we care about. And it's not easy to detach yourself from that because we usually care about the things around us and we care about justice, whether that's on a tiny, small, local level of our department or more widely than that, but you get to choose how many spoons you spend thinking and talking to yourself about this stuff. It is perfectly acceptable to sit in a committee meeting and go, you know what? I don't have enough emotional spoons for this argument. I'm just going to keep my mouth shut and not get involved. You can do that. You can decide that this argument just is not worth the emotional spoons. You can decide that this decision is not worth the amount of cognitive spoons you're giving it. Sometimes we get really caught up on, you know, should the title of my article be this or this? I don't know. How many cognitive spoons are you willing to give it? Not many. It doesn't matter. Just pick one. It's all good. Okay. So if you're finding there are things that are particularly draining any one type of your energy, ask yourself, Not how many spoons does it take? Ask yourself, how many spoons am I willing to give this thing? Because you have more control over that than it might feel sometimes. Another lesson we can learn is around what we do when we're low on spoons. And I'm going to talk in a second about replenishing spoons because that's super important and I don't want anyone to think that any of this is about sort of driving through and doing more than you're capable of because it's really not. But when we've got a small number of spoons left, we often think what we need to do is small tasks. And then we end up doing the things that are often much less important. Just clearing these emails here and there, filing that, tidying this up. You know, the busy work that always feels achievable, often doing things for other people, because that feels achievable and it feels important because they're going to thank us for it, and so we think not many spoons left. I'll do the easy things. And that's fine. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But if you find yourself doing that habitually, and you're always or regularly a bit short of spoons, the problem is that you will never feel you've got enough spoons for the big tasks. Often, especially during term time, when, you know, academics, you're teaching and got student responsibilities as well as all your research work and so on, we feel like we haven't got any spoons at all that we can give to the big tasks, because we need lots of spoons for them. And so we give little bits of spoons to all of the small things. But what I want to encourage you to think about instead, is if you haven't got many spoons left, how can you take small chunks out of the big tasks, instead of filling yourself up with the small tasks? What do I mean by that? So often our big tasks are writing, designing a presentation, planning our thesis, those sorts of things, you know, big important things that actually our progression of our PhDs dependent on, our getting a secure jobs dependent on, going for promotions dependent on, all these big things that actually really need to happen for our careers and for our contribution to the world are often the ones we don't feel we have enough spoons for. If we can really break those down into much more manageable chunks than we usually do, then suddenly we're in a position where actually with our few spoons we've got left, we could choose to just chip a little bit away from that paper, instead of using those last spoons to fill in some bit of crappy paper at the universities told you to do. But this only works if we know what those chunks are, because we know when we're low on spoons, when we're low on energy, the thought of looking at a big task and going, oh, how can I break off a little bit of this that I can do while I'm struggling, It's not going to happen, is it? We're going to struggle with that. It's not going to be good. So one of the things you can do when you're in boss mode is figure out how to turn the big job that you want to do this week or this month into very tiny things so that it's always clear what the next step is, and you don't have to work out all the tiny things. You just have to work out the next two or three tiny things that need doing. Because then if you have only got a few spoons left, Let's eat something important. Let's eat something that we actually care about. Because it's amazing how, if you chip away at something, how fast progress you can really make. The final thing is, I want you to think about what replenishes your spoons. And I want you to think about this from two perspectives. One is the, what replenishes your spoons that will feel good and that we therefore want to do more. So for me, walks always replenish my spoons, uh, showers always replenish my spoons, playing with a dog, all those things. I've talked about that in a past episode, before, so figure out for you, what tasks replenish your spoons. They make you feel better and able to do the things that you want to do. I want you also though, to be careful of false replenishment. So, this may be mainly for the ADHD people out there, but I think some of the rest of you might struggle with it too. I get false replenishment from taking on new tasks. Because I'm a creative person, and I'm somebody who's very enthusiastic, and I have lots of ideas, and there's lots of things that I think should happen in the world, I get a lot of energy from discussing new ideas and agreeing to do new things and starting new stuff. I get very excited. And that's brilliant. It's good to know. But I have also learned over the last few years to be cautious of trying to get my energy from there, because that's the route to overcommitment. That's the route to overwhelm and that's the route to never feeling like I'm on top of anything at all. Because if every time I'm low on spoons, I make myself feel better by taking on more things, that's no not astainable strategy. And it's taken me 20 odd years to realize that, but we got there. So, you know, happy days. You can learn it now. Um, But think for you, what are activities that you think replenish you, but that don't? Another one for me is social media. When I've got no spoons to do anything useful, I'm I often go on social media and feel like I feel, I never feel better for going on social media. I like social media, it has its place, I still want it in my life, but too much time on social media feels like it's replenishing me, feels like it's a break, but actually I end up more drained than I started with. So think for you, what false replenishments do you have? For some people it's alcohol, for some people it's eating. So think about what things do you tell yourself replenish you but don't actually in reality replenish you and be really cautious of those things. So I want you to spend some time picking things, picking just one or two activities that do genuinely replenish you. You enjoy them while you're doing them. And you feel rejuvenated after you do them. Be really mindful of what those are and consider even planning them into your day in advance of everything else. One of the principles of role based time blocking is to put your replenishment activities in first. So we don't put meetings in first. We don't put tasks in first. We put the things that are needed to maintain your spoons, to maintain your energy, to maintain your quality of life frankly. We put those in first. So identify what they are. Make sure you're planning them first. I really hope this has been useful for you. I am very aware that I am using a theory that has been designed by and for people in the disabled community. Often what is designed by those who are most in need can also be used in a kind of universal design way for everybody else. There's an awful lot we can learn from and with people who are struggling with this the most. With that in mind, just as a little side note at the end. Be really mindful of the spoon levels of the people around you, and the fact that they might have different absolute numbers of spoons, and might be distributed differently amongst the different types of energy. So one thing my sister and I always have to deal with is that I get more energy from interacting and she uses up energy from interacting. And so we have to balance that between us. Cause I offer is like, Oh, if you need to get that done, we could do it together. It would help. And so she's like, no, that doesn't help. That makes it harder, that uses more energy than if I did it on my own. Whereas for me, the self regulation required to do something on my own is enormously higher than if I was doing it with somebody else. You know, I'm the kid that my mum used to get my friend around to sit on my bed while I tidied my bedroom because then I'd actually do it. Because I have so much less resistance to doing it when somebody else was in the room. So be mindful of your own spoons. how many you have, what type, and how you spend them, and where you can get more of them, and be mindful of the spoons of the people around you, and how they may well be different to yours. And with a little bit of consideration to ourselves, and to those that surround us, we can make much more intentional decisions about how we use our energy so that we can live the lives that we want to live. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.

 Do you ever listen to my podcasts and go, well, that sounds all very nice and I'm sure it works for you, but I don't think I could do that. I don't think that's possible for me. Have you tried every organization system out there and always fall off the wagon after a couple of weeks, tell yourself that this is the time it's going to be better and then it's not, and then beat yourself up for it? If that's you, this is going to be the perfect episode. I'm going to tell you about all the things that I still struggle with, even though I teach them to other people and how I got to be pretty much okay with that. Hello and welcome to episode 25 of season 2 of the PhD Life Coach and this is going to be a bit of a personal one. I have been talking with clients recently who've been sharing how they can sometimes feel really almost hopeless about the prospect of improving the things that they currently find difficult, so people who plan or struggle to stick to their plans and they're kind of burnt out of looking for new systems. They feel like they've tried every single option out there and they never stick to it. And they're beginning to believe that maybe there's someone who just can't do this. In fact, you're going to hear from one of these clients in a couple of weeks time, because I've got another coaching session coming up where I'm coaching her on the podcast so you can hear our whole session. So keep an eye out for that one in a couple of weeks. But she's not the only person. Other clients have also said that sometimes they get put off learning new systems because they just don't believe that it's going to work. They believe that it works for other people. They believe it could be useful. But they've tried so many things and failed so many times, they almost can't get their hopes up about it. And they almost don't want to put themselves through it because when it doesn't work out, when it just becomes another planner that sits on the shelf or another IT system that you're not using anymore, it just becomes another stick to beat ourselves with. And a lot of the clients that work with me regularly, really like hearing about the things that I've found difficult because they see me as somebody who, A, I'm a coach. I do all this stuff. I have all these ideas. I have all these techniques that people can use. But also I was a highly successful academic, you know, I won awards, I made full professor, I've got, I don't even know, 60 plus publications, you know, I did all of those things. And when I tell them the things that I find difficult and they're the same things that they find difficult, then it kind of just gives them a little reassurance that, oh, I don't need to be perfect. In fact, I had a hilarious conversation in one of my membership coaching. So as many of you will know, I have a membership program at the university of Birmingham where students have annual access to ongoing coaching. And one of the students said, you have to be organized to be a lecturer. It's just like. Mate, have you looked at your department? No offense, and I don't actually know specific people in her department, but any academics listening, you'll know what I'm talking about. Seriously, there is no way in this world that you have to be organized to be an academic, because if that's true, there's a whole bunch of academics that we could all list that really don't fall into that category. I was like Has your supervisor ever forgotten to give you feedback? Has your supervisor ever, like, failed to turn up for something? You're like, yeah. That's them not coping with their workload. That's them not being able to organize things. Now I'm not criticizing the supervisors. We all know that the vast majority of this comes from overwork and overwhelm and the unrealistic expectations that this sector has of us. But this notion that you have to be this perfect example of organized, absolutely on top of everything bliss in order to be successful in academia, it's just not true. There's so many examples of people that are a hot mess but doing okay anyway. Now, that's not necessarily how we want to live, and it's not necessarily fun to feel like a hot mess, and we certainly don't want to feel like we're constantly overwhelmed and burned out, but the solution to that is not having to be a perfect organized person. The solution to that is learning to be a pretty good version of yourself and okay with the things that you find difficult. The first thing that I struggle with is getting started. In the mornings, I consider myself a morning person. I'm pretty chatty. I'm pretty awake. My worst nightmare is to go and stay with friends and them not get out of bed and me be kind of like, come on, what are we doing? What's happening? I hate it, But getting up and actually starting doing the thing I'm intending to do, I find it really hard. I get super sucked into catching up with a TV show on my phone, or scrolling through social media, or any of these sorts of things. I Get caught up in something that feels easier than the next thing I'm doing and then all of a sudden it's an hour later than I said I was going to start and I haven't started yet. And I used to make this a massive problem. There were many days, tell me if you've experienced this before, there were many days where if I hadn't started work at the time I intended to and therefore I'd thrown my schedule off, I would essentially give up on the day, not in the sense that I would just do no work whatsoever, but I would be in my mind, well, today's rubbish, today's a write off, I haven't even stuck to it now. You know, if I haven't even stuck to the beginning part, there's no way I can do the rest of it. And so, you know, it's all rubbish, isn't it? And then I'd go through the day in that kind of mood, like defeated, like, and I'd do the bare minimum, I'd go to the meetings I was meant to go to, but I'd waste time in between. And what I realized with coaching was that the problem wasn't so much the getting started in the morning, the problem was how I was then spending the rest of the day. So I still struggle to get up in the morning. And I say struggle, struggle implies that I'm trying really hard. Part of what frustrates me is in that moment, I'm not struggling at all. I'm just watching my phone and having a cup of tea and thinking, Oh, I'll start later. And that does still frustrate me and I'm still trying out tactics to make it a little bit easier to move myself on. But what has made it enormously easier is that I'm much better now, but when I do get going Of going, right, what are we doing? Picking the thing, going, or following my plan, if I've made one, we'll talk about that in a second. But, not beating myself up about the fact that I didn't start when I intended to, but focusing much more on what I can do now. That's the bit that's improved. I'm now much better at getting going on the thing that I said I'd do now. And making sure that that bit happens. And making sure that I squeeze bits in as I go through. And telling myself I can implement the rest of my plan. And then if I do that, it will be a pretty good day and it really can often be a really good day. One slightly weird technique that I can't remember whether I've ever shared on the podcast before, so bear with me if I'm repeating myself. I used to be part of a coaching program called Focused with Kristen Carder. If you have ADHD, I highly recommend it. It's really good. And we have body doubles where we would dial into zoom calls and just tell each other what we're working on. And then kind of not monitor, but like, just feel like you were there with someone while you were working. It was a really good way to get things done. And these people were all over the world, right? Some of them, and a lot of them were in the US. And what that meant was that if I was logging on at like half nine, ten o'clock, beating myself up about the fact that it wasn't 8am when I expected or intended to get working, there would be people there who'd be up super early working at like 7am, 6am their time. So I went through this phase of just adopting their time zone. I'd be like, I'm in New York, it's 6am, I'm super organized, and I'd just do that. And there was something about it that just changed the vibes for me. So if you struggle to get going in the morning, first step is to make sure you're not allowing that to poison the rest of your day. We're not gonna ignore it. I know some of you are going, yeah, but I need to start going on time or I'll never get everything done. We're not going to ignore it. We are going to try and tweak it, but we're going to start from removing this kind of knock on impact of that. From there, we can get more experimental. I'm more kind of trying things out now. I'm not beating myself up. I'm not thinking my day is ruined if I haven't started on time. I'm just Going, Oh, I wonder what happens if I start with writing. I wonder what happens if I start with exercise. I wonder what happens if I start with a dog walk. Whatever it is, I try different approaches. I'm definitely getting up earlier. Definitely getting up earlier. I'm not, still not getting up exactly when I want to, when I tell myself I should, which is a whole other conversation, but it's better. And you know what? I'm okay with that. Better is good enough at the moment. So the second thing that I talk a lot about in coaching, in fact, I have a whole episode about is time blocking. I use an approach called role based time blocking, which you can hear, I've got a whole episode about it, but essentially the idea is that you don't have to plan exactly what tasks you're doing in every block, but you plan what hat you have on. So as a PhD student or academic, you might have a teaching hat. You might have a data analysis hat, a report writing hat , you might have a reading hat, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. You get the picture, you get your different roles. As a business owner, I have I have coach, I have course preparation, I have operations like the admin behind the scenes, I have marketing, those sorts of things. And with role based time blocking, you essentially block in what role you're going to take in each slot. And then from there, work out what tasks you want to do. So in that marketing role couple of hours, you're only going to do marketing tasks. In the operations one, you're going to do these. And it can, it's a simpler way of time blocking than putting specific tasks in. It's really good if you're not very good at judging how long a task will take because as long as you stay in role for that whole block, then you've achieved it as it were. And I find it super useful and I've been using it for maybe three, four years. And when I tell people that, they assume that I mean that I block out my whole week and then I do what's in my blocks and I'm like this perfect embodiment of role based time blocking. I, that, no, that, that is not what I mean by using it. By using it, I mean that most days, or most weeks, I plan most of my role based time blocking things. I could show you my diary. I could show you some weeks where, you know what? There's whole days that I haven't put anything in. I'm like, I have no idea what I did that day. I do. Cause I have some notes of what I do each day. But in terms of the diary, I haven't put any time blocks in at all. Cause I For whatever reason, decided I'm not to, and didn't do it, so just did some stuff. Other weeks, you can see every time block in there, and I may be stuck to 60 percent of them. Something like that. But the reason I still use it, and the reason I still consider it a hugely effective system, Is that when I do use it, my week goes better, my day goes better. And when I don't use it, I'm really pretty good at not beating myself up too much about that. And just going, Oh yeah, you didn't do that for the last couple of days, did you? Well, let's do that for the next couple of days. And just sort of start it back up again. And I find that even on the days that I plan it out and then have to move things, it still goes better than if I hadn't planned it out. Because it's easier to know what I should be doing. It's easier to know what tasks got bumped because of the emergency or whatever. So there's much greater awareness. There's much greater intentionality. And so far for me, as a way of organizing my time, it's the least worse option. You know, people talk about democracy as being the least bad system of government. It's a bit like that. You know, I'm not that great at organizing all my time and sticking to the things I intend to do. But this is the system that I stick to the most and where I get the most benefit from, even when it's implemented imperfectly. And it is always implemented imperfectly. I don't think I can think of a week that I have ever done every single block in my, that I intended to do. And I mean, that would be nice, wouldn't it? So it was like computer games. Can I achieve perfection one week? Maybe I set that self as a goal, one week this year, I'm going to have a week where I do my time blocks absolutely perfectly. But if I work better doing it imperfectly than I do, if I don't do it, happy days. I'm okay with that. So I want you to think about what systems for you, are you able to implement imperfectly that would still make things better than they are at the moment? Another example of that, my third thing I struggle with is task management. And that kind of relates, right? It's my list of things to do. I have a fancy little Excel spreadsheet that I really like this system. So I have columns where it's, when am I intending to do it, as in what week am I intending to do these things? What tasks are there? What role do they fall into? So what type of task are they and are there specific deadlines or whatever associated with it? And I add filters in the top. So one of the things that I'm able to do with it is filter anything that I do need to do, but not this week. So often we get in our heads like, oh, and I've got that conference, and I've got that paper, and then in two months I'm going to be doing this, and da da da, and it can really add to our cognitive load to have all those things in our heads, even though we're not meant to be working on them now, knowing that we are going to have to in the future really can make that feel very overwhelming. And so what I love about my system is that I can filter, on the columns and just have the things I'm intending to do this week. In fact, let me know. So you can either contact me on social media, on all the usual places. I'm at Dr. Vikki Burns on Twitter. I'm the PhD life coach on. Instagram, or you can email me via my website, the phdlifecoach. com. Let me know whether you would like that Excel file as a freebie. I can share that with you and show you how it works. So I really like the fact that I can filter and be, only show me things I need to do this week, only show me things that are in operations. I've got my operations time block. I'm going to do those tasks. It works really well. Sometimes, quite often, I end up with bits of paper like this all around as I've thought of something. And what I then do is at some point when I go, Oh my God, my desk's a mess. I start sticking them into there, get rid of the paper, bring myself back to that system. And. I would usually, in the past, call that a fail. Like right now, I'm looking at my desk, and I've got three post it notes here that I've got things on that I need to do. I've got another bigger post it note over there. And then I know in my notebook there's a bunch of tasks that I haven't put on my sheet. And normally I would call that a fail. I would decide that that means my system doesn't work. And I would then start looking for a Notion template or a Kanban board or whatever it is that would be the system that works, that I actually stick to. And I don't now. I take that as a sign that I just need to get back to my system. I just need to go, okay, we'll pop those things into the file and then we'll go from there. . Because this system has the features that I need. It has the ability to keep track of what I need to do. It works with role based time blocking and it has the ability to simplify. Cause if I see too many things at once, it's all going to go wrong. And so, from that perspective, this system works really well for me. What I still struggle with, what I'm still not very good at, is checking the damn system. Checking the list. So there are days when I'm here and I do two hours work and then I'm like, I haven't even looked at my to do list, I have no idea. And they were things I needed to do, because they were on post it notes, they were in my inbox, whatever it was. But sometimes I look at my to do list after a few hours and I'm like, Oh my God, there's so many things. And then I look at them, I go, hang on, I've done that one. I've done that one. I've done that one. And I just haven't ticked them off. And again, I used to beat myself up about that. I used to think that I had to be somebody who diligently checked their to do list at the beginning of the day and diligently checked things off as I did them and diligently reconciled it at the end of the day and added things in and wouldn't that be nice? And I am building towards that. I am slowly working at my systems as to how that will work better. And each week or each fortnight I experiment with a different way of helping myself with that. But without reinventing the whole system, without deciding that I need to translate everything into Todoist app or whatever, um, this is the system. This is just the system. And I'm going to keep nudging back to it. And that's okay. It doesn't have to be perfect. But the more often I think, Oh, I haven't looked at that. Oh, I haven't put these in it. Then the closer it is to up to date anyway. There's very few people. If you're listening to this and you are one of these people, then all credit to you. But there's very few people that manage this stuff absolutely perfectly. And we don't have to. It's okay. We can do it in our own little way. And then get back on track and then do those things, use it exactly as we intend for a while and then not, and then get back on track. And the key, the bit I'm working on with all of this is reducing the amount of time in which I realize that I'm not using my system because back in the day, before I discovered coaching, before I discovered any of this work, I would not notice for ages that I'm not using it. I wouldn't consciously note that I'm not using it. I'd kind of be aware, but I wouldn't stop and think about that. And then I would declare the system rubbish and me rubbish and reinvent. Whereas what I'm really working on now is maybe not taking a week to notice that I haven't checked my to do list recently and haven't updated it and I've been going off a piece of paper instead, but to take three days or to notice today or to notice this morning and that as soon as I notice I'm a little bit not using it to move back into it. It's a little bit like, so my stepdaughter is going to be learning to drive soon and her grandparents live on a farm. And so she's been, you know, even though she's not 17 yet she's been able to practice up and down the farm track a bit. And, you know, when you're learning to drive, you can overcorrect. She's actually pretty good at her steering, but you can often overcorrect a bit or not realize you're drifting. And as you become a better driver, you're much better at just noticing tiny shifts and correcting them. That's what I'm working towards. Just being able to spot a bit quicker that I'm not doing the system as I want to, and nudging myself back to it, but not beating myself up every time. Yeah, we've all been that learner driver where we're like, I can't believe I can't do this. This is so bad. It's like, no, it's okay. Of course you can't do it. We're just going to, as time goes, we're going to get better. That's the sort of vibe that I'm trying to bring to all of this. The fourth thing I struggle with is decision making. I still have a brain that wants to do everything. I have so many ideas. Honestly, if I could run a company where I'm doing all the things, I have so many ideas for you guys that would help PhD students, that would help postdocs, that would help senior professors, leaders. I want to work with professional services. I want things that you can buy online that are completely self paced. I want high end coaching where it's super bespoke. I just want to do it all. I want to help you guys so much, and I'm so excited. I want to be doing keynotes. I want to be writing books. I want to everything. And so I find it difficult to make decisions because I want to do all of it. And making a decision means telling myself I can't do everything. And I have a whole course on this. You can go back to my podcast about how to make decisions or my podcast about what to do if you have too much to do. If you want to know more about the workshops that I do for universities, then do get in touch. There's still some available to book, but for example, I'm running one for Birmingham on Monday. So the day this comes out on how to make decisions and prioritize and I still find this very difficult. The difference now is I understand why I find it difficult. I find it difficult because I'm enthusiastic about all of them. I find it difficult because part of me still believes, to some extent, that I should be able to do it all and that I would be happy if I could do it all. The difference now, after coaching, is that I know that bit's not true. I know that I shouldn't be able to do it all. I know that it's not realistic on any level to do all the things that I want to be doing right now. And I also know that I wouldn't be happy if I tried. I know that the attempt to do everything and feel happy because you get to do everything culminates in not enjoying doing any of it. It's a bit like trying to eat all of your favourite foods on the same plate. So you might love ice cream, and you might love sausages, and you might love candy floss, and you might love avocado, but if you had them all on a plate Not so hot. And I know that now. So I know that it's uncomfortable to make decisions, and I know why it's uncomfortable for me. And whilst that doesn't make it any easier, and I still avoid it, it means that I do understand better that it helps. And I do understand that what I need to do is pick things to meet my different needs. So there's about 47 hobbies that I would love to have. More than that. So many more than that. But what I'm working on at this year is sort of picking one for the month, and then embedding new things. So from a physical activity perspective, January was about walking more. And I did, I increased my steps per day by 2, 000 or so extra steps compared to the end of last year. And that was my big thing. I was trying to do some strength training, but I wasn't putting a big thing on adhering to that. And then I did okay in January. I didn't quite add as much as I wanted, but I did okay. And then in February, it's like, right, let's keep on the walk and keep trying to increase that a bit. But I want to be a little bit more focused on adding the strength training stuff. And again, It's not been perfect. I've just done my monthly review and it's not been perfect, but it's been a lot better on the strength training and the walking I've maintained is slightly better than January. And now March coming up, I want to add a racquetball session every week. We played a couple of times in February, but a bit more ad hoc. I want to add that in. And then my idea is to get back to silks in April. And so rather than, as I would have done in the past, going, I'm going to go to silks and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that, and I'm going to finish writing my novel, and I'm going to sew this, and I'm going to paint regularly, and I'm going to do this, da da da. My brain still wants that, but I'm getting much better at going, but not all of the time. So I find it hard. I still have to battle my inner instinct. I've still got a brain that is going, you should be painting more. You should be sewing more. You haven't even got your paddleboard out yet. What's happening? But those things can come later. I'm going to start introducing paddleboarding after silks is embedded, so that I can go out on my paddleboard more. And we'll just see, and if at some point it becomes too much, then I make a decision about which things I swap out. Maybe racquetball is a winter thing and paddleboarding is a summer thing, and we rotate them. So it's getting easier. It's hard, and I recognize I don't like doing it, but I'm getting better at making it less painful and doing it more often. And then the fifth thing, and this is the one that's hardest to admit, is the beating myself up. Because, you know, I do coaching from a compassionate point of view, where we're really accepting of ourselves, and where the first thing we need to do is remove or try and reduce at least this level of self blame and self criticism that so many of us have. And I sometimes feel a bit of a fraud when I know that I do still criticise myself. I share all this stuff with you guys and I share all this stuff with my clients and encourage them not to beat themselves up too much and to be more understanding and I still beat myself up quite regularly. And that might feel like I'm being hypocritical and it might feel like, you know, how can, how can I be helping you guys? I say this to myself sometimes. How can I be helping you guys not to beat yourself up so much when I still beat myself up? But the thing I've really realized from that is I do still beat myself up. But I don't mean it as much as I used to. So I have these little dips where I'm criticizing myself but they don't feel as bad. They don't feel as true. In that moment, they feel true enough that I'm thinking them. But I know I'm being a bit dramatic and I know I'm being a bit unfair to myself. And when I'm not in that little pit, I don't believe them at all. I, you know, I believe the good things about myself and that's a huge difference. I used to have a high baseline of beating myself up all the time with then some really quite low dips of criticizing myself even more. And now the dips aren't as low and they don't last as long and I don't take them so seriously. And I'm definitely getting a lot better at not beating myself up about beating myself up. Because then that adds a whole other layer, doesn't it? If we're criticizing ourselves for not being able to regulate our thoughts and emotions better, then we're adding more critique on top of the critique that's already there. And that bit I'm getting much better at. I'm getting much better at telling myself You beat yourself up because you care, you beat yourself up because you want to be doing all these things, but you know, it doesn't help. So we don't need to do that. And you know, it's not really true. And sort of like with the tools, I'm much better at regulating it back. Cause that's what it's all about, right? This is about regulation. If you think about tools as in like mechanical tools or whatever. Anything that regulates itself, a thermostat, it doesn't keep things at the exact same temperature all of the time. It doesn't do it perfectly. It notices when the temperature veers off and turns up the heating. Or it notices when the temperature goes the other way and turns off the heating. That's what I'm getting better at doing. I'm getting better at knowing when I veer away from things that work for me, and I'm getting better at making the adjustments to nudge myself back there, but I still find them hard. I still struggle. There's still days where I don't time block. I don't follow my time blocks. I don't get started when I intend to. I don't make decisions about what I'm doing. I criticize myself and I don't update my to do list. There's days like that, quite a lot of days like that, but you know what? It's okay. I'm still getting done so much of what I want to be getting done. I'm still helping so many of you. I'm still enjoying my life so much more and I'm quite enjoying the project of working on these things, because now that I see it as a little fun project of things that I can refine, rather than an inherently broken me that I need to fix, it becomes a little bit more of a like, Oh, I wonder if this helps. I wonder if that helps. And that's so much better. If this has resonated with you, I really want you to think about which podcasts have you avoided listening to because you think you would never implement it perfectly? Go and listen to them. Try it out. Try it imperfectly. If you think you need more support with this, check out my website for all the different services I have. If you're listening to this live, then it's kind of the beginning of March, something like that. I have a new program for PhD students and postdocs where it's three months support. You get a ton of workshops, you get online coaching, you get an ebook and it is all about this stuff, learning to speak to yourself better, learning to organize yourself better from a compassionate and understanding perspective. So if you're somebody who thinks you can't change these things, but that this episode has given you a little bit of hope that maybe it could be easier than it feels right now, just drop me a message. Say I might be interested. I'll send you a bunch of information. There is an outline on my website, but it's always nice just to be able to chat about it. If you are listening to this on the day it comes out, on Wednesday, I have a free workshop to help you review your February and plan your March. Again, message me for the details. I'll send you the zoom link completely free. There will be a little bit of information in it about my program, but don't worry. The majority of the session is going to be helping you develop this reviewing and planning habit, which is one thing that I've been doing since September, actually sticking to and finding enormously useful. So do try and come along if you hear this in time. I'm sure I'll run it again at some point soon if it's past that date, by the time you hear this. I hope today has been useful. It's been really interesting for me to reflect on these things too. So for listening to me chat and I will see you next week.

 I used to think I was good at planning. I used to think that I could like structure out all the tasks that needed to be done and figure out exactly how it needed to happen. What I thought I was bad at was implementing that plan. I thought that I lacked the discipline and the hard work and the focus to actually do the things that I had planned. And for ages that was what I worked on for ages. I worked on trying to desperately stick to the plan that I had made, and then not doing it, beating myself up and trying really, really harder next week. And it took me a long time to realize that the problem wasn't my ability to implement a plan, or it wasn't only my ability to implement the plan. The problem was that I was making stupid plans. I was making plans that weren't clear, that were unrealistic, that didn't have a focus. Plans that if another boss had given them to me, I'd have been like, what's this? This is not helpful. Yet I was giving them to myself. Every single week. So we are gonna be thinking about how we can be a better boss for ourselves when we are in that planning phase, so that we set ourselves up for success each week. Hello and welcome to episode 24 of the PhD Life Coach. This week, we're talking boss mode. Now, just to get clear straight up, I do not mean boss mode in the "girl boss" sense. This is not about how to boss yourself into doing things. This is not some vague call to get out there and boss your life and blah blah. Instead, what I mean by boss mode is how we almost lift ourselves out of the day to day for a period of time, just a short chunk of time, in order to take an overview of the task, in order to make some decisions, and in order to plan what we need to do. Now, you might be thinking, Oh, I already do that. You know, I plot in some times to do things. I write a to do list. I do that already, Vikki. We're going to go so far beyond just making a list and planning in what time slots you're going to do things in, because there's so much more to it. Because we all know that we don't always do those things and just because we write it on our list doesn't mean it happens every time. And just because it's in our diary doesn't mean we adhere to it every time. So we're going to be thinking about how we can put ourselves in the sort of boss mode that makes it easier for us to implement during the week. You might also be thinking, hang on, I listened to your first episode, which was all called how to be your own best supervisor. And lots of you did. It's still my most listened to ever episode. If you haven't listened to it, I highly recommend you go back and listen. But in that episode, we really talked about what qualities we want ourselves as our own best supervisors to have. And this time, what we're really thinking about is the more pragmatic side of, okay, when I actually put myself in boss mode, what do I even mean by putting myself in boss mode? How do I do it? And how do I want to show up? So we're getting much more into the practicalities of it. The other thing that is exciting about this episode is that I am going to be announcing my new group program for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. So this is essentially for anyone working in academia who doesn't yet have a permanent post. So if you're in teaching fellowships, that's fine. Research fellowships. That's fine. Any stage of your PhD. You can be a PhD student that's come straight through from a master's. You can be a part time PhD student who's doing this in retirement. Everything in between. Doesn't matter if you are a PhD student or you're in a temporary academic job, then this is the program for you. So make sure you keep listening and I'm going to give you all the details towards the end. I am so excited. It's going to be so good. This episode is going to touch on some of the stuff that I will be teaching in that program. So have a listen, if you find this useful, there is going to be so much more in this group program. So this gives you a real taster of the sorts of things we'll be talking about. So, first, what do I mean by lifting ourselves into boss mode? What I mean is, a lot of us spend our lives in a single mode of just being us, and sometimes we're planning things and sometimes we're doing things, and often we switch between those, so we get partway through doing things and decide maybe we're doing the wrong thing. We should do something different, so we go over there and do something different. And other times we have decided things and then we don't follow them and we argue with ourselves about it. And often we don't have a particularly thought out way of managing any of this stuff, of managing the fact that we're intending to do things and doing something different. And one technique that I have found really useful in my own life, but I've also been teaching now for quite a long time with my clients, is this notion of separating out the boss version of you and the worker, student, researcher, teacher, whatever you want to call yourself, the doer version of you, the you that does the work. And when we can separate those things out a little bit, we can then start to think about how we want the relationship between those things to be. And we start thinking about how one can really help the other. Now, I've touched on this a little bit. Those of you who have already listened to my How to Manage Procrastination Part 2, that one, the second one, where I'm thinking about past, present and future self, I've touched on this a little bit there, but we're going to take it a few steps further in this episode. So if we can separate out the boss version of us from the worker version of us, then we can start thinking, okay, how can the boss version look after the version of us that needs to actually do the tasks and how can the version of us that actually has to do the tasks show up the way we want to for the boss version of us. By separating it out, it gets much easier to describe how we want to be, and it becomes much easier to separate the tasks of planning from doing and much easier to think about the best ways to structure our days and our lives. So when I'm talking about going into boss mode, I'm talking about pausing on the doing for a minute. So stopping answering emails, stopping trying to write, stop trying to do the jobs that need doing now and instead take a moment to look at this from one step removed. To look at this situation from the perspective of someone who is managing this situation instead of the perspective of someone who's actually doing it. Now, one way to kind of. build this in your head, one way to kind of make this clearer for yourself is to imagine how would I act if it wasn't me that had to do the tasks that are on my to do list, it was my research assistant. And in this case, I want your research assistant to be super able, really keen and enthusiastic, but has a limited amount of time and a limited amount of experience of doing these things. Okay. And so what we get to do in boss mode is we get to think about how am I going to plan out the time, tasks, and understanding of this research assistant in a way that makes it as easy for her as possible. As with real life relationships, there's two main ways that you can have meetings, in inverted commas, with your boss in this context. So, yourself as boss. The first is in a planned and structured way. So this is where you might put aside some time each week, where you go into boss mode to look at where you're at, look at what you've been doing, what's gone well, what you might change. What you're going to do in the future. And if you haven't listened to it yet, go back and listen to the episode where I speak to Marie, who talks about her meeting with herself on a Monday morning, because that'd give you a real structure for this. So there's that sort of planned meeting. It doesn't have to be on a Monday. It could be any time of day, any time of the week. But there's that sort of planned ahead meeting. I always have one with myself on the first of the month, where I look back at the last month and look forward to the next month, for example. It's planned, it's structured. You're sort of really taking an overview approach. And then the second type of meeting is an emergency impromptu meeting, where everything feels like it's going a bit wrong. We've all had those moments, right, where everything just feels like it's going wrong, and we go to our boss and we're like, I just need help getting out of this moment. And in that situation, we're going to handle it slightly differently. So in this podcast, I'm going to be thinking about planned meetings and about the impromptu meetings and how we can differentiate those and how we can use this sort of boss mode to keep ourselves on track and to make things feel a lot easier. Now in that planned meeting, we're going to be thinking about things like recognizing what we have done. So a good boss recognizes progress and allows an element of praise for the progress made so far, so that we're not constantly just looking at the next to do list. So we're actually taking a moment to go, you know what, January I actually got this done, I got that done, I know I didn't cross that off, but we did do these things. In that meeting, we're giving credit to ourselves. We're also being reflective. We're also thinking what didn't go so well and why didn't it go so well? How could I modify things in order to make this work better next month? And this is where we do it from that place of firm compassion. We've had that conversation before. Firm compassion, where we're not just going to indulge the worker version of us, we're not just going to say, Oh, probably don't do that, it's a bit too hard. But we are going to say, if this person is consistently finding it difficult to focus for three hour blocks, why do we keep planning three hour blocks? Or if this person is consistently telling us that there's too much on the to do list, why are we putting more things on the to do list? So we get to be reflective, and we get to actually listen. And I want to listen to those worries of worker us, the things that we're finding difficult, so that we can compassionately and not judgmentally and curiously start to investigate, are there ways I can make this easier for them? If we're struggling with getting on with writing because emergency tasks are landing on our desk, can we plan time to do emergency tasks. Even if we don't know what they are yet, because they're emergencies, if we have something unpredictable happen every week, can we plan in time to do those unpredictable things? Do we need to help our worker self to believe that it's okay for people to wait for things sometimes? So sometimes the problem isn't that we don't have time to do those things, it's that we're telling ourselves, I need to help immediately, or else they'll think I'm useless, they'll think I'm not listening, they'll think I'm bad at my job, whatever it is. And so in boss mode, when we're in this reflective portion, we might want to think about what thoughts we want to give the worker version of us. So, for example, we might decide that a focus thought for the week would be something like, there's no email that can't wait two hours, for example. When we're reflecting, we might notice things like the fact that we're struggling with motivation at the moment. We might notice that we're spending a lot of time thinking, I don't even know why I'm doing this anymore. And so when we're in boss mode, we can choose to actively put in time to help with that. Now, some of us can generate more motivation by simply reminding ourselves why we're doing it. So you might put in time in your diary to spend five or 10 minutes writing about why you wanted to do this PhD in the first place and why it's useful for you or why you're doing the research that you're doing. Alternatively, other people get more of that from talking to other people. So you might then plan in time to talk with somebody else about your PhD and generate your enthusiasm and motivation that way. We get to problem solve for the version of us that has to actually do the work to make it that bit easier for them. So in this reflective part, we're really listening to the challenges that we had last week, and then we're leading the way we're planning for how we can try and address those things in the upcoming week. In these planned meetings, we're also making decisions and that can sometimes be making the difficult decisions. So one of the things I used to do, and I think I've talked about this in past podcasts, but one of the things I used to do was realize I had too many things to do, but I didn't want to decide which things I was going to do and which things I wasn't going to do, because that felt really uncomfortable because a load of me still thought that I should be able to do it all if I was just organized enough. So I would then just decide I was doing it all, get on with it, and then not do it all, obviously, and just wait and see which things I didn't do. And it was a strategy that lasted a surprising amount of time, considering how ridiculous it sounds now. But when we're in boss mode, it's our specific job to make those difficult decisions. It's our specific job to contact the people we need to contact to tell them that certain things aren't going to happen this week. Okay, so in this zone when you're planning, part of your role in boss mode is to go, you know what, there's not time for all of this. It's not that Worker thinks there's not enough time and she's panicking, there just actually isn't. In which case, what are we doing about that? Which things am I putting to one side? Which things am I just saying no to? Which things am I going to spend a little bit of time on? In this planned boss mode sessions, we also get to ask ourselves the question, how can I make this easy for her? So if we know we've got a writing block coming up, how can I make it really easy by spelling out in advance what the five key points I need are? How can I make sure she's got the resources that she needs to do this piece of work? How can I preempt what questions she might have and make sure that I've asked those questions in advance so that I'll have the answers by the time I need to do this? So we get to think ahead and think what would be really, really useful for me this week. Another technique that I find really useful when I'm in boss mode is to actually write notes to myself. So we all write to do lists, many of us will time block in some version, but the notes that I write, and I encourage my clients to write, are more extensive than that. I'm actually writing in sentences. I'm not doing bullet points of what tasks need to be ticked off. I'm actually writing instructions to myself. And the joy of this is that I can be more clear, so it forces me to really what I mean, but it also means that I can explain why I want myself to do this. So I'm able to write out, I want you to start with replying to customer emails because those are the most important part of my business. And I want to respond to them as promptly as possible. If you've still got time left at the end of this session, then I'd like you to also go to the whatever else, emails and prioritize those. But if you don't get to them, they can wait till tomorrow. So I put actual instructions to myself and I try and preempt the arguments that my brain might have with myself. The reasons I might come up with as to why not to do the thing that you said, I try and preempt those things in the note. And so try and explain why we do particular things. I can make it really clear, which are the tasks that are the kind of must-dos today. So I follow, Amanda Goetz , I'm not sure how to pronounce her name. I'll tag her in the show notes. I follow her and she talks about her Two Do list, the two things that she needs to do in a day. In these notes to yourself, you can make really clear which things on your list are your Two Dos, the two things that you absolutely must do today, and which other things are things that will fit in if there's time. You can make that really clear by spelling it out. You can also use this as a moment to reassure yourself. So if you listen to last week's podcast, you'll hear about me talking about how to reassure yourself, and why we need to learn to reassure ourselves. You can do that in your notes. So in my, here's my little notebook if you're on YouTube, um In the bottom of yesterday's note to myself, when my boss was, my boss, me, was writing to myself, I wrote, this feels overwhelming, but we're going to do is a bit at a time and see how far we get. Okay, so I made a note to myself and I would see that again during the day and be like, it's okay, boss knew I was going to feel overwhelmed. But it's alright, because we're just going to do the next bit. So you can use it as an opportunity to really explain out what we're doing and why. It also forces you to reflect, though. Because, I don't know about you, but if I just jot stuff down on a list, it's like, oh, do this, do that, do that, do that, do that. I don't really think that much about how long all those things are going to take, whether that's realistic, how I might feel when I look at the list. I don't think about those things. I just jot it down in a list. And that means that the first time I really think about it is when I turn up to do the list. Whereas if you are encouraging yourself to actually write out instructions to yourself, you rapidly start to realize when you're being unrealistic. You're sort of writing all this stuff out and you're like, okay, yeah, this is way more than fits in a day. Or I've been writing for ages and I'm only halfway through the task, that maybe this is more complex than I thought. So forcing yourself to do it can actually make you re- reflect in that original boss mode meeting so that you actually write something that's more sensible anyway. It helps at both ends. It helps when you're writing it and it helps when you're reading it to keep you on track as to what you want to be doing. Another thing you can do in boss mode is make a priori decisions. So decisions ahead of time. And the reason that's so important is we all know that we can plan but we don't always follow the plan. Things come up and we have to make decisions on the fly about whether we're going to let those things interrupt what we're doing. Now, some things are obvious, you know, if somebody you love needs an ambulance, you are going to interrupt everything you do to get that ambulance. Other things, I've got a bit of a tummy ache, or I don't really feel like doing it today, or the window cleaner's here and I can't concentrate while he's scrubbing the windows. Not quite so clear cut, They could be good reasons to stop working, there could be not good reasons to stop working. One of the things that you can do in boss mode is make some little mini rules for yourself about whether you would change your plan in different circumstances. So you say to yourself, this is the plan. These are the things I want you to do. These are the rough blocks that I've got lined up. Listen to my episode on role based time blocking, if you want to know more about that. We plan that all out, but we can also say, but if reviewers comments come back before Wednesday, spend Thursday on those instead of what I've got planned on Thursday. Or, you write to yourself, I'm expecting reviewers comments back any day. Please stick to this plan regardless, because we've got a good couple of weeks to do those, and there'll be time next week to work on it. So you kind of get to pre empt one way or the other things that might happen and what you want to do in that situation. Another example of that is deciding what to do if you feel like your writing's just not flowing. Maybe you've blocked in time to do some writing and you never quite know when to persist versus when to kind of concede the point and decide, you know what, it's not happening today, I'm going to let it go. You can in boss mode decide in advance how that's going to go. So, for example, you could decide, I've made it as easy for you as possible, I've given you some bullet points, I've given you the references you need, this is the paragraph we're working on, so we've made it dead simple, and I need you, i. e. me, I need myself to try my best to get into writing mode and get some writing done for at least 40 minutes. Okay, we are going to push in, even if it's feeling difficult, we're going to try and get in the mode. We're going to remind ourselves we only have to write the next sentence. We're going to, you know, really break it down. And we're going to keep doing that for 40 minutes. If, after 40 minutes, it's still, 40 actual minutes by the way, not 40 minutes of sort of doing it, sort of going on Twitter, sort of talking to the dog, sort of staring out the window. 40 minutes of properly deciding that we are going to make this work. If after that, it's just really, really not working, then you can decide a priori, that's the point where, okay. I'm allowed to go back and edit my references, or I'm allowed to go back and do some other task that feels less taxing and possible, but still is writing related. Now, those numbers aren't there to, like, give you a rule. You might not want to try for 40 minutes. You might want to say, after 10 minutes, it's not flabbing, I'm going to stop. Or you might say, 40 minutes? I can force myself to keep going for two hours. I'll do two hours. Whatever you decide is up to you. But decide it in advance, because when you decide it in advance, you're not then reanalyzing all the way through. You're not kind of going, Oh, I could just stop and do something else. I wonder if I should, after five minutes, I could just do something else. I wonder if I should, you're not using that. You're saying, no, we agreed. I was going to try my best to do this 40 minutes. And if after that, I can't, then that's fine. I'll go and do something different. So you kind of pre make those decisions. So have a think about what decisions you want to pre make. The joy is, you can of course reassess these decisions next week. So when you're next in boss mode, you can say, Okay, we tried the 40 minute rule and actually, you know what, that worked pretty well. We're going to keep that. There were several times where I didn't think I was going to get into it, but I did. So we're going to keep that one. Or you might go, you know what, that 40 minutes was just painful. Not once did keeping going for that long make me actually get in the flow of writing. So you know what? 20 minutes is long enough. If I'm not into it by then, I'll do something different. You get to reassess, you get to make it again, but you get to do it when you're in boss mode, rather than second guessing it the whole time while you're in worker mode. So these are the sorts of things that you do in structured boss mode, the boss mode sessions where you plan it in advance, you're looking back, you're giving yourself reassurance and credit for what you have done, you're looking ahead, you're making realistic plans, taking the difficult decisions, explaining your reasoning and trying to make as many advanced decisions as you can to really set yourself up for the week. Now I keep referring to a week. You don't have to do this weekly, you could plan to do them twice a week, plan to do them every morning, last thing before you start the next day, whenever you do them. But these are the ones that you've sort of structured in, in advance. And those are the types of tasks I want you to do in those boss mode meetings. The other type of boss mode meeting though, is an impromptu boss meeting. And as I said, this is when you're just having a little bit of a breakdown and struggling and just like, I just need to lift myself out of this for a second. And the key rule with these meetings is that we're only trying to solve for this specific issue. Often we lift ourselves out and decide this is the moment to reevaluate our entire career. Nah, no. What we're doing now is we're lifting ourselves out and we're saying, right, I'm just going to stop even trying for a second. I'm going to take a breath. I'm going to put myself into boss mode. My boss is calm and compassionate and clear. And I'm reminding myself that I can be all of those things. And we are just going to have a quick chat about how I am right now. And this is where you might be deciding that, you know what, I thought I was doing that this afternoon, but I don't feel good, or some stuff's happened that's changed things, something's come in, something's got cancelled, whatever it might be. And you get to have just a quick check in with yourself to make a decision about what you're going to do. One big tip, slightly change environment for this. Even if it means just going standing on the other side of your desk. Okay, I'm not saying go off to another coffee shop or something like that. But, stand up, move from where you have just been sitting and stressing and things. Remind yourself what type of boss you want to be. And ask yourself questions about what do I need right now and I want you to ask them from that compassionate, firm place. So, you're slightly sceptical, but very kind. So you're sort of saying, okay, are we tired? Or does this just feel difficult right now? Those sorts of questions. Are we the sort of tired that's gonna feel better because we have a nap? Or are we the sort of tired that's gonna feel better because we have a walk? What do I really need right now? Check in with your basic needs, you know? When did you last drink water, for example? She says, with her diet coke can next to her. I need to remember to ask myself that question more often. Where did you last drink water? You can check in with those things. You can ask yourself, am I spiralling right now? Because often when we're in these sorts of moods, these distressed states, the problem isn't the specific problem, the problem is all the other things that we're telling ourselves. That because we're finding this paragraph hard, we're going to get further behind, we're never going to finish, we're never going to get a job. And so when you go into impromptu boss made, you get to ask yourself questions like that. What am I making this mean? It's okay. What's the actual problem at the moment? And what are you telling yourself is now going to happen? So we get to just separate those things out. And this isn't easy if we're in the midst of feeling, you know, upset and stressed and things like that. And it could be that as your impromptu boss, the first thing you decide is she is not in the mood for any sort of logical discussion here. What she really needs right now is just get outside, go for a walk, and calm down a bit. And so you do that bit. And then you have the rest of impromptu boss meeting when you get back to make decisions about what else you're going to do. You can do the thing that you need immediately there in the moment. What impromptu boss doesn't do is take that stress moment and decide to reorganize the whole week. They don't decide they're going to completely change the research project they're doing or whatever. They just figure out what do you need right now, that will actually make you feel better, not the things that just mask it, so we're not talking going off for chocolate or whatever. What would be actually helpful right now, as your boss, as the slightly more calm and sensible version of you, what would be most useful? And how can I help you implement that right now? So that is boss mode, both planned and impromptu. If you found that useful, and I'm sure all of us need more of this in our lives, and you want to learn more about the specific how, so if you've left this episode going, okay, that's interesting, but how do I do this? What if I don't follow through? What if I still find it difficult to judge what's realistic? If you're asking all these questions of yourself, then you are perfectly set up to come onto my group program. So as I said, it's for PhD students and people in non permanent academic roles, so postdocs, teaching fellows, anyone like that. It starts the first week in April. It is going to run three months and it's going to include some taught workshops that are bespoke and specific to your program. It's going to include weekly group coaching sessions where you get to see other people getting coached, get one to one coaching yourself. You're going to get my ebook on how to be your own best boss with tons of exercises in it and things like that. And there's going to be some secret bonuses too, which I will tell you about soon, but access to other workshops, access to private videos and all sorts of things. You get access all the way through directly to me, so I will be able to help you with your specific issues and you'll be able to be in contact with the rest of the group, the rest of the community, so that you can support each other too. It is cheaper than my one to one coaching. It is 300 pounds for three months. And that includes all the workshops, all the coaching, the book, the community, everything is substantially cheaper than one to one coaching. I know if you heard my podcast last week, you've heard a little bit about it, but that is some more detail for you. I'm going to teach you how to do quarterly and monthly reviews and planning. I'm going to take you through those, how to monitor your progress, how to implement boss mode in your life in much more detail. We're going to think about self management, emotional regulation. It's going to be amazing. I am so excited to the extent that I'm actually encouraging many of my one to one PhD clients to move across into that program. That's how good I think this program is going to be. If you want to know more about it, make sure you're on my mailing list. Go to www. thephdlifecoach. com, go to work with me, and then pick the sign up option for my free online community and you'll get all the emails about it. Alternatively, contact me through any of the different ways that you can contact me, vikki@wemburycoaching. com or you can find me on Twitter at Dr Vikki Burns or on Instagram at the PhD Life Coach. Wherever you can find me, just send me a message. If you book in, you'll be directly in contact with me. You can tell me what's challenging you at the moment, what sort of support you're looking for, and I will explain everything to you about how to get involved. If you're a supervisor or another member of staff, please make sure you share this with people that you think would benefit from it. I might do one like this for senior academics in the future, keep your eyes peeled. Make sure you tell lots of people about it. Send me a message, just call it, I might be interested and I will take it from there. We're starting first week in April, it's going to be incredible. Hope you found today useful. Let me know how you get on implementing boss mode for planning in your life. And I look forward to seeing you all next week.