One of the things I hear clients say most often is that they don't know what to do. They either don't know what decision to make in their life, they don't know how to do something, they don't know how to present their argument, how to structure their paper, they don't know which study to do, they don't know, they don't know, they don't know. It comes up all the time at every level of the academic journey, whether you're a PhD student or a full professor. This idea that we don't know something and that that is a problem can really cause a lot of delays. It's a huge source of procrastination. If you've written something in your kind of task list for the day and you get to it and you're like, yeah, I'm not really sure how to do that, it's really easy to decide, oh, I'll do it later. It's really easy to put off because you're putting off something that's kind of a bit nebulous anyway. This is something I've addressed with some of my one to one clients recently, and lots of them have had success with a really specific tool that I like to call the do know don't know list, which I'm going to share with you today. Hello and welcome to episode 40 of season 2 of the PhD Life Coach. And we're going to be thinking about this tool, the Do Know, Don't Know list. But first, let's think, why do we even keep telling ourselves we don't know? Well the first thing is, we're all working in an area where we're right at the edges of human knowledge. And we sometimes forget that, I think. It becomes so normal to be in this kind of higher education environment where everybody's doing research, everybody's experts, so much so that most of us don't feel like we're experts, we forget that actually doing things that we don't know how to do is almost entirely our job description, whether you're PhD students or academics, doing things that people haven't figured out how to do yet is what we do. Yet often we allow this to be a reason not to act, not to do something. Now sometimes we tell ourselves that we don't know, when we actually don't know. Where there are bits of information that are missing, bits of training that are missing, that would enable us to actually do the thing. So sometimes we just don't know. Other times, what we really mean by I don't know is I haven't decided yet. I'm on a bit of a thing at the moment that most time management problems are decision making problems. And I think this is true a lot in the "I don't know" issues too. Often we're saying things like I don't know how to structure this paper. And one of the things we'll think about is how to actually reframe that as I haven't decided yet how I'm going to structure this paper. Because not knowing, I don't know, implies there is a correct solution out there that if only you knew enough, you would be able to do, when in reality that's usually not true. So sometimes there are things we specifically don't know. Other times we tell ourselves we don't know when we just haven't decided yet, for lots of different reasons. The third reason we sometimes tell ourselves that we don't know is because it's easier to tell ourselves that we don't know than it is to do the hard thing. Often when we pin it down, we do know what we need to do. I felt a little bit like this. I wrote a children's novel that I'm still going through submissions and everything like that for, looking for an agent. And I'd written the whole thing. I was pretty pleased with it. It taken me a really long time. I had this wonderful mentor that I won in a competition and she was giving me advice. And I'd written the whole thing in third person. And I was talking to her about it. I was saying, you know, I'm really happy with it, but I just don't know how to make it a bit more vivid, a bit more engaging and all these things I just don't know. And the more we talked, the more it was like. I do know., I need this book to be written in first person. I need it to be the voice of the main character. And I was telling myself I didn't know what to do because the thought of having to rewrite the whole thing was just enormously overwhelming. Now as it was, once I decided I was doing it, went for it, so much better and going through a new round of submissions now. But sometimes we tell ourselves we don't know when. do, but we don't like the emotions that we think that decision is going to bring up, whether it's going to be something hard, whether it's going to upset people, it's going to disappoint people, whatever it might be. Okay, so there's a bunch of reasons that we tell ourselves that we don't know. So why is it a problem when we don't know? Well if we're telling ourselves we don't know it's really hard to take action because we don't know what we're doing. We're telling ourselves all the time that we don't know. It's also hard to resolve because when you're saying I just don't know, I just don't know, I just don't know, you're not leaving any space to come up with ideas. We're not energizing that curious part of our brain that we talked about a couple of weeks ago that really help us come up with solutions and decision making and all of this good stuff. We sort of freeze, a bit like a computer that's got too many tabs open. Another thing is we often make it mean something about us. Not only do we not know, but we should know, and if we were good enough at it, then we would know, and other people seem to know, and suddenly now this means that we're not good enough, we don't belong to be here, that everybody else is better than us, all of these things. We take the fact that we're telling ourselves we don't know things to mean a whole bunch of other stuff that it simply doesn't mean. And that can be even more paralyzing than that initial thought that we don't know. The final thing is that it also completely hides all the things we do know. When we're saying, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, we forget to acknowledge the things we do know. And almost everything we know a bit about. It's very rare for us to be embarking on something where we have literally no clue. Maybe you don't know the structure of an upcoming article that you're writing. But you do know, I assume, that you're going to start with an introduction and that you're going to finish with a conclusion. You do know that you have to make an argument through the paper. If you're in the sort of sciences area, you know you've got an intro, method, results, and discussion, or whatever format it is for you. There are things you do know. You probably know roughly how long it needs to be. You probably could figure out pretty easily how long paragraphs might need to be. There's a bunch of things that you do know. But when you're telling yourself that you don't know, we forget all of those. So, my solution. My solution here that some of my clients, my one to one clients have been using recently and have found really useful is the do know, don't know list. I want you to think of something at the moment that you are struggling with. That you're like, I just don't know how to write this. I just don't know which route to take or whatever. And I want you to grab two pieces of paper and I want you to write at the top of one of them, do know, and I want you to write at the top of the other one, don't know. Start with the things you do know. I want you to write specifically, in as much detail as possible, all the things that you do know about this thing. All the basic premise behind it, all the basic structure that it should have if you're writing something, whatever it might be. If you're going, I don't know what I'm going to do in this presentation. Well, I do know how long I need to talk for. And I do know that I usually use X number of slides per minute or whatever it is. What do you know? I do know who the audience is. I do know why I'm doing it. Be really silly here. Write down the obvious things. I do know I shouldn't swear in my talk. I do know I, whatever it is. Okay? Get all of that stuff down. And now we turn to the don't know list. And I want you again to be as specific as you can here. Don't write, I don't know what the structure should be. Say, I don't know whether I should write about A before I write about B or write about B before I write about A. Get as specific as you can about all the things that you don't know. Now, as you're doing this, you might remember other things that you do know. Go back to that note. Write them in the do know list. When you're writing the do know list, you might go, I thought I knew that, but now I'm not sure. Brilliant! Put it on the don't know list. But make it really specific. Force your brain not to just go, Well, I don't know. Ask, What don't I know? Get it as detailed as possible. Now we've got two lists. First thing is we get to look at these lists and we get to go, you know what, I know some stuff. There's stuff I don't know, but I know some stuff. So we sort of reassure ourselves that we know some stuff. And now we get to ask the first question. How far can I get with the bits I do know? And I would really recommend actually starting with that. If you know that you're going to start with an intro and you're going to finish with a conclusion, could you write some of that now? Even if it doesn't say the exact things you know it's got to say, or that you need to figure out, could you draft some of it now? Could you start making the slide, like, putting out the right number of slides, putting a title at the beginning, put a conclusion, you know, I need roughly three that are introductions, say, and roughly two that are conclusion or whatever. How far can you get just from the things you do know? This is really useful to get you moving, especially when you've found it paralyzing to not know what you need to do. Especially when you're feeling like I'm just not making any progress. I'm spinning. How far can you go just from the things that you do know? Once you've made some progress with that, In doing so, you might come up with other things you do know, other things you don't know, by the way. So we keep adding to the lists as we realize things. But once you've made a chunk of progress based on what you do know, we now get to look at your don't know list. And we get to ask ourselves, Do I actually not know? Or is one of these options just a bit scary and I'm delaying making it? So if we actually know what we need to do is not do this presentation, then we get to think about, okay, what's stopping me making that decision? Who am I worrying about letting down? What do I think I would make it mean about myself if I didn't do this presentation, what's stopping you taking that decision? If it's that you do know what you need to talk about, but you're delaying doing it because it feels like a lot of work or it feels quite complex, how can you support yourself to be able to do it? So identify the ones where it's like, you know what, this isn't a don't know issue, this is a I'm scared issue or a I'm overwhelmed issue. And then we manage that separately. Now identify things where you don't know, but really it's a decision. And this is anything where it's about what order, what to include, all of these things. There's no right answer. There's no magic thesis in the sky that is exactly what you need to be aiming for, and no one's told you exactly what it looks like, so you've got to figure it out. No, you get to decide. And one of the things I want all of you to think, and this is a word that comes from PhD criteria, but is relevant across your entire academic career. And that is, you do not need to know what is the right answer, because there is no right answer. Academics are good at Lots of things, but arguing and disagreeing with each other is one of them. There's no right answer. What you need to make is a decision that is defensible. So you need to take a position in your paper, whether it's the argument that you're making or whether it's the order that you're telling it, you need to take a position and you need to take a position that is defensible. That means you could explain why you took it and you could stand by it. Now, with most of these, there's probably three different decisions you could take and all of them would be defensible. Cool, pick one. Pick the one that feels the most defensible. Pick the one that feels fun. Pick the one that feels true to you. Whatever it is. But recognize that an awful lot of these don't knows are, I haven't decided. Pick one that you can defend. And then the third type of item that you might have on your don't know list, are things that you actually don't know. I don't know how to import my transcripts into NVivo. I don't know how to code in R for the task I need to do. Whatever it is, pick your discipline, pick your thing. I don't know how to do that. But if we can get really specific about that, then it becomes super easy to say, okay, how do I find out? Because if nothing else, we're researchers. If I don't know what form I need to fill in to reclaim the expenses that I did at conference, whatever, who does? Where can I find that out? Who could I speak to? Where could I look? Who has done this before? Who could teach me? What options have I got? Where could I find out about those options? We get to put our best research pants on and ask ourselves, Okay, if I don't know How do I learn? How do I figure this out? And then, as you gather the information, this then becomes a decision. This then stops being something where I don't know, I'm missing key facts, and becomes, okay, now I've got a bunch of key facts. Bob says I should do it like this. Belinda says I should do it like that. And then we get to pick. We go back to our decision. We get to pick it's defensible. I like it for this reason, this reason, and this reason, I decided not to do the other one because of this reason and this reason let's go Now, this then all relates into decision making and I've done a podcast about decision making before. If you haven't checked that one out, highly recommend you go back and look. It's called how to make decisions. I think I have to make decisions you love, that's what it's called. Go back, find that one, but I'm going to take you through the basics now. So let's take an example. We're deciding what argument we're going to put forward in our article. So quite a big decision, you'd think. What we get to do is we get to ask ourselves what options are there? What arguments could I plausibly put forward? Because whilst you're saying I don't know what argument I want to make, there's presumably a relatively limited range of arguments that you're likely to make. So what are your options? It's the first step. Second step is you get to ask yourself, why would I do this one? Pick one of those options and ask yourself why would I do this option? Why wouldn't I do this option? So what are the reasons I would, the reasons I wouldn't. Then look at a different option. What are the reasons I would do this one and the reasons I wouldn't? Try not to think of it as pros and cons. Pros and cons is different, slightly. We're thinking about what would be my reasoning. If I was arguing with somebody that this is why I did it, what reasons would I say? Okay, if I was arguing why I didn't do this other thing, what would the reasons be? And you get to do that for each of your options and then what you do is you look at your reasons. You look at the reasons why you would do things and the reasons why you wouldn't do things and you look at all of them and you get to pick which reasons you like best. Maybe you've got an argument. I would, I would make this argument because there's compelling evidence in the data. I would make this argument because, it's also in line with stuff I personally believe. I would make this argument because I think it's a really novel contribution to the literature, and then the reasons for not might be I would not make this argument because it has the potential to be controversial. I would not make this argument because it actually has implications for the second study that I had planned, that maybe I would need to change that now that I've done this one and made this argument. And then you get to look at them and say, which reasons do I like better? Do I want to be somebody who makes the compelling argument, who makes the argument that's in line with their beliefs, and who makes an argument that's novel and interesting? Or do I want to be someone who doesn't do those things because they're worried what other people are going to say? They're worried that it's too controversial. Or, there's no right answer here, do I want to be somebody who protects my own psychological safety at absolute maximum and if it's an argument that is going to make other people uncomfortable or I'm not willing to put myself out there and do that, I will find a way of arguing this that is novel and interesting but is less controversial, for example, and you can translate this out into your own disciplines. You get to decide for you in this moment when you're making these decisions, which is the better decision for you. Some of it will depend a little bit on what you want now and what you want in the future. If you're someone who just wants your PhD done, you might choose to make an argument that's straightforward, that's easy to argue, where it's incremental change based on other people's work. So it's novel, but it's building on other people's work so that it's probably going to have a straightforward review process into a nice, comfortable journal and happy days, it's a chapter done. If you're somebody who's really pushing for an ambitious career, where you're hoping to get big grant funding as an early career researcher and all these things, maybe you'll push into the more controversial argument. Maybe you'll do something that really stands out that bit more. For example, so you get to bring in your own beliefs, your own preferences, your own ambitions when you're making these decisions. Now, this is a bit, usually people stop, they make a decision and then that's the end of their process. There is more to this process because what you now do is you decide this was the best decision you ever made. Because the worst thing about making a decision is if in a week's time or a month's time or a year's time, you beat yourself up about making the wrong decision. So you get to decide, I love this structure because of this, this, and this. I love this argument because of this, this, and this. And when your brain is going, oh, this feels a bit difficult, or I'm a bit worried that they're going to hate me or whatever, you go, yeah, but we decided this. I love this decision. I'm really excited about putting something out there that's going to get people talking. People talking is attention and all attention is good for my work. This will increase my profile, even if some people disagree with me. And you remind yourself of all the reasons you chose this one, because there is nothing that is going to diminish your motivation and diminish your wellbeing more than telling yourself you should have done something different in the past because you didn't. Okay? You didn't. And it's a pointless exercise. We can learn from the past, we can decide to do things differently next time, but we can still decide that it was the best thing ever. Would it have been easier for me and my novel if I'd written it first person in the beginning? Yes. Absolutely. Do I stand by the fact that I decided to write it third person and then that means I had to change it? Yeah, absolutely. Because I think I figured out a lot of stuff writing third person that then made it really easy to write it in first person. I don't think I'd have got there in the same way at least if I'd done the other one first. So I stand by my decision to do it third person first and I absolutely stand by my decision to completely rewrite it afterwards. Was it efficient? No. Was it the right decision for me? Yes, absolutely. The other thing you can do is decide how long you're deciding for. So let's say you're deciding on what your argument of a paper is going to be. You might find that there are times when you want to change your mind about it. Okay. But what you don't want to be doing is changing your mind about it every two minutes. Oh, I could argue it this way, write a little bit. Oh no, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll argue it that way, write a few minutes. And going backwards and forwards. And same with the structure. You know, I've had clients who they write it one way, then they change their mind, they write it a different way. And what it means is it never gets to full draft stage. So, for example, if we're talking about an argument or we're talking about a structure, you could decide, I'm doing it like this, for these reasons, these are the best reasons ever, and I'm deciding this until the first draft exists. This is what I'm doing, and I will do my best to make it work, until a whole first draft exists. After that, I'm up for change. Once I've got a whole thing I can look at, I could, at that stage, decide, you know what, this argument's not working, I'm gonna change this bit, I'm gonna move that bit. This structure's not working, I'm gonna swap these around, whatever it is. But you decide how long you're deciding for. You might decide I'm going to write it like this until somebody else tells me that I shouldn't. So you might decide that you are going to write it in this structure with this argument until you submit it to your supervisor and after that everything's up for grabs. Now, always remember you shouldn't just be doing what your supervisor tells you, but that can be a time point at which you'll reconsider. That I'll write it like this, I'll see what my supervisor thinks, and then in collaboration with my supervisor I'll make decisions about whether I'm sticking with this decision or whether we're going to modify it. In collaboration, and what that means is you take into account their ideas, you take into account your reflections that you've had since this, you tie that all together, and then you make a decision that you take responsibility for. So we decide, based on the reasons we like best, we decide that we love our decision, and we decide for how long we're sticking with our decision, when are we going to re evaluate? This is the same... Some of you might use the do know, don't know list about other decisions. You might use it about what you're gonna do after your PhD, for example. I don't really do career coaching, other people do, but you might be thinking about what do I know about what I want after my career? What don't I know? How can I find that stuff out? And then you can go into the same decision making process. And you can also set time schedules. You can decide, I've decided that for two years after my PhD, I'm gonna attempt to get a permanent academic job. After that, everything's off the table. We'll see what we can do, but for two years, I'm going to do everything I can to make this happen, for example. The power of the do know, don't know list is that it helps you really elucidate what you know, what you don't know, and importantly, where you go next. If you ever hear yourself saying, I just don't know what to do next. I don't know what the next step is. Then I'm going to tell you right now what your next step is. This is what you're going to write on your to do list. If you're saying, I don't know what I do next, what you write on your to do list is decide what I do next. That's your next decision. Okay, and you do it in this process. What are my options? What would be my reasons for doing it? How do I pick one? Pick one. Best ever. Let's go. Okay. You always know what to do next because if nothing else, the next thing you do is make a decision and this do know don't know list will really help you figure out how to take this really stuck feeling of I don't know, and turn it into a bunch of actionable steps so that you can keep moving forward. Try it out. Let me know what you think. Some of my clients have used it highly successfully. I'd love to hear how you find it and what types of decisions you use it for. If you're signed up for my newsletter, just reply to the email that you'll get about this podcast anyway, and let me know what you've been using it for and how you found it. If you ever have questions, you can also reply to those emails and ask me the questions and I'll try and clarify them in future sessions. I hope today has been useful. It's been a short, sharp tool, sort of a session. Coming up we've got a couple of guests booked in that I'm really excited about. I will tell you more about them soon. And we've got the next installment of the 10 qualities that I think all best supervisors for ourselves should have. So keep an eye out for those too. Make sure you tell your friends about the podcast if you found it useful. I just found myself recommended on Reddit last night, which is very exciting. I don't know how I found it, but I spotted it and that was really exciting. So if that was you, Thank you. If you've been finding this useful and you haven't told anybody yet, why not? Please let people know. I want to try and help as many PhD students and academics as I can, so help me get the word out there. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you next week.

I used to say that if only I had a personal assistant, I would be the most efficient academic in the world. Have you ever watched Suits? I wanted a Donna, the wonderful Donna, Harvey's amazing personal assistant who always had the things he needed right there, who kind of protected him from the worst aspects of himself and made sure that all the things he did worked brilliantly. I needed a Donna. Now, I reached professor in the UK, but I never took on any of the roles where you ended up getting a personal assistant. So like head of department and things like that in the UK, you might get access to a personal assistant. All the leadership roles I did didn't reach that level of support. And so I never really experienced what that would be like. And to be honest, most of you probably don't have access to a personal assistant either, as nice as that would be, but even just recognizing that would be useful can give us some guidance about what we can provide for ourselves. So whenever we're thinking about what we wish we had, we can start thinking about how can we incorporate some of those elements into our lives now. So today we're going to be thinking about how you can be your own best personal assistant. Hello, and welcome to episode 39 of season two of the PhD life coach. And we are talking about how to be your own best personal assistant. First of all, we should probably define what we mean by this. And for those of you who listened to the podcast before, separate it from this notion of boss mode and implementer mode that we've talked about. So boss mode is where we're making. strategic decisions. We're sort of separating ourselves from the minutiae of day to day. We're planning what we're doing, we're prioritizing, we're deciding on what our focus is, we're scheduling important work, we're time blocking, we're reminding ourselves why we're doing what we're doing. And hopefully, if you've been listening to my podcast for a while, we're also setting the intentional thoughts that we want to think, as well as the intentional actions that we want to take. Now, if that sounds like something you don't know about yet, that's fine. No worries. There are several episodes where I talk about this stuff and I'll link some of them in the show notes for you. For example: How to be your own best supervisor How to use boss mode to plan How to plan your week It's also something I teach in my How To Be Your Own Best Boss program, which is running at the moment. We're entering into the last month of the three month program, which has been amazing. I will be running that again in the autumn, so if it feels like all this stuff is something that you would like more support with, make sure you're on my newsletter , so that you're the first to hear when registration for that starts. Anyway, so that's boss mode. Then there's implementer mode. That's the version of us that gets on and does stuff. We're the ones that read the articles. We're the ones that write the papers. We're the ones that design and do the teaching. The implementer is the one that actually gets on and does it. So how is personal assistant different? Well, personal assistant is all about how do we make it easier for the boss? And for the implementer to do their jobs. How do we make it tidier? More organized? More pleasant? More efficient? Okay, the personal assistant does the kind of operation stuff that makes things run more smoothly. So I mentioned Donna from Suits at the beginning. If you don't know that show, not a problem, I'm sure there are other versions of a kind of supportive assistant that you can think of. When I'm not envisaging Donna looking after me, I often envisage somebody who's maybe a bit older, who's known me since I was really young, who's a little bit firm and maybe a tiny bit stern, but who I know loves me deeply and really understands me and wants the best for me. You can decide what sort of vibe works best for you, but your role is to make it easier for the other two roles. The other thing that the boss and the personal assistant have in common is that we work with the you that usually shows up for work. So often when we're in boss mode, we plan for a version of us that has to be perfect and has to do exactly what we say and has to turn up perfectly on time and organized and ahead of themselves and all of these things. And to be honest, for most of us, that's not real. So when we're in boss mode, we often talk about how we need to plan and strategize for the implementer that we actually are, the person who usually shows up and the same is true in personal assistant mode. So for example, any personal assistant of mine will need to understand things like I get really distracted by new and exciting ideas and want to run off down those rabbit holes. I'm getting better at not doing that every time. Okay. But that's still a tendency. I have a tendency not to put things away, so they know and work with these types of tendencies, rather than things only working if you turn up as your perfect self. And I'll talk as we go through, as we talk about different tasks that you could ask this personal assistant of yours, i. e. you in personal assistant mode, to do when we think about what those tasks are. I'll give you ideas as we go through how you can make those tailored to the real you and understanding of how you usually show up. But first I want to think about why this is even desirable. So for me, the benefit here is that it makes everything else work better. It means that when I'm in a writing block, I'm ready for that writing block and I've got the things I need. When I'm in operations role, I know what tasks I need to do and I feel like I've got sufficient time to do that. It means I'm working in an environment that's nice to work in and it is as undistracting as I can make it. Why is pretending that you're your own personal assistant different than just doing this stuff as one of your tasks? For me, it's just a different mindset. It's a separate thing to think, how could I make this easier for myself and do those tasks than it is from actually doing the tasks. And in reality, we often get bogged down in doing the tasks. How many of you, and I know I'm guilty of this still, how many of you have got items on your to do list that are things like sort out the files for whatever that just never come to the top of your list because you've got so many other things that feel more important and feel more pressing. Those are the sorts of tasks, as you'll hear in a second, that your personal assistant version of you could do in personal assistant time. And that then brings them to the top of the to do list. So those are some of the benefits that I see. But let's get specific. What tasks are we going to give this personal assistant? Now I already had a bunch of ideas about this, but I also did a little bit of research and how I did it was I looked on websites for people who were offering actual personal assistant or virtual assistant roles. So working in a business like mine, at some point I may appoint somebody to help me with all of these things and to do it for me and a really good way to come up with ideas about what we could do for ourselves in personal assistant mate and to look at what they would do for us if we were employing somebody to do this. So I've come up with 10 things that you could do for yourself when you are in personal assistant mode that will make the rest of your academic life feel easier. As usual, you know me, might add things as I go along, might not end up being 10, we'll see, but it started out as 10 anyway. So the first one is, if we spend time at the beginning of the week planning our time in boss mode, which I would really recommend that you do. If you haven't already listened to my how to plan your week session, where I talk to an ex client, Marie, about how she plans her weeks, do go back and check that one out. It will really explain to you how that boss mode start of the week happens. But for now, just imagine you're starting the week in boss mode, making strategic decisions about what things you need to do this week and when you're going to do those major roles. Your personal assistant time might come just after that, where you actually go in and you really specifically check, have I actually left gaps between things. Have we actually left time to eat? Are we finishing at times when we want to, that are kind of in line with the skeleton calendar that we've come up with, i. e. our kind of rough approximation of what we want a week to look like. Now, if in boss mode, you can be compassionate and think about all these things too, Brilliant. But often we still find that we don't. And so I find it quite useful to switch myself into personal assistant mode and just double check that those things have been done. Where I've got friends who have become heads of department, heads of college, pro vice chancellors, those sorts of people, who do have personal assistants, one of the things that they have found most useful is how much their personal assistant defends their diary. All of us have had these situations, and this is maybe more relevant for the academic listeners rather than for the PhD students, but all of us have had those situations where we're blocked in time for writing or reading or something like that, and then somebody's asked for an appointment and you've kind of gone, oh, I don't have any other slots, but yes, okay, I can meet at this time, and you just kind of wipe out your block. Or you wipe out your lunch, or the break you were going to have, or the walk that you'd scheduled, just because somebody else was having an emergency. And one of the things that I've heard people reflect a lot of times is that personal assistants are really good at saying, no, no, no, you need that block. If there's no time, they'll have to wait till next week, or they'll have to wait, I'll schedule in slot in future, which is for emergency conversations. I'll put that in your diary, but this week it's going to have to wait till next week. We can do that for ourselves. Just double checking that when we're in boss mode, we didn't get overexcited and plan too much. The second thing a personal assistant can do is notice when you've got a writing block coming up. So say you've planned, this comes out on a Monday, maybe you've planned on a Tuesday morning, you're going to do two hours of writing. You can look ahead as personal assistant and say, how can I make this easier for implementer me to do? Examples are things like, can I make sure that there are some really clear instructions as to exactly which bit you're writing? Can I make sure, maybe put a folder on the desktop that's got the three articles that might be useful during this? Now, do go back to my episode from a couple of weeks ago about why you shouldn't read during a writing session. But you might decide that there's one or two bits of notes or one particular article that you want to have just to check quick things. Okay, how can you make sure that those things are there? How can you make sure that you're going to avoid distractions? Do you want to think about changing location, working somewhere away from where you usually work? Is there anybody you need to tell and put on Do Not Disturb so that you don't get interrupted during this time? Could you even go as far as like filling up a water jug? That's something my husband does for me sometimes and I love it. He fills up a water jug so that I've got water on my desk when I'm gonna work. Can you think about things like that? Can you book in a walk in the diary immediately after the block so that once they've got their writing done they can go and have a little walk and decompress? And I'm still talking about they as though it's somebody else But I'm talking about us. I'm talking about the personal assistant, us, thinking about the future us that's going to be doing that writing block, and thinking about how can I make it easier. As you do it, you'll get [00:12:00] better at this as well. Just as if I was going to appoint a personal assistant or a virtual assistant, they would slowly get to know me and what's helpful and what things would really speed me up. As you start doing this, you'll start to notice then, Oh, it would have been really useful if I'd done this before this session started. And so you will get better. And so when you mindfully practice this, you will get better at being your own personal assistant. The third thing is personal assistant might look at what meetings you've got coming up, and they might just double check. Have you actually got the Zoom link for them? Is it in the appointment on your Outlook? If you use a system like that, is the Zoom link right there where you can find it? Are there materials, are there other word files or whatever that should be attached to that document? Are you physically going somewhere? Do you know where that is? How are you doing? Get there where you can park or what public transport to get or what the walking route would be. Do you know what you need to wear if there's any restrictions around that sort of stuff? What can you do to make it so that when you come to that moment, you don't just go, Oh my God, I don't even know where the zoom link is, which is something that has definitely happened to me in the past and I'm sure the same is true for you. How can you make it really easy for them to show up to that meeting prepared with the things that we need? The fourth thing is about reading sessions. So if you've blocked in some time to read some literature, what could your personal assistant do that would be useful? Things like, could they file away your notes. So they're actually properly labeled and somewhere that you can find them next time. Have you found more PDFs and downloaded them? And they've all got those stupid names that when you download them, just make no sense at all. Could your personal, personal assistant rename them for you in something that actually makes sense and put them somewhere you can find them next time. By the way, this is where I'm going to ask you guys is knowledge. See whether you guys have got more insight than me. If somebody could invent an AI assistant that goes into a folder of PDFs, opens one of them, gets the name of the author, the date, and the title, and then saves the PDF as author, date, title, I would literally give them all my money. I mean, I wouldn't, but somebody, if that does that exist. If you already know that exists, if there's a way I can dump a load of files into an AI thing, tell it what format I want the file names to be, and it does it for me, that would be amazing. If not, computer scientists get onto it. That would be amazing. I hate the stupid titles you get when you download PDFs. But anyway, I digress. At the moment, that's just a job that as personal assistant, we can do for ourselves. For example, last night I had a big CPD file on various topics because I love to stay up to date on the research side of being an effective researcher, whether that's being an effective supervisor for my supervisor training course that I offer, whether it's the literature behind self regulation, procrastination, I try and stay on top of those sorts of things. I find it fascinating, and I think it's really important that I practice evidence based support as well as you guys. Anyway, so I have these big files. They're all things that I've downloaded loads of. Some of you kindly download them for me because the downside of being a, independent business is that I don't have access to the libraries that you guys do. So my various listeners and clients and things often download things for me. Thank you, my lovelies. And I end up with this huge folder. Anyway, I spent a little bit of time in personal assistant mode. My personal assistant was very relaxed last night because we did it in front some very drivel dating program that I found on TV, bit of junk on the telly, renaming my files. It was fine. I had the telly to watch, not a problem. Wasn't too boring. Was quite easy to go. Got my little boost from feeling like I was organized. And today I feel very looked after because my personal assistant worked hard last night and I now have a beautiful folder of labeled articles where I can actually find the things I want when I'm designing new workshops, which I am at the moment. So that's another sort of thing you can do. The fifth thing that I think personal assistants can do is think proactively about what meetings might be useful. So we've already discussed how if there's a meeting already in your diary, they can help you be ready for it and organized for it. But what about meetings that you haven't yet decided that you need? Taking a moment to actually stop and go, Who would it be useful to catch up with right now? Who haven't I spoken to for a while? Who could I pick their brain? Who could I inform or keep interested in what I'm doing? And how can I get those scheduled in? Spending just a little bit of time sending out some messages, trying to get those things booked in, can be a really helpful way of organizing things. It's always easier to get meetings in the diary in two or three weeks time than it is urgently now. So a personal assistant who can think slightly ahead and be like, Oh, I haven't seen my second supervisor for a while. I'm not quite sure what I need just yet, but in a couple of weeks, it would be brilliant to have a meeting, tell them what I've been doing, double check. Get that booked in. Use your personal assistant time to get those sorts of things booked. I've started doing it with haircuts. Now, my organized listeners, you are going to laugh at me because this should not be a revelation on any level, but with things like haircuts and dentists and all that kind of repeated stuff, I've had a habit forever that I eventually book it, I go, and then I don't do anything else, I've been, fine. And then, however long later, I'm like, Oh god, I really need to book a hair appointment, and then I don't go round to it, I don't phone them, da da da, and then it just takes longer. I've started at the end of my hair appointment, just booking the next one. And I know you, at least half of you, are rolling your eyes that this is not rocket science. But for me, this is making a big difference. When I turn my diary like, Oh, I've got a haircut book this week. How [00:18:00] organized am I? Brilliant. So, if anyone, you know, do that too. But you can do this with all your academic work as well. What would be useful to have booked in already? Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. The sixth way they can help is another being proactive task. And here is thinking about what regularly wastes you time. What do you regularly lose? What do you regularly struggle with? What regularly just uses up way more time than it should? So where don't you know your passwords? Where can't you find your files? Where do you find yourself reinventing the wheel? So some examples here are things like I've got much more... I've spent a little bit of time in personal assistant mode, sorting out all the handouts for my different courses. So that my, my notes, the handouts that I give to the people after they've attended, the PowerPoint slides, if I have them for the various workshops that I run, I can now go and be like, Oh, there's my how to make decisions and prioritize course, and I've got all the bits I need right there. Might not feel very revelationary for you, but often I was re downloading those from places and pulling them together, and now they're all just there, which makes implementing this stuff so much easier. What wastes time for you? Where could you make some of these things simpler for yourself? Another one that I haven't done too much yet, but I've had colleagues who've done this in the past and found it really useful, is writing auto replies for things that you get often. So if you get regular emails where similar types of things need to be said, can you pre write that text, and then be able to just either cut and paste it in or have it on one of those auto text things that you can do in most email software so that it's ready to go. I remember one of my very organized friends, shout out Professor Jenn Cumming, who's been on the show before, when she stopped being project module supervisor, so she used to oversee our dissertation module years and years ago. Um, she handed on like all the emails you needed for different times of the year when you told the students how this worked and when to hand that in and reminders about this that and the other and finding out when you know starting the marking process and all these things she had like just a bank of emails that she was able to give the next person and the dates that they needed to be sent and it was just like legendary. How could you do those sorts of things to just make some of your routine processes a little bit easier? Now the seventh one's going to sound a bit of a strange one. This is sorting your email, processing your email, because I think it's really useful to separate out processing your email from doing the tasks in your emails. So if you're in personal assistant mode, you can go into your emails, you can delete anything that's junk and unsubscribe - apart from from my newsletters don't unsubscribe from those -so you can unsubscribe from anything you don't want anymore, you can file away anything that you want to keep look at later, you can mark as spam anything that's found please don't mark my newsletters as spam they're not you can just unsubscribe if you don't want them anymore um you can, as personal assistant, you can answer quick ones. So it's just, you know, where's the zoom link for this webinar? Oh, I can do that one. Do, do, do, boom, gone. So if they're quick and easy and don't really need the implementer version of you to do them, you can just do them. You can flag ones maybe, that are bigger tasks, but that are time sensitive and others you can take and put on your to do list. Now, whether you then leave it in your inbox or put it somewhere else is up to you and your systems, but really flagging which ones need doing it urgently and turning them into tasks can really help keep you on track. Because one of the things I see, and I fall foul of this as much as anybody, is that we have a to do list, but we also sort of have a to do list in our emails as well, things where people have asked us stuff that we need to do, and often we don't reconcile the two. And if we don't, we end up at the end of the week feeling like we didn't do any of the things on our tasks. It's a task list, but we were definitely busy. So what were we doing? So your, what your personal assistant can do is deal with the easy stuff and then put the more complex stuff, the stuff that takes more than a few minutes to answer actually into your task list so that you can allow for it when you're planning and so that you know when you're going to do it. If you use my role based time blocking system, check out the episode on that if you haven't seen it already. Then when you're taking them from your email, you can allocate them to a role. This is a marketing job, this is an operations job, or whatever it is for you. The eighth one is a fun one. And this is your personal assistant can make things beautiful for you. So all of us, whatever level we're at, will sometimes make presentations, for example, whether it's for conferences or teaching, uh, we'll be formatting documents to send to people, all of these things. And it's easy to get bogged down in making them beautiful. What I would really suggest is that you separate out what [00:24:00] are jobs for the implementer you, and what are jobs for personal assistant you. And for me, the implementer does content. Your boss decides, aka you when you're in boss mode, decides that you're going to do this presentation and what the point of doing the presentation is, you know, what's the strategic value that you're going to get out of doing it. So the boss decides those things. The implementer is the one who has to decide on the content. He has to decide, what am I going to say? When am I going to say it? On what slides? What's the key points here? What's the take home message? All that good stuff. And actually make that stuff exist. That's implementer's job. Implementer's job, by the way, is not to second guess boss. Implementer's job is not saying, maybe we shouldn't do this. I don't think this is a good idea. Implementer's job is to do what the boss has asked them. But, Implementer's job is not finding the perfect picture to illustrate a point you want to make. That's your personal assistant's job. And if you can separate this stuff out, it will stop you disappearing down these rabbit holes of wasting ages making things look fancy during blocks when your intention was to create content. And what you can do, therefore, is you can block time. Okay, I've got three hours this morning to write this presentation. That is not picking color schemes. That is not making designs. That is certainly not finding photos. That is, on this slide, I need to say these things. On this slide, I need to say these things. Here's my data. Here's my conclusions. Whatever. Okay? It's getting that stuff done. You can then block an hour in some period of the day, for me, it's often like late afternoon, but whatever time of day you feel is a sort of low time for you to make it beautiful. And now you've got an hour to make it as beautiful as you can. And at that point, yes, your personal assistant might correct typos and things like that as they go along, but your job's not to second guess the content, your job is just to make it presentable. Now, if we think back to the proactivity, if your personal assistant's got a bit of spare time, they might make a slide deck where it's all, you know, it's got the right colors, it's got the layouts, da da da, that can always be used. So you're not reinventing this every time. In fact, some of your universities will have standard ones, and maybe your personal assistant will find those for you, so you've got them. By separating it out, same as with not reading during a writing session, we're not beautifying our slides during a slide creation session, separating it out makes it way better. The ninth thing and I've left this towards the end because it kind of in the week comes towards the end, personal assistant can reconcile your task lists. And what I mean by reconcile your task list is actually go through your tasks, tick off the things that you have done, add anything that's come up since you last looked at your task list, and just make sure that you know what's going on. I used to get myself really stressed. I'd be like, Oh my God, I need to do this. I've got so many things on my list. Look at all of these. And then I go through it and be like, hang on. I've done that one. I've done that one. I've done that one. And it'd be like, once I crossed off the things that I had done, or even found that I had the same task on my list four times, cause my brain kept reminding me I needed to do it. So I'd add it to my list and then be like, hang on, your list is artificially inflated with repeated tasks here. Maybe that's just me, but spending time actually reckons like moving things you've done onto your done list. And if you don't remember about the done list, there's an episode on that too, uh, moving that onto your done list and then. Knowing exactly where you're at. During that time, you can also check any statistics you want to keep track of. So, I keep track of things like how many people I have on my newsletter, um, income. That's always a nice one. Uh, things like that. You might keep track of how many words you write a week, for example. In that end of week, when you're reconciling the task list, your personal assistant can also look ahead and go, what have we got coming up next week? Just checking. Now, it's not for you to make decisions. That goes into kind of boss mode, but you then make it easy for you to have some boss mode time. So when you start on a Monday morning, you're like, right, I've got a reconciled task list. I've got a tidy desk. I know what's coming up in my diary. I can make some decisions about what I'm doing when, what I'm going to prioritize, what's going to get delayed. You make it easy. When I was first started doing these sort of Monday morning meetings where I was checking in with myself, I was doing this all at once and I was finding that I was using some of my best time on a Monday morning on really mundane, oh, how many Instagram followers have I got or whatever all that stuff. And so what I'm really trying to do now is separate that out, have my personal assistant Me, on a Friday afternoon, do as much of the kind of mundane checking out of things so that on a Monday morning, I can be in strategic mode and actually get straight to making decisions. The other thing Friday me is trying to do is just tidy up my desk, get rid of my Diet Coke cans, empty the bin, all of those things. If you ever get a real PA, you probably don't expect them to clear up your junk. But when we're our own PA, we can ask them to do those things. Finally, you can also make a decision about whether this PA that you're being to yourself only exists in your work life and only does work things. Or, whether they also are part of your personal life as well. I like to think of them as part of my whole life, because I think it's the easiest way to kind of keep on top of things. And so if you're having a sort of a personal assistant, who is also a domestic personal assistant, you can think about things like, okay, I've noticed that I've got a really busy week next week, where I've got lots of coaching, I've got lots of sessions, whatever. I'm going to make sure there's some food in the fridge that's really easy to cook. This is not, by the way, the time to get super overambitious and decide that you're going to do food prep a la Instagram gurus and whatnot, just have stuff that's easy, that's roughly in line with what you want to be eating so that when you are trying to grab something in between sessions, it's vaguely nutritious, vaguely in line with the sorts of things you intend to eat and doesn't take too long. You can also think about things like, are the clothes I [00:30:00] need for next week clean? Do I need to book any train tickets? Do I need to fill the car up? Are there any personal appointments, haircuts, dentists, things like that, that I need to book? They can do those things too. So you could even schedule some time on a weekend that you spend in personal assistant mode. So those are 10 things that I think you can do when you put yourself in your own personal assistant role that will make the rest of your time so much easier. As I said, it might sound weird because you might just say, these are just tasks, Vikki. These are things that I could just put on my to do list and do, but I would encourage you to block time as personal assistant. Create a role, personal assistant, where your priority is doing these things so they don't get pushed out. I also find that by characterizing it as a role, it makes it easier to get on and do. As you all know, I may or may not have ADHD, who knows, maybe this is a neurodiverse thing, maybe my neurotypical audience will think this is strange. Often I find things that work for people who are neurodiverse actually often work for people who are neurotypical too. You just may be less dependent on them. But one of the things I find is when I put myself in personal assistant mode and I think about it like that, I find the tasks easier to do. Those of you who follow me on Twitter, I'm at Dr Vikki Burns, might have seen me post this week that I was looking after my twin nieces this week. I, I go and see them before school 'cause their mom worked early one day and they had been told that they weren't allowed any device time, until they're tidied their bedrooms. And so my job was to help them finish tidying their bedroom before they go ready for school and everything. And I'm not the world's most tidy person. Anyone who's met me, you probably know this. And often I get overwhelmed when I'm tidying up my own thing, unless I really use my own coping strategies. And I found, I mean, I'm in a bedroom. It was a lot better to be fair, but it's still slightly chaotic twin 7 year olds bedroom. And I was going, right, let's just find all the hair things, headbands, hair clips, all that stuff. Let's find all of those, we'll put in this box. Now let's find all the cuddly toys and we can put them on your beds. Okay. And I found it so easy to break it down into specific let's just do this one thing. Okay, we're done. And there was something about the fact that I was doing it for and with them that made it enormously easier than when I do these things for myself. Like I say, might be a neurodiverse thing. But I think the same comes true with personal assistant. When you put yourself in personal assistant mode, it's easier to go, Oh, okay, how can I make this nice? How can I make this good? In a way that we often don't bother to do when we're just in our own task list. If you're thinking, this is all very well Vikki, but I don't have time to do the other things, let alone have time to put in my diary that I'm going to tidy up my desk. I would just really encourage you to reflect. I would really encourage you to think, if I just put 30 minutes 15 minutes a day in my diary where I had this vibe where I was thinking, how can I make it easier for myself? What difference would that make to my productivity in the rest of the week? I feel like investing half an hour to make sure that you've got the things you need for your writing session. That your reading session wasn't a waste of time. That you know what's coming up in your diary. That you are organizing the meeting details that you need. I think all of those things will make everything else more effective. I also think, and this is a bonus for you because you guys know that I really emphasize compassion and a kind of building a relationship between you and your future self. I also think this is part of generating a positive relationship with your future self. Often, we blame past us for making bad decisions and not doing the things that we think they should have done and we almost believe that future us is like, Perfect and amazing. And we'll get everything done, which kind of lets present us off the hook. It's like, Oh, I'll just do it tomorrow. I'll be able to do it tomorrow. No problems. Where actually, if we can get to a stage where we really practice thinking about what will make things better for future us, then we're so much more likely to do the difficult things now, to do the boring things now, do the non urgent but really helpful things now. So actually, I think not only will you be getting these personal assistant tasks done, you'll be nurturing a relationship between you and your future self that will change how you relate to yourself the rest of the time. And this is where for all that I would love to have a real life personal assistant that I can delegate some things to, I actually think that learning to be my own personal assistant is making me better at being an implementer, it's making me better at being a boss, and it's making it easier to do the things that I'm intending to do. So I'm still practicing this. It's a work in progress. It's something that I sometimes spend time doing and sometimes don't, but I noticed that things feel much better when I do. And when I noticed that I haven't been, I try and nudge myself back to it. So have a think about how you can practice this. If you want some more support, my newsletter is going to have some summaries of what I've said today, and it's going to have some specific journal prompts and actions that you can take to help you really embed this stuff in your life. So make sure that you sign up for that. I'd love to hear what things, have I missed any tasks that your personal assistant version of yourself can do for yourself? Is there anything you've tried and found really useful that I haven't thought of and talked about today? Let me know. Get on my [00:36:00] newsletter list, drop me a message, and who knows, maybe I'll include it in a future podcast. If you've got questions, things you're unclear on, or topics that you think I should cover, make sure you let me know. I can always do future podcasts on your topics and questions. I really hope you found today useful. It's something that's helped me enormously. Thank you all 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.

My very first episode of this podcast, 78 episodes ago, which I'm very proud of, was about how to be your own best supervisor. And since then, that concept has really underpinned everything that I do in my podcast, in my coaching, and now in my group program, How to be your own Best Boss. In that first episode, I introduced you to seven qualities that I think help all of us be better bosses to ourselves, if we can just nurture them in ourselves. Since that episode, I've coached hundreds of clients, from new PhD students through to full professors, and all of what I said still stands. But I've also learned more. I've seen more, I've listened more and clients have taught me more about what's helping them and I've seen them develop over time. So I decided it was time for a more detailed look at how to be your own best boss. We're going to have a series of episodes, not every week, but kind of every other, every three weeks, where I'm going to pick a couple of qualities that I think we should be trying to nurture in ourselves when we're being our own best boss and talk about them in a little bit more detail. We're going to think not only about why these qualities will help us, but importantly, how and when we need to nurture them. What sorts of thoughts and feelings do we want to try and generate in order to take these actions that are in align with these great qualities? Today's episode is the first in that series, and we're going to be thinking about why it's important to be compassionate and why it's important to be curious. So if you've ever beaten yourself up about something that you've done wrong, in inverted commas, or where you just got confused and didn't know what to do, and beat yourself up for that instead, then this is the perfect episode for you. Hello and welcome to episode 38 of season 2 of the PhD Life Coach. I am currently coming towards the end of the first iteration of my How To Be Your Own Best Boss program, which is a group coaching program for PhD students and postdocs where we really try and develop the qualities we need to be our own best boss. We've thought about how we're currently bossing ourselves and what challenges that can sometimes create. We've thought about how we can be a boss that can plan our time and our tasks in a way that feels fair and achievable and even exciting. Today we have a workshop where we're thinking about what happens when we don't do what we intended to do and we're going to finish up learning about how to plan for our weeks, our months and our quarters in a bit more detail and in a way that is informed by all of the coaching practice. It's been an amazing experience. We're going to be running it again in autumn. So if you missed out this time, don't miss out next time. But that whole experience has really made us all reflect on what qualities we want to have as our own bosses. And today, as I said, we're going to be thinking about compassion and about curiosity. So let's start with compassion. I often find that people think that compassion is the same thing as indulgence. But if we're compassionate to ourselves, we'll say, Oh, don't worry about that. It's okay. You don't need to work today. We can do it tomorrow. It doesn't matter that you missed the deadline. Not a problem. Let's just have a rest and eat some chocolate and do stuff tomorrow. When in reality, compassion is being compassionate for our whole selves. It's being compassionate for the parts of us that make mistakes and the parts of us that need some love and care and attention, but it's also being compassionate for the us that wants to achieve our goals. It's not compassionate to our ambitious selves or to our determined selves if we always indulge when we want to rest or get distracted or have treats. One of the ways you can distinguish between whether you're being compassionate or whether you're being indulgent is asking yourself, is what I'm proposing doing good only for present me, is it good for present me and future me? So, if I'm really tired, and I'm genuinely very, very tired, I perhaps haven't slept well, maybe I'm not well, maybe I've had a really heavy time of work recently. If I'm genuinely really tired, then resting is good for present me, but it's also good for future me, because future me will actually benefit from me having energy and having taken this rest period. So it's good for me, it's good for future me too. Whereas on the days where I kind of feel a bit tired, but there's no particular reason I should be feeling tired, I'm not ill, I haven't missed out on my sleep, and I suspect that that tiredness is maybe at least in part resistance to the task I'm planning to do, i. e. I just don't really want to do it. The napping in that moment is good for present me, it means that I haven't got to do this task that I don't want to do, but it's not good for future me, because future me doesn't actually need that nap, we've judged, and future me needs this task done because otherwise she's going to have to wedge it in somewhere else that she didn't intend to. So by asking yourself, is it just good for present me or is it good for present me and future me, you can kind of distinguish a bit between compassion and indulgence. Now, I've started reading the work of Kristen Neff, who specializes in the area of self compassion. And I really liked the way that she broke it down. She broke it down into three components of self kindness, rather than self judgment, common humanity, rather than isolation and mindfulness rather than over identification. And I think these are really useful to think through in turn. So self kindness, what she really means is being gentle and understanding with ourselves and using, she says the word, soft and supportive tone when we speak to ourselves. I really like that notion of generating a soft and supportive way of speaking to ourselves. So we're not telling ourselves that we're rubbish. We're not telling ourselves that we're lazy and we just have to pull ourselves together. We're not indulging ourselves. But we're just using a gentle voice to say, I understand that this is difficult. We are still going to do it. But I understand. How could you generate that sort of a tone when you're speaking to yourself? How different would it be if the voice inside your head came from self kindness rather than self judgement? By common humanity, what she means is recognising that the things that we beat ourselves up for are universal. Everybody procrastinates to a greater or lesser extent. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody offends somebody sometimes. All of these things that we often take as massive moral failings when we do them are things that every single human being does and does quite regularly. When we can experience that common humanity, that universal experience, suddenly it reminds us that this isn't just about us being rubbish. This is normal. This is what people experience. This is part of that kind of bigger human experience. Now this element is why I love group coaching. If you haven't ever experienced group coaching, do make sure you're signed up for my newsletter and you'll get access to my free online group coaching once a month. So the next one is beginning of june. So make sure you are signed up before that to get the invitation. Because in these group coachings, not only can you get one to one coaching yourself, but you get to see other people getting coached. And so often the people who are watching people getting coached say, it was like I was talking, but it was coming out of her mouth. I couldn't believe that he was saying all the things that I've thought. And I had no idea other people felt. So don't get me wrong. I love my one to one coaching and people get a really long way with that sort of intensive one to one support, but there's something very special and something really helps you develop that sense of common humanity in group coaching. And then the third element that Neff mentions is mindfulness. And this is here really about staying in the present moment, but not in the sense of that kind of traditional mindfulness that's associated with meditation and those sorts of things, but staying with the specific incidents that we're thinking about. Often when we're not compassionate to ourselves, we take a single mistake now and make it mean a hundred different things. We make it mean things about us as a person, about us in the future, our prospects, whether we're going to finish our PhDs, whether we're ever going to become a professor, whatever it is. When with self compassion, if we can stay mindful, what we're doing is we're staying right here in the moment and just dealing with this one thing that isn't going so well, this one thing that is feeling like a struggle. It's avoiding self identification. So a lot of my clients tell me, I'm a perfectionist. I've never been someone who sticks to my plans. And these very, Fixed identities. These, this is just who I am. I am someone who procrastinates. I am someone who's a perfectionist. I am someone who doesn't do what they say make it way harder to change things than if we can stay right here in the moment in a mindful and compassionate way and say, okay, this time I didn't write for my full writing block. But I can do this now, but I can do that differently next time. Now for each of these qualities that I'm going to talk about over this series, I want us to also think about that self coaching model. If you don't know what I'm talking about at all, I will take you through it a little bit today, but there's a whole episode on how to coach yourself in the archive. So do make sure you go back and check that out. But the self coaching model has five components. Circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. And it proposes that our circumstances are broadly neutral. At least they're certainly factual. Our thoughts are the cognitive story we tell about them. Our feelings are the emotions we experience in our body. Our actions are the things that we do, either with our bodies or with our minds, and the results are the consequences of those actions. And what I want to do is think about what types of circumstances is it useful to be compassionate, what thoughts might you want to think if you're trying to be compassionate to yourself, what feelings those thoughts might generate, and what actions and results you might take and get as a consequence of thinking and feeling those things. And we'll do this for each of the different qualities that we talk about. So when should we be compassionate? Now, I think all the time is the answer to that, but some of the really specific times that I want you to think about are when you've experienced setbacks, where there are delays that are outside of your control. Maybe there's things you can't do in the laboratory, or access you can't get to something, or your supervisor's taking more time than you would like them to, to get you feedback, for example. So any of those sorts of setbacks. When you've made a mistake. of some description, so where there's something gone wrong that maybe is your fault, either knowingly or unknowingly. Maybe when you've said something embarrassing, or maybe when you're unhappy with your progress. I want you to have a think about whether there's other times in your life that it might have been useful to be more self compassionate, but those are the ones that I identified. And then some thoughts that come to me that feel compassionate and kind in this setting are things like everybody makes mistakes. This doesn't mean anything about you as a person or as an academic. This might not have gone well, but I can do the next thing in a way that feels good. Then this final one, and this one sometimes isn't true for my clients, or they don't think it is, but I think it's a useful one to try and nurture. I trust myself to decide whether I actually need a rest or whether I should push on. And if that doesn't feel true to you at the moment, I want you to think about how you can kind of develop that as an ability. Now, when you think about those thoughts, what sorts of emotions come up for you? For me, I thought of things like calm, understood, and worthy, cared for even. Those sorts of feelings. What comes up for you? And now for me, when I feel calm, understood, and worthy, the actions I'm likely to take, I'm much more likely to think about the things I've done right as the things I've done wrong. I'm much less likely to kind of spiral and catastrophize and make this all into a massive deal. I'm more likely to correct, in inverted commas, my mistakes. So if we're feeling self compassionate and we're telling ourselves, everybody makes mistakes, it's so much easier to go and apologize to somebody or go and make up for something than it is if we're telling ourselves that the fact we've made a mistake makes us a bad person and that we'll never finish what we're trying to do. It makes it much easier to take the next step, to get on with the next thing we needed to do, and it makes it much better, and it makes it much easier to take a break that actually helps, to take a break when we need it and that will make us feel rejuvenated rather than as a way of just avoiding our tasks. And think about those actions. If you took those actions regularly, what would happen? The next step would get done. You'd make a task feel good. You'd right the mistake, or at least you'd avoid making the same mistake again in the future. You'd build trust in yourself. You'd take breaks that you need, and you'd move your project forward. So I want you to think about that model, that all is underpinned by self compassion, and how different it would be than if we did a model that was driven by self judgment. When we have self judgmental thoughts in those exact same circumstances, we usually feel guilt, shame, dread, these sorts of emotions, which we know will probably lead to either procrastination or frantic action. And we know that those results are never good. So I think this really illustrates why self compassion is so important, both for how we feel and making our experiences more pleasant, but also for our actual achieving goals and getting things done too. I want you to have a ponder. Do you think it's desirable to be self compassionate? Is there anything that worries you about being self compassionate? Let me know. If you're on my newsletter, you can always email me straight back and let me know your different thoughts and feelings and who knows, I may even make you a podcast in the future, answering your questions. Also, now that there's a lot of podcast episodes out there, nearly 80 like I said, it can sometimes be hard to navigate yourself around them. So if you're feeling like you really want to develop more self compassion, I'm going to put in the show notes some links to some other episodes that might link well to this notion. So things like what to do when you feel a bit bleurgh , how to stop beating yourself up and learn from past mistakes , and so on. So the show notes are always on my website, the phdlifecoach. com under podcast. If you go there, you'll find the show notes and I'll put a few links of some suggestions in there for you, if you want to follow this one up further. Others include: - How to stop comparing yourself to others - How to stop feeling guilty when you rest - Why you should be more proud of yourself - How to rest over the holiday period (Christmas themed, but always relevant!) Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately. To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. The second quality I want to think about today is curiosity. And I think this is one that I rarely hear people think about. We're often curious about our research, about, you know, our teaching, maybe. But we're rarely curious about the process by which we do things, don't do things, and how we can change them. Now, curious is very different from judgmental. Same as self compassion is different to judgmental. When we're being judgmental, we really shut down the problem solving part of our brain. We tell ourselves these are fixed things. They're shortcomings. They're not something that we can do anything about. Or if we do do something about them, it's through kind of discipline of forcing ourselves and all this stuff that just doesn't sound fun or interesting at all. Curiosity is a much more open approach. Rather than saying, Oh, you never do your writing blocks, we've missed another one. You're going to get really behind. We're saying, Oh, it's interesting that whenever we put a writing block in the morning, we really struggle to get going and don't often start until a bit later on. I don't know why that is. What is it that gets in the way? And what this does is it engages that creative problem solving part of our brain. It engages the part of our brain that wants to solve little puzzles. We can also be curious about our thoughts and feelings. Sometimes we just get mad about something. You know, we're cross that our supervisor hasn't sent us something. We're cross that our boss has allocated us a new admin role without telling us about it, whatever it is. And we don't really get curious about why it bothers us so much. What is it about the fact your supervisor hasn't sent you feedback that's upsetting you? Because sometimes, it's because deep down we're worried that this is going to hold us up, it's going to mean that we're not going to be able to finish on time. Other times, it's because we feel like it's a sign that they don't care, they're not interested, we're not a priority. If we can sort of be curious and dig into it a little bit, it's so much easier to fix because I don't know about you, I can't make your supervisor get feedback to you more quickly. Supervisors who are listening to this, I get it. I was often late with feedback. You guys are so overloaded. I understand. But if we can't change the other person's behaviour, then what we can do is think about how can we protect ourselves from the kind of negative impact. And it's a very different problem if we're worried that the feedback is going to mean that we can't get done on time, versus whether we mean that the lack of feedback means that they're not interested, they don't care, or we're not a priority. We can look after ourselves in very different ways if we understand what the underlying emotions are here. Curiosity for me is lighthearted, it's solution focused, it's creative, and it's open. So not only does it actually helps us to change things. It actually feels really good. It's really nice to be curious. It's why a lot of us have ended up in academia in the first place, because we're really curious about different things. If we can turn that curiosity in on ourselves to think, Ooh, how can I make this easier for me to do? Ooh, I wonder in what ways I could make this more fun to do. I wonder if there's any different ways of writing this that I haven't thought of. Then suddenly we're opening up this really enjoyable part of our lives. So let's apply it into the self coaching model like we did with self compassion and think about what circumstances it would be useful to be curious. The things that came up for me are when you're not sure what's gone wrong, where things just aren't working and you don't know why. When you're struggling with something and you don't know why it feels so difficult. When you're not sticking to things and you don't know why. When you're choosing between different options, so curiosity can be really useful in decision making. Now, often, just as an aside, often people don't even register they've got a problem with decision making. So, if any of you are out there thinking, I don't know what the right way to do this is, whether it's writing, whether it's teaching, whether it's your promotion materials. If you're thinking, I don't know the right way, the problem is not that you don't know the right way. The problem is that you're not recognizing this as a decision that you need to make. There is no right way to structure a paper. There is no right way to frame your promotions materials. What there is, though, is a series of decisions that you need to make based on your own best judgment at the moment and be able to justify those decisions. And in that situation, curiosity really helps, because suddenly we go from, I don't know how to do this, to, I wonder how I could do this. I wonder what options there are. If I did it like this, what would it be like? If I did it like that, what would it be like? I often think with writing, people would be way better off, when they're saying I don't know how to write it, they'd be way better off just writing it four times, in four different ways and seeing which one they like. And most people would say, well, that doesn't sound very efficient, but I can assure you it takes a lot less time to write something four different ways than it does to sort of battle to get yourself to the desk, procrastinate for weeks on end, tell yourself you're terrible, tell yourself you're useless, and all of these things. Way easier to go, I'm going to spend an hour writing it this way, an hour writing it that way, and see what works out best. So bringing curiosity to decision making can be really useful. So what sorts of thoughts help us to feel curious? Things like, I wonder why it's like this? This is an interesting problem to explore. So reminding ourselves this isn't some massive crisis we've got to fix here, it's just quite an interesting problem. Am I better off writing in the mornings or the afternoon? I wonder. Am I better off talking about this thing first or that? Am I better off focusing this entire paper on this one thing or including all three? I wonder. How interesting to explore it. Thoughts like there could be a different way of doing this. Sometimes when we're feeling stuck it's because we're really fixating on it has to be like this, whereas actually if we can tell ourselves No, could there be a different way of doing this? I think there could be, we often identify more. When we're thinking about how we respond, so you get an email from somebody that's upset you, for example, you're having thoughts that make you upset, think about, I wonder how I could respond to this. What options are there? The other one, and this kind of relates across to self compassion, is, it's okay that you don't know, I can figure this out. So something about curiosity that has a certain optimism, about it that I don't know, but I can figure it out. It reminds me a lot of one of my old coaching clients who used to say, I don't know how to do that, but I'm a researcher, so I will research it. I just thought that was an amazing mindset to have. Now when we're generating curiosity through these sorts of thoughts, what types of feelings do we generate? I identified things like interested, inquisitive, open, hopeful, those sorts of very open and optimistic sort of vibes. I wonder how it feels for you? And now I want you to think, if you were feeling hopeful and optimistic and open and creative, what things might you do? Well, you might braindump all the reasons that this might be bothering you at the moment. You might ask different people what approaches they take and think about whether they're relevant for you or not. You could speculate wildly about different approaches without judging them. There's an old story, I don't know how much it's based in truth, but there's an old story that post it notes came about because people were talking about qualities of glue, and what things it could be useful for, and what types of qualities they would want it to have, and they were kind of trying to be as open and, optimistic and kind of curious as possible. And one of the things that somebody identified was not very sticky glue. And they said it as a joke, because in most circumstances, it's not very sticky glue would be incredibly unuseful, but from that open curious place, they identified that actually, Post it notes and unsticky glue is incredibly useful and has made them billions of pounds. So the other action we take is that we believe other ways of doing this. We believe that other ways of reacting are possible. And now when we do those actions, what results do we get? We come up with creative solutions. We get better insights into ourselves. We create links with other people because when we discuss these things with other people, not only are we likely to find solutions that we want to try out, we also get better understanding of them as people. We start to feel a bit more connected to them and we give ourselves a bunch of options. So those are the reasons that I think generating curiosity can be so powerful. And I have to say, I started with these two for a reason. If you're going to pick any two qualities, self compassion and curiosity will take you a really, really long way. I would love to hear your views on it. Make sure you're on my email list. Jump on, let me know what your thoughts about this. Have a think about what barriers are there to being self compassionate, to being curious. How could you overcome those barriers? How could you make it a little bit easier to be self compassionate and to be curious? Again, I'll put some links to some podcasts that if you want to build your curiosity might be really useful for you. So for example, how accepting where you are is the first step to getting where you want to be . That was one of my very early episodes that kind of relates to this topic. I also have ones about how to make decisions and I have a great one about how to curate your life with Jamie Pei, with one of my guests that came on. So, make sure if you want to see those, either dig through the archive yourself, or I'll put links in the show notes for those too. This is the beginning of our series. There's going to be five episodes like this where I talk about two different qualities. I'll intersperse them with some of my more traditional episodes and some of the guests that I've got lined up for you all and I'd love to know what you think. Can you guess what qualities are coming up? Jump on my social media. Let me know what qualities you think I should talk about. At the moment, I've got 10 identified, but who knows? Maybe you'll come up with some that I haven't thought of. Let me know. Anyway, thank you all 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.

Do you have things on your list that you should be doing, but you're not? Are you finding yourself getting distracted by anything and everything? Whether it's distracted by doing other admin y easy tasks, whether it's getting distracted by television or social media, whether it's even getting distracted by cleaning. I'm seeing this all the time with my clients at the moment, and even experiencing it a bit myself, so let's get into it. Hello and welcome to episode 36 of season two of the PhD Life Coach, and to date, we are thinking about what to do if you get distracted. It feels like at the moment, there's so many things to get distracted by. Some of them are fun, some of them feel really important, some of them are just distressing and take your mind away from the things that you actually want and should in your mind be doing. Those of us who work from home, we've got things all around us that can distract us. If you work on campus, you have your colleagues, and interruptions, and temptations. We always used to interrupt each other to go for a walk to the shop to get something to eat, or whatever. Wherever you are, it feels like there are distractions. Yet at the same time, I hear people all the time being super judgmental of the fact that they get distracted. They think it means that they're lazy. They think it means that they lack self discipline. They think it's something that is going to stop them achieving the things they want to achieve. So today, I want to think about why we need to start by accepting that distraction is completely normal and completely human, and then go through some really specific tactics as to how we can address it. First of all, let's get really clear what we mean by distraction. For me, getting distracted is where you're intending to do one thing, and you end up either thinking about or doing something that is not what you intended. Sometimes it can be for a relatively short amount of time, your mind wanders and then you come back to what you were doing. Other times it can be really intrusive and we can end up moving away from and maybe even never coming back to the thing that we intended to do that day. We get utterly sucked in to doing something else. And when we think about distraction as either thinking about or doing things other than what we intend in the moment, we can really see how absolutely everybody gets distracted to a greater or lesser extent. There is nothing about getting distracted that means that we can't succeed, that means that we're lacking self discipline, that we're lazy, that we're weak, any of these things that we often make it mean. It means that we're human beings and we're human beings that are living in a highly distracting world. And as academics, whether we're PhD students or full professors, we're living in a world where the thing that we intend to do is often quite difficult and requires some cognitive effort and some concentration. So it's not a big surprise that most of us will struggle with distraction at some point in our careers. For some of you it might feel like a big issue though, and some of you will be listening to this going, yeah but I get distracted all the time, always, no matter what, whatever I'm doing, I get distracted by something else. And it's true. Obviously, there's huge variation in the extent to which people get distracted. If you have things like ADHD, this will make it even more challenging or even more likely to get distracted. But regardless of whether you get distracted a little bit sometimes or a lot often, we still start from accepting that this is a very normal part of the human condition. And that it doesn't have to mean anything about your brain or your future. I am immensely distractible. So much, it's a joke in my family, how distractible I am. Thankfully, my husband's just as bad. I don't know why I say thankfully, maybe that's a bad thing, but it means we have conversations that start out about one thing, pass through about 14 different things and end up on something else entirely. And then we're like, yeah, we still haven't worked out what we're having for dinner though, have we? I utterly, utterly empathize with the challenges of getting distracted. The reason it's so important to recognize that everybody does this, and it doesn't have to mean anything about you, your abilities, or your future, is because as soon as we make those extrapolations, as soon as we make the fact we're distracted, into a big deal, capital B, capital D. You know, it's a big deal that we get distracted. Then we start layering in a whole other load of emotions. We start layering in frustration and disappointment and shame and hopelessness, all these different emotions that actually make us much more likely to get more distracted. Because all of a sudden, doing the work we intended is associated with a whole load of really negative emotions, and we're even more in need of going and doing something that feels fun and interesting in the moment. We often think that if we shame ourselves about doing something, it will make us less likely to do it in the future. And it's not true. It's never true. When we're shamed about doing something, it ironically, and often inevitably, makes us more likely to end up doing it. Because the reason we're getting distracted in the first place is we're associating negative emotions with the thing that we want to be doing, that we're intending to be doing. And when we feel shame, we just layer that all up some more. So, first step, you remind yourself, getting distracted is normal. Does that mean we just accept it and don't bother to not get distracted, or to manage our distraction? No, obviously not. And I'm going to give you some really useful strategies that you can use. But, having to use these strategies, completely normal, okay? I want to compare it to a tightrope walker. I miss circus. When I was in Birmingham, I used to do lots of different circus things, and I'd see people doing all their different things, including tightrope walking, and I miss it. So I'm going to bring circus analogies in whenever I can. But I want you to imagine somebody who's tightrope walking. Anybody who walks on a tightrope or something like that will wobble a little bit. Yeah, it's a difficult thing to do, especially, you know, you're a bit nervous, your legs are shaking, you know, the wire itself moves. Anybody from beginner to expert will wobble a little bit when they're on a tightrope. If we expect that we will only be able to tightrope walk when we don't wobble, then we're never going to be able to tightrope walk. The difference between beginner tightrope walkers and expert tightrope walkers is that when a beginner experiences that wobble, they either don't notice they're wobbling and so they've kind of wobbled a really long way and they fall off, or they notice they've wobbled and they overcorrect the other way and so they fall off the other side. Okay, they don't notice effectively, and they don't make appropriate corrections when they wobble. An expert tightroper will sense tiny wobbles. They'll notice there's a little bit where their balance is off, and they'll make a tiny movement, to correct for it. They'll nudge themselves back. They don't think while they're up there performing, oh no, I wobbled, I must be a terrible tightrope walker. They think, oh, slightly to the left, let's go slightly to the right, center of gravity over my feet, let's keep going. They learn to notice the wobbles and correct for them subtly, proportionately, and without overthinking it. That's the difference between beginner tightrope walkers and expert tightrope walkers. In time, do they learn to wobble less? Yes, absolutely, but even at their best, they will always be making tiny corrections as they go through. The same is true for distractions. There is nobody in the world who doesn't get distracted. But the people who are less impacted by distractions are the ones that are able to notice more quickly that they've got distracted and to nudge themselves back to what they were going to do. Those of us that struggle with distraction are the ones that don't notice for ages. We wobble further, we get more distracted and all of a sudden we're out there clearing out the kitchen cupboards or whatever when we're meant to be recording a podcast. Or, when we do get out there, we make it such a big deal that we end up actually making the thing we want to do feel really negative and really awful and we don't want to get back there. So, what we are going to think about today is how do we notice more quickly and how do we make small corrections, so that when we do get distracted, it's not as big a deal. We're also going to think about how we can think proactively to make it less likely that we will get distracted. So there's going to be some things you can do there in the moment while you're trying to focus, and there'll be other things that you can plan . Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful. I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately to start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with. So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. Vikki: In order to understand either of these tactics, though, we need to think about what distraction actually is. And I like to think about the push and the pull of distraction. What I mean by that is the push of distraction is the things associated with the task that you have planned to do that push you away from it. So these might be a lack of clarity of what the task actually is. The task feeling difficult, or you telling yourself that you're not able to do it. The task requiring effort. The task being associated with shame, because maybe you should have done it before in your mind. There's a lot of things that push us away from the task that we're intending to do. There's then the things that pull us towards the distracting thing. So have a think what distracts you the most. Mine is a kind of constant balance between either social media y stuff or sorting things out in the house. So, I'll either get distracted scrolling Twitter, or I'll decide that now is the exact moment that I definitely need to clean the bathroom even though I haven't done it for three weeks, but now is the moment right when I'm meant to be recording this podcast, for example. So, we have the things that pull us towards things. Now, with some things, it's quite obvious what pulls us towards it. Social media is inherently engaging. It's been specifically designed to attract you in and keep you there. It's interesting, it's short, you don't have to concentrate. So sometimes the pull can be as simple as that, just the pleasure of engaging. Even the devices have been designed so that they're pleasant to hold and pleasant to make that scrolling process. You might wonder though, what's the pull of cleaning? Yet so many of you, cleaning and tidying will be one of your distractions. And the pole there is a sense of something tangible. It's a sense of something that you definitely can do and you know how to do and where you will see an immediate benefit. Cause the thing with cleaning, we grab something to clean with, we clean something, it looks cleaner. We get an immediate like, Oh, that's nicer. Happy days, in a way that often when we're writing or planning a study or doing analysis, we don't immediately get. Not naturally anyway. So there's the push away and the pull towards. Another thing that you see in the pull towards, the distracting thing, can be things that you will do for other people. And there the pull is somebody seeing how hard you're working, somebody being grateful, somebody thanking you, suddenly you feeling useful because you're doing something that's getting recognized. That can be a pull as well. And I'm going to do an episode in a few weeks about all the different things that are procrastination that we don't often count as being procrastination. So we have the push away from the thing that you have planned to do, and the pull towards the thing, the distraction, that's tempting you. And when we can understand that, suddenly we have a whole bunch of strategies that we can take. There in the moment, let's think about that first, there in the moment, you notice that you're getting distracted. And remember, the challenge here is that we have to notice, but minimize the shameful thoughts around it. So we get to go, Oh, look at me, I'm getting distracted. Yeah, that happens. Okay? One thing I find helps with making that real is saying it out loud. It's actually rather than just thinking, Oh, look at me, I got distracted. It's saying, Oh, look at me, I'm distracted. I am choosing to tidy my office instead of editing that newsletter. So we really kind of make it real that we've noticed that we're distracted. And from there, the skill is we just nudge ourselves back. We don't need a new system. We don't need to investigate what emotions have dragged us off over there. Those of you who are into the self coaching with me, I love that you're thinking about all that stuff, but right there in the moment, we don't need to get into exactly what it is that's putting me off doing my piece of work that I intended to do. Exactly, what is it that's attracting me so much about this distraction? It's like, Oh, look tidying again when I'm going to be doing something hard. Let's get back on with this. Okay, so I think tightrope walker, a nice Simple, steady correction back to the path that you were intending to be on. There's a tendency to either make it a massive deal, and this is where we over, overcorrect, make it a massive deal and have to uncover why it is that I'm so worried about this piece of work, blah, blah, blah. Or, to allow ourselves to wobble. Oh, I'm distracted now. I'm so useless. I always get distracted. And so now I'm going to watch the rest of the program. Or so now I'm going to scroll for another half an hour. We notice, we correct. And you might find yourself getting distracted every 30 seconds. That's okay. Because as long as we notice and we only spend 10 seconds over there and we come back, then it's fine. We're still staying on track. We're still engaging with the piece of work that we're intending to engage with. So this is what we do there in the moment. We notice, we bring it back. We notice, we bring it back. And in doing so, you remind yourself, this is the piece of work I'm doing. My brain may wander, but I bring it back. Those of you who are into meditation, it's never been something that I've kind of got into. If any of you think I should, maybe message me, let me know. Tell me what practice has worked for you. I know a lot of people say that if you think you aren't good at meditating, you probably really need to meditate. But anyway, those of you who do, It's a very similar process. You know, your mind wanders off from your meditative practice, and you bring it back non judgmentally. We don't have to make a big deal. We don't have to stay over there. We just bring it back kindly and gently. And it's very, very similar with distractions. That's the bit there in the moment, how we deal with distractions. However, we also talk a lot about boss mode, putting ourselves in a position where we can actually make it easier for ourselves to engage. So the second part of what I want us to think about today is how can we, as our own best bosses, create an environment in which we are less likely to get distracted so that we have to do that nudging back less often. So we notice ourselves wander off less, we have to nudge ourselves back less often. And that's where we go back to this idea of the push and pull factors, because if you've got things that are pushing you away from the piece of work you intend to do, we can look at that curiously and compassionately and figure out how can we reduce those push factors and how can we increase the pull factors to the thing we want to be doing. So let's have a think. What was pushing you away from it? A lack of clarity was pushing you away from it. Often the thing we should, in inverted commas, be doing is getting on with my writing, or whatever, okay? Really vague, really hard to know exactly what you should be doing, and induces feelings of confusion, overwhelm and so on. So one thing you can do to reduce the push factor is to make it much clearer exactly what it is you're intending to do. What specifically are you writing? What needs to go into it? What's it going to look like? All of those things. So we reduce the confusion, we reduce the lack of clarity that pushes us away, in order to make it more likely that we'll stay. What else pushes you away? Sometimes what pushes you away is the sense of shame that you should have done it before. Well that's something, again, we can clarify that in our own minds. We can tell us that it's perfectly understandable I haven't done this before. I've got a lot on. I'm a busy person. Completely understandable I haven't done this before. I'm a human being who sometimes procrastinates things. That's okay. And we reduce the shame associated with doing the piece of work. If you're pushed away because it's difficult, you get to ask yourself, why is it a problem that it's difficult? I don't think any of you got into academia to do easy things. There's a lot about doing difficult things we enjoy. There's a lot of reasons why people do puzzles and stuff for fun. Why is it a problem that you're finding it difficult? And how can you sort of reduce some of the sensations around that that feel so bad? And sometimes those negative sensations come from the fact that we're telling ourselves not that it's difficult, but that it's too difficult, that we're not able to rise to that challenge. So again, you can reduce that push factor by reminding yourself that that's actually not true. that you are able to do the next step, that you've done difficult things in the past. Every single one of you, I know you have done difficult things in the past. You don't get to be a PhD student or an academic without having done difficult things in the past. So how can you remind yourself of those things to reduce the push away from the piece of work that you're trying to do? We also get to increase the pull to that piece of work. Reminding yourself why you wanted to do it. Why is it important? Why would it be so good to get this done now? Why does it fit with your bigger goals? Why is it something that just, once it's off your plate, you don't need to think about anymore, depending on what it is. How can you increase the pull to it? How can you make it feel pleasant while you're doing it, so that it feels like somewhere you want to be? Another thing we can do to increase the pull to the things that we want to be doing is to make them more like the things that are attracting us. So especially if you're finding yourself getting distracted by things like doing cleaning, doing jobs for other people, sort of small tasks that are easily bitten off that you know you can do and where you get reward afterwards. How can you make the thing you want to do more like that? How can you make it feel more like you can just chip bits off it? How can you make yourself feel like you're more able to do it? How can you make it so that you recognize that you've done it? So we get to steal ideas from the things we're finding distracting and make the things we actually want to do a bit more like that. We then also get to think about our typical distractions. We get to think about how can we make them less attractive, so there's less pull towards them and more push away from them. Some people talk about real environmental manipulations like keeping your phone in another room. That increases the push away from that because you've got to actually move and go and get it. One thing I've seen, and I do play with occasionally myself, is you can, on many devices, turn off the colour, which can make it much less attractive to be scrolling Instagram or whatever it might be. If you find yourself getting distracted by other people, we can try and reduce the pull of that. You can ask people between certain hours not to interrupt you. You can turn notifications off. It always amazes me, I always feel like that's really trite advice, turn the notifications off on your emails. And I always feel like it's really obvious advice that you've all been told a thousand times and that you don't really need to hear from me, but many, many, many of you will still have those on. So, instead, what I want you to think about is why. Why do you feel the need to have those on? Why do you feel the need to be able to see it? And often it's something around control. It's something around, if people need me, I have to reply immediately. I like to know what's going on. Sometimes I can just answer things quickly. There's lots of reasons, but when we've identified them as something that pull us towards something that we don't want to be pulled towards, we get to really question all those assumptions, all those reasons why you haven't reduced the pull factor before. Is it really true that you have to be there at all times? The analogy I often offer for this, is if you were in a meeting with a vice chancellor, would you be checking your emails and answering them there and then? And if you wouldn't, because, no, you would put your full attention into that meeting with the Vice Chancellor, why is it different when your meeting is with your own writing? Because if you could take that hour out and the world will just have to cope without you, why is it different? So you get to think, how can I reduce the pull? How can I make it so that I'm less attracted to do these things, and I spend less time over there. The final thing you can do, and this is kind of when you're in boss mode and when you're in implementer mode, is know your weak points. Know the things that you specifically get sucked into. So one that I'm still working on, I have to say, this is still a work in progress, but the one I'm still working on is social media before work. I know that if I sit down. So I try and get up, go and have my breakfast and things like that. I take my phone back upstairs with me and I'm intending to go in the shower. And I know if I sit down because I'm just going to scroll for a few minutes, that's a pit. I am then stuck. Okay. I struggle. Now I'm getting better at noticing that I've done that and getting myself back out. But the best thing I can do is just decide I don't do that. Okay. Okay, like I say, still a work in progress, but I know my mornings go much better when I accept I just don't do that. If I go back upstairs, I do not sit on my bed, I get straight in the shower and I get on. And that's because we can coach ourselves out of anything. We can notice we've been distracted and nudge ourselves back, but all of that takes effort. It takes cognitive thought, and sometimes just avoiding that entirely can really help. Know what your thing is. One that I have quite successfully managed is the tidying up thing. So I get quite distracted if my desk's a mess, my study's a mess. That doesn't mean it's not a mess, but I get quite distracted by it. And sometimes I get the, I'll just sort all of this out and then I'll be able to concentrate, except that takes a lot of time. So my strategy there is to, is I just put things in a pile. And you know what? That just stops it being distracting for now. I can tidy it later. That's okay, I'll do that another time when I'm not intending to be getting on with something. But the way I manage my distraction there is because I know myself, I am likely to get distracted by a messy desk. I put it all in a pile. And then, not messy right now, and that is good enough for me. What are the things for you? What do you get sucked into? How can you make it easier for yourself to avoid those things catching you? Sometimes this is about environment. Sometimes this is about working somewhere other than in your office. If you find distractions hard to say no to. Or if people don't honour your requests to not interrupt you, for example. How can you physically move yourself somewhere else so that it, you're less likely to experience those distractions? We all have different things. We can notice them without shame and then structure to make it easy for ourselves. The other thing we can do in terms of knowing ourselves is know when we don't get distracted either. When are the times? Think back over the last week, two weeks, month, when you didn't get distracted, where you did sit down and just crack on with the thing you were intending to do. If you can think of an example, try and identify the characteristics. What environment were you in? What were you working on? What was it about that piece of work that pulled you in and didn't push you away? What was it about the environment that kept out some of the distractions that pull you towards them? And most importantly, what were you thinking during that time? Now, be cautious around this one. Sometimes the thoughts that we have aren't necessarily adaptive. So some of you will be thinking, well, the last time I just sat down and got on with something, I was thinking, I've left this so late now, I just have to do it. I'm so lazy, but it's the deadline and I absolutely have to. Those aren't thoughts that we want to replicate as a healthy way to move forward to get ourselves to do tasks in a focused way. So if those are the sorts of thoughts that have got you to do it in the past, that's fine. We don't have to criticize ourselves for that, but we don't want to replicate those thoughts. If, however, you can think of times when you've focused, where the thoughts you were having were things like, I'm really getting somewhere with this. I'll be so glad when this is done. done. I know exactly what I need to do next, and I'll just do this bit. If those were the thoughts you're having, let's think about how we can replicate those thoughts more often with other tasks that we're not naturally finding so engaging and so focus grabbing. So, when you're distracted there in the moment, our job is to notice and to gently nudge ourselves back as quickly as we can. So nice, calm yep, but we're doing this thing. Yes. Oh, I'm on Twitter. Okay. Phone down. Yep. My room is messy, but I can tidy it later. I'm doing this thing. We nudge ourselves back. When we're in boss mode, we think about how we can increase the pull factors towards the things we want to do. Remind ourselves why we like them, remind ourselves why they're important and why we're capable. We reduce the push factor away from them. So we try and. We try and stop it being unclear or unwieldy or unmanageable or unpleasant. How can we make them more attractive? And then the distractions, we think about how can we structure our time and our thoughts and our locations so that those distractions distracting. So that those distractions have much less pull towards them, and in fact, push us away. And remember, all of this is underpinned by compassion, that we are human beings who are going to get distracted forevermore, and that's okay. We can get a long way when we just learn to nudge ourselves back to the thing that we intend to do. I really hope you find that useful. Make sure you've signed up for my newsletter and let me know if there's other things you get distracted by that I haven't talked about today or other questions or comments that you have. I love to respond to listener suggestions. Thank you all so much for listening and 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. .

Vikki: Hello and welcome to the PhD life coach. And this is the third now in my series of episodes where we actually do a live coaching session here on the show. And so joining me today, I'm super excited to say is Danielle. It's so good to have you here. Let's start, tell people a little bit about who you are and what you do. Danielle: So, I would class myself as a third space professional. I work as an educational developer in a research intensive higher education institution and I am currently in my second year of a PhD around higher education research. It's non traditional in the way it's half of it is modules and the supports to get you up to speed and then the other half is doing the real thing. Vikki: Perfect. So another one of my part time students that we have so much to learn from, I think, because doing a PhD part time is like the iron man of doing a PhD. So what's feeling challenging at the moment? Danielle: So there's definitely quite a few things that are swirling around in my part time PhD universe. I think probably one of the foundational ones that I would like to unpick personally and I think really challenges quite a lot of us at different points is the whole thing of feeling stuck. And I think feeling stuck and labeling it as such feels slightly less me judging myself than calling it procrastination. But it's trying to make sense of that and where it can be helpful and obviously where it can be challenging and how I can sort of dampen down the challenging bits of, of those tendencies and you know, soar to the great heights. Vikki: Definitely. We love soaring to great heights. Perfect. That sounds like a great topic, particularly for a one off coaching session like this. We can have something that feels quite tangible where hopefully from this, you can go and do some things differently after we've had this conversation. Hopefully for everybody listening, they'll be able to take something quite tangible from it as well. So let's start, tell me a little bit more about what you mean by stuck. Danielle: I think for me, stuckness is multifaceted. So it's partly around feeling a bit like an imposter. So the department I'm doing the PhD in is, is very much about higher education research, teaching, learning, assessment, et cetera, hence why I'm there and I'm really enjoying it. But it's something I've experienced before is you're feeling like the people that are tutoring you, your academic colleagues are just on such a higher level plane that sometimes it can really mess with your head. It's almost like those beginner feelings of being a first year undergraduate going, what the heck? And almost like that thinking, I want to know there's a right answer or a wrong answer. And intellectually, this is what I talk about and I believe that's obviously not how life works but I think there's, there can be always those points when you're feeling like, I just want to know there's a right way of doing it. And, you know. There's methods and methodologies and ontologies and epistemologies, and there's lots of ologies, and I feel sometimes that I can be like this duck that's in the pond that's just like, my legs can be going like this. And I'm not going anywhere, which is just a weird place to be because, you know, I, I could list off and I exhort all my students, I know what to say, right? But it's how do you make those incremental steps, I guess, to launching, And maybe, I think probably at this point, I've been doing a lot of like, reading, and not, I don't know what's wrong with me, it's just like, not much putting it down, because I know that once you put something down, you've then got something to build on, so it's, it's just, it's a bit weird, I'm in a bit of a weird limbo y state. Vikki: Okay. A weird limbo y state. Yes. Cool. So, there's definitely stuff there, as you say, about feeling like there's a right answer and you're not maybe qualified to decide what the right answer is. But let's understand a little bit more of the specifics first. So how does this actually manifest? If I was seeing you work, or I could see inside your head day to day, how does this actually affect you? Danielle: So I think one thing would be, I would, and this is the most hilarious, thing to ever confess, so I. really don't like housework. And I have, at moments, gone and purposefully done housework because it meant that I wasn't just almost staring at my screen kind of thing. Danielle: So that, that was just a really interesting observation about my behavior. I thought, Ooh, it's obviously gotten to a point where I really need to physically walk away. There's that whole sort of hamster wheel kind of paddling furiously of trying to find, you know, the right theory or just the right kind of language and, you know, the whole frustration that can come out and it's knowing when to stop going down delicious rabbit holes because it's like fundamentally, I find everything really interesting, probably too interesting. And I think it's trying to work out how I can be more purposeful, um, probably less panicky. Um, and just feel confident to, go on those different steps that lead you to the end product. It's just that thing of feeling like you don't quite belong or you're broken or you're not normal and I think pretty sure that this is all normal and it's not just me being defective or anything like that, but it's, yeah, it's just, how do I get pulled out of that? Vikki: Absolutely. And, you know, I can sit here and tell you that I hear this all the time and that this is completely normal and that nothing that you've said in my mind means that you're defective or broken or not normal or any of these things. Vikki: But I'm sure lots of people have told you that. Yeah. And, you know, you cognitively know that, but that's not the same thing as kind of consciously believing it inside. Danielle: It's not, no. The knowing and the believing, sometimes they're just, they're wandering off in different directions. Vikki: Why is that a problem? Danielle: Because A, I need to progress. So, this is helping me make sense of who I am, where I am in the picture of higher education, what my positionality, what my belonging is, how I can be the best person. I think it also comes back to a student experience. I try and bottle all my student experiences to feed into my own practice and how can I make sense and move on will help me then be a better teacher and facilitator of learning. Um, so I think, I think those, those are some of the many myriads of reasons. Vikki: One thing I'm seeing here, and tell me whether this feels true to you or not, is there's quite a lot of pressure here that not only do you feel that you don't know some of this stuff and you're not sure whether you're good enough and you're not sure whether you can make the right decisions to progress. And from that layer, there seems to be a layer where you're making that mean something about you. That because I'm not clear on these things, maybe I'm broken, maybe I'm defective. Maybe I'm not good enough. But then it seems like there's almost this other layer of and I need to overcome this because otherwise I won't be able to be a good PhD student, I won't be able to support other students in the future, I won't be a good professional. And that, that feels like a lot of pressure on this learning environment. Danielle: Yeah, and I think, I know there's a lot of external factors that I'm probably internalizing, not the least, working extensively in a, in a research intensive institution, and being able to be a ninja researcher, in whatever shape or form that is, is highly valued and, and knowing that I, it's just like, I'm not going to be that at the beginning, but it's almost like, what building blocks do I need to actually really believe that? Vikki: At what stage in your PhD do you think that should be cemented and clear? That you believe that you can do a PhD that you know how to make your decisions and so on, when should that be cemented. Danielle: It's from an intellectual point of view, I probably know that it's not something potentially that would happen during it, it might, you know, happen once somebody says the magic words, congratulations, you're a doctor or it might not even happen till after, many years after. I'm not expecting to get a whole of anything. I'm actually wanting to build up sort of segments like an orange of confidence, because I know I can have a weird trait as well around assessment. Sometimes I can convince myself totally irrationally that I have failed and I can't read feedback for maybe a week or so after it's been released because I am totally convinced at some point that I am a failure. It's one of those little things that are sitting in the back of my mind. And then, like, I know it's all irrational, but it doesn't stop me sort of going through those motions, and so that's why, like, I'm wanting to sort of develop some sort of techniques to lift myself up to the next rung and banish, not wholly, I'm not expecting to banish some of these things entirely, but actually just making a bit of progression, so. Fingers crossed. Vikki: Yeah, and definitely. So let's, let's get even more specific. What is one piece of work that you are either intending or currently working on at the moment that you feel a bit stuck on? So, I've got a module, which is looking at, you're given a smorgasbord, you know, as long as it hits the learning outcomes, you can basically look at anything you, you like, in regards to higher education. And I put together a little framework to support learning design. So, I, I've done a lot of the thinking. But what I hadn't found is a theory, support, and really concretize what I was trying to express, and then, then, then it kicked in of, you know, how can I tell people that, you know, live and breathe this, which is the irrational bit, you know. How do I know what a good thing looks like? And I mean, probably if you look at a transcript of what I'm saying, I, I know a lot of these things are irrational to think and there's lots of journal articles and this, that and the other. There's lots of published things out there that provide that structure and support and ideas of, you know, how you can put stuff together. It's just, I feel, just feel a bit like I'm in quicksand as well. Yeah, it's, it's those tensions and feeling like I've got enough brain space to really pick how things are because, you know, if you've got a very, over full professional life, you've got an over full personal life, you know, things that can't be dropped in either and then that then becomes some things that can be dropped. So, yeah. Yes, it's a, it's a challenge. Vikki: Definitely. And I can see how the PhD work becomes the stuff that gets dropped, right? Cause you've got your job and obviously other people are relying on you, expecting you to do things and stuff. And then you've got your personal life where people are relying on you and where it feels fun and easy and you feel kind of comfortable in it . Vikki: And then you've got these. tasks that feel quite tenuous, feel like things that part of you believes you can't do, part of you believes that you should be able to do, and that just feel very unclear as to how to progress them. It's not a surprise that That those are the things that slip. You know, it's got lots of the characteristics of, you know, it's unclear, it, our thoughts about it induce emotions. Vikki: Those of you watching YouTube will see that I sort of did a little wonky thing with my eyes there. That's because the, the fact you've got the work doesn't cause emotions, but the thoughts we have about the work can cause emotions, um, and it's tasks that induce emotions we don't like that we end up procrastinating. Vikki: And so, all of this is, is really understandable. The bit that I think is really useful to think about, though, is how much extra pressure you're putting on yourself by telling yourself you're being irrational. Because I feel like there's this whole load of self judgment. Danielle: Oh, a hundred, a hundred, a hundred percent. Vikki: That this shouldn't be an issue. Danielle: No, I'm, I'm like, I know I'm good at self judgement, I like a hundred percent know that. Vikki: And that's something, when people have got really good self awareness and really good reflection skills like you do, we can almost use it as a stick to beat ourselves with. I know I shouldn't be thinking about it like this, but I am. I know cognitively I'm a beginner and that's okay, but I just don't believe it. And. I think the most useful place to start is there. That it's completely normal. Let's be totally compassionate about the fact that it's completely normal to cognitively think one thing and to believe something else, or at least not to be able to act on, at the moment, our cognitive beliefs. Vikki: And so I would really encourage you to avoid words like irrational, because knowing something and feeling it as true for yourself Are just two completely different things. There's nothing irrational about the fact that that doesn't match up. Danielle: Yeah, it, it probably comes back to feeling that a lot of words and concepts are very negatively related. And, you know, the internalization of that. Because I've always thought, you know, there's probably very little that somebody in, in power or authority could say about me that I can't say better about myself in a sort of a beating oneself up way. point of view, but that's, I know it's, it's not healthy, but it's, it's feeling, how can you get out of probably that cycle of, of, of thinking? And I know it's not an instant thing either. So. Vikki: It's definitely not an instant thing, but it starts from recognizing compassionately that it's, this is completely normal. The beating yourself up is completely normal. For all those of you listening who spend too much time beating yourself up, the first thing to do is to stop beating yourself up about beating yourself up because then we're just adding more judgment. Of course you beat yourself up. It's understandable. It's the way society trains us. Vikki: It's the way people with high expectations of themselves sort of learn to treat themselves. It's often how we've got stuff done in the past. Of course you beat yourself up. There's nothing wrong with that. Do we want to do it forever? No. Are we going to make it completely disappear? No, probably not. Can it feel an awful lot easier? Yeah, definitely. Vikki: But it starts from accepting that this is all completely normal. And I think this will be true, there'll be people who are full time PhD students that have come straight from their masters who will be feeling exactly the same way. But this is particularly true for part time students. I see this time and time again. I have so many part time clients. And you're so used to being a relative expert in your day to day job that it's really dissonant to suddenly get used to and be okay with not knowing in this other place. And especially, it's an issue for mature students who come back to study full time. Definitely. But I find it's even more of an issue for people who have got this weird parallel world where in one world they're, they're senior and knowledgeable and they know what they're doing. And then in this other world, they're relative newbies and they're, they're really unsure. Vikki: So nothing weird here, nothing broken. The other thing that I think is the error we make when we're thinking about this stuff is thinking that we need to resolve any of this in order to do things. Okay. Okay. So, often, and again, tell me if this feels true for you, often people think that I just need to get a bit more confident and then I'll be able to X. I just need to feel a bit less lost and then I'll be able to Y. Are these things you tell yourself? Danielle: I, yes. I think they definitely come into play. Vikki: And what I want us to have a ponder on is how can you do your next tasks whilst not feeling any more confident than you do at the moment? Danielle: One of the ways could be just to put some stuff down. You know, it's something I'm happy to tell other people. I need to take my own advice and just put it down because putting something down that's a draft is nothing to be sniffed at. That's a great achievement. And if you don't have a draft, you certainly don't have a final product at any point. Vikki: What prevents you from doing that at the moment? What, what thoughts, I'm going to say, what thoughts prevent you from doing that? Danielle: Probably, um, anxiety around structure. Rightness. Um, but I, I do know, you know, I can go, there's plenty of stuff that's been published, you know, if I can find something on a similar theme, that will help me from a structural point of view. Maybe even just, you know, setting myself a task of writing 50 words or 100 words. Vikki: But what would you need to think in order to do? So what happens here, and I want you to, you're doing it, and everyone does it, and everyone you've ever spoken to will also do it, is we focus in the actions. What actions do I need to take? I just need to do a draft. I just need to set myself 50 words to do. And these are all true. Yeah, these are definitely the kind of actions you need to be taking. Vikki: What I want to know is, we know that our actions are driven by our thoughts and our feelings. And at the moment, other people will have said to you, You just need to start. Danielle: Just do it. Vikki: But if you're thinking, I need to know what the structure should be, I don't know enough to decide on the structure, then of course you're not going to start. So, what thoughts and feelings might enable you to start a draft without knowing any more than you do at the moment about the structure and the rightness or anything else? Danielle: I Danielle: think probably space, finding a, finding a space, actually telling myself I can do that, and Vikki: You can do what? What are you telling yourself that you can do? Danielle: I can do X or Y, whatever needs to start or to continue. Vikki: Do you believe that? Do you believe you can do it? Danielle: Um, I think equally yes and no. Vikki: Okay, then let's think of a different thought. Danielle: Because I, I think it's one of those things that I've observed about myself. I can also be very influenced by the emotionality of the rest of my life. And it's almost like, how do I get into this bubble? Vikki: And this is where we have to be really careful because sometimes we tell ourselves that there are certain preconditions on which we can do this task. I need space. I need a bubble. I need to be in the right mood. I need to be in the right frame of mind. I need to know what the structure is. I need to know that I'm right. And if I don't have those things, can't write it. Yeah. Sorry. And that, you know, all of those things are probably true to some extent. Would this be easier if you were in whatever the right frame of mind is? Yes. If you were on some beautiful retreat in a stately home and wandering the gardens while you think about it and returning to your leather desk overlooking the lake, yes, probably easier. Vikki: Would the same crap go on in your head that what you're saying is not good enough? Yes, probably. So some of these things might help, but we have to be really cautious about telling ourselves that they're prerequisites. Okay. You do not need space. You do not need to know what the right structure is. You don't need to know whether the argument you're making makes sense or not. Danielle: Yep. Vikki: To write something. Danielle: Mm hmm. Vikki: So, thoughts around, I'm gonna muddle this out, I'm gonna see where I'm at. Danielle: Yep. Vikki: And figure it out from there. Or one I love that I use with clients a lot is I can pick. So when we're saying, I don't know what's right. That's true. That's probably true. You probably don't, but is there a specifically right answer? Probably not too. And it becomes this kind of, I'm a beginner. I don't know what's right. I picked that one. Yeah. Who knows? Let's go, kind of vibe. And it sounds a bit flippant and lighthearted, but in some ways I think that can really help. I'm a beginner here. I get to just make it up. Danielle: True. And You know, it's almost like being paralyzed because for choice if you're in front of those pick and mix sweets. And you're going, oh, I really like that. It's just like, yeah, it's just, take one. Vikki: Actually, just pick. So I'm going to get, that is a great analogy. I was at a farmer's market thingy last weekend, and there was a fudge stall, and there were so many different options, and I ended up picking almost one of everything, which meant I, A, ended up with far more fudge than I intended to buy, and B, when I came to eat it, half of it was really disappointing. And what I should have done is gone, I like that flavor and that flavor, and just, And I didn't, I ended up with a mishmash bag, and it was yummy, don't get me wrong. I love all fudge, but I ended up with a mishmash bag of too many things because I refused to make a decision. And I think that is a great analogy to bring into this. Vikki: And in reality, I don't need to know, you don't need to know, is it the perfect bag of fudge? Who knows? Does it exist? Yes, it does now because I picked it. And allowing yourself to not think not knowing is a problem is super important here. Danielle: Not giving permission. Vikki: Permission? I'm not meant to know. This is meant to be a muddle. I'm meant to be figuring it out. There's not a right answer. And I'm not even meant to know what's the top four. I just get to pick something that I think I can make make sense. and then we see from there. Danielle: Yeah, that makes total sense. Vikki: How could that translate to some of the things that you've got to do at the moment? Danielle: So what I had thought recently was What collectively do I care about enough to look at? In, in greater depth research from a theme point of view and see if I can bunch some themes together. Because it's, it is about, you know, wanting to find out as much about myself as it is about other people, about behaviors, about routes through higher education, teaching, learning. So it's. Yeah, I think going along that road would definitely be a start out of stuckness. Vikki: I could pick this. And this feels as good a reason as any. To pick that. Danielle: Yep. Vikki: Now do be cautious. I'm going to give you one word of warn, warning, warning. That's dramatic. Don't mean warning. One word of like advice or whatever. Anyone who's doing research around stuff that they are deeply personally involved with and mean something about you and all of that as well. Just be really cautious. How often you, um, what's the word? Like, bring that into it, because you can, if you connect something to too many other things, it's like Lego. Have you ever tried to take Lego apart? If you connect it, especially the, the like movementy ones. I can't remember what that's called. They're all attached to so many different things that it's impossible. Sometimes when we have something that feels like it's about us and our development, our career and our sector and our beliefs and everything, it's incredibly hard just to move this one piece of assessment forward. Vikki: So I would really encourage you to have that motivation in your broader background, in the back of your mind, but that's the job of your whole PhD. That's not that, every single bit of work you do does not have to, like, reveal something about the sector and your position in it and your humanity that underpins this or whatever. Vikki: Sometimes it's just a piece of coursework. It's just an essay. Let's just write the thing. So just be careful how many, because sometimes it can feel like that's motivating. Yeah. If I remember why I'm doing it, why this is so important, maybe I'll do it. But other times that's what makes the quicksand because this thing is now too important for you to get wrong and it's too important for you not to develop as a person and become a better thinker and, you know, a more reflective practitioner and blah, blah, blah, blah. It, it, it can just be a piece of work. And that's true all the way up to your thesis. Danielle: True. Vikki: It can just be a piece of work that serves this purpose. Danielle: Yeah. Yeah. And, and sometimes just cutting losses. Because you've had that dialogue at, at, at length with yourself and just going, no, I will do this. It just needs to pass. Vikki: And some of that, it's not that that's unimportant, but you discuss, and I can't remember whether we discussed it since we've been recording or, for everyone listening, we have a little chat beforehand, or whether we, you mentioned it,, before that, but, some of this reflection and the kind of recognizing the change in your own abilities and your own beliefs and things like that only happens in retrospect. Vikki: So sometimes we are expecting to see our understanding change as we write the thing, we can only write it when we're sure we understand it and stuff. And sometimes, but what we need to recognize is sometimes it's not until. After you've done the thing that you look back and go, Oh my goodness, I know so much more now than I did then. Danielle: Yes. Vikki: But you don't need to see it at the time. Danielle: It's just frustrating. Vikki: It's so frustrating. Wouldn't it be nice for it to be linear? Danielle: The lightbulb should just be like flickering on and off going, Woohoo! Vikki: There's no lightbulb. Danielle: Darn it. Vikki: We just get to look back later and go, Oh, how does that feel when you think about it like that? Danielle: It's certainly very helpful and sort of given me a bit of a, like a hook to hang on and just, just do something. Vikki: Now just implies it's easy. I'm not saying it's easy. But it's okay just to have a go at this. It's okay to try and figure this out. Danielle: Definitely. Vikki: What's my best guess? You know, when you hear yourself saying, I just don't know. Okay. You don't know. Cool. What's your best guess? That's all we need. We just need your best guess. It doesn't have to be right, which probably doesn't exist anyway, just need a best guess. I read, I'll try and link to it in the show notes because I'm going to butcher it if I try and remember the exact place I found it, but I read some really interesting research describing the PhD as a liminal space where you're transitioning from being like a taught student through to being an independent researcher. Vikki: And the problem with that is that we inherently have to do things in a place where we feel uncertain. We have to do things in a place where it's unclear, because the research is unclear, because that's the problem with being on the cutting edge of research is you're doing things no one's done. So there's no answer here. And us as an individual is in this state of flux and change and we're becoming someone else. But in order to become them, you have to act while we're not them. Danielle: Uh, the whole fake it till you make it, um. Vikki: Yeah, but that sound, that, yes. Danielle: But better phrased. Vikki: Yeah, I will. Well, so I'll, I I'll give a shout out. So, Jamie Pei, who has been a guest on the podcast before, has released a blog on Jo Van Every's. Vikki: blog site. Jamie wrote this post about confidence. And one of the things she talks about in that is that we don't have to aim for, um, kind of a. flashy, sure of ourselves version of confidence and fake it till we make it because we don't have to fake it. We just can be okay with being unsure. So it's not about being a PhD student who doesn't know what you're doing, but pretending you know what you're doing. It's just being a PhD student who knows, okay. I'm not meant to know it all. I'm a PhD student. My job is to do the best I can with the stuff I've got and with the current ability I have. That's my only job. The rest of it comes when we look back and see how much we've developed. So we haven't got to fake anything. We haven't got to pretend that we're comfortable with this. We just need to get used to the fact that it does feel a little bit uncomfortable. Oh. That's not a problem. That's not a sign that something's gone wrong. Vikki: That's just the space you're in. But then actually, if we don't make that a problem, it feels a lot less uncomfortable. Because instead of being, this is so hard, it shouldn't be hard. I don't know what the right answers are. I should know what the right answers are. We're like, well, I don't know, we'll figure it out. I'm bright. I can do things. I'll choose something and we'll see if they like it. I'll make a good case and let's see what happens. Danielle: Yeah. Cause that because maybe some of that whole thinking, um, comes from just feeling like you're enculturated to ignore the emotionality of learning, that any, any learning that's worth is at some point hard and challenging to make, you know, make it stick. And that whole narrative around, you know, perfection. And failure is seen in a, in a really negative light, but actually everybody fails at everything at some point or other. It's, it's really interesting how we can internalize things from society that make absolutely no sense. Vikki: And we can, we can recognize that. We can go, Oh, look at me, believing that and sort of notice it. We don't have to beat ourselves up because as you say, this stuff's pretty deeply ingrained in our society and the institutions that we're in. But just because it's in our heads, we just don't have to take it that seriously sometimes. Be like, oh, look at me trying to be perfect again. That's okay. Not going to be perfect because I'm a beginner. So let's go. What do I need to do? And I think that's something that people underestimate the power of, that just because you're thinking it, you don't have to hate yourself for thinking it, and you don't have to make it go away. Vikki: You can just go, yeah, I do think that, but we're doing this anyway, so might as well crack on. Let's give it a go. Danielle: Yes, I can. Vikki: Yeah, of course you can. My final thing, you said you chose the phrase getting stuck as improvement on procrastination. And I like the logic that you're thinking about how you talk to yourself about this. I'm going to dispute the benefits of calling it stuck though. Danielle: Right. Vikki: Because I think, and you can tell me whether your version of it feels different. To me at least, stuck implies a certain lack of control. That there's things holding you there. I like to frame stuck as I haven't yet made a decision. Danielle: Okay. Vikki: Because for me that feels less scary. I'm not stuck. Nothing's trapped me here. I haven't, I'm, you know, I'm not some princess in a fairy tale who's got like the ivy come up around my legs and pulling me into the depths. I'm not stuck. I just haven't picked what I'm focusing on yet. And it's not that you haven't found the theory. You haven't chosen it. Because there're theories, this piece of work you've got coming, you can wedge any old theory to fit it if you want to, you just haven't picked yet. Danielle: Yeah. Vikki: And that's okay because you've been telling yourself it needs to be perfect and it needs to be the exact right one and da da da. But when it comes down to it, you just haven't picked and you get to pick. Danielle: I get to pick. Maybe that's, maybe that's the title for the episode. I get to pick. Vikki: You get to pick. You're not stuck. You get to pick and it's not that big a deal. It feels like it. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it shouldn't feel like it. Danielle: No, there's lots of feelings. Vikki: That's okay. But we just get to pick and do the next thing. Danielle: Thank you. Vikki: How does that feel? Danielle: Yeah. Very useful. Very useful. Vikki: What do you think your kind of main take homes from today would be? Danielle: I think about the permission to transition, the permission to choose to do to justify my choice is just as legitimate. I think it's, it's, and it's practicing as well. Just keep on practicing. Vikki: I'm practicing making choices. Danielle: Yeah. Vikki: Practicing constructing an argument. Danielle: Yeah. Vikki: If it's not the right one this time, and maybe there was something better I could have picked. Danielle: Yeah. Vikki: Okay, cool. We'll try that next time. We'll try a different one next. I'll use a different process to pick next time, but let's practice with this one and we thought about what would help you, you know, you came up with some great actions like just getting on and doing a draft, doing words or things like that. And we were talking about what thoughts might help. I think I'm practicing could be a great one here. I think sometimes, you know, you think about people who do music and art and things, and those of us who are just on the appreciation end of that, we see the end product, we see them do their orchestral piece, we see their thing hanging in a gallery and we don't see the hundreds of hours that they've practiced. Vikki: We don't see the piles and piles of canvases where they've done all their different practices. You know, I, I follow these people on Instagram who do all these beautiful things and you scroll and they're like, they've painted the same thing in slightly different colors, slightly different ways, hundreds and hundreds of times. Vikki: And I wonder why mine aren't as good as them. Yet somehow as academics, and especially as PhD students, we think we should be able to sit down and write an article and it will look like a published article. And even as an experienced academic, we don't do that. So why beginner academics tell themselves they should be able to do that? It's like, let's just practice writing a paragraph. Danielle: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's just the weirdest thing to be thinking about oneself. And, you know, I think the more we can talk about The messiness of, especially transition, which obviously I'm feeling very transition y at the, at the minute, as you've articulated all of that stuff that goes on that nobody sees, but if you don't do the stuff, then you're never going to have that in baby masterpiece. Vikki: Exactly. We have to do our rough sketches, our failed attempts, our practices, our early versions, all of these things, in order to then get to something that is good enough to hang in a gallery and even that, you know, the gallery can be the school hall at the local fete or the gallery can be the national gallery. Vikki: It's the same in science, right? Your PhD will sit on a shelf in a PhD. Some of it might go into a journal that's pretty good. Some of it might go into journal that's amazing. Who knows? We just, we need it to exist. And we get to practice a bunch on the way. Danielle: Practice, practice, practice, practice. Vikki: Just going to practice. Amazing. And you talking about the, the sort of being open about the process, I think is so true. And that's why I really appreciate your willingness to be open and to discuss the challenges that you have. I empathize with them so much. I know my clients do. I know the listeners do. So thank you very much for coming on and thank you everyone for listening. And I will see you next week. .

I've tried a ridiculous number of to do list management systems, everything from bullet journals, online Kanban boards, the getting things done system, the total workday control system, productivity ninja, whiteboards, little different colored cards, like physical cards, notion, to do list, those, all those different apps that you can get, uh, planners, diaries, Literally, I think pretty much anything you can think of, I have tried, and almost every single system has lasted a period of time, that's not necessarily very long. All of them took quite a long time to set up, by the way, just so you know that bit too. Perfect procrastination fodder, because I felt like I was being productive, setting up a new system. Lasted a little while, then stopped. Now, some of this may be my undiagnosed ADHD. But a good portion of this is not understanding the principles of what makes a to do list system work for you. So today I'm going to share with you the three reasons that I think those different systems didn't work for me previously, and I'm going to share with you the system that currently has been working for me for about two years now so that you can see which bits of it you might like to steal for yourself. Hello and welcome to episode 34 of season two of the PhD life coach. And we are talking to do list systems. Anyone who claims that one particular system will solve your problems- I wouldn't trust them. I am going to share with you a specific version that works for me, but I'm not sharing it because I think you should all use my system. My system has some really specific nuances that make it work really well for me, but that might make you guys think I'm a little bit strange. And that's fine, because the ultimate goal we're going for here is a to do list system that works for you and how you work, not just when you're at your best, but also at your more kind of typical normal person level of work and organization. Now I said there were three reasons these systems hadn't worked for me in the past. The first is that I had too many things. So I was expecting to find a system that would enable me to fit in all the things I wanted to do when actually all the things I wanted to do was an unrealistic amount of stuff. And so one of the reasons that these systems failed was entirely on me. I wasn't reducing the amount of things that I was trying to fit in, I wasn't making those important decisions and prioritizations before I put them in the system. And then I was somehow blaming the system that it didn't all fit in my life and it didn't all get done. And I blamed myself for not having implemented the system properly. If that sounds familiar to you, don't worry, you're completely normal. Go back and have a look at some of my episodes on things like what to do when you've got too much to do, for example, and how to make decisions and prioritize, because I think those will really help you to narrow down some of the things you're trying to do. There is no system that is going to enable you to do an unrealistic amount of work. The thing I realized is that these systems failed. And for those of you who can't see me cause you're listening on podcasts, not on YouTube, I'm doing little Speechmark thingies failed around that is because I had really unrealistic expectations of what level of adherence I should have to the system. So I would get all set up in a new system, put all my tasks into a new app and bear in mind, I usually had hundreds of tasks. This was always quite a thing. I'd get all set up. I'd use it for a while. I would stop using it perfectly either using it somewhat or stopping using it altogether and then I would declare it a fail. I would immediately say this system doesn't work for me. I need to find a different system and then spend time researching that new system. And the problem is what I was doing then was I was writing it off before I'd even given it a chance. Whenever you use a new to do list system, you need to think about that beginning phase, that first couple of months as being a practice phase. You're trying this out. You are not trying it out to assess whether it works for you or not. You are practicing using it. And if you go about it from the perspective of practicing using it, then when you notice that that you haven't been using it, you nudge yourself back to starting using it again, rather than declaring it just some big fail and looking for a new system. So remember you are practicing, you're figuring out what works for you. You are optimizing it for your own tendencies, your own work style, and your own preferences. And if you can see it more like that, as a work in progress, rather than a kind of yes no test, is this system going to work, then it really changes the way you engage with the new system. The third thing, is the thing that I'm going to spend the bulk of this episode talking about, which is, I had no system for choosing which approach I was gonna take. I would just see a new way of doing it. I'd see a little YouTube about Notion Worksheets, or my friend would show me her beautiful bullet journals, and that would inspire me to be like her or somebody else would say, I do it like this, and I'd try that out. I had no system for deciding whether it's an appropriate system for me or not. So when we're thinking about something that's tailored for ourselves, it's really useful to figure out what are the principles that will make this a good system for me. Now, what I'm going to do today is talk you through some of the principles that I now look for in a system, and the principles that have led me to the system that I'm using at the moment, and I stand by these principles. I think that a good chunk of these principles will be useful for you as well. You will listen to them and go, Oh yeah, I need a system that does that. Yeah, I need a system that does that. There's other bits that are about my personal preferences that won't make sense for you. So as you're listening, I want you to evaluate each of the principles for yourself, see whether you want to adopt it as a principle that's relevant for you. And if you don't, what would you swap it for? What additional principles would you add to the ones that I use that would enable you to decide that a system could work for you. So at the moment, I have eight principles, who knows if we'll make up more as we go along. But the first principle is it needs to be a system that I can implement imperfectly and still return to a state of order. I know I am never ever going to find a system that I stick to absolutely perfectly. I am not that person. You might be. Maybe you are somebody who loves being systematic and methodical and all of those things. And you know that when you've got a system you like, you will stick to it absolutely beautifully. I'm not that person. I get caught up in things, especially when I've got time urgent stuff happening, and I forget to use my systems. Now, I'm working on that myself. I'm working on that through my own coaching and things, but I have to be realistic about who I am, and plan for the real version of me rather than the version of me that I wish I was. And what that means is a key principle for me is that I have to be able to sort of return to it having not used it for a few days and be able to sort of get it sorted out relatively quickly and get back on track. Now I'm getting way better at allowing that gap to be less time. I used to let these things slide for ages and ages and then it would take quite a long time to get back. But I need a system where I can disengage with it for a while and still return to it and sort it out. For a while that led me to things like, non dated planners so that you could miss weeks and not miss pages. That worked quite well for me, but there was other things that that was lacking that I'll talk about in a second. But something that I could use inconsistently was really important. Kind of part of that is having a system for where I capture things that I need to do when I'm not using the system perfectly. So in an ideal world, you would have a single place that you capture your tasks and then you do them from there. That would be dead straightforward. Wouldn't that be lovely? That's not how my life works. I have bits of paper from my mom telling me to book my boiler service. Which I still haven't done yet. So I have those on bits of paper on my desk. I have bits that I've jotted down in my phone. I have emails that I've sent to myself, emails that other people have sent to me. I have bits and pieces, you know, and I'm always trying to narrow down the sources of things. I mentioned at the beginning that I read a book called How To Be A Productivity Ninja. I actually really liked that system. Again, I had to modify things for myself. There were bits of it that are overly complex for me, but one of their key principles is being able to collect all the places. They have a cord model, C O R D, and the C is collect. And that's all about knowing where your tasks are coming from. And so I needed a system where the fact that I had tasks in a few different places was not insurmountable and that could be relatively easily reconciled back into my to do list system. The second thing is that I need to be able to throw things over the horizon. Now, this is a phrase that I originally came across with the Total Workday Control system that I was introduced to, like, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago, I guess. It's developed by Michael Linenberger. I had a proper old school book on it, which taught you all these little outlook tricks as to how you could manage your task systems. But this principle of throwing tasks over the horizon means capturing tasks that you do need to do, but that you don't need to do now, and having them there in a way that you can't see them until you need to action them. Often we end up with these huge long lists. This is a list of things that are really overwhelming. Whilst I've got a lot better at managing my thoughts, it's not the list that makes me overwhelmed, it's the thoughts I have about it. I also know that it's a lot easier to have those overwhelming thoughts when you've got a huge list in front of you and where half of it you don't even need to do yet, but you've just got to keep track of it. And so, with throwing things over the horizon, you have a system whereby you will find it when you need to do it, but that you can't see it every day when it's not what you need to be doing. This rules out an enormous number of systems. Most systems aren't set out to cope with that, especially most paper based ones, which I always have a natural affinity with, yet it's incredibly important for me. Again, part of that is that I also need a system that will show me if there's something that I've been kind of kicking down the road every time, where it's never quite come to the top of my to do list. I need a system that kind of flags that to me. So that I can then make a decision, right, we do this thing now so it's gone, or let's just decide we're not doing it. Because if we keep pushing it back, we might as well just decide we're not doing it. The third thing is that I need to be able to sort my tasks by role. Now, this is something, if you haven't already listened to my podcast about role based time blocking, go back, listen to that. It's one of my favorites. I refer back to it a lot. And the idea there is that that you plan your week by giving yourself chunks of time to be in different roles. So for me, those are now business related roles. So sometimes I'm in coach mode where I'm working with clients. Sometimes I'm in content creation mode when I'm doing things like this or writing my book or whatever it is. Other times I'm in finance mode, operations mode, CPD mode, for example, all different roles. If you're a PhD student, it might be writer, data analyzer, you know, laboratory demonstrator, whatever it is. If you're an academic, you will know you already have a ton of different roles. You're a PhD supervisor, you're a personal tutor, you're a lecturer, you're a researcher, you're a principal investigator manager person. And because I use that time system, so this morning I'm in content creation role before I switch to my coaching session at 10. And therefore I want to only be able to see my content creation tasks. I don't want to be looking at my to do list when I'm meant to be doing content creation work and going, oh, I do need to send those invoices. Those invoices I want to see when I'm in operations mode later. So I need to be able to sort by the role that that job is kind of part of. Again, this, in theory at least, rules out most paper based systems, although I'm going to tell you my workaround for that in a second. It also rules out quite a lot of other systems that don't have that sort of functionality. My fourth thing, and to be honest, this doesn't rule out any system, but this is about how we use it, is I need every step to be very specific and very actionable. So I need to be able to see exactly what I need to do. So I had on my list, which I'm just pulling up in front of me, I had on my list, write the next section of my book with what I've written and what I've done this morning is turn that into much more actionable steps. Add this section, look up that bit, write that section, much more specific what I need to do step by step. And any system that I use needs to have that ability to have multiple steps. Now what I tend to do, this isn't about the system, this is just the way I use systems, what I tend to do is things that are further away I put in in bigger categories, so write book or whatever, write workshop and then once it gets to the stage where I need to be thinking about it. So I've thrown it over the horizon saying plan workshop for June, then when it comes into my, okay, I actually need to be thinking about this now I'll break it down into much more specific steps as to what I need to do next, because there's nothing like looking at an item on a list and being like, yeah, I don't really know where to start with that and therefore going on to something different. As I say, you can do this with pretty much any task list. It's just that most of us don't. Most of us leave it quite generic to remind ourselves what we should be doing and forget to give ourselves that really specific instruction. The system I use at the moment works really well for that though. My fifth thing, and I talked about this in one of my very early podcasts, is I need to be able to see what I've done as well as what I've got to do. And this is mostly from a motivational perspective. Sometimes it's useful for my kind of audit thing of looking at what I've spent my time doing and all that kind of stuff. Although I don't do time tracking in any systematic way, I love being able to see what I've done. And I talk about that in podcast seven or eight, something like that, about how motivating it can be to focus on what you've done in a day rather than what you haven't. And what that means is anything that involves deleting things or crossing them off doesn't really work for that unless they go somewhere. It was one of the reasons that a Kanban board was quite tempting for me because then you had things that were to do that you were doing and things that were done, and you kind of moved the ,card into the doing when you were focusing on it, and then you moved it on after that. I found that my systems were too complex for that to work for me, you might be able to get it to work for you. But it did have that thing where you could see the tasks that have gone into done. Many of the apps I tried using, it just deleted it when you'd done it, and that just didn't work for me at all. Remember, all the way through, make sure that you are assessing these principles against what you think. You may well, I really hope that some of them you're like, oh, that's just not important to me, I don't care. Or, god no, that'd be awful, I definitely don't want a system that does that. Or, actually, yeah, that's a good one that I hadn't thought of. I need that in my system. So make sure you're evaluating this for yourself all the way through. Principle six is not a crucial one that, but it's nice. Would rather it was free. I've got lots of things I like to spend my money on, and to do list management isn't really one of them. If I found a perfect system that was absolutely amazing and made my life easier, would I invest in it? Yeah. Absolutely. Have I spent inordinate amounts of money on pretty planners in my time? Yes, yes, I have. Do I want to keep doing that? No, I don't. So for me, being free, easily accessible was really important. It did mean that there were other principles that I would have loved to have in here that I had to let go. So one principle that I have let go, to put it out there for you guys, and you might not be willing to sacrifice this one, is that my system is a computer based system and I can only add tasks to it when I'm in my computer. What that means is if I'm on my phone or I'm somewhere else, then I email myself and then at some point I've got to reconcile it later. That's not ideal. I would love it if there was a way for me to add things directly into my to do list in the exact format that I want them to go in from my phone. There isn't in the way I do it at the moment. And some of these fancy apps will tell you that they do that. For me, there were too many other sacrifices. So free is a principle that I would have been willing to sacrifice if the other things were better. Accessible from every device was something that I did sacrifice in this. Number seven is I need it to not be distracting. So bullet journaling, there were big elements of it that I really liked. Some of the abilities to sort and things like that didn't work for me. But one of the other things was I got way too distracted googling pictures of beautiful bullet journals and buying washi tape and deciding to watercolour a page before I turned it into a spread or whatever it was. And I got too judgy when my bullet journal looked scruffy instead of beautiful. Now again, as usual, I could have managed my mind about that, I could have coached myself on it, but , you know what? There's a billion things for me to coach myself on, and sometimes you've just got to make it easier for yourself. So I wanted a system that would look organized and functional, that I didn't even think about wanting to make pretty, and that would just work with me keeping me as focused on the bits that are actually important as possible. And then the final thing, and this is one of the ones that's definitely probably a bit nuanced for me, but see what you think, is that I love the facility of it being digital. I love the way that that means that you can sort and hide and all those things that you can't really do on paper. But. I also engage with the to do list system if it's on paper, much better. So I decided I needed a system that did both. It means it's probably not the most efficient thing in the world, But it is highly effective. And those of you who listened to Jo Van Every's podcast a couple of weeks ago will have heard her talk about that difference between efficiency and effectiveness. The most important thing is finding something that works for you. Does it mean that I'm there on my printer on a Monday morning? Yes, it does. Does that make me like I'm living in the 90s? I don't care. The 90s were great. It works for me. It's inefficient in places, but it's a lot less inefficient than having a system that doesn't enable me to do the things that I want to do. So those are my principles. I wonder what your principles are. Have I missed any that you think are super important that I should be considering? Hopefully none that will make me want to change my system, but do let me know. You guys can always get in contact with me. If you're not already on my newsletter, please, please, please go to my website and sign up. So it's the phdlifecoach. com and you'll see the work with me. Join free online community. You can sign up for my newsletter. You'll get an email every week, which talks about this podcast, gives you some take home messages, gives you some activities and reflective questions and all that sort of stuff. So it makes it much more likely you'll take things that you're hearing in this podcast and actually create actionable change in your life rather than just listening to me and then forgetting. So make sure you sign up for that. So let me tell you about my actual system. And the good news is that I turned it into something that you can have too, if you would like. If you sign up to my newsletter, you will get sent a file that will give you my task management system. And that's because my task management system is an Excel file. I know, deeply unsexy. Like I say, we're in the nineties. It's happy days. But it works, it works really well. So the main sheet that I use, imagine just an Excel sheet, the main sheet that I use is called tasks. And this is where everything goes. I have a column that has week commencing. So what week am I going to start doing this thing? I just put the Monday date in. I don't get more specific than that. Then I have a column that is, what is the specific task? I have a category. column. So that's my roles. So what role does it fall under? I have a notes column where I can jot down anything that I need to remember, anything that's important. I also use that if there's a specific day I have to do it. And then I have status, which I was just done or not done. Essentially, you could put something more sophisticated in there, but that's all I do. So that's how it goes. Everything I need to do that I'm aware of goes in there. So things that I need to do now, things that I need to go do in the future, everything goes in there. Everything is categorized by my role. I also put personal stuff in here too. Not all the things that I do with my partner, but just like little bits of, you know, book dentist, do guide leader training or whatever it is. Okay. And then what I've done is I've put filters in that top row. So what I can do is I can filter by week commencing, so I can only see the tasks that I need to do this week, and I can then filter by role to see what I need to do in each role. So what my system is, is that as things come up, I put them into that task. Those things might be coming in on my emails, they might just be from my ideas. So I put those in as tasks, and I put in an approximate date that I'm going to do it. If I'm not sure, or if it's a general idea for the future, I just put it in and put the week commencing as future. Okay. And then every now and again, I can filter by future, see all the future things and decide whether any of them are actually coming into, like, play, whether they're actually things I want to implement or not. If not, I can either leave them there, if I might do them at some point, or I delete them at that. So, I put it on this week, see what comes up. Is that a manageable amount of work when I look at this week? Fiddle with it if not, chuck some stuff to next week, put other stuff in the future if it's things that aren't urgent and that I don't want to do right now. And then what I can do is I can toggle by role. Now, all you normal people who might be able to work from digital systems, you could just use it like that. So that when you Go into operations mode. You just toggle to operations and you start working through those systems. I like paper and I like writing things down and I have a metal ruler, which I'm showing the people on, on YouTube. , I have a metal ruler that I like underlining things with and crossing things off. I don't know why I just like the tactileness of it. So I thought, you know what? I'm going to enable this to happen. So what I do on a Monday morning, I reconcile all of this. I chuck in anything that I haven't thought of. In theory, I do that on a Friday night. I rarely do it on a Friday night. Monday morning, sort it all out, get it down to what tasks I'm doing today. And then I just go through, I go to filter for coach tasks, print it out. Filter for operations tasks, print it out. Filter for program. So I'm running my Be Your Own Best Boss program at the moment for PhD students and postdocs. Filter for program. Print it out. And then I have a clipboard because again, clipboards make me feel really organized. So this is the bit you might not want to copy this part of it. This is me and my own strange brain. Clipboards make me feel organized. So those of you on YouTube can see I have a clipboard with about six or seven bits of paper on it, each of which is a different role and each of which only has three, four items on it, which suddenly makes it feel like, you know what? I can win this. I can do this. So I'm looking at my top sheet here, because it's what I've been working on at the moment is program. And I can see that one, two, three, four, five, six of the things are crossed off. There's two things left. One of which I've broken down into more specific tasks to make them smaller and more cross off able. If there's things I think of during the week that I need to do, I just jot them in the right category. And then if at the end of the week I've done them, then I add them into my done list, which I'll tell you about in a second. And if I haven't done them, then they go into the to do list. So it just means that the bits of stuff that I drop down onto bits of paper actually are vaguely organized. So that whole collect thing is a bit simplified by the fact that I try and add it onto these sheets. I can then see what I've crossed off, see what I haven't. I'm also a humongous fan, I should start having one of those like Amazon affiliate things, shouldn't I, of these tiny, they're tiny little highlighter strips. So for those of you who can't see, they're like post it notes, they're semi translucent, except they're How big's that? Five centimetres long, so probably something like that, and about half a centimetre wide, so they're super tiny, and you can use them to highlight things. So in the morning, I go through and I'll be like, right, I've got an hour for operations this afternoon, which are the one or two operations tasks I want to do, and I can highlight them with my little thingies. And because it's not a real highlighter, I can take it off after I've done it, which is amazing, because obviously, normal highlighters are there. It's highlighted whether you finished it or not. So I combine it up with that. And it works really, really well. And then in theory what I do on a Friday, although in reality it's usually on a Monday morning when I'm getting myself together, is that at the end of the week, I go through and just cut out all the rows where it's things that I've done, and I paste them into the Done tab, which is exactly the same format, it's just the things that I've done. Okay, so I get rid of all of those and then I re reconcile ready for the next week. The other thing that I've started doing is I have a tab called every week and a tab called every month where I have tasks that I want to do regularly. So they're in red and on a Monday I go and grab my every week tasks and pop them in the bottom of the to do list ready for me to deal with them like any other task and in the first week of any month I grab the first, the week of the tasks and put them in. And that just means that they sort of automatically get pasted in at the time that's appropriate to do them. And that's my system. And if you want that Excel file, you can join my newsletter mailing list and we will get it sent to you automatically through that. And you can let me know what you think. Like I say, This system may not work for you, especially the printing out, putting on a clipboard. I think that's a little nuanced for me, but hopefully it's an example of how you can personalize these things, how you can take things about yourself that are already true and are always going to be true and just make them so that you work with them rather than telling yourself you need to be different. What are your little nuances? What would make it a system that works for you? Mine's quite linear. I like jotting. If I'm trying to be creative, I use mind maps and things like that. But when I'm getting things done, I want it to be very linear, very structured. You may not like that. You might want to do a to do list system that's more organic and more kind of branching off in different directions and where you can see the connections between things. I get overwhelmed when I look at things like that because I can see all the connections and I want to do all of it. You might find that inspiring and interesting and engaging in a way that a linear one just doesn't fit your brain. That's fine. But figure out what your principles are and try and adapt a system so that those principles are true for you. And then we stick to it, even when we implement it imperfectly. I don't think I have ever had a week where I have done this system exactly as I intended it all the way through. Never. Literally. I don't think I ever have. But what I do know is that it's quick to get back on track. What I do know is the days where I do it more like I intend, work better. I do know that it plays to the best of me, not to the best of some imaginary person that's perfect. And you know what? It's good enough and it works. And I can't see myself changing it for a really long time. Final point. If you are listening to this on a Monday morning as it comes out, now is not the time to go and find a new system. Do not spend the first three hours on a Monday copying and pasting your tasks into my Excel file. Please. Don't do it. Planning can be procrastination if you do it at times which is not when you intend. I am sure you've got one big task that you've been putting off or that you're not looking forward to doing. Do that task. Do that now. And then think about this task management in an hour where you're a bit frazzled or where you're not going to do something more useful, maybe later on in the day, if that's a less constructive time for you. Please do not make this a reason to procrastinate a task that you have already been avoiding. Go do that first and then, final tip. When you do come to do your to do list, write that thing on it and then cross it off straight away. Because I'm also a big fan of making sure that if you do something that wasn't on your list, write it on your list, cross it off, and then at least it's in your done list as well. I really hope that was useful for you. I was originally developing this for students on my program, where we're going to do this in loads more detail, figuring out exactly what their principles are and supporting them to both implement and then try out and kind of modify systems for themselves. But I thought that this sort of short overview would be really useful for you guys too. If you're wondering what this program is, it's a three month program called Be Your Own Best Boss. It's running at the moment, so I'm not taking registrations. I've got a wonderful cohort in it at the minute, but I am going to be running it again in September through December. In the program I can just give you a lot more hands on support for how to actually implement these things in your life. So if it's something that you want to make sure that you hear about as soon as it's available, again, make sure you're on my newsletter email list and you'll get all the information. Thank you all so much for listening and 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.

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.