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