In this episode, we accept a universal truth. We have too much to do. We'll explore what happens when you accept that as a fact and challenge instead the notion that we have to do it all (and especially the notion that we have to do it all this week). I teach you about boss mode and worker mode, introduce you to my plate spinning analogy, and explore how the project management triangle can be used when we're really up against it. We're also going to celebrate that this is my 20th episode! Yay! Thanks for your continuing support :)
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode 20 of the PhD Life Coach. Today we're going to be thinking about what to do when you have too much to do. But before we start, I'm actually going to practice what I preach. One of the things we often talk about is taking a moment to reflect on how far you've come and what you've achieved, rather than just looking at what's next.
And so I want to do that. This is episode 20. I started this in October, 2022 and decided it was going to be a weekly podcast and that I was going to do it every week. Now those of you who know me, trying to do something regularly like that is not necessarily my strong point, particularly when I don't have somebody who's telling me this has to happen, ie when I'm my own boss, like I am now.
Now I say it's not my strong point. I'm going to call myself on that. I do finish things. I do stick to things, but I have a story about myself that I don't stick to things and that I can't do things regularly. And more and more I'm realizing that is just a story, and it's not a story that helps me because the more I tell myself, I'm not somebody who finishes things, who sticks to things, the easier it is to be somebody who doesn't.
And so with this, I decided I was going to be somebody who published their podcast every week. I published it every week, all through the Christmas holidays, not because I worked through the Christmas holidays, because that's another boundary I've set for myself, that I'm not going to work holidays anymore. But because I planned ahead and got those episodes recorded. I nearly missed last week's episode because for various reasons, holidays, not feeling that great, I'd left it and left it and left it. But I decided, no, I am someone who does this every week. And so I got it done and last week's episode came out.
So I just want to take that second to say, yay me, I've done 20 whole episodes. Thank you all for listening. I really love hearing stories about how useful you are finding these. People keep telling me it feels like I can see inside their heads but I assure you, I am not mind reading. We are just all human beings coping with the same academic system. Here's to 20 more, a hundred more. Who knows? Let's go.
But today we are thinking about what to do if you have too much to. I was talking to a friend at the weekend and he was asking more about what I do in my job – he used to know me at my old job. And as I was explaining to him, he said, “well, you know, okay. , take an example. What would you do if someone said they were overwhelmed?” And I explained what I know happens when we feel overwhelmed, we start to think about all the things we have to do. We start to feel the emotion of overwhelmed, which can feel really crushing, it can feel like you're drowning. And then we start to not be able to prioritize. We able start to tell ourselves that we have to do all the things, but we can't do all the things. And so we either procrastinate entirely by doing something completely different, scrolling on social media, going and getting food, whatever your thing might be, or we do something called frantic action where we just try and get things done. So suddenly your admin is super important. Suddenly filing away those things that sat on your desk for three months is super important and has to happen right now. And as I was talking, he put his head on the table, um, was like, “Oh my goodness, this is literally me.” And again, this is totally human.
When we tell ourselves we have too much to do, we get overwhelmed. And when we get overwhelmed, we either don't do anything or we do the wrong things. We also sometimes take it out on others. I remember many times in my career where I was feeling under pressure. I was feeling behind, and like I wasn't on top of things, and it made me much less tolerant of other people.
It made me much less able to cope when somebody else was late with something or didn't do it how I thought they were going to do it. I got more snappy, I got more judgy, and it all came from this place of personal overwhelm.
So we know this thought “I have too much to do” is a problem because it leads to emotions like overwhelm, which don't lead us to feel good and don't lead us to get done the things that we want to get done.
Now, those of you who've been listening for a while will know - what do we do? We look at the thought and the first question we ask ourselves usually is, is it true? Is it true that we have too much to do? We're not going to do that this week.
The reason we're not going to do that is because if you are listening to this podcast, you are probably a PhD student or an academic. And if you're a PhD student or an academic, you have too much to do. We're going to take that right out of the thought line, put it in the circumstance line.
It is a fact. There are too many things for you to do. If you look at all the things you could do and all the things you probably have on your to-do list. There's too many for this week. There's probably too many for this semester and for this academic year.
So what happens if we take that as a fact? There ARE too many things to do.
What we traditionally do, if we accept yes, that is a fact, is we say, “yeah, but I have to do them all. I have to do them all.” Except we don't have to do them all, because every week we get to the end of the week and there's some things we haven't done that's inevitable. And so we can't have to do them all.
That's the bit that we need to challenge. We don't need to challenge the truth of there being too many things to do. We need to challenge the truth of the thought, “and I have to do them.”
I remember telling a client quite recently that the thought “there's too much to do” is only a problem if you also believe you have to do it all. If you don't believe you have to do it all, too much to do isn't a problem because it means you just get to pick.
So what I want you to do is it really explore the notion, do you actually have to do this all? And do you have to do it all to the standard and level that you are thinking.
So what we're going to do in this episode is we are going to use three different techniques to figure out what to do when you have too much to do.
The first technique is the idea of separating yourself into two different roles in your life so you can be in boss mode and you can be in worker mode. Often we're simultaneously in a place where we're deciding what to do, what to prioritize, what's in our best interest, what's strategically important, what makes us feel good, and the person who needs to do it. And when we're trying to do both those things at once, it can feel like a real battle.
Because part of you is saying, oh, we should do this and the other part is, oh, I don't really feel like that now. And then part of you is going, yeah, but it would be really important, and the other part is going, yeah, we haven't got time. And so you kind of end up having this, this sort of argument with yourself, which can be really, really tiring.
If we can separate out at different times a day when we are being the boss and when we are being the worker, it really simplifies all of this. So what you would do when you're in boss mode… now we're not talking like bossy boss mode, we're not talking like Instagram girl boss or anything like that. We are being the kindest, most compassionate, but firm supervisor you can imagine.
We love this boss, we love this supervisor. They are fair. They're understanding, but they believe in you. They challenge you to achieve, but they support you to do it. That is the boss we want to be. And you might want to set aside 30 minutes or an hour to put yourself in boss mode and make some decisions.
Now, during this time, you are not doing any work. You are not deciding, oh, I'll just answer this email while I'm looking at it. Nope, that's worker's job. You are in boss mode. And while you are in boss mode, we look at the week and we think about what we are going to do. And I'm going to give you some strategies that you can use while you're in boss mode.
What then happens once you've made those decisions is you then put yourself in worker mode. And workers here do as they are told, and they do as they're told because they know that the boss had their best interests at heart when they made this plan. They were fair and realistic.
Therefore, even if we don't feel like doing the thing we do the thing because that was what our boss told us to do. Now, I am sure every single one of you listening to this wherever you are in your academic career, have had some other job. Some other job where you have to turn up at a set time and do as you are told. I know I had a million jobs growing up as a teenager through my student years, and to be honest, since to the early years of my academic career where I worked in shops, I worked in factories, I worked in offices, all sorts of different jobs where I had to be there at set time. They told me what to do and I had to get on with it.
And somehow it was a lot easier when someone else was telling you what to do just to do it. You just, you didn't just lay in bed and not go, because you didn't feel like it today. Oh, I don't feel very motivated today, maybe I'll go tomorrow. We didn't do that. We went because our bosses expected us and that was how we got paid. And that's the vibe we want to try and instill in our work ourselves. That when this amazing self boss has come up with this nice, realistic, fun, interesting, sensible plan, we can then follow it.
So really think about trying to separate out those two sides of yourself. You might want to give them different names, you might want to wear different clothes or go somewhere different. So try not do it all at the same desk. Maybe worker does their work at your desk, but Boss mode goes to a nice coffee shop while they plan over a nice cup of tea or something. Maybe your boss sits at the kitchen table and decides what's going to happen for the week, and then the worker goes to your desk and does it. Try and separate out physically as well as psychologically these two different roles.
Now that's useful, but you are still your boss in this case, and you've still got too much to do. So how do you decide what you're going to do? The first thing? We are going to really remind ourselves of that compassion. It is totally okay that you have too much to do. We can waste a lot of time “shoulding” on ourselves.
I should have done this before. I should have organized this before. I shouldn't have said yes to this. If I was just further along and this would be easier, blah, blah, blah. We. Not the sort of boss that says those things to our workers, and we are not the sort of person that says those things to ourselves.
Well, we might be, at the moment, we probably are. We all do. It's a habit that this society kind of creates, but we don't have to. We can tell ourselves that we are not that boss anymore.
It is totally understandable that you have too much to. You work or study in academia, there is too much to do. We live in a culture with very few boundaries where people talk about obscene levels of productivity as though it's a good thing.
We are in this all the time. It's totally understandable that you have too much to do and that's fine. There will be things on your list that you could have done before and you didn't, but you were overwhelmed then, you're overwhelmed now. You've done nothing wrong. We are not doing this because there's a problem with you. We're doing this because there's too many things on your to-do list right now, and we just need to figure that out.
So if you haven't gone back to my very first episode where I talk about how to be your own best supervisor, this would be a really good time to revisit that. We talk about being compassionate and we talk about being curious.
And the curious really comes into its own now because we start to go, okay, if I take all the shoulds out of this, if I take the fact that maybe I could have done this earlier. I shouldn't have said yes to it. I've got too many things. How do I solve this problem? Let's figure it out. We're clever people. We can figure these things out.
The fact is you could look at somebody else's to-do list and help them prioritize it, and that's because you're able to separate yourself from some of the emotion that you have when you look at your own. But we're not just going to say prioritize it. I hate those advice things. When you see it on Twitter and stuff and it just says, um, what to do if you've got too much to do.
Look at your list. Prioritize, work on the top priorities. Well, how do we prioritize? Do we prioritize what's best for our long-term career? Do we prioritize what's going to make it less deeply unpleasant in the next hour? Do we prioritize things we do for ourselves? Do we do for other people? What do we prioritize?
The problem is there's no right answer to that. I can't tell you what you should prioritize, and that's where it's super difficult when somebody just says, oh, what you need to do is prioritize. People used to say that to me. And I'll be like, oh, really? Never thought of that. Cheers. Thanks for that. For those of you on the podcast. I'm pulling one of those, uh, faces right now.
So I'm not going to tell you just to prioritize. I am going to give you some criteria that you might want to use in order to prioritize and to do this, I want you to think about spinning plates.
So some of you who listen to my podcast for a while, who know me outside of this, know that I love the circus. I am involved in some of the more acrobatics of circus stuff, um, but another circus task that people do love, the circus trick that people do is spinning plates.
So having plates on tall sticks and you like wibble the stick. Not sure wibble is the technical word for it, but we'll go with it. You wibble the stick and the plate spins, and the problem is they can spin on their own for a while and they look super cool, but after a while then they slow down and they start to wobble, and if you're not careful, you don't give them another wibble, then they wobble too much and they fall off.
And working in academia, studying in academia can often feel like you're spinning plates. There's loads of different things for you to do. Even if you're a PhD student who's maybe only working on a single project, there's all the different components of that project.
Whether you should be reading or writing, or doing whatever your actual data collection element is. There's lots of different things that you should be doing. You're also getting told all the time that maybe you should enter this competition or go to that conference, or go to this workshop or learn that new technique or whatever.
We're all spinning lots of plates. So we are going to use this analogy, the spinning plates analogy, to think about how do we pick which things to do in a particular week. First job, what plates are you spinning? Let's get a list. Sometimes the problem is that we don't actually even know what's on our to-do list, because we don't want to write it down because that's too much.
So get them all out. What plates are we spinning? What are the main tasks that are actually spinning at the moment? And the first question I want you to ask yourself is, which plates don't even need to be spinning right now? Often we have projects where we're going, oh, and I need to do that, oh, and I need to do that. But actually, they're not things you are planning to do this week. They're things you need to remember for next week or the week after perhaps. But they're not things that are actually at the top of the to-do list now.
So first job is look at this to-do list, which of these are you actually just realistically not doing this week? Maybe they don't need to be. Maybe it's planning for a conference. That’s not for six months and you don't actually need to plan it yet, but it needs to be on your to-do list.
Start next week's to-do list now. Don't worry if you're actually going to do it next week, just dump it over for next week. We consider it again next week. So which of these plates can you put down? It's a lot easier to spin plates when you've got fewer.
Now we're remaining with the ones that we think on some level at least we need to spin this week. What I want you to think about now is which of these plates are the most valuable? And you get to define this. So which are the most valuable in the sense they'll bring most benefit to you? Which are the most valuable in the sense that they bring value to somebody else in a way that you want to be a part of. So not just writing something that builds somebody else's career, but perhaps supporting students, returning comments on somebody else's draft, that sort of thing. So which of the most valuable plates?
At the same time though, I also want you to think which of these plates are most fragile? Which of these plates, would it be a disaster if you let them drop? So perhaps you have promised somebody that you'll get comments back to their, um, on their paper this week and they have a deadline of next week, and it's a hard deadline. If they miss it, they won't be able to submit. Maybe that counts as a fragile plate. If you drop that plate this week, they're not going to submit for that conference. They're not going to submit for that special issue, whatever it is. Maybe that would be a fragile plate.
Maybe though you've said that you'll give it back this week, but to be honest, they're in the lab. They've got a ton of other stuff happening. If you just let them know, it doesn't really matter if it falls off or not. They're not counting. So knowing which plates are more valuable, knowing which plates are more fragile, can really help us to choose which ones we need to spin.
The next question I want you to ask yourself though is how much spinning do they need? So when we think about what's fragile and what's valuable, sometimes there are things that would be really useful in the long run to keep going, but they're not urgent this week. If you're familiar with Stephen Covey's four quadrants, these would be ones that fall in the important but not urgent.
Often it's things like reading around a subject, for example. It doesn't have to happen this week. Nothing's going to fall apart if we don't do it this week. But if we don't do it any week for six months, then we're going to find ourselves behind. And these are often the ones that we really neglect and we save them for a time where we are going to have time, but we never have time.
So the next question I want you to ask yourself is, what's the minimum spin I could give this plate to keep it going. So, especially for important non-urgent stuff, rather than saying, “oh, I haven't got time for that this week. I'll find time next week. I'll find time the week after that.” And then that time never comes.
What's the minimum little spin you could give it that would just keep it going? So could you spend 20 minutes scanning a new article just to pick out some key points? That's it. Rather than just putting the plate down, what's a little spin you could give it just to keep it ticking over.
If you haven't got time to read somebody's draft this week, for example, um, could you drop them a quick email saying, “had a glance over it, I think we're missing a section on that. Why don't you crack on with that section and I'll read the rest of it next week”, for example. What's a little tiny spin you could do just to keep those going?
Another question to ask yourself is, do you have any plates that if you gave them a good spin now, you could then take off and put down? So which plates - this is where my analogy starts to break down a little bit, but go with it - where they're nearly at the end of their spinning, where actually if you could give it two hours this week, then it could be the end of that plate. You could put it down.
Those are really worth prioritizing because they're ones where spinning it means that with a few hours work, you'll have one less plate to spin. So if you've got something that is just a few hours off finishing, how can you prioritize that one this week, so that next week, that's not even a plate anymore.
So get the thing submitted so that it's somewhere else, whether that's submitted to your supervisor, so it's on somebody else's desk, whether it's submitted to a journal, whatever it might be. Can you get that thing so that next week it's not even on your to-do list? That's another one to prioritize.
Another option you can do is to think which plates are close together. Now for this, I want you to imagine you are on stage. These plates are spinning all across the stage, and you are running around madly trying to spin all of them. Imagine that panic. Imagine how chaotic it looks. Imagine how you are not your best self if you're doing.
Whereas if you can look at the layout of your plates and decide which ones are close together, um, it'd be so much easier if you could go to one side of the stage and spin all of those and then go somewhere else and spin all of those. Same goes for our to-do list. See whether you can cluster tasks together so that while you are sorting out that admin task, you also do that admin task, that admin task and that admin task.
I used to start organizing my to-do list by people. So when I was Head of Education overseeing all the undergraduate and postgraduate taught master's programs in my school, I would order things by person who I needed to speak to about it. So that when I went to see George, I had six things that I needed to deal with with George.
They were all different things, but they were all George things. And so rather than sort of bothering him all the time, I would go and I would have my little list that were all him things. How can you cluster things? If you need to go to the finance office, what's four things you can do at the finance office while you're there so that you tick off a bunch of different things.
So see if you can cluster things that are geographically close together, but also just type of thing. So if you are in the mode of just getting through emails quick, quick, quick, what other tasks can you do while you are in that sort of mode? Rather than trying to make a phone call here and then a phone call there, and then send an email another day, how can you cluster all that stuff together so you have an hour or two hours of going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, through those basic admin tasks.
The other reason I really like the plate spinning analogy is I want you to think of yourself as somebody who only has a certain number of sticks to put plates on. So when you are making decisions then about whether you can take on a new task, you can take on a new plate, you look at how many sticks you've got and decide if you have space or not.
And there's two ways of doing that. You can say, ah, actually I've just finished up this project here. I put that plate down. You know, I finished it to a point where I don't need to work on it anymore. I've put that plate down. Actually I have a gap. I could do that thing here for you or that I've come up with, or wherever this idea’s come from. Yes, I could take that on. So where you've got a pre-existing gap and you're like, yep, okay. There's space for that.
Or especially if you're asked to do something, but even if you come up with a new idea yourself, say, okay, I love this new plate. This is a new, shiny, exciting looking plate. What plate am I taking off another pole in order to put this one in the game?
Because what we often do is just try and grab another stick and keep 'em all going anyway. And that's also where we get overwhelmed. So try and think of yourself as somebody who has a limited number of sticks.
Now, this actually comes from an idea called Spoon Theory, which a lot of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses will know about, where we have a certain number of spoons, a certain number of energy each day that we can use to do tasks.
That could be physical energy, cognitive energy, um, social emotional capacity, whatever it is, but we can conceptualize them as spoons and it follows from that. But the thing that I love about this is everybody has a limited number of spoons, or in my analogy, a limited number of poles to put their plates on.
So if you have disabilities, you have caring responsibilities, you have reasons that mean that perhaps things become overwhelming more quickly for you, then yeah, you have a limited number of poles and it's really useful to recognize that and be able to prioritize what you put on those poles.
But those of you with disabilities are probably already really good at that. Where I see people struggling is where there's no specific disability, there's no specific reason, and they therefore somehow think they have infinite poles. I used to think this. I'm a highly energetic, highly enthusiastic person and always thought I had unlimited poles.
I did not have unlimited poles. I just didn't acknowledge where I had limits, and so I would just keep piling more tasks on and try and do them all anyway and then beat myself up when I couldn't, as though I should be able to manage infinite spinning plates on infinite numbers of poles.
Learn from our friends and colleagues with disabilities. We all have a limited number of poles. You just need to learn how many you have. How many things can you keep going at any one? So when you're thinking about taking on something new, really look at those notional poles. Have you got a space? Can you create a space? Or is this plate going to have to wait until you finish spinning some of the others?
So I said I was going to give you three tactics in this episode. First tactic is this idea of separating out the boss mode and worker mode, and then when you're in boss mode, it is using this plate spinning analogy to really consider what tasks you have, what you can put down, which ones you need to do this week.
My final one actually comes from some project management training that I did years ago. I'm a bit of a habitual course taker. I think it comes from a sort of insecurity that I don’t know enough about this and I don’t know enough about that And so when I was doing my postdoc, I did, I had some funding for CPD and I did some project management training.
One of the concepts you come across in formal project management training is the project management triangle. I want you to imagine a triangle where on one corner of the triangle it says time, another corner of the triangle, it says quality, and the other corner of the triangle, it says resource.
So time, quality, resource and in the middle of the triangle is written “scope”. Now what the Project Management Triangle says is that if one of these things changes, the others need to change too. So if you want to complete something faster, you’re reducing the time, then you need to change either the quality, the resource, or the scope.
So if you have less time than you thought, you either need to do it less well, you need to bring in people to help or at throw resource at it in some other way, or you need to reduce the scope of what you're doing.
Now this can be really useful for decision making. Often when we say, I have to do this, I don't have time, we don't have any other solution. We have to do it. We don't have time, so we just sort of put our heads down and try and do as much as possible. And what we are doing there is we're adding more resource in the form of ourselves doing more hours on it, and we do that as though that's our only option.
And sometimes it is. Maybe there is an absolutely fixed scope, an absolutely fixed quality, and an absolutely fixed deadline, and you have no one else that you can ask to help you. So you have to throw more of your own resource at it. You have to give more of yourself.
Sometimes that's the situation. It doesn't have to be the only situation, and it seems to be the only option that people ever consider.
Now, instead, I want you to think what would happen if we considered the other elements of this triangle? Can you ask for more time? Can you get an extension so that you can give the same amount of yourself per day i e resource, but you have longer to do it. Sometimes that's possible. Sometimes it's not. It's useful to consider what's stopping you asking.
Quality. Now we always say we don't want quality to go down. We don't want to hand in something that's rubbish, but it really depends what stage of the process we're at. If this is a draft for your supervisor, would your supervisor rather have a rough draft at the time you said you'd do it or something more polished with an extension?
Maybe that's a question you could ask your supervisor. We always assume they want the perfect version, even if that means it takes longer. But as a supervisor, there were many times where I would rather have seen a rough draft on time, so I can see where you are up to, whether you're going roughly in the right direction, whether there's any fundamental misunderstandings, rather than you taking an extra two weeks to polish something that I am not even sure you're going in the right direction.
So sometimes actually being able to say, look, I can either get you a rough draft by this time when we originally said, or I can get you something more polished by that time, you and the supervisor can work out together which of those is better.
If you don't, can't compromise on the quality. You can't ask for more time, and there's a limited amount of resource that you are able to give it or willing to give it, then the scope has to change. So in that case, maybe the parameters around your literature review need to be less so maybe you only focus on experimental studies instead of experimental and descriptive study or whatever it might be, Translate into your subject area. The scope needs to change.
So keeping that in mind, thinking what different options you've got, is there more of me I can give to this or somebody else that can help with elements of it? That's the resource side, but remember you get to pick where your boundaries are with that. Can I ask for more time? What does the quality need to be? Is it better to do something complete but rough, or is it better to have done some of it in good quality or to have had an extension? And scope. Do you have to do the whole thing, say to your super, I can get you the introduction by the deadline, but I won't have the method as well, for example, rather than saying, can I have an extension for the whole thing? Sometimes that can be useful. Here's a section of it on time. Now I need an extension for another section of it.
Working around that project management triangle can really help you figure out how am I going to manage when I've got too much to do, but I feel I need to do it all.
Another place where the project management triangle can be useful is with some of the basic admin tasks that we do. We're all high achieving people. We like doing things well. I have spent a lot of time correcting fonts on forms because those stupid auto fill forms come out in one font for one box and one font for a different box, and it annoys me.
That's not necessary. If I had been looking more curiously and mindfully at my project management triangle, I might have gone, “you know what, if I fill this form in, but to a lower quality ie I don't faff about with the formatting. I just get things in there that need to be in there and don't overthink it”, then I can get this done in a lot less time. Get that whole plate off my list and not have to think about it anymore.
So which of your plates, which of your tasks, could you actually do to a much lower quality than you're doing at the moment and it not really matter? You know the sorts of tasks this can be. Don't polish the underside of the banister.
So those are my three tips for you today.
If you are feeling like you have too much to do, you are probably right. Start from compassion, start from curiosity, and see this as a problem to be solved rather than a judgment of you and your capacity and your ability to do your job. There is too much to do for everyone. How we succeed and how we thrive is by deciding which things get, how much of us for how long, and to what quality. We get to pick.
Thank you so much for listening. 20 episodes Yay! And I will see you next week for episode 21.
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