So many clients tell me that they struggle to transition between different types of tasks, particularly when it comes to fitting writing into their regular days. In this episode, I'm talking about my not-very-illustrious history of attempting triathlons and what I learned about "transitioning" between the different sections of the race. If we're going to time block effectively (and not just tell ourselves that it "doesn't work for us"), then we can pick up some really useful tips from triathletes to use in our every day lives.
Transcript
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 34 of the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Now, before I became a life coach, I was sort of a sports scientist. I say sort of because, even though I spent 20 something years working in a School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, which I adored, I never felt like a proper sport scientist. My PhD looked at more psychological factors and immune function. It wasn't really sport per se. And even though later in my career I moved into more exercise type research, I was never really your archetypal sport scientist.
And that extended to my sporting abilities too. I'm what could very much be described as a jack of all trades, master of none. And one of the things with being in a sports science department is that what science is first and foremost what we do, there's an awful lot of people who are super good at sport. Really fit, you know, go off and do races for fun on the weekend and all of these things. And so I sort of found myself in this world where I could kind of do a bunch of sports, sort of, but I was surrounded by people who were amazing.
Anyway, that's a very long way around to explain how somehow, for lots of different reasons, I ended up doing some triathlons. Sprint triathlons, I hasten to add. Those of you who know anything about triathlons, sprint triathlon is very much the baby brother of the full triathlon. I never did a full triathlon. I've certainly never went near an Iron Man, even though I knew lots of people who did. But back in the day, many moons ago for a good cause, I did two sprint triathlons.
The reason I'm talking about triathlons today is not to try and pretend that I am the kind of person who just goes and does these races, because I'm really, really not. But because one of the things you have to do in triathlon is you have to transition between disciplines. You have to switch from swimming to cycling, cycling to running. If you are into triathlon, this is a whole thing. People perfect the art of the smooth transition, where it’s as fast as possible, moving from one discipline to the next and then onto the next.
I really got reminded of this recently when a lot of clients that I've been talking to about time blocking said that one of their biggest problems with time blocking is that they get to the end of their block that they'd assigned to writing, for example, they hadn't finished all the things that they wanted to finish, and so they then choose not to transition into the next thing that they had planned.
So maybe they'd planned an hour for writing. And then an hour for some committee task that they need to do, but they hadn't got enough writing done and so they didn't, and then they didn't do the committee task and they get behind and they declare time blocking doesn't work for them.
And thinking about those transitions really made me think back to my triathlon, my very amateur triathlon days when we would go down to the astroturf, we would practice running in our wetsuit, taking our wetsuit off, getting onto our bikes, and then dropping off our bikes and putting our trainers on and running.
If I learn anything in my time in the sports science department surrounded by people who do Ironman competitions for fun, is that these people take their stuff seriously. They hone it down to a fine art. And so it just made me think, what could we learn from triathlon transitions that would be useful in time blocking?
So today I'm going to be telling you nine lessons that I have learned from my rudimentary, very amateur triathlon experience. None of them include avoiding the geese, but at Windsor Triathlon in London, I would highly recommend that. I got delayed because there were geese at the point where we needed to get out of the water and I don't know about you, but we don't want to start a fight with those geese, but there's no, you know, so avoid the geese. There's an extra bonus one for you.
Anyway, nine lessons. First lesson. It's okay that it's hard. So sometimes people seem to think that if they find it difficult to transition between one thing and another, that means they shouldn't. That means they should decide not to follow their time blocking for the day. It's difficult to transition, so I'm not going to transition. I'm just going to keep doing what I was doing until I feel like changing and then I'll do something different.
Imagine if that was how it went in triathlons. Now there's always in triathlons, people have preferences for which leg they like best. Most triathletes hate the swimming. Tweet me if you're a triathlete that loves the swimming. I've never really met one.
Well imagine if they could just decide, “oh, you know what? I'm only going to swim a tiny bit and then I'm going to do loads and loads and loads of cycling.” It doesn't happen. You have to accept that just because transitions are hard doesn't mean that you get to just avoid a transition. You're going to have to change task sometimes.
It's okay that it's hard and when something is difficult like that, we don't get to just avoid it. We have to practice it. And so if you find transitions difficult, then the first step can be, let's practice making transitions. Let's set up our time blocking in such a way that you are switching between tasks and let's just accept in advance it's going to be difficult, but you are going to do it anyway.
It being difficult is not a reason something has gone wrong. There's nothing wrong with finding it difficult, but it doesn't mean we don't do it either.
The other thing that doesn't help is keep telling yourself that you are somebody who finds it difficult to transition between tasks. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but the more we keep telling ourselves that we are not good at it, the less chance there is of us actually wanting to practice it and give it a go.
A triathlete can spend all this time saying, they're not very good at transitioning from swimming to bike, they're still gonna have to do it. So we might as well say, “okay, that's okay. Maybe I find it difficult, but that's okay. I can get on and I can practice.” So let's turn this into a skill that we try to develop rather than something we just tell ourselves is hard and therefore we're not going to do.
The second thing is to allow for transitions. Now, whenever I've seen an academic’s diary, including my diary when I was working in academia, we will go straight from one task into another task and we wouldn't leave any time for transitions. We know when you get your triathlon breakdown at the end, you get your swim time, your transition time, your cycle time, your transition time and your run time. You can see the breakdown of it.
We need to accept that we need to plot in a transition period, five or 10 minutes between meetings, and do not tell me that this is not possible because the stuff that you have to do in meetings or in lectures or whatever it is, doesn't just happen to fit into exactly one hour blocks.
It fits into an hour block because you schedule an hour block for it. If you scheduled a 50 minute block for it, you could make it fit into a 50 minute block. If you scheduled 45 minutes, you could make it fit into a 45 minute block.
There is nothing magic about one hour meetings, so you do not have to have one hour meetings back to back. You can plot in five minute transition, 10 minute transition. In fact, this is something that I've massively noticed since the pandemic, so back in the day, you know, pre pandemic, the olden days, all of that.
I used to walk between meetings. I would go to a meeting in somebody's office and then I would walk to a committee meeting and I'd have a meeting there, and then I'd walk out of that meeting and I'd walk somewhere else. I'd go back to my office to meet somebody. I'd walk to my lecture theater, da, da, da.
I worked out once that I was walking like three miles a day, just around campus, going between meetings and. Somehow there was time for that yet. Now that so much happens on Zoom, we often up using all the time right up until the last minute. End that meeting. Start the next meeting, and off we go. The meetings haven't got longer, we're just using that time that we used to spend walking between them.
Reinsert that commuting time, reinsert that time that you would've allowed to walk between them so that you allow yourself some transition time. It's no wonder you find transitions difficult if you're not allowing time for those transitions to happen. Nobody boings straight out of the river onto their bike with no transition time, and you shouldn't expect the same thing either.
I also want you to think about how much time you give yourself for these transitions. Sometimes we feel like we have to jam pack every single moment of every single day. I just saw a tweet today from Dr. Liz Gloyn talking about how if you've got five hours of meetings in a day, You're not allowed to beat yourself up about not being productive in the other two hours.
It's so true. Sometimes we expect ourselves just to be able to transition from one thing to another to another. Even triathlete rest after their second transition. They do three things and then they rest. So thinking about how can you actually plan in short transition times for some parts where you just want to get going on the next thing, but then plan in longer transitions your gap between races, as it were, where you know what, it's perfectly fine not to be productive during that time.
In fact, the productivity that's expected in that time is just you clarifying your brain, resting your body, having a moment outside. Planning in those breaks is all part of your effective transition strategy.
The third thing, is if transitions are difficult, let's minimize the number of them we need in a day. Sometimes we, again, we can feel like that's out of our control, but there are things that are within your control. So one of the things I talked about last week in my session on role-based time blocking is trying to slot together things that feel similar.
So if you have a couple of teaching sessions in an afternoon, for example, can you plot in to do teaching admin in between those sessions so you sort of stay in that teaching mode. If you've got a couple of committee meetings, can you plan to do admin stuff in between those so you stay in the same mode? Let's minimize the number of transitions that we have so that we can keep it as efficient as possible.
You don't see triathletes. Do a bit of swimming, do a bit of running, do a bit of cycling, bit of swimming, bit of right running, depending on how, what they feel like at the time. Let's see how it goes, know how long it takes. No, they do this, then they do this, then they do that. We can channel more of that into our daily planning as well.
Tip four. If we're going to transition, let's make it as easy as possible. So those of you who have ever seen a triathlon, transition area, you'll know that the athletes like lay it all out in advance. So before the race begins, you'll find all the people in the transition zone laying out their bike exactly where they want it, checking they know where it is putting their bike shoes, if they're using specific bike shoes, their helmets, all of those sorts of things, the tools they need for the next section, they lay it out all nicely.
So right down to having the helmet lying on its back so that the opening is upwards and the little straps out to open already so that you can literally just grab it, shove it on your head, do it up underneath your chin and off you go.
So getting your thinking about where am I gonna need this? What's going to make it super easy to transition? This is something you can spend time doing when you look at your diary thinking, okay, I'm going to have a meeting there. I've got an hour to get that task done. And then I've got a meeting there. How can you lay out your work in a way that makes it as easy as possible to jump into that task and get it done in that hour?
How can you make it really clear what you're doing? How can you make sure you've got all the things you need for it? You've had a quick look at it in advance so that you know it can happen in that gap. One of the things that people often do is they leave forms. They don’t know how long a form's going to take to fill in, and it's not until they decide to do it that they open it and realize actually it's really short or actually it's really long.
Have a look in advance. What bits of information do you need to request from somebody else? Is there anything like that? How can you set it up so that you know that when you transition into that task, you make it as easy as possible? Connected to that at the end of our sessions, we can also make it as easy as possible for next time. And this is something that you probably not allowed to technically do in a triathlon, but I call it parking on the downhill. So if you've been writing, for example, and you know that you're coming up to the end of your session and your brain is saying to you, “oh, but actually I know what I want to write for this next bit, maybe I'll just keep going.”
Don't keep going. Write some quick notes to future you, telling you what comes next. Because actually, if you are leaving this feeling like I know exactly what I need to do next, that's the perfect way to leave it. Because if you can take a few minutes to write those thoughts down, quick bullet points to your future self with an encouraging statement, suddenly it's so much easier to transition into next time.
And you'll notice in triathlons, people do this even though they're not returning to the cycling leg, once they start running, for example, they do have to avoid something called littering, which is essentially getting your kit laying around in other people's way. So they do, when they come in, they put their stuff back exactly where they intend to put it, so that it's kind of tidy and away, and you can do that too, so that you are then set up ready for the next time that you dial into this particular activity.
Tip five. Triathletes know that those transitions are key points to look after yourself as well. So I mentioned that triathletes will lay out their kit. They'll have it all exactly where they need it, but it's not just the kit for the next leg that they lay out.
They also lay out their water. They lay out their sun cream, they lay out their gels, for example, their carbohydrate gels that they might use for energy. I would lay out jelly babies because I wasn't fancy enough to do gels and this was in like the early two thousands or something. So I just stuffed jelly babies in my face.
Worked quite well to be fair. So I would lay out my little open, already open, ready to go bag of jelly babies so that I could stuff some of them in my face. I say this like I did lots of them. I did two. Two. Stuffing jelly babies in my face was my favorite part of it anyway. They know that transitions are a key point for you to look after yourself as well.
So in your transitions between tasks, what can you do to look after yourself? Do you allow enough time to actually go to the toilet? Do you allow enough time to make a cup of tea? Do you allow enough time to actually just take a moment, close your eyes and remind yourself why you're doing this anyway?
Whatever it takes for you to have a good transition. Do you put music on? I would love to hear if any of you use music to transition between tasks. Say after something that involves interacting with lots of other people, maybe you put some calm music on to transition into doing writing, or if you are going from writing out into needing to be more sociable, maybe you put some upbeat music on. That would be pretty cool. So think about how can you look after yourself in those transitions so that they become points of the day where you just touch base with the fact that you are a physical being with a body as well as a brain and that looking after that can make all of this a whole lot easier.
I'm trying to get in the habit of refilling my massive water cup thing. That those of you on YouTube will be able to see. Refilling that because if that sat on my desk, then I do tend to drink it. And if it's not full, then I tend to not drink anything and then crave Diet Coke. So one of my transition tasks is in between moving from one task to another is refilling my water cup to try and increase how much I'm drinking.
Number six, accept that you need to transition. Triathletes don't get to decide that they're just not going to transition. They don't get to decide that, actually, “I'm quite enjoying this swimming. I think I'll go round again.” When they've done the distance, they have to get out and they have to get on their bikes even if they don't like the bikes, even if they were enjoying the swimming, even if they felt like the swimming was going quite well, and so maybe they'll just keep doing some more so they get further ahead.
We need to just accept that there are times when we're going to need to transition. Fighting against it, saying it shouldn't be like that, doesn't really help us. And avoiding the task until you don't need to transition doesn't really help either. So one of the biggest outcomes I see of this non-acceptance of transitioning is people saying that they can't write unless they've got a whole day aside for it.
The problem is a), those clear days don't come along very often, especially for academics, maybe a little bit more for PhD students. But once you are teaching and you've got admin roles and stuff, a whole day aside for writing is really, really difficult to find, and it's also easily disrupted. So you can have a whole day put aside, somebody puts a meeting in the middle of it and suddenly your day’s ruined and you can't write anymore. That's not a way to stay in control of your writing habit and to get done the things that you want to do.
Maybe your life would be easier if you could just write all day, but if you want to get writing done within the constraints and the reality of the job that you have, maybe we just need to accept that we need to practice transitioning into it and out of it.
With that comes the fact that the amount of work you do in a slot isn't going to just tie up neatly in a little bow. It's not going to just happen to take an hour when I set aside an hour for it. So you didn't finish it. Okay? You didn't finish it, but you made a damnsight more progress than if you waited for the next time you've got three hours spare to spend on it.
Maybe you can also just decide how long something takes, and this is something I've talked about in previous episodes, but just to remind you, you get to decide how long something takes. If I told you to write 3000 words now, you could write 3000 words pretty fast. If you weren't worried about how good they were, you could write them pretty quickly.
You get to decide how long we put into these. There's consequences if you take less time, potentially. The quality of it might not be so good. The scope of it might not be so good, whatever it is, but you can decide to do it in that amount of time, and that's where you get to pick which things do you give more time to and which things do you give less time to, because frankly, the quality of it is less important to you.
You get to pick that. Often my clients seem to think that it's a fixed amount of time that things take, and you just have to accept that and fit it in. No. You can do things fast and scruffy if you want to. If it's something that's not that important and you just need to get it done fast and scruffy, let's get it out of here. You get to pick how long it takes.
I've forgotten what number I'm up to, but we'll just go with it anyway. The next tip is it's OK if your transitions are wobbly. One of the things that all triathletes know is that when you transition from cycling to running, your legs feel really weird. There's something about the different muscular movement, something about the fact that you were sat down even though you were powering yourself with your legs, moving into running your legs feel really weird and the wobbly legs can last a good few kilometres, especially depending on how hard you pushed yourself on the bike and how sort of accustomed you are to running.
So one of the things they used to tell us even when we were like baby beginner triathletes like me, was practice that. Don't just do the three disciplines separately. Practice running after you cycle so that you get used to that sort of wobbly feeling and you understand that it disappears.
The same is true when you transition. So if you are coming out of a committee meeting and going into doing some writing, there's going to be a wobble at the beginning. Even with the best laid plans in the world where you've written nice detailed guidance to yourself, you are probably not going to just go straight into beautiful fluid prose.
That's okay. You don't have to. You can have wobbly legs for a while until you get your writing groove on. So sometimes I think we tell ourselves that like, we come out of this committee, we're going to start writing. Five minutes in, it's not coming. And it's like, “oh, this is rubbish. I'll just wait until I've got an afternoon free and I'll leave it.” And then we go and check our emails or whatever because it's uncomfortable to stay here.
Stay with your wobbly legs. Stay writing really slowly. That's one of the things they recommend with running, is just you don't have to push it hard at the beginning. Just keep moving. Don't stop. Keep moving. Gentle jog. Your legs will start to feel like they belong to you again soon.
And the same's true with run with writing. If you're transitioning into writing, you're going to be wobbly at first. It's okay. Let's just keep writing. Stick with the wobbly and you'll start to feel a bit more human soon.
My second to last tip because I've utterly lost track of numbers now is analyze it. Now triathletes get to decide what type of triathlon they do. Some people realize that they're really good at the endurance components of it, and actually they want to go for the longer course triathlons all the way up to Ironman. Others decide that actually they hate the swimming, they don't want to do triathlons anymore. They're going to do biathlons where it's just biking and running. Others, you can just do swimming and running. There're all different combinations that you can go for. You can decide that you are only going to do pool swims. I did one pool swim, one river swim when I did mine, and it's very different.
You could decide you're only going to do pool swims. You could decide you're only going to do river swims, but not sea swims. You could decide that you are only going to do races where the cycling is super hilly, or you only do it where it's super flat. I'm a big fan of flat, it has to be said.
I'd also recommend not having a running course that goes past a Haagen Daas and a Ben and Jerry's. I do not thank you for that Windsor triathlon. I had to run past those three times. Cruel, cruel and unusual punishment, that was.
Anyway, you get to pick where your strengths are and how things work, but the only way you get to understand that is by trying them out and then analyzing it afterwards. Which bit did you do better? Which bit did you enjoy more? How did it work for you?
Often with time blocking and the transitions that come with time blocking, we just decide that we didn't stick to it, and therefore time blocking is rubbish and we can't transition between tasks. Then we sack it off for a while, until we feel so overwhelmed again that we listen to some podcast and they tell us to time block and we give it a go again.
We don't have to do that. We can try it, and then after we've tried it, we can analyze what worked and what didn't. Maybe you are routinely finding that you don't finish the writing bit that you want to. You've sort of end up feeling like you didn't quite get into it in the session. Okay. Let's look at our diaries and plot slightly longer blocks, maybe an hour and a half writing block works better for you than an hour.
It's okay. Let's try that. Or maybe we realize that actually what we need to do is if we've only got 45 minute slots available for writing, we need to have much clearer guidance as to what we're going to do in that slot so that we finish it feeling like we accomplished something, because what we set out to accomplish was just a paragraph or two paragraphs. So, we get to pick, we get to analyze, and then we get to decide what we're going to try next week. This doesn't have to be perfect. It's an iterative process and remembering that means you can kind of analyze your performance and keep going with it.
My final tip, and I remember this vividly when I was a baby beginner triathlete, people were giving me advice about the transitions, but they were also saying, don't overthink it. The majority of your triathlon time is going to be down to how fast you swim, how fast you cycle, and how fast you run. Yes, if you are at the kind of peak of human condition and you are trying to make up those hundreds of a second, that will get you into first place instead of second place, then yes, spending more time really perfecting the transition is, can be really important.
But when you are a beginner time blocker, maybe just accept it takes you a little bit of time to transition between tasks and that's okay. So we allow for it. With practice, we reflect, we have a think about how we can make it easier, but let's just accept that actually the important stuff is the work we're doing.
This is why I love working with PhD students and academics. You guys do such important work. You are out there at the cusp of human knowledge, changing the world, learning about the things we need to move our cultures forward, to understand why we did the things we did, to understand hearts and minds and bodies and souls, and all of these things. You're doing such important work.
The transitions. It can help stop using it as an excuse and just focus. What can I get done in this chunk of time? Now I'm going to get done something else in this other chunk of time. Let's learn from triathletes and particularly learn from the ones that said, don't overthink the transitions, just focus on getting the stuff done.
I really hope that's useful. I would love to hear from you on Twitter or through my website, Instagram as well in LinkedIn, all these different places. Let me know if you've ever done a triathlon and what you learned about transitions and whether you can apply them to your time blocking journey too.
So good to talk with you and see you next week.