2.36 What to do when you get distracted

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.

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. My weekly podcast, The PhD Life Coach covers the most common issues experienced in universities, including procrastination, imposter syndrome, and having too much to do. I give inspiring and actionable advice and often have fun expert guests join me on the show. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you already listen, please find time to rate, review and tell your friends! 

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

#phd #academia #lecturer #professor #university #procrastination #overwhelm #amwriting #writing #impostersyndrome #timemanagement #support #coaching #highereducation #research #teaching #podcast #community

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. My weekly podcast, The PhD Life Coach covers the most common issues experienced in universities, including procrastination, imposter syndrome, and having too much to do. I give inspiring and actionable advice and often have fun expert guests join me on the show. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you already listen, please find time to rate, review and tell your friends!

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

#phd #academia #lecturer #professor #university #procrastination #overwhelm #amwriting #writing #impostersyndrome #timemanagement #support #coaching #highereducation #research #teaching #podcast #community

Transcript

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 .

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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.