2.37 Why you should never read when you're writing

So many of my clients this week have been struggling with writing. Now that's not unusual. But what has been unusual is how they've all identified the same issue with writing. They talked about settling down to have a block of writing where they decided what they were going to do. And started writing, and then realized there was a little detail that they couldn't remember, or an argument they wanted to check, or something they just wanted to look up.

And so they'd get the article, they'd check, and then they'd find themselves in a rabbit hole, disappearing off, looking up new things, finding out the details, and sort of plunging off into that literature. And then, before they knew it, their two hour block had gone, they'd written a hundred words or something, and spent the rest of the time reading.

And when I shared with them what I'm going to share with you guys today, the words You've blown my mind have come out more than once this week. It didn't strike me as being that revolutionary, but it seems to have been. This is in one to one coaching. This is in the workshops that I offer. This has come up several times this week. And so I wanted to share it with you. So if you find yourself reading when you're intending to be writing, This episode is for you.

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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

So many of my clients this week have been struggling with writing. Now that's not unusual. But what has been unusual is how they've all identified the same issue with writing. They talked about settling down to have a block of writing where they decided what they were going to do. And started writing, and then realized there was a little detail that they couldn't remember, or an argument they wanted to check, or something they just wanted to look up.

And so they'd get the article, they'd check, and then they'd find themselves in a rabbit hole, disappearing off, looking up new things, finding out the details, and sort of plunging off into that literature. And then, before they knew it, their two hour block had gone, they'd written a hundred words or something, and spent the rest of the time reading.

And when I shared with them what I'm going to share with you guys today, the words You've blown my mind have come out more than once this week. It didn't strike me as being that revolutionary, but it seems to have been. This is in one to one coaching. This is in the workshops that I offer. This has come up several times this week. And so I wanted to share it with you. So if you find yourself reading when you're intending to be writing, This episode is for you.

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach where we help you get less overwhelmed, stop beating yourself up and start living the life you want. I'm your host Dr Vicki Burns, ex professor and Certified Life Coach. Whether you're a brand new PhD student or an experienced academic, I'm here to show you that thriving in academia can be a whole lot easier than it feels right now.

Let's go. 

Hello and welcome to episode 37 of season two of the PhD Life Coach. And normally I stay within the realms of coaching and mindset and helping you figure out what's best for you. Today, I'm getting dictatorial. I'm going to give you some rules, and they are grounded in mindset, but take these as recommendations, as advice grounded in evidence and coaching strategies, see what you think. You can see if it works for you, but I highly recommend you give it a shot.

And in the interest of going down the whole writing vibe, I am going to structure this like a exam essay. I'm going to tell you what I'm going to say, and I'm going to tell you all the reasons why I think this is completely justified.

So, my key point is that when you are writing, when you are in the middle of a block of time that you have allocated to writing, you should not be reading anything. I'm going to add a second one, which is that when you've got an allocated reading block, you absolutely should be writing. So these are the two things that I'm going to try and convince you of in this episode.

So, the writing one first. Why shouldn't you be reading in a writing block? The first reason is we see the problems it causes. Every single one of you will have got partway into writing, decided you don't know quite enough, and gone off into reading and wasted that time. You will all have done that to greater or lesser extents at some point. And that's reason enough to try something different. If you didn't think about it anymore, but you just noticed that when you try and write, you end up reading and you end up derailing your writing attempts, you can try something different without any other logic there.

But, I'm a coach, and so I'm going to try and explain to you why I think this is so helpful. And, the first thing I wanna share is that it's because your reasons for reading are not helping you. Your reasons are things like, I don't know enough yet. I can't remember the details, and I should be able to. I can't write this as well as other people can, so I need to see how they put it. It's all these thoughts that generate self doubt and confusion that make it hard to write. It's not even the fact that you go off over there reading. It's the thoughts that are making you want to that are the real challenge here. Because actually if you could just quickly look something up, come back to your writing and carry on, this episode's probably not for you. This is for the people who end up buried over there, five papers deep, without realizing what they're doing. This episode's for the people who do it from panic and scarcity and confusion, rather than from a kind of quick, ooh, I'll just check that. Yes, happy days. Okay? 

And if you sometimes end up getting sucked in over there, I recommend you go cold turkey, that you don't check anything at all. Because it's easier, as is often the case in life, it's easier just not to do it, than it is to highly regulate ourselves while we do it. So that's my first reason, is that it's driven by your self doubts, that behaviour is driven by your self doubts, and therefore it's not likely to be a helpful activity.

Second reason is that you allocated this as a writing block and part of building this relationship between the us that plans, boss us, and the us that does our work, implementer us, part of building that relationship is doing the thing you plan to do in that slot. And if we regularly, as boss, plan that this is a writing slot and then as implementer decide we know better as the boss, we break down that trust between boss us and implementer us. So writing only in a writing block is important just from the point of view, that it's what you said you'd do. You called it a writing block. We're reinforcing the fact that we do what we said we will do in these slots. 

The third reason is that if you read in a writing block, you don't know how long it takes you to write something. One of the biggest pushbacks I get against role based time blocking, or any sort of time blocking, is that I don't know how long things will take. And It's no wonder you don't know how long things take if you spend half your session or three quarters of your session doing something other than writing. It's like saying you don't know how long it takes you to run 5k if you keep stopping to chat to your friends on the way and have a little picnic. It's fine, they're lovely things to do, but it means of course you don't know how long it takes you to run 5k because you never run it all the way through without stopping for those things in between.

So, if we want to be able to time block, and I highly recommend that you work on this, we need to know how long it takes us to do something when we only do that thing. We need to know how long it takes us to write 200 words when we only write.

Fourth reason. This one feels a bit harsh. But, reading is procrastination a lot of the time. Now, I am not saying, please do not go to your supervisors, or your bosses, and say, I listened to this coach on the internet and she says I don't have to read anything. Not what I'm saying.

But it is true that if you are feeling an uncomfortable emotion like confusion, or boredom, or frustration, because you're finding writing difficult or slow or any of these things, it's so much easier to go and look stuff up and read some articles under this story that I don't know enough yet than it is to face front on the frustration and the boredom and the confusion.

It becomes something we do to avoid those emotions. We think we're going over there, you know, we've got a really good story as to why it's totally justified I need to look at these things. But it's not really why we're doing it. We're doing it to avoid the uncomfortableness of a blank page or not knowing what we want to say.

All of this is solved by some really simple strategies. We're not even doing thought work today. All we're doing is putting in place one boundary. One thing that you are saying, this is now true for me, and it will change all of this. Which is, we don't read in writing sessions. Now, this means two things.

It means before writing sessions, you need to work out what you're gonna need in order to be able to write. Now, I don't mean you need to have memorized everything. I don't mean that you need to know everything back to front, but you need to have at least some idea of the point you're trying to make and a couple of the reasons why you're making that point.

We can set this up for ourselves in advance. And I've got an episode coming, which is about how to be your own best personal assistant, which is a kind of further development on the whole boss thing that we've talked about before.

But essentially, in this case, in order to be able to write without reading, we need to just make sure that we've got a few notes and a few things set out for ourselves beforehand. That enables us not only to write without reading, it also makes that time so much more effective. How many times have you sat down for a writing session where you started out going, right, uh, where was I up to? What do I need to do today? I'm not entirely, uh, not sure. So many times, I'm sure, it's really, really common that that's how we start writing sessions. And it's no wonder we feel so much sort of lack of motivation to do it, because the first thing we've got to do is actually work out what on earth we're meant to be doing anyway. That's not fun.

So this task you have to take in order to plan for a session where you're only going to be writing actually makes the writing session better. It actually makes it easier to start. It makes it more fun because actually you start it going, okay, I need to write that. Let's go. I can write that because I've got some bits down there. 

The next thing it needs is it needs you in the session, when you're thinking, Oh, I need to look that up, to just write down on another piece of paper what you need to look up and then keep writing. You can type into the chat, blah, blah, blah, brackets, check that the paper actually says this or you can write it on a separate list. Whatever you want to do, but you keep notes as you write. Insert reference here. Clarify this argument later. Work out whether this is actually accurate or not from the article. Look up the figures. Look up the statistic here. Insert number here. Whatever it is, write little notes to yourself, but keep writing. Because in reality, those things can be slotted in later when we are not in the prime real estate of writing time. Checking those things can happen in the evenings when you're tired or in the afternoon in between meetings or whenever you've got time for little bits of faffing around jobs. You can check that stuff then, you can check that stuff in a reading session.

 What we do is we write, we write to the best of our abilities, we make notes where there are things we're not clear on there, and make notes where there are things we want to check, and we keep writing. You will be amazed at how much progress you make, how many words you can chug out, when you don't let the fact that you're not quite sure what you're saying in this bit stop you writing. 

In fact, you will get a better understanding of what you do know and what you don't know if you just keep writing. Often you'll come out with things you're like, oh, I hadn't even thought of that. That's exciting. Keep that thought. Or, you'll go, I had no idea that I really didn't know this bit at all.

But, what it then means is your next reading session is going to be so much more effective. Because when you're in a reading session, you've now got a to do list. Because even a reading session can become procrastination, if it becomes a session where you're just sort of meandering through literature with no particular goal and getting frustrated about it.

Side note, if you plan a session that is about meandering through literature and that's the purpose of the session, happy days, do it, enjoy. Part of the love of academia is that side of things. But, if that's annoying and you're like, I end up reading but I don't really know where I'm going and I'm all confused and everything, this is a great way to make your reading sessions more effective as well as your writing sessions. 

Have a reading session where you're like, my job is to answer all these questions that writing Vikki came up with. Reading Vikki is now going to check that argument's true. She's going to find the numbers you need for that bit. She's going to find you a reference that backs up that point and check that there isn't anything that massively contradicts it. Let's go, let's find each of those things. You're a researcher. You research.

Then, after you've had a reading session, maybe you want to put in editing time. And your job then is to read this chunk of text that you created in a writing session, put in the bits you found from your reading sessions, and then actually make it all sound better, you know, check the structure, check the flow, check whether you repeat yourself, all of that stuff.

By separating it out, and only doing the things that you're intending to do in that session, you will be inordinately more productive. You will probably have heard the message, don't edit in a writing session, write in one session, edit in a different session. That's quite a common one. I've never heard, and certainly the students that I was speaking to this week, had never heard of not reading in a writing session, but it stands by the same logic.

You don't want to waste time perfecting sentences in a session that's designed to generate text. You don't want to waste time checking details in a time that is specified to generate text. Let's generate text. 

I would love to know. I'm going to go on in a second and tell you about reading sessions because there's a whole other thing there. But, I would love to hear from you guys. What do you think? Have a go at doing this. Even if you think I'm completely weird, have a go at it. Let me know how much writing you get done, how you find it, whether it makes a difference for you. 

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The second half of this is thinking about reading sessions. Now, you might say, Okay, Vikki, if I don't read in a writing session, then presumably I don't write in a reading session. No, I'm not going to follow my own logic there, and I'm going to say, not only are you allowed to write in your reading sessions, I would massively recommend that you do.

Because again, passively reading can be a form of procrastination. It's a form of just kind of taking stuff in. It takes cognitive effort to understand somebody else's argument, but it's not quite the same cognitive effort as deciding what your argument is. It's deciding what you're going to say and how you're going to argue it. It is easier than that.

It can also become really untargeted really quickly and not in a let's immerse ourselves in the literature way in a I'm kind of drifting through this without a purpose. kind of a way. And how we get around that is we change the tasks we give ourselves in a reading session. So many of you will put as your task, you'll be doing role based time blocking, you'll give yourself a reading block, you'll come around to that reading block, you'll look at your reading list and you'll go, I need to read the Burns et al paper. And that will be your task. Read Burns et al paper. Except if you don't know why you're reading it and you don't have a plan for what will exist at the end of that session, then you read it and you go, well done, that's interesting. Maybe you make some notes, maybe you highlight some things. I would ban highlighters, I'll tell you about that in a second. Sorry to all of you who love highlighters. Um, and then that's your reading session over. And often we can do that without any real sense of why we did it or where we are now, because we did it, other than being able to tick off our list that we read that paper. What I would encourage you to do instead is to come up with a specific task. Read the Burns et al paper and pull out the take home message. And pull out how she measured stress, for example. Because we're going to be measuring stress, let's figure out her methods and what we like about them. So what I would encourage you to do is before a reading session, decide what is going to exist at the end of that reading session. And it's not just a read paper, it's something that you've written. 

One of the things I used to get my undergraduate students to do, which I shared recently with a client and they really liked is answer. Five questions, and I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna add a sixth for you guys. So the five questions I used to get my undergrads to answer is, Why did they do this study? What did they do? What did they find? What does that mean? And what do I still want to know? And that often covers off, like, limitations, future directions, things like that. The one I would add for you guys, because you're PhD students and academics, is, what does this mean for my work? So, as a minimum, if you plan nothing else for a reading session, I want you to write answers to those five questions. When you've read a paper, why did they do it? What did they do? What did they find? What does it mean? What else do I want to know? And what does it mean for my research? 

Now, those of you in the kind of arts and humanities end of things may want to reframe those questions. Those are probably a little bit biased towards a kind of social science, sciences, actual collection of data type thing. You might want, and I'm not an expert in this area, so please adapt them for yourself, but you might want to have questions like, what was their key argument? What evidence did they use to back up this argument? What do I still want to know? Why do we care? And what does this mean for my research? Those sorts of things. Adapt these to your disciplines, but you get my point. 

Having some clear questions that you want to find the answers to, that hopefully force you to kind of process in some way, to connect, to pull out key summaries, so that you're sort of cognitively working through their material and not just looking at it in your eyes and hoping it goes in your brain.

Because this is why I hate highlighters. I like highlighters for like making stuff pretty, but highlighters when used to make notes, you have to go through so little cognitive process to actually do that. You just go, Oh, there's an interesting bit. Highlight, highlight, highlight, highlight. It takes no effort. There's no barrier to highlighting lots of things. It's quite nice highlighting. If anything, it makes you want to highlight more. I used to see my students papers and they'd highlighted like two thirds of the paper. I'm like, okay, what do you remember of the highlighted text and hide their paper? They'd be like nothing. I'm like, so what's point? Achieve nothing. Okay? 

So, try and have a note taking form where you're A. Structuring yourself as to what you're looking for. You're not just writing down a summary of their paper. And B. Where you have to actually process it through your brain in order to do so. I promise that that will make your reading sessions more effective. It also means, especially if you have these set questions, either my ones or ones that you've adapted for your discipline, this is going to make your writing session easier, too, because you've kind of already broken it down into these things. It's way easier not to need to go back and check stuff if you'd already broken it down into six, seven sentences anyway, so much easier to remember what you want to write about. 

So those are my suggestions for you. Never read in a writing session. Instead, make notes of what you need to look up in your next reading session, and just keep writing. And then in your reading session, pick in advance what you're going to write in that session on the basis of what you've read. Give it a try. Let me know how it goes. Like I say, my clients have loved this idea this week and have all excitedly gone off to try it out. Those are students who did my How to Write When You're Struggling to Write workshop this week, as well as some of my individual clients as well. If you want to know more about those workshops and stuff, do make sure you check out my website. I've still got some running through till the end of July. They're booked by universities, so speak to your university about getting those booked. Or if you're interested in coaching, do make sure that you're on my newsletter so that you get all the information about my free online group coaching. 

I really hope today was useful. The day that this actually comes out is a bank holiday, a national holiday in the uk. So if you're listening to this live, I hope that this is one brief moment of academia in your day, and you are gonna go off and enjoy the holiday. For everybody else. I hope that today is as productive and enjoyable as you want it to be. Thank you 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.