2.42 Eight ways you might be secretly procrastinating

Procrastinating is when we scroll social media instead of working, right? No! Procrastination is anything that we do to avoid the emotions associated with doing the task we intend to do. In this episode, I will share eight things that I think are often used as procrastination and help you figure out what to do if you recognise yourself in this! I suspect we all will...

****

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

****
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

What is your go to procrastination activity? I think my worst one is scrolling social media. It's my kind of default if I get stuck on something, I, there's something I don't want to do or whatever, I end up scrolling social media. Sometimes it can be things like watching TV if I'm particularly stuck in a series. It can sometimes be, now that my husband works from home, going and annoying him instead of doing my work. But today I'm going to argue that those forms of procrastination, whilst unhelpful, at least we know we're procrastinating. If I'm scrolling on social media when I'm meant to be recording a podcast, I know I'm procrastinating. If I'm chattering with my husband when I'm meant to be writing the next stage of my handout, I know I'm procrastinating. If I'm watching all the episodes of Traitors U. S. Season 2, which I did last week, message me if you've been watching. No spoilers, but oh my god. If I'm watching those when I'm meant to be planning next year's membership, also exciting. Then I know I'm procrastinating. Doesn't mean I've fixed it, doesn't mean I can stop it necessarily, but at least I know. And for those of you who know my NICE model of procrastination, the N is for notice. It's notice we procrastinate. If you haven't seen that one, make sure you're on my email mailing list and you can have a whole freebie article thing about it. Today's episode though, we are going to be thinking about eight things. that I believe are often signs of procrastination that we usually don't think of as procrastination and they are the insidious ones. They are the ones that leave us ending a week going, I don't even know what I did this week, but it wasn't the things I intended to do. So, keep listening, make sure you identify which of these eight you're doing and what you can do about it.

Hello, and welcome to the PhD life coach. And if you are listening to this live, I am on my holidays. So I am pre recording this one because I didn't procrastinate it. Yay. Go me. I put a time block in for recording podcasts. I planned it, I'm recording it, and I'm very proud of myself. Today we are going to be thinking about eight things that can often be procrastination that you may not think of as procrastination. I'm going to talk about why we need to identify those and what we can do when we notice that we're doing them. 

Now I often start with a caveat. Apparently this is a sign of ADHD that you feel the need to like pre explain to people what you're going to say so that you don't offend them. So go with me if this is just me being neurodivergent but I feel the need to say this in advance. All of the things that I'm about to identify are things that can be very, very useful. Some of them are things that are absolutely essential to our academic career. So if you go away from this podcast saying, Vikki says I don't need to read anything. Vikki says I mustn't help other people. You've entirely missed the point! 

My point is the activities that I talk about today are things that we often choose to do instead of the other thing that we actually intended to do. None of these things are harmful in their own right. None of these things are things that we must never do. But I want you to notice which of these you do when you're intending to do something else. Because that's the definition of procrastination. Procrastination is doing something other than what we intend, in order to avoid the emotion associated with the thing we intended to do. So, if you had planned to write in a block on Wednesday, and you ended up doing one of these eight things instead, that's procrastination. You are avoiding whatever emotions are associated with this task that you wanted to do, and you're avoiding it by doing other things. 

Now there's two reasons why we want to notice this. The first one is if you don't notice it, you can't do anything about it, and you end up in this confused state where it's like, things always come up, I don't understand, I end up doing other things. I don't know how I'm ever going to get this done. If you don't notice it, you can't fix it. And the second thing, and this one's really cool, is if you notice which of these you usually do, you can start to identify what needs that task is meeting and work out how to meet those needs doing the task you intend to do. Because often when we're procrastinating, not only are we avoiding the negative emotion that we associate with doing the task, we're also looking for something as well. And I talked about this on my recent episode about getting distracted, the kind of push and pull, the push away from the things we intend to do and the pull towards the things we're distracted by. So if we can understand the things that we procrastinate by doing, and we understand what needs they're meeting, we can really start to plan our intentional activities a lot more mindfully, so they meet those needs and we get done the things we want to get done. So as usual, I've noted down eight. I might make up more as we go along. We'll see. 

The first one is reading. Now I touched on this. I'm not going to talk about this for ages. Cause I just did a whole episode about why you shouldn't read in a writing block. Reading can be procrastination. Obviously reading's important. Don't go and tell your colleagues and supervisors that I told you you don't need to read. But often what I see is the reason for people reading is to feel more certain about their ideas, to feel ready to write. And I want to remind you, your feelings of certainty or your feelings of being ready don't come from reading.

They come from the thoughts that you are having. There is no amount of reading that will prepare you to feel absolutely, completely certain as you do a first draft of something. Reading can be a procrastination from experiencing the emotion of uncertainty, from experiencing the notion of confusion. We keep reading in order to fix the uncertainty, in order to fix the confusion, rather than because we're looking for anything in particular. If you notice that every time you sit down to write, you think, oh, I don't quite know enough about X, and you go off and read, that's procrastination. Now, do you still need to read more things? Yes. Will that work better if you do the reading after you've attempted to write something? Yes, absolutely. And check out that recent episode if you want to hear more about why. Reading more can be an attempt to avoid uncertainty. It can be an attempt to avoid having to make a decision, because when we write, we have to decide what our argument is, okay? Whereas when we're looking at other people's work, we don't have to make any decisions about what we're including or not including. We're just reading all this stuff. Reading can be procrastination. If that is one that you experience, I want you to notice what emotions you're trying to avoid, and I want you to ask yourself, what would it be like to write while feeling uncertain? What would it be like to draft something while not being sure that my argument makes sense. Those are the emotions that we need to learn to tolerate in order to get on with the writing. We don't even have to make them go away. You can think thoughts to try and make yourself feel more purposeful or determined or whatever, but you can also just decide, I'm going to write while feeling uncertain. I'm going to outline this while feeling a bit confused. I don't need to fix that by reading. Then once we've got outlines, we've got drafts, we go and read afterwards. Absolutely that activity comes, but avoid it as a way to make yourself feel better. 

The second one is doing tasks for other people. Often when I speak to people, whether it's PhD students helping out their supervisors, whether it's academics supporting their students and colleagues, often we find we don't have time for writing or the big tasks that we want to get done, because we end up doing bits of things for other people. Someone emails, they need to know where something is, so you let them know. Somebody knocks on your door, asks if they can pick your brain, so you invite them in. All of these things munch away at the time that we've dedicated to do a piece of work. Why do I think this is procrastination? Because helping other people is way easier than doing your difficult tasks. You've got somebody specifically asking for it. It's a very clear question. Seeing answers to other people's problems is way easier than seeing answers to your own problems. You get immediate gratification because you tell yourself you're a good person for doing it and they thank you as well. And it feels kind of urgent and time pressured because somebody's asked for it. Okay, all of those things are really tempting and all of those thoughts will make you feel purposeful and on it and helpful and like a good person and those are all good things. We all want to feel like that and again, we also don't want to be that professor who just locks himself in a room and doesn't help anybody with anything. No one wants to be that person. But that equally doesn't mean you have to be on demand available for absolutely everybody all of the time to the detriment of your own ideas and career and enjoyment. There's a place in between this. If you are someone that finds that you're procrastinating by helping people, the first step is to recognize it as procrastination. Often we tell ourselves, I couldn't get to writing because I had to blah. I had to, I was interrupted, I was asked to. And we hand all our empowerment to somebody else. We hand all our empowerment to people who are asking things of us and almost hold ourselves as this kind of slightly helpless thing that, well, if people ask me, then I have to. It's not true. What's happening is that you had planned to do your task and when that time came, you chose to do something for somebody else instead of this. And where this one is particularly difficult is secretly I think you like that a bit. Secretly I think you like the fact that you're somebody who puts others before yourself. And that's fine, that's okay. That can be a big part of your kind of sense of self, but you also have to then balance it with the you that does want to do this work, with the you that wants to help others by role modeling the fact that you don't have to do everything that everybody else asks. If you're not willing to do this for yourself, do it for the people behind you. Do it for the members of staff or the students who are more junior to you, who see you sacrificing your own career in order to help everybody else. This is procrastination. It's really nice procrastination. It's really well intentioned procrastination. But it is procrastination. You are partly choosing it because you want to be lovely to everybody else, but you are also partly choosing it because it is easier than doing the hard thing. You know you're capable of helping them. You don't know whether you're capable of writing this paper or getting that grant. Now, if you find yourself, if this is you, there's a few things you can do about it. You can schedule time for that. You can schedule it. There's two hours of my day, every single day, where I'm doing work that I'm perfectly happy to be interrupted from. Come by then. You can schedule it in. If you want to be someone that helps people, tell people, after lunch, as long as I'm not in a meeting, interrupt, whatever, contact me, I'll do whatever. But between 9 and 11, I'm not here. I don't exist. There's nothing that can't wait till this afternoon. So you can schedule time for the things you like. You can remind yourself that helping yourself to complete these tasks is helping other people. Your department needs you to publish things. Your department needs you to get grants. Your department needs you to finish your PhD. Getting these big tasks done is also for other people as well as yourself. It's for your participants. It's for the people that care about your research. It's for you. It's for your family. There's other people that care about that one too. They're just a few more steps removed and so we have to more actively remind ourselves of that. The other thing you can do is you can notice the extent to which this procrastination is because the tasks for other people feel achievable and more time constrained and you can then choose to replicate that in your writing practice. Make it much clearer and more specific, exactly what you're meant to be doing today. So there's much easier to go, Oh yeah, get that done. Do, do, do. And you can look at my episode about how to break your work down into chunks to get more tips about how to do that. Lovely to help people. Not as an excuse not to do your own work.

Third one, napping. Now, many of you will be a fan of a nap. Many of you will actually feel better after you've had a nap. Many of you will have psychological or physical disabilities that mean that napping is a really important part of your self care. If that's all the case, not procrastination. If you've got a young baby that means you get broken up sleep and you nap in the afternoon in order to catch up your sleep, not procrastination. You are intending to nap. You are napping. That is productive. That nap is a productive nap. Happy days. If you need it, you intentionally planned it in and you're now doing it, it's not procrastination. However, if every time you sit down to start a writing block, you feel the urge to have a nap. I want you to really question, is it a physical need for a nap? Or is it resistance to doing the task that we're about to do? Because our brains are tricky things, okay? There's many times that where you just don't want to do a thing because it feels difficult, it feels confusing, it feels too big, it's overwhelming, you should have done it before, that your brain actually gives you physical sensations of sleepiness. This isn't that you're just going, Oh, I think I'll just lie down. You actually properly feel sleepy. If there's no specific reason you need a nap, you haven't missed sleep, you're not ill, you don't have disabilities that would feel better for naps, I want you to really ask yourself, am I just avoiding doing this thing? And if you are, what can really help is actually, ironically, a little bit of physical stimulation, a little bit of having a jump up and down, a little bit of putting a favourite song on, a little bit of fresh air, just a few minutes of something that's more energising. If you're somebody who regularly actually needs naps, actually needs to fall asleep and actually feels better afterwards, let's just plan for that. Let's put that in your diary. I know for everyone that's not possible if you're working on campus and all of those things, but if that's something you regularly need, let's just intend to do it, put it in a time slot where it will be good, and then do it. And then it's productive, happy days, you're doing what you intended. But watch out for the desire to nap as a form of procrastination.

Quick interjection. If you're finding today's session useful, but you're driving or walking the dog or doing the dishes, I want you to do one thing for me after you've finished. Go to my website, theasyourlifecoach. com and sign up for my newsletter. We all know that we listen to podcasts and we think, Oh, this is really, really useful.

I should do that. And then we don't end up doing it. My newsletter is designed specifically to help you make sure you actually use the stuff that you hear here. So every week you'll get a quick summary of the podcast. You'll get some reflective questions and you'll get one action that you can take immediately.

To start implementing the things we've talked about. My newsletter community also have access to one session a month of online group coaching, which is completely free, but you have to be on the email list to get access. They're also the first to hear when there's spaces on my one to one coaching, or when there are other programs and workshops that you can get involved with.

So after you've listened, or even right now, make sure you go and sign up. 

Fourth thing, making things beautiful. This might be your slides. This might be tidying up typos. Oh, I can't move on. If there's typos in the paragraph, I can't possibly move on to the next one. It just really bugs me. Well, you could just choose to not let it bug you. Or you could choose to allow it to bug you and write the next section anyway. You're allowed to be bugged. It's okay. Making things beautiful is often way easier than writing the next bit. And when we tell ourselves these stories that I couldn't possibly move on until it's sorted. I just need to find the right picture for this slide and then I'll move on. Otherwise it's going to bother my head. We end up using up so much time that is meant to be being spent generating new content. Now in my, how to be your own best personal assistant episode, we talked about how you can actually refer that almost to another role. That one version of you is in charge of generating content and your personal assistant version of you is responsible for making things beautiful. That can really help because you'd be like, I am going to make it beautiful. It's just not my job right now. So I want you to notice if this is something that you do. You like everything to be just so, as a way of avoiding the more challenging emotions associated with generating new content. Again, you can start to recognize what needs this is meeting. So often when we make things look nice and tidy or beautiful, we say nice things to ourselves. Oh, look at that. That looks so good. I'm so pleased with that. Yes. Just like that. And we say nice things to ourselves. So you could start doing that when you've just created a scruffy paragraph. Like, oh, look at that. I've got a whole paragraph written. Wicked. It's a bit of a mess, but happy days. I'm so glad it exists. We can give ourselves a sort of praise that at the moment, some of us only reserve for when something looks all nice . . We can also, like with the reading, just get better at tolerating the negative emotions associated with it being scruffy. If it annoys you because the things aren't lined up properly, that's okay. You can be annoyed. We're grown ups. We can cope with being a bit annoyed and still do our work. We can try and reduce the level of annoyance by thinking different thoughts. It doesn't matter. I'll sort it out later. Whatever. But we can also just be annoyed and do it anyway. So with many of these things, it's about learning to tolerate some of the emotions that we're trying to avoid by doing these procrastinatory activities.

The fifth one is waiting till you're ready to do something. Often we talk about waiting till I'm in the right state of mind, till the creative juices are flowing, waiting until we're sure that we're ready for promotion, for example. Waiting is often also procrastination. Again, it's avoiding the challenging emotions of feeling unsure about whether you can do something, but trying anyway. Now, with things like promotion or sending stuff to your supervisor, I'm not saying that sometimes you shouldn't wait until it gets to a particular stage before you do that. What I'm suggesting is that instead of passively waiting, you spend time figuring out exactly where it's at and exactly what we're waiting for. What decisions do we need to make? What things are going to happen or what time points, what things do we need to put in motion so that they do happen? So that when the time is right, we are actually ready, rather than waiting until we just spontaneously feel ready, which is usually a long time after, we could have done it sooner. If you're saying, you know, I just don't feel ready yet. I'll do that when I feel ready. Ask yourself much more specifically, what do I need in order to feel ready? What are the specific things I need? And how can I start moving towards those things? So that becoming ready is become some action that you're actually doing in an intentional and guided way, rather than a kind of sensation that you're expecting one day will just kind of pop up and go, okay, we're ready. Because that often doesn't happen.

The sixth thing is planning and task organization. Now I'm well aware that many of you will have listened to my role based time blocking episode or the various ones about task management, whatever, and started to reorganize some of your systems. So again, reorganizing your systems, finding out things that work for you, isn't always procrastination. It usually is procrastination if you've got a sudden urge to do it right in the middle of being really, really busy with doing other things. So in my what to do when you've got too much to do course that I offer for PhD students and members of staff, we talk about how when you're in the midst of overwhelm, where everything is just feeling too much, that is not the moment to decide you need a new planner, you need a new to do list management system, a new app or whatever else. That's the moment to pick one thing and make some progress on it. We get to recognize that there are points at which more new systems might be useful, might help us keep better track of what we're doing, but in the midst of overwhelm is not one of them. If we try and do it in the midst of overwhelm, it's procrastination because we're avoiding the sensation of overwhelm without actually addressing the things that are overwhelming us. We're avoiding the sensation of overwhelm by making ourselves feel organized because we want to feel organized. And we're doing that by chasing down this elusive perfect system. So planning, useful, finding new systems, useful, but only when we do it, when we intend to do it, rather than as a way of avoiding those feelings of overwhelm and stress.

The seventh one, and I'd be interested to hear what you think of this one. So make sure, make sure you're on my email list. You send me your thoughts on this. Seventh one is complaining. I remember as an academic that there were certain people that you knew, if you bumped into them in the corridor, were gonna spend 15 minutes telling you why everything was so terrible. And don't get me wrong, I love being a shoulder to cry on sometimes when somebody is in acute need, or where it's a good friend and you want to be there for them and all of those things. But there's also just other people that you know will just moan to you, and then when you go in your office, they'll moan to somebody else, and then they'll moan to somebody else. And the stories are more dramatic every time, you can almost predict the things that they're going to say. And that is procrastination. Them complaining is procrastination, and you listening to them, or joining in, is also procrastination. 

Now, how do we tell the difference between the sort of complaining that's healthy and the sort of complaining that's procrastination? The first is, if you're complaining and the purpose is to experience the emotions and to vent, it should relieve over time. It should be something that actually, by getting it off your chest, you then feel a bit better about it. You've sort of passed through that initial response. If you find that by complaining about it, what actually happens is it just gets worse and worse and you work yourself up, then often what we're doing is avoiding doing something about those things. We're avoiding making the decision to accept them, we're avoiding making the decision to resist them, and we're avoiding coming up with some sort of compromise system that works. We're just moaning about it. So if you're venting and you feel better immediately afterwards, maybe that's okay. Maybe that doesn't count as procrastination. Maybe that's a necessary experiencing of emotions. If you're complaining in a way that might actually initiate change, also not procrastination. So if you're complaining in a way where you're saying, look, this is happening, this is why it's a problem and these are the things we could do about it, you're effecting change in your environment, or you're trying to at least, that doesn't count as procrastination. When it's procrastination is when we're not making ourselves feel better, we're not changing anything, we're just spending more time moaning about it than actually getting on and doing something. And the doing something could be putting in formal complaints. The doing something could be just getting over the fact that that person is annoying and that's just the way it is and we've got to put up with it and we're just going to let them be. It could be getting on and doing some of the tasks that we're complaining we have too many things to do. There were times when I spent so much time complaining to other people that I had too much to do, that if I'd just done some of the things I would have felt a lot better and I would have had less to do. So we've all been there and it's not to beat up on people that spend time complaining, but I want you to notice when you're using complaining as a procrastination to avoid doing something about the situation. And finally, and this one is the most me one of all of these, and if any of my friends from my old workplace or anything are listening to this, you will know this one is one that I am constantly on. My final form of procrastination is coming up with new ideas. So many of us who have creative brains, many of us with ADHD, with whatever tendencies, we love to come up with new ideas. And the times that new ideas are most tempting is when there is something you need to finish that you've been doing for a long time. That last 10 percent of a project, that cracking on with something that you're not sure why you signed up for, but you really need to just get finished now. When you've got admin jobs that probably need doing, that's the time when it becomes really exciting to design a whole new workshop, to design a whole new research project, to try and set up a new collaboration, whatever it might be. New ideas can be procrastination from focusing in on the things that you've actually chosen to do. Again, I love my ideas, I love the sensations I have when I have ideas, and I love the fact that I'm a creative person and that many of these new ideas I bring into fruition, but I'm getting much better at recognizing when I'm going off into a little rabbit hole of new ideas as a way of avoiding doing something. I'm getting better at recognizing it, going, Oh yeah, you're procrastinating. And I'm getting better at taking the steps I need in order to move on. And what do I mean by that? The first thing is I need somewhere to put the new ideas. So I have places where I can jot down my ideas that are things for the future that are not for now. And I can put them on those lists, knowing that there will be a time when I put that in my diary and intentionally think about that new idea. But that time is not now. So much better at having somewhere to put them. I'm also getting better at recognizing that when I have the new ideas and when I'm getting all excited about them as a form of procrastination, it's usually because I'm feeling in need of some connection, for some enthusiasm and some sort of optimism, because when I've got new ideas, I automatically am like, Oh, we could do this, we could do that and it'd be amazing. And. I'm recognizing that what I really need is those emotions. I don't need the new project. In fact, the last thing I need usually is the new project. It's usually when I'm completely overwhelmed by having too much to do that I come up with these ideas and get excited about them. What I need is the emotion that it's generating and so what I can do instead is take a step back and figure out how can I make myself feel zest, feel enthusiasm, feel excited about the things that I'm actually intending to do and actually need to do rather than experiencing those by coming up with new ideas. I'm recognizing the emotions that I'm avoiding and I'm recognizing the emotions that I'm being drawn to.

So those are my eight things. Which ones are your things? And how are they impacting your ability to do the things that actually you want to do? This isn't even about doing the things you have to do or should be doing. These are things that you actually want to do. Those of you doing PhDs do want to finish your thesis. Those of you in academic careers, do want to do the piece of work that enable you to get to the next step or to enjoy what you're doing, or to do the bits that you came here for in the first place. Which of these are most common for you? They might come in waves depending on what you're experiencing. Whichever it is, it's okay. You're completely human. There's nothing wrong with doing any of these things. They don't make you a bad person or a lazy person or a big procrastinator that can't do anything about it. But it's really useful to notice. To know that procrastination isn't just faffing about on the internet or watching TV. It's doing many of these things when we're intending to be doing something else. When we notice, we can take power from that, create the environment we need in order to do the things that we want to do. I really hope that has been useful for you all. I'd love to hear what you think. 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.