2.43 What to do when you can't judge how long things take

So many people tell me they struggle to plan because things always take longer than they anticipated. They then end up not following their plan because things run over and they get disheartened. Sometimes they stop planning entirely because it feels pointless. If that sounds like you, I've got you! In this episode we'll talk about why it's hard to judge how long things take and how to get better at it, so that we can learn to plan and to stick to our plans. 

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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

****
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

 One of the most common things I hear from clients is that I can't plan my time because I never know how long things take. Things always take me longer than I allowed for and then that just messes up my system and so there's no point planning because I never get it right. Does that feel familiar to you? Is that something you experience? It's really common at every stage of the academic career and so today we're going to be thinking about what you can do if you struggle to judge how long things are going to take.

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 43 of season two of the PhD Life Coach. Today's episode is taken directly from my Be Your Own Best Boss program. This has been a three month group coaching program that I've been running through April, May, and June. On day of recording, we actually finish today, which is super exciting. And I'm going to be turning this program into a self paced course, something that you can take yourself through. There's loads of information, there's loads of tasks and activities, reflective practices that help you to develop what type of boss you want to be and how you can become them. Make sure you're on my email mailing list, and you will be first to know when this is available for you guys to get.

In the course, I have a whole section about what to do if you're not implementing your plans. But what I'm doing for today is just selecting out this one little bit to give you a little taste and to give you some really helpful advice about something that's a really common problem. 

So the issue is people who think they can't plan their time because they're rubbish at judging how long anything takes. What they're finding is that they plan their time, things take longer than they think, and so they end up having to re jig their entire, like, time plan for the week in order to make more time for the thing they haven't planned enough time for. They often end up bumping other activities later, often those activities are the ones that are really important, or for us.

And then it all just becomes a bit of a pickle. And I get it, I've had this problem since I was a GCSE student. I remember making all my revision timetables. Be getting a little carried away with color coding them and then realizing that I was already behind on my schedule and I was going to need to make it all again.

It's a really common problem, but I think there are some real strategies and I think there are some real changes of mindset that will help us to approach this so that we can get better at planning our own time and that these misjudgments become less of a problem.

So today I'm going to take you through six things that I think you can do if this is something you struggle with. So the first one is one you're going to have heard a hundred times before, but bear with me. Do not just go, Oh, well, no, there's reasons why this advice hasn't landed before and why it will land this time.

So my first piece of guidance is that we have to be realistic about what we plan in. We have to think through all the stages of completing a task in order to plan for it accurately. 

I know you know this, I know when you plan you think you're being realistic and you've struggled with being more realistic in the past. Why I think I can help you in ways that this advice hasn't helped you before is I'm going to give you two reasons why I think you're being unrealistic at the moment and help you and overcome those.

And by overcoming the kind of things that underpin the challenges, which is what this podcast is all about, the entire podcast, it makes it so much easier for us to follow the advice that others give us. So the first reason I think that we're often unrealistic is because we put too big tasks into a block of time.

If your instructions to yourself are, work on my introduction, then who knows how long that will take, because it's a very unspecific goal. And even if you get more specific and you say write three paragraphs of our introduction, unless you're really clear what stage that is at, it's hard to know how long that would take. If you said to me, how long does it take to write three paragraphs of an introduction? I'm like, well, it depends. Do you know what's meant to be in them?

Have you got your notes? Do you have a plan? Do we have a draft and we're just tarting it up a bit? Are we generating it from start? What exactly are you trying to do? So, one way to make it easier to be more realistic is to get really specific about what you're doing in each time block. And this is a fundamental part of time blocking and task management, in fact, that I teach on this Be Your Own Best Boss program. We have to know exactly what we're meant to be doing at the moment. If I said, how long will it take to turn these bullet points into a paragraph, then suddenly it's easier. It's not easy, I'm not gonna go so far as easy, but it's much easier to guess how long it will take. 

The second thing that makes it difficult for us to be realistic about how long things take is what that means admitting to ourselves. When I talk to some of my clients in my group coaching program about this, they often said that one of the barriers to giving themselves more time was feeling like they shouldn't need more time. Feeling like other people would have been able to do it in the time that they allocated to it. So in that moment of planning, they weren't willing to be uncomfortable by giving themselves more time than they think it should and so they planned in an unrealistic amount of time, and we're then uncomfortable later. So if you're often unrealistic about how long things take, I want you to think about why. What are the thoughts that you would have if you gave yourself more time? Sometimes it's about what you should be able to do. Other times it's thoughts like, if I don't do it in this amount of time, then I won't be able to finish. And that might feel really true to you. But if you're repeatedly telling yourself, if I don't do it in this amount of time, I won't be able to finish, but then you don't do it in that amount of time and you just readjust, then it's not true that you had to do it in that amount of time, because you didn't and you're still trying to finish.

So really think, what are the thoughts that are preventing you from being more realistic? And start to challenge some of those to make it a little bit easier for us to overestimate, to give ourselves more time.

The second thing is that we need to understand that this is a skill that we're developing. Judging how long something will take, and then taking that long to do it is a skill and an art and it's something that we can't just naturally do. People seem to think that it's something that you can either do or you can't do. And if you can't do it, then, Oh no, I'm never going to be able to plan, but actually it's something we can get slowly better at. But as with anything, if we want to get slowly better at it, we have to practice, and we have to sort of follow how that practice goes. 

So what I want you to do, if you're somebody who tells yourself you can't tell how long something takes, I want you to pick a task, I want you to guess how long it will take, I want you to do it, trying your best to prove yourself right, to do it in the amount of time you said you'd do it, then see how long it actually takes and see how close you were. There used to be a race, when I was at University of Birmingham, there used to be a race where everybody had to run, I can't remember whether it was 5 or 10k, and the point wasn't to run it as fast as possible. The point was to run it in the amount of time you had told them that you would do it. Now this was before, like, widespread use of GPS and phones and all that stuff, you weren't allowed watches, you weren't allowed a phone. You had to just race the race and try and get it as close as possible to what you said you were going to do. A really fun concept for a race because it means that the fastest people won't necessarily win. And I want you to do something similar for your planning practice. Guess, have a go, try and prove yourself right, assess which direction you were wrong in, and guess again.

Now, many of us will be inconsistent. Many of us, there will be days where you can get something done in half an hour, and other days where something will take an hour. That's fine. No problem. We get to plan for those things. When we're planning, we get to say, okay, I'm planning to do this on a Friday afternoon. That means I'm probably going to be more tired. I'm probably going to be losing momentum. Let's give myself a little bit more time. Or I'm planning to do this on a Tuesday morning. I'll be in the flow after having worked on Monday. And actually I can plan in a relatively stringent amount of time because I reckon I'll be on it.

Let's go. Those of you with menstrual cycles, you can plan around those things. What times of the month you might be better, less good. Those of you with health conditions will know what times of day, what times of week, times of month are more of a struggle for you. You can even plan around weather. Some of us work more slowly when it gets warmer, things like that. Understanding what things affect how long something will take, and taking them into account, and practicing taking them into account, means we can slowly judge, and slowly get better at judging. 

The one thing I will tell you with this is estimating badly will always be better than just starting and seeing what happens. Maybe you do get it completely wrong, but when we estimate badly and we notice what we get wrong and we readjust next time, we get better. When we keep just winging it because we think we're not good at it, we never get any better and we never develop this skill.

By the way, this can also be a useful tactic for getting any boring jobs done. I used to procrastinate emptying the dishwasher and things like that, because it's like, oh, I'll do it later. And so I tried to guess how long it would take me, and I was like, 15 minutes. And then I emptied it, and it takes, like, four. And that really helps, because when I'm going, I can't bother to empty the dishwasher. It's like, four minutes! Four minutes. You can do four minutes, Vikki. So even just this guessing, trying and timing, re evaluating can help in all sorts of things, not just your academic life. 

The third thing you can do is make sure you're using role based time blocking. So if you haven't listened to this episode, I think it's episode 33. It is this notion that we all have different roles in our jobs and that if we can allocate time blocks to a role rather than to a specific task, it means we don't have to be quite as good at judging things. Now, I would always try to give yourself specific things that you're trying to get done, especially if it's writing or something like that.

But if you've just got a bunch of admin tasks and you have no idea how long they'll take, block in an hour's admin work and just smash through them. And this time it's not how long will these take? It's how much can I get done in an hour? Okay, we've allocated to that role. These are the jobs that are associated with that role. How many of them can I get done? 

The important thing here is that you've decided what order you're going to do them in. So that as soon as you start, you're like, That one. Boom. Let's go. That one. Boom. Let's go. Okay, and you work through them and you don't have lots of, Oh, I suppose I could do that one or that one. You have a list, start at the top, you keep going, you work until the end of your time block. 

So using role based time blocking, especially for those smaller things where trying to make big judgments about how long they'll take is probably more of a waste of time than just getting on with it. Role based time blocking, really, really useful.

The fourth thing is that sometimes we have to flip this on his head, and instead of saying, I wonder how long this will take, we say, I am giving this task 90 minutes. So we choose. It's not, I'm guessing it might take this long, let's see. It's, we decide, I've got 90 minutes to do this, let's go. It will be as good as I can get it in 90 minutes. If your house was a mess and somebody that cares about that stuff and that you care about was coming to visit, maybe your parents, your friends, whatever, and they're suddenly like, we'll be there in 15 minutes. And you're like, Oh my God, there's crap everywhere. You would get your house as sorted as you can within that 15 minutes. Do you guys do that? I feel like I've done this a lot in my life. I kind of crazy run around to try and make things look more presentable before everybody arrives, at least hoovering dog hair.

Now, if you'd asked me how long it would take me to clean up my house, take me a couple of hours or whatever it is. If you tell me I've got 15 minutes, I will get it good enough. I will get it as good as I can in that time. This can be particularly useful for things where you feel you might be prone to wasting some time messing about and making things beautiful.

So presentations, for example, you might decide, I'm giving myself 90 minutes to make the slides for this presentation. I know roughly what I'm going to say, I just need to make the slides. 90 minutes. That's what I'm willing to do. Let's go. And at the end of that 90 minutes, that's how good they're going to be. And that's what I'm going to present with. 

This isn't to stress yourself out. This isn't to like make yourself work frantically fast, but it's to make yourself prioritize. It's to make yourself go, if I've only got 90 minutes, I'm getting the content in first. I'm not spending 20 minutes on Google looking for the most beautiful creative commons free picture to use to illustrate this point. I'm just going to get the content in. If I've got time for pictures, I'll do that at the end. If I've got time for animations, I'll do that later. You get then prioritized so that you get the important stuff.

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.

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My fifth suggestion here comes to this idea of what do I do if something did take longer than I anticipated? So say you set yourself a two hour writing block. You intended to write three paragraphs and you actually wrote two paragraphs, and you don't wanna get behind on schedule. So you're thinking, oh goodness, I need to find another hour in order to get that final paragraph, that third paragraph that I'd intended to do done. And people often ask me, what do I do in that situation? If I'm not perfect at this and I'm practicing and I'm being compassionate to myself and all of those things, what do I actually do? And my tip here is try not to rearrange today.

So if you'd planned to work from 10 till 12, writing those three paragraphs, it's 12 o'clock and you've written two. I would make sure you congratulate yourself because you've created two paragraphs of work. That's amazing. Happy days. You notice that the third paragraph hasn't been done. I would give myself just a few minutes to write down all the things that need to go in that third paragraph, so the stuff that's top of my head because I've been working on it, the stuff that I would do next if I was carrying on with it now, just to make it really easy for the next time I pick it up, and then I would try to stop on time. If you're suddenly like, oh my god, it's 12 o'clock and I hadn't even noticed, give yourself 5 or 10 minutes just to jot down what you're doing next, and then off you go. End your time block. If you were planning a break, then go have a break. If you were planning to do different work, then go do different work. Try not to rearrange your current day on the hoof. We'll talk about rearranging tomorrow in a second. On today, try not to make changes for today. 

We then get to be really proud of what we did get done in that session and we get to make a little note to our boss selves that three paragraphs didn't fit into two hours in this particular circumstances and that we need to take that into account next time.

What we can then do later on in the day in one of our admin blocks or something, we get to look at tomorrow or the day after and figure out where we can find an hour to do that final paragraph. Now, if you are planning a compassionate, realistic diary, then that may be relatively straightforward. If you've planned a realistic amount of time to work on a presentation tomorrow, for example, and you finish with 30 minutes to go, because you were quite realistic, you could go, Oh, I've got 30 minutes. I can chip away a bit more of that paragraph. And smash through that.

Alternatively, if you find that you are someone who often underestimates how long things take, and even though you're trying to follow my first tip of being more realistic, you still have that hangover, you can plan for that too. 

You could block into your diary leftovers time. Time to finish jobs that you didn't finish yesterday. So that when you then get to that, You haven't got to rearrange other things. It's time that was specifically allocated to this. And if you get all your jobs done on time because you were nice and realistic, that leftover time could be for fun work or it could be for not working at all. It could be that, you know what, if I have finished everything in the slots that I gave myself, I finish at three o'clock on a Wednesday. Happy days. Let's do it. Your goal, if you do plan in that time, your goal is to not use it. That's the ideal. The ideal is that we try and finish in the slots that we've allocated, and that leftover time becomes joyous time that we can do with whatever we want. So it's there, we can use it if needs be, but we're trying to protect it. Having some idea of what you'd use it for. That's time that I could just chat to my colleagues. That's time I could just sit on campus and have an ice cream and enjoy the sunshine. If you have something that you could sort of be looking forward to it equally incentivizes you even more to try and stick to your time block.

Finally, and this is one that I actually hadn't written into the course when I was drafting it, but it came up when I was coaching some of my membership students this week and it's actually ended up being the most important item on this list. And that is, do not expect your work to fix negative emotions for you.

One of the biggest reasons that people give me as to why they can't get a piece of work done in the time that they have available is because they don't think they know enough. They still think it's not good enough. They're not clear. They don't feel ready to send it to their supervisor. They don't feel confident that it will be accepted. They don't feel certain that it's good enough. And so they want to work on it longer in order to feel confident, ready or certain.

Your work does not create your emotions. Your thoughts create your emotions. If you are going to work on a piece until you are confident, or until you are ready, then you are inevitably going to take longer over it than you had planned to. Because you're expecting that piece of work to fix your emotions. Instead, what we do is we judge how long should it actually take, do I want to give it? We try our best to do it in that time, and if at the end of that time we still feel uncertain, we still lack confidence, we still feel a bit confused, we manage those emotions ourselves. We still give it to our supervisors, we still submit it to colleagues for comments, for example. And we cope with the fact that we feel a bit uncomfortable because we're not sure whether it's good enough.

We can also plan time not to carry on working on it, but to check specific things. So instead of saying, I'm going to keep working on it until I feel confident, you can say, I am going to stop working on it after this amount of time, regardless of whether I feel confident or not. But I am also going to come up with a checklist of things that I want to check in another session, which will help me to think the thoughts. "Actually, I've checked all the important things, and I think it's good enough". So instead of just expecting us to continue working until such a time as an emotion just spontaneously arrives that we're ready, or a different emotion arrives, like panic, because we're coming up to a deadline, we get to plan for that and we get to look after ourselves through those thoughts and emotions instead of expecting the work to give it to us. 

I really hope that you found that helpful. Those are the six things I think you can do if you are struggling with judging how long something will take and finding that's messing up your planning. Have I missed any? Is there anything that you think I should have included? Is there anything that you struggle with that I haven't touched on? Please make sure that you're on my email list and then you can message me or you can message me through social media on Twitter or Instagram and let me know where there's anything else that you think I should address in future. I love to have a listener led sessions. We've got an interview coming up with a dissertation coach. She is absolutely amazing. I'm super excited. Make sure you tell your friends about PhD life coach so that they are all subscribed ready for when that comes out. 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.