3.03 How to get started on a task

A lot of PhD students and academics struggle to get started on a task or believe that they can’t start until they’ve got lots of time. In this episode, I show you how to get started on a task, so that you can complete work even when you’re busy, with less drama and stress. I show you how some of your thoughts are holding you back and give you three ways to get started on your key tasks. 

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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.

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Transcript

I've noticed a lie that a lot of my clients are telling themselves. And it might sound a little bit harsh to accuse my clients of lying. I don't mean they're actively misleading me, but I do think they're misleading themselves. And maybe you guys are misleading yourselves too. 

The lie I hear is that I can't get into my work unless I've got a big chunk of time. It's the clients who are convinced that if they only have an hour, it's barely worth starting because they need to get into it and flow doesn't come unless they've got all day. It's usually the same clients who are struggling to find those big chunks of time because other things come up or get in the way. And the irony is that I also hear from lots of clients that when those big chunks of time finally come up and you're like, yes, I can actually get some stuff done. I'm going to get in the flow. Today is the day. That somehow those hours disappear and we don't do all the things that we said we would be able to do in those big chunks of time. And the reason I call it a lie is because even in those big chunks of time you're doing the work one block at a time. It might feel easier sometimes if you can hit that kind of magical flow where things come easily but an eight hour day is still a series of one hours.

And what that means is there's nothing except your thoughts preventing you from using these smaller blocks of time. Now. This episode is not about chunking your work. That episode already exists. Go back and check it out. I'll link it in the show notes for you, but instead it's about getting started. The reason I told you about this lie to start with is because this is one of the reasons why people struggle to get started. They struggle to get started because they're telling themselves that it isn't long enough, that there isn't a big enough chunk of time for them to do anything meaningful.

It's just a really good example of how our thoughts sometimes prevent us getting started on the tasks that we want to do. So in today's episode, we're going to think about some other thoughts that get in the way of starting, and I'm going to give you three specific tools that you can use to get started. I'll also refer you back to some other podcast episodes that are going to help as well. There's tons of support for you here.

Hello and welcome to episode three of the third series of the PhD Life Coach, and we are talking about getting started on a task. As I said, first we're going to identify some thoughts that make it more difficult to get started, and one of them is that I don't have enough time to do anything meaningful. If we believe that, we make it true. We start slowly and indecisively. We warm up on things that maybe don't really need doing. And suddenly it's an hour and we haven't even got into it. And now we need to be somewhere else and we've wasted our time. We make it true by believing that it can't be useful.

I was recently chatting with one of the clients in my membership about this and she really believed that she needed time to gradually warm herself up into working and that that meant these shorter bursts of time just weren't enough for her. And I can't remember how we... I love an analogy. I mentioned last week that I'm really creative. I love an analogy. And it made me think of tennis lessons. I want you to imagine that you went down to tennis lessons at your local sports centre and you turned up for the lesson. And the person said, Yeah, the thing is, we need to do backhand and forehand and serve, and we need to do ground shots, and we need to do volleys, and we need to do placement, and we need to do footwork. So I don't think it's worth us having this lesson. Um, come back when you've got a full day. 

How, how would you react to that? I think if you were anything like me, you'd be like, well, we could do a bit of it, perhaps. You know, and it's not that they're lying, you know, to play tennis, you do have to work on all of those shots, but do we need to work on them all in this hour? Does that mean it's not worth working on any of them in order to have a tennis lesson? No. Obviously not. We would pick one bit and we would do that bit and we would come back next week and do some more and we wouldn't wait until we could play eight hours of tennis in one day. 

When we think of it like that, suddenly it becomes obvious, well of course I could just do a bit of it. We could get a bit better at one part of it, but somehow when we're thinking about our thesis, it doesn't feel like that. Now, the client that I was talking to, we were also talking about the need to warm up, that sometimes she likes to do some emails, do some reading, kind of get herself in the mode for writing, and that often by the time she's done that, suddenly the time she'd allocated to writing had gone away. And again, we went back to that tennis lesson and I thought, well, okay, what if you turned up to this lesson this time? They don't send you away. They're like, okay, you're here for an hour, but they tell you about the importance of warmup and they get you a bit warmer. And then we start doing something easy. We start doing a little gentle rally or something like that across the net. And And you just kept doing that until the end of the lesson. And you were like, well, hang on, what happened to the tennis? I came because I wanted to do some drills, I wanted to play some games. And they said, yeah, yeah, but we had to warm up. And you said, well, yeah, I know, but I came for an hour's session and we haven't done any of the things that we said we'd come for. And they said, yeah, yeah, but we have to warm up. You know, takes us a while to get into it. And again, I don't think you would be paying for that tennis lesson. I don't think you would be returning to that coach. Because we might say, well, yeah, okay, maybe I need a warm up, but maybe I need 10 minutes and then we get going anyway. Is it the most perfect warm up ever? No, but we could warm up by playing tennis. How about that? How about we do just enough warm up that we don't injure ourselves, we kind of get vaguely in the mode, and then we hone the rest of our warm up, do the rest of it while we're actually playing tennis, i. e. the thing that we came to do. 

And again, the same is true in writing or in any of your kind of harder academic pursuits. Sure, if you want to start by doing 10 minutes of reading, 10 minutes of editing, okay. But why are we allowing that to turn into 50 minutes? Because that's when warm up becomes procrastination. That's when we're not getting into it, we're avoiding it. And one of the things I suggest, if you're someone who feels like you need to break into it gently and you sometimes get sucked into, okay, I'll just answer a few emails to get in a work mode, and then suddenly it's two hours later. If that's you, it's okay. That's understandable. But I also have a suggestion for you, and it builds on that tennis analogy. 

I'm an ex sport scientist, and one of the things that we know is that the way you need to warm up for a sport is with movements that are relevant for that sport. You wouldn't warm up in the same way for a gymnastics meet as you would to play football, for example. That very first bit of just getting your heart rate up may be, but beyond that you want to be mirroring movements that you're likely to be making in that sport. But we do them more gently, we do them more slowly, and we do them so that they're not at the extremes of your range of motion. You can do the same when you warm up for writing.

Instead of warming up for writing by doing some other academic task, like answering emails or reading papers, warm up for writing by writing slowly, gently, and within the realms of what you know. i. e. not at the extremes of your range of movement, your range of knowledge. So instead of distracting yourself by doing something that maybe gets your brain going, but doesn't actually get you into this task, Write a gentle paragraph on something you do already know about, without worrying too much about whether it's good or not, this is a warm up after all. Just write a quick paragraph about the topic that you're about to write on. Give like a little rough introduction to what you're about to say. Warm up by doing the thing you came here to do. Warm up by playing tennis, by writing, rather than disappearing off over there and doing something that feels a lot more manageable but doesn't move you towards your goals.

Other lies we tell ourselves are that we don't know where to start. Now, I've mentioned this in previous podcasts, but I'm going to reiterate now because I think it's really important. I want you to always be clear between the difference between don't know, i. e. lacking information, and don't know, i. e. haven't decided. And where you're starting on the piece of work that you're doing is almost always a haven't decided issue, not an actual I'm missing information issue. And that's because it doesn't really matter where you start, you just need to start somewhere. And that means you just get to pick. So again, if you're struggling to start and you're telling yourself you don't know where to start, Remind yourself that this is a decision to make, not something that you don't know.

And again, I was talking to a different client in my membership about this as well, this idea of making decisions. And her decision was around where she was going to go to work, whether she was going to work at home or work at the library. And she often procrastinated making the decision, wasted time, and then kind of didn't really do either. And one of the things that I reminded her is not deciding is a decision. So if you've got a piece of writing to do and you haven't decided yet where to start and you allow that to mean that you don't start yet, you do something else instead, that means you are deciding not to start. It's not that you haven't made a decision. You had a choice. You could start with this, or start with that, or start with this other thing, or you could not start. And at the moment, you're just not starting. That is a decision. Same as for this client. If you don't decide that you're working here, or you're working there, then you're deciding that you're not working. And that's not, again, not to beat up on you. I'm never trying to beat up on you. But I want us to take responsibility for lack of decision making being a decision in itself. 

Another thing we tell ourselves that doesn't help is that I'm not ready to start yet. I don't know enough to start yet. Again, all lies. I want you to listen to my episode about the Do Know, Don't Know list as a tool that will help you with this if you're feeling like you don't know enough. That will help you get really specific about what you do know and that you don't know. And I just want you to be mindful of the fact that usually when we're telling ourselves we don't know enough to do it yet, it just means we're a little bit scared and we just need to be a bit more supportive to ourselves, not that we're not ready to start.

There's probably a whole load of other thoughts. Tell me, let me know. You can either respond, if you get my email newsletter, you can respond by email or if you just listen to my podcast, if you go to the place where you get your podcast, you'll see a send Vikki questions button. Let me know -what other things do you find stop you from getting started on your work? 

Because what I want to spend the rest of our time on is thinking about what can you actually do aside from coaching yourself on those thoughts, which is a really important element of this, what tangible steps can you take in order to get started on a piece of work that you want to do?

My first tip is to separate finishing what you're currently doing with starting on the task. Now, let me tell you what I mean by that. Often what I'll find is it's the morning, I'm having my breakfast, I'm scrolling on my phone, and what I need to do is I need to start work. And I usually know what my task is, because I've usually set that out in advance with my role based time blocking system. Check that out in another episode as well. Um, But I can hear in my brain, as I'm scrolling on my phone, I can hear in my brain, right, you really should be going and doing X now. You know, this is the time you've blocked for that. I can hear myself almost persuading to do it, but I'm still scrolling. And I'm still scrolling.

And one of the things that I have found most useful is remembering that we've actually got two different activities here. First activity is stop scrolling. Second activity is start the next thing. This is true whether you're watching TV, whether you're talking to friends, whatever you're doing that you don't want to be doing anymore and you want to be starting work, experiment with stopping that first thing. We don't need to think about starting work yet. We just need to think about stopping scrolling. We need to put our phone down. We need to turn the TV off. We need to stop playing the computer game. Because it's very easy to stay in that kind of parallel world where we're doing the thing and thinking about the work.

And that's the worst world because that means we're not doing the work and we're not really enjoying the thing we're in. But if you can separate it out, suddenly it's like, I don't need to think about work. I just need to put my phone down. I can do it. I can put my phone down. Right. Phone down. Let's go. Then suddenly you haven't got all that stuff going into your eyes, whether it's computer games or TV or scrolling, whatever it is. You haven't got all that stimulation coming in. And then it's easier to sit quietly and be like, okay, right. What work is it that we're doing? And again, our task is not start work. Our task is open document. Identify next step, for example. And suddenly when we break it down like that, actually it's much easier to get started. Because we're not thinking about everything at once. You can use this tool. 

I procrastinate going to bed. I think I've talked about this before. I procrastinate going to bed because I think of it in a whole series of tasks. If you can break it down, put feet on the floor, walk upstairs. Clean teeth, wash face. Then suddenly, actually, if you're only thinking about the next one, it becomes much more manageable. This will be, some of you will be looking at me going, well, surely you just go to bed. Um, any of you , neuro divergent will recognize this. Uh, some of the others of you may as well, but the more you can break it down, the more you can identify stopping one task as one decision, starting the next task as another decision, the easier it is to get started on the next thing.

The second tool I want to use, and this is a little mantra that we talk about a lot in my membership, is stay in the room. One of the reasons that starting a task feels complicated, Is because in our brains, we've connected it to 47 other things. I need to do this thing. And then you see that. And then I need to do that. And then I need to send it to my supervisor. And then my supervisor will give me comments. My collaborator will give me comments and I need to respond to those. And then you send them up. But I've also got that other thing and I'm teaching next week. So I need to do that too.

And suddenly it's like, well, I can't start on anything because there's 400 things in my brain. We also sometimes spiral into, but if it's not good enough, then they're going to think this. And if, you know, if I can't respond to their comments, then they're definitely going to think I'm an idiot. Maybe I won't even be able to get onto the next thing after all. And we connect it to a load of things about our abilities, our future and so on is the, what we're making it mean. When I can see clients doing this, I can see them taking the one task we want to start and connecting it to all the other tasks and all the things about themselves. I often say, stay in the room with me, just stay here, stay in the room with me.

And that's our little shorthand. Let's just stay on this one thing. We need to start this task. That needs to be the one thing. We don't need to think about all those other things. We don't need to think about what's going to happen if your supervisor doesn't like it. We don't need to think what happens if this grant is rejected. We need to stay in the room and focus on this one thing. This is an amazing strategy. If you hear other people spiralling, you can use it. You can use it on yourself. Just stay in the room. Take a breath. Stay here in the room with me. What do we need to do to start this?

I find it super calming. I know my clients do too. It enables you to feel the emotions associated with this specific thing that you're trying to do without having to kind of connect it and fix absolutely everything else. We stay here, we start this one task, one thing at a time.

My third one's a semi silly one, but I like it and I think it really, really helps. And that is, I think it's useful to have a theme song. You know how in like boxing or wrestling or whatever, I used to watch WWF. Did you guys used to watch that when I was like 16, 17 or whatever in, what would that have been, nineties. And it was Brett the Hitman Hart and Triple H and all that crowd. Please let me know, comment or something. Let me know whether this is just me being ridiculous. Anyway. WWF. They all had their theme music, right? When they came out, they had their theme music. And it like, got them in the mood and they came out all like, feisty. You know what I mean. They came out ready to fight.

And I think we can do this. I think we can identify songs, and it can be your very, very personal choice. I am going to share mine with you in a second. It can be your very, very personal choice, but identifying a song which is, uh, right. Let's go. Fight time. We're doing this piece of work. Music. And for me, I think I've mentioned the, the, the playlist before. I'm not sure I've told you the specific song. So, for me, it comes from the Selling Sunset playlist. It's drivel. I'm aware. Very excited. I think there's a new season out on Netflix. Gonna be checking it out soon. They're all like, Power ladies strutting around in their heels and things.

Those of you who know me realize that I am very much a trainers and leggings sort of a girl. So it is not my vibe on any level, but there's something about the music that makes me like, yeah, I can do this. And there is one particular song. And for those of you on, YouTube, you will see me in just a second, share it with you on the screen. It's called Strut by Dita I'm now holding my phone out. Apologies for the terrible audio quality. Okay. And it keeps going like that. And so this is me getting ready to start working. I'm getting ready. I've got my document open. Now we start writing. Okay, so it has like a minutes build up into it and now we're going. Now if any of you are going i can't write with music on nor can i but this gets me going and then what happens is i'm typing, that starts to annoy me and i turn it off and i carry on typing okay so this is not me suggesting that you should write with lyricked music on But, choose your song.

Choose a song that kind of gets you in a like, yeah let's go, I can do this sort of a mood. Preferably one that builds to like a little bit of a crescendo like that one did, so you know your moment where you start. And let me know what it is. I have a secret goal that I'd love to make a Spotify playlist with all of your songs on.

So, if you think of songs, let me know. Either Instagram, PhDLifeCoach, uh, Twitter, DrVikkiBurns. Or, you can send it, where it says ask Vikki a question in the podcast thing, you can send me your song there too. Or reply to my newsletter, because hopefully you are all, all on my newsletter, because every week you will get summaries of these podcasts and loads of other good stuff that you'll have heard about. Let me know, what song gets you ready to get your writing done? Seems like a small thing, but it can super help you go from, uh, I should start, to yes. Let's start. I really hope that's useful. I really hope YouTube's not going to tell me off for having illegal music. So if that bit didn't work, then, ah, sorry.

It's called Strut by Dita. Find it on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Check it out. Laugh at my taste in music. It is all good. I really hope that's useful. Have a think. What are you getting started on today? Which of these techniques are you going to use so that you can move even in maybe a small chunk of time that you have available today? Thank you all so much for listening and I will see you next week.