3.20 Why we should think less about deadlines (and what we should do instead)

Do you find yourself putting stuff off because it’s not due yet or never reaching some goals because they don’t have a specific deadline at all? Is the only thing that actually gets you moving that slight panic associated with a looming deadline? If so, this is totally normal but it can mean that work feels very pressured and that we don’t always do the things that we want to be doing in the long term. In this episode, I will talk about how we can reduce our dependence on deadlines and how we can use start dates to organise our tasks instead.

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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

If I have a deadline, I have always been able to hit that deadline. I'm not going to tell you that I hit it in some kind of calm, organized, working methodically all the way up to it kind of way, but through pulling some late nights, a bit of overenthusiastic working, whatever it might be, I will hit that deadline.

The tasks that I've always had problems with, and I know a lot of you have problems with too, are the tasks that don't have an externally imposed deadline. Maybe we try and put our own little fake deadline on it, but we know it's fake so we're able to push it back. Or maybe the task is really vague and there's not even a point at which we know it's complete, read more or whatever. It's those tasks that I always struggled with. Now, as usual, I'm not going to lie and tell you I'm perfect at this now, but I have found a tool that massively helps me schedule and get done some of those important but non urgent tasks that often fall by the wayside. 

The other thing that this tool has helped with is smoothing out that runup to a big, actual formal external deadline. So rather than kind of skidding in at the last minute, I am now getting better, not perfect, but better at starting work on it earlier and working towards it in a more consistent way, and that's the tool that I'm going to teach you in this episode. So keep listening.

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. The first thing I'm going to say before we get started properly is you might notice my voice is a little croakey. This is actually the improved version. I had flu all over the Christmas and New Year period. I'm now feeling fine, but my voice has not yet recovered. So it's not too bad, but if I squeak a little bit in this episode, please bear with me. It's all good.

But, voice or not, I've got a really important tool that I know is going to help you guys loads and loads, so I want to get this podcast done, and even more excitingly, I want to tell you about the membership program, which if you're listening to this live, is opening in one week's time.

So at the end of this podcast, I'm going to tell you a little bit about what that involves and some of the new structures. So even those of you who are current members need to listen to this because it's going to be super cool. I'll tell you a little bit more about what you're going to get out of it, what it's going to look like and how you can join if you want to be a part of this very special community.

So Before I tell you what the tool I'm talking about is, I want us to think about the problem with deadlines. And for me, the big problem with deadlines is that they tell you when something needs to finish. But that doesn't tell you much about the process of getting it done. And some things have very hard deadlines. So usually a grant deadline, for example, is very fixed. You can't just write to the grant offering body and say, can I have longer, please? So there are some deadlines that are like. super clear, super hard, it's got to be done by then. If you're booked in to do a talk, your talk needs to be done at least at some level by the time it's time to do your talk.

Then there are kind of externally set but somewhat fluffy deadlines. So these might be submitting a chapter for a book to the editor, submitting a draft to your supervisor, any of those sorts of things. So notionally, there's a deadline. Somebody else will know if you don't hit that deadline, but there may be some flexibility. Often you can message your supervisor and say, this came up, that's taking longer than I thought. I've had this issue, can I have an extra week? And it usually works. And to be honest, same with submitting to books and things like that. I used to feel really bad about asking for extensions to those deadlines. And then when I spoke to the editor, they're like, yeah, everyone's taken the extension. Don't worry. 

And then there are things where there's no real deadlines. I have a bunch of tasks around CPD, for example, I'm really keen to make sure that I'm an evidence based practitioner, that what I'm teaching you guys is based in the literature and the research. And so those CPD tasks, unless I specifically decide that I'm going to talk about that thing in that podcast, in which case I have more of a deadline, they don't have real deadlines. I can set myself deadlines, but no one else knows what they are, and they're not real. There's no consequence for missing them.

And what that means is, whilst deadlines can be a useful motivator for certain tasks, it means we often end up prioritizing tasks that have deadlines over tasks that don't. And that's not necessarily a criteria of what's most important. Just because it has a deadline, it does not mean it's more important. If you have to fill in some boring form, which you have to do in academia, and there's a deadline it has to be done by, that task is not more important than reading a research article to stay up to date in your field, for example. But the fact that it has a deadline associated with it will usually mean that we will prioritize it over tasks that don't have specific deadlines. 

Now, many of you may be familiar with Stephen Covey's work. He wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I highly recommend reading at least a summary, maybe not the entire book, but if you Google, you'll find loads of summaries. And one of the things he talked about was the four quadrants of tasks. Some of you all heard this before. This is not the new thing I'm teaching you. I'm just making sure everyone's up to speed. And in this he maintains that you can classify tasks as important and not important, and urgent and not urgent. And if you use those two scales, you end up with a quadrant where you've got one quadrant which is important and urgent, one quadrant which is important but not urgent. And those are the ones that we're talking about that we often neglect. Then there's urgent but not important. See little forms, that kind of jazz, and then there's the not urgent not important stuff And he maintains that you start with the important and urgent stuff Then you move to the important but not urgent stuff, the stuff we usually neglect. Then you do anything that's urgent but not important. And you try and either ignore or delegate stuff in the other box. 

Now, I find that quite a useful framework to kind of think about my tasks. But I have to say, it never worked for me. Certainly not when I was an academic. Because by the time I'd finished all the important and urgent tasks, I had run out of time.

If you don't pre schedule the other stuff, if you don't block time for the important and not urgent tasks, the important and urgent tasks expand to fill the time you've got, in my experience. I was also never very good at defining what I mean by important. You know, I would I was the person that said, you need to make a priority list. My priority list would be like 40 things. So that's not a priority list. That's just a list. 

So for me, it kind of gave some insight into the types of tasks that I was neglecting. Those important but not urgent tasks. But it certainly didn't solve the problem. Now I mentioned there time blocking. If you want to know more about time blocking and specifically about my version of time blocking, I want you to check out my podcast episode about how to use role based time blocking. I'm not going to go into lots of detail now, but essentially this is where you're putting time in your diary for particular categories of work.

So for me, I block time in my diary for CPD. I don't decide weeks in advance exactly what I'm going to read or watch or learn during that period, but I'll block in time that is specifically for the role of continuing professional development. Do go check out that podcast. I will link it in the show notes. If you can't find it.

The other thing that I think deadlines don't help with is the sense of having an overwhelming to do list. So, deadlines. You guys might have deadlines all the way for like the next three years, right? You know roughly when your PhD is going to finish if you're doing that. You know roughly when you might apply for promotion and what the deadlines are.

You might have a conference booked in October. You might have a module that needs delivering by December, whatever it is. You've got deadlines often that are not just these imminent deadlines. You've got all the way through to six months, a year, three years. What that means is without careful management, your to do list could be huge because you've got write talk for conference, which actually should be around 12 different actual tasks within that, but let's just call it one for now. And it's on your to do list because you know you need to do it and you know what the deadline is. So there it is. So every time you look at your to do list, thinking, what do I need to do? There's too many things. There's all these things that some of which you don't need to think about yet. Because it's not till October. It's not till December, whenever. But you look at it and it takes up cognitive space because your brain goes Oh yeah, I need to do that too. Yeah. And I've got that coming as well. And then next month I need to do that. And da da da. It fills up our kind of cognitive capacity.

Now, how some of you get around this is having a kind of master to do list of all the things you need to do. And then more kind of daily and weekly to do lists where you pick things off this, which is brilliant. Love that system. We want to be getting it right down so that we can see these are the things. You, me and these two tasks. That's all we're doing. Okay. Makes it much, much more manageable. 

But the tool I want to talk about today is a way of semi automating that and strategically deciding what you're doing when. Because I don't know about you, but when I just have a master list and then I pick things off it for what am I going to do today or what am I going to do this week, I pick off stuff that I want to do and I abandon stuff that I don't fancy or that feels difficult or feels boring or long winded or whatever. I never pick it off. 

So the tool that I want to teach you today is about using start dates as well as deadlines. And in many cases, instead of deadlines. I actually got this from a pretty old school now book. I read it at the time. This has been in my shelves for a long time. Called Total Workday Control, by this guy Michael Lindenberger. Okay, and I want you to see, it proudly announces, covers Outlook 2007, 2003, 2002. So the actual kind of technical stuff, people on YouTube will be able to see me flicking through.

The technical elements of this are pretty out of date because it is a system that is designed to work through using Microsoft Outlook. However, there are some principles in it that are enormously useful. I actually want to re, I was going to say reread, I want to reread, I want to re flick through this to see if there are other things that I can pick out of it too. But the one I want to teach you today is his notion of throwing things over the horizon. 

So he talks about this idea of having too many things on your to do list so that they're all sort of there in your mind when you need to just get on and focus. And what he suggests is that you go through your tasks and you decide which of these do I need to work on now or do I choose to work on now? Now, some of that decision making may be to do with deadlines that are coming up. Some of it may be choosing which are going to have the biggest impact, which are the most important for you, those sorts of things. And what you then do is you decide which things you don't need to be thinking about yet.

So, for example, if you're doing a presentation in November, make slides for November's presentation should not be on your to do list right now. You should not be seeing that. Now, you might want to think back and think, Okay, what data am I going to be presenting? Is there any data collection or analysis I need to be doing now that's going to feed that?

You know, do I need to be doing ethics applications? Do I need to be doing project planning? What is it? What am I actually going to be talking about? You don't need to be making your slides. And so what he suggests is that we throw making those slides over the horizon. i. e. we take it out of our kind of current to do list and make it pop up in the future.

So I might think, right, I need to make sure that I know what data I'm going to be presenting so that I can backtrack and work out if there's anything I need to do now. But let's assume I'm presenting data I already have. So if my presentation is in November, I probably want to be making my slides mid October, depending on when in November it is. Some of you might want to take longer than that. I'm now pretty fast at making slides. It's not something I have much drama about. So I'd probably put it in for mid October. Okay, that's your start date. The deadline is maybe two days before the conference so that you can send off your handouts or whatever it is. But the start date is mid October. And you can do this with a bunch of things.

If you have, here's 10 articles that you need to read to stay up to date with your field. They're not for a specific piece of writing you're doing right now, but they're new. You could, instead of looking at that list and going, Oh God, I need to read all of those. You could throw nine of them over the horizon and set one of them as a start date for this week.

Okay. So at some point this week, you want to read that. Now you could give it a deadline. You could say, I want it gone by the end of the week so that next week I do the next one. But even just having it as a start date means it appears on your to do list and puts in your consciousness that that's actually one you're intending to work on this week.

And the joy is if you use either my role based task management sheet, which you can email me to ask for, so you can email info at wenburycoaching. com, email me, you can find it. It's a kind of interactive Google sheet where you put your tasks in, it uses the system that I use.

If you use something like that, or if you use Click Up or Notion or any of these kind of automated task management systems, you usually have to add a column that start date is not usually one of the default columns. Most people don't use it, but you can set up a column that start date as well as deadline.

And then what you can do is you can set filters. So in my Excel sheet that you can all get, I have filters already on the columns, so you can filter by start date. And in ClickUp and things like that, so I now use ClickUp, the version that I share with you guys, teaches you the basic system to see if you like it.

I've now transferred it into ClickUp. I've made filters, so that I have a filter that is started tasks, so tasks where I have passed the start date, i. e. I should be making progress on them. . What that means is there's a whole bunch of things on my task list that I don't see pop up until I need to start working on them. And that's amazing. 

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Now, you might ask, yeah, but I don't know when I'm going to start working on it, because it depends how long the other things take. Perfect. I have a system for that, too. What I do there is I have a specific date that I throw them to. So what I will do, for example, is I will book some time in my diary on, let's say, February 2nd. I'm recording this on the 16th of January. I'll book some time on the February 2nd and I will throw all my tasks that I don't know when I'm going to do them to a start date of February 2nd. That doesn't mean I'm going to start them on February 2nd. What it means is I'm going to review them on February 2nd.

So on February 2nd, I'd block an hour into my diary to look through my tasks and decide, Do I actually want them on my start list now? I. e. I'm intending to do them in the next week or so. Or do I want to throw them over the horizon again? Some of them you might just throw over the horizon again until March 2nd or April 2nd or whatever your next one is.

Or you throw it, say I'm not doing it this week, but I am going to do it next week. So you set a more specific task, set a start date for it. 

Now, what this does is many things. It simplifies your to do list so that you only see the things you actively want to be working on now. So it really reduces overwhelm, makes it much more straightforward. It gives you a structure by which to review your to do list every month so that you can make decisions about what you are and aren't doing. And this one's very important for me, is the act of having to throw it over the horizon every month. And I do this, I have tasks that just go and go and go. Next month, next month, next month.

And then at some point I will say to myself, Vik, are we actually doing this thing? Because at the moment we've put it off month after month after month after month. Are we ever doing it? Or are you just accepting that this one's not going to happen? It kind of encourages you to review whether you're going to do the thing you said you were going to do anyway. So it kind of clears up those historic to do lists. 

Now that actually reminds me. Those of you who've stayed this long on the podcast , I'm going to give you a sneaky extra tip. And I planned to do this, then I got sick, so it didn't happen, but I'm going to replan it into my diary. Little tip for you. If you've got a bunch of little bits on your to do list whether they're, for me they're usually crappy little admin tasks. Things I just, I need to talk to my website host about something. I need to, I need to talk to Microsoft. That's a whole other story. We're not going there. Anyway, I've been not doing those things. You might have those sorts of things. You might have reading. You might, there might be a bunch of things that you've kind of pushed backwards. I would really encourage you now, go and grab your diary. And, Look a few weeks ahead and block in something, time where a week doesn't look too bad. Block in a couple of hours and mark it as historic to dos. Okay, so this isn't a specific role.

This isn't I'm going to be doing marketing things. I'm going to be doing operational things, whatever. This is historic to dos and your job in that two hours is to do as many things that you've been putting off as possible. This works perfectly at home as well. So if you found that there's jobs around the house, or maybe things like booking dentists, that kind of stuff that you haven't done, book in a time to do historic to dos.

And the joy is A. It blocks time where that is your job. Other things aren't more important. But B. It removes a little bit of the shame. Because one of the things that stops you doing these things isn't that they're particularly difficult. It's that you've got a bunch of emotions about the fact you haven't done them yet.

Whereas if your task is literally to get done things you haven't got done. Much less shame about it. So it's like, that's literally the job. That's literally what this time slot's for. I don't need to feel bad about the fact I haven't done this so far because I've literally blocked in time where doing things I haven't done for ages is my job.

So there's a sneaky bonus for you.

The other thing that you can use start dates for, let's take that example of a conference in November, is you can use it to support your project planning. So a deadline in November tells you nothing about what you need to be doing during the year. But what you could do is break that task down. Let's imagine now you do have to collect data for it.

You could break that task of the conference in November down into all of its constituent parts. And so you've got to, let's go backwards, you've got to make this. Slides, you've got to, well, you've got to make the slides content wise. You've got to make the slides beautiful before that. You need to know what you're going to say. You need to have planned it, before that you need to understand your findings before that. You need to have findings before that. You need to have collected data or whatever your. Before that, you need to have designed the project, recruited participants, found your resources, whatever it is. Before that, you need to have a big picture idea of what it is you're intending to do. Before that, you might have to apply for funding, you might have to get ethical approval, you might have to get access to an archive, whatever it is. There's a whole bunch of different tasks. 

What start dates allow you to do is you can spend time identifying what those different tasks are, and then you can give each of them a start date. Now, if you use something fancy like ClickUp, like I do, you can set the map as dependencies where the next thing doesn't appear until you've done the one before it. I actually quite like it appearing because if you're are still in the habit, as I am still a bit, of not doing the things on your to do list when you said you would, the next one pops up anyway, so it stops it kind of getting you a bit like, Oh, blimey, I need to have done that and that. So it kind of gives you that little sense of urgency. You can set in all the start dates, so you know that even though you don't have to do the conference until November, realistically, You need to be project planning now so that you can collect data in March so that you can analyze data in June so that you can whatever, you know, you put your time scale in depending on how, how much pressure you're under and how much time you have.

So you can then put start dates in for all of those subcomponents. So this start date idea is brilliant for your tasks that have no deadline, that are really important but don't feel urgent. It puts them on your agenda in a specific week, but it also helps you avoid that crazy run in to a deadline where you've only just realised that actually there's a billion things you need to do in the deadlines then.

It helps you to pace that out over the year. And of course, when you're looking at start dates, you can put into your diary your other constraints. So if you have children, you might want to be more gentle about what you put start dates during the school holidays for. If you have a period where you're going to be on holiday, you don't put any start dates during that period. So you can structure it around your life. If you know you've got a heavy teaching period, let's not put lots of research start dates during that time. Okay? So you get to, by using start dates, which you're in control of entirely, rather than deadlines that are either fake or set by somebody else, then you can also schedule the work around your key things.

Now, if you're telling yourself, yeah, yeah, but I don't always follow through, or that sounds great, but it sounds a bit complicated, and I don't know where to start, that's something I can help with. And that's my final announcement for you all, which is the PhD Life Coach membership is opening to new members at the end of January.

And how it's going to run is instead of joining monthly and kind of coming in and out whenever you want. We're going to be a quarter. If you join at the end of January, you are in until the end of April. You are going to have three months specialist support, and it is focused on structures. It is going to be focused on time management, task management, designing a day and a life that you love, so that you can do the things you want to do in a way that feels good.

You're going to leave the quarter feeling clearer, feeling more capable with a personalized time and task management system that you know how to practice, you know how to iterate, and that you can work on with minimal self judgment. Because I ain't going to teach you a tool that you do this perfectly. I ain't found a tool that I do this perfectly.

But I have found tools that enable me to do this with minimal self judgment and still achieve my goals, even though I don't do any of it perfectly. And that's what I want for you guys. If you're interested, I want you to go to my website. I want you to click on the membership and I want you to put your name on the waitlist.

If you're listening to this live, so in the week, beginning the 20th of January, put yourself on the waitlist. If you're listening to it in the week, beginning the 27th. You could just join. So just go to the same place on my website. You'll find a button. If you're listening to this afterwards, we are going to reopen again at the end of April for the second quarter.

So keep an eye out for that. Put yourself on the waiting list. You'll be amongst the first to know when what's happening and when it's open and when I announce the new theme for the second quarter.

All important question, cost. I hate people when they don't tell me what the costs are, make you go and search through pages. I've reduced the prices. It's cheaper than it used to be. It, the quarter is going to be 1 49 Great British Pounds, which for people more familiar with US dollars is 180, 185, something like that. That's for the entire quarter, not per month. For that, you get access to six two hour workshops about things like how to write when you're struggling to write.

You get access to 12 themed coaching sessions where I teach you all the specifics of the various time management task management systems and support you to adapt them to meet your needs. You get access to 24 coaching sessions. The sessions are going to change in time over the day to try and make each week to try and make them as accessible as possible for as many people as possible.

And you also have access to all my self paced courses. So if you can't make the live versions, there are self paced versions of all of these courses that you can access. You get access to my Be Your Own Best Boss program, which is like my flagship big course . Access to that.

You can also ask me questions in Slack. So if you're ever in a position where you're like, Oh, I can't come to the live session. I really want some advice. You can ask me questions in Slack and I will give you personal responses. It is so good. The members love it so much. Make sure you check it out. Go to www.

thephdlifecoach. com Click on the membership you'll find all the information and I would love to have as many of you in there as possible. Current members. How exciting is it that we're going to have this more structure to it? You're going to get, uh, sort of your own worksheets that you can work through if you're not able to attend sessions.

It's going to be amazing. I'm so excited to continue working with you. Thank you all so much for listening. Go away, look at your task list, see whether you can allocate start dates to just a few things, and see how it works for you. Let me know. You can always message me if you have questions, anything you're unsure about. Thank you all so much for listening and I will 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.