3.29 How to Stop Wasting Time by Trying to Be Too Efficient

In this episode of The PhD Life Coach podcast, Dr Vikki Wright explains why chasing ‘perfect efficiency’ is actually making your PhD harder. Many students think that taking flawless notes or writing excellent first drafts will save time — but this mindset often leads to procrastination and stress. Instead, Vikki reveals why starting imperfectly is the key to progress. She explains that writing is part of the thinking process, reading evolves with your understanding, and connecting with others can be the most effective use of your time. If you're overwhelmed by the pressure to be ‘productive’, this episode will help you work smarter — not harder. Ideal for PhD students and academics feeling stuck, behind, or anxious about their thesis. Listen now to learn how embracing imperfection can help you finish your PhD with less stress.

Links I refer to in this episode:

Why you shouldn’t read when you’re writing

Why perfect plans fail: embracing imperfection in academic writing

How to get started on a task

How to use the do know don’t know list

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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. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

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.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. I'm getting a bunch of new listeners at the moment, which is amazing. So if you don't know me, my name is Dr. Vikki Wright. I was an academic and PhD supervisor for 20 something years and in a large research intensive university in the UK, where I made it to full professor specializing both in how stress affects health and in how to effectively train PhD students. I now run the PhD life coach full time, meaning this podcast, my membership program, my online courses, and my workshops. Today is actually something that came up in one of my membership conversations. So I had a student who was thinking about writing and reading and was getting quite stressed about how much she had to do and I'm sure we all kind of empathize with that feeling.

And one of the things that she kept saying was that she wants to be efficient. She needs to know how to read things, how to take notes in order to be efficient. She needs to know how to write things in order to be efficient. And I asked her what she meant by efficient while this is going on. So this is in a group coaching format, by the way.

So I'm talking to her on screen, but then we've got the rest of the members online as well, watching this happen. And they're jumping in the chat going, "yeah, yeah, me too, me too. Tell us how we need to be more efficient. I need to be more efficient too. I'm so inefficient." And so everybody was really getting on board with this.

And I asked her. What are you meaning by efficient here? And her definition of efficient was when I've read an article I want my notes to be good enough that I don't have to go back to it over and over again to find the stuff I need, I've got my notes. And when I write, you know, I know I have to do drafts first and stuff but I don't want to be editing it 47, 000 times I want to know enough that I write it to a level that will need some editing, but that I won't have to do tons and tons of rewrites too.

And everyone's in the chat going, "yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah, tell us how to do this, Vikki, tell us how to do this." And it was one of those moments where I had to break to them that what they were desiring was the wrong thing. It's completely understandable that we want to be efficient. In fact, people are telling us we need to be efficient all the time.

But if your definition of efficient is only reading things once or twice because your notes are so good and only having two or three iterations of writing because you're writing so good Then what you're actually doing is making yourself enormously inefficient because when you come to do the thing, you come to read the paper, write the notes, start the drafts, all you can hear in your head is, this has got to be good or I'll be wasting time. I've got to get all the notes down that I need or I'll be wasting time and then what we end up doing is spending four hours reading a single research article which is only going to contribute to one or two sentences of our introduction but we need to make sure we've got everything we need to be efficient. Or we procrastinate writing because I can't start writing until I know exactly what the structure should be and exactly what I want to say, because that would be inefficient.

It's such an understandable response to uncertainty and time pressure and high workloads and all that stuff that you guys are struggling with. And by the way, this isn't just a PhD student thing. I see this with academics saying this too. You know, I only have an hour a week to write, so I have to be efficient. I have to use my time perfectly. But that's not efficient. Asking yourself for perfect notes and asking yourself for excellent first drafts is not efficient. What it is instead is denying the very research process that we need to be engaging with. Let's take reading as an example. When you read an article at the beginning of your research project, you're reading it with your naive, uninformed, open and intelligent, but not very kind of knowledgeable brain on.

And so the stuff you need from the article then is completely different than the stuff you need from it when you've read around the literature, you've got a really good overview and understanding and you've got much more nuanced questions now. It's completely different than what you need from it when you're deciding on your methodology and you just need to look at that bit.

It's completely different than the stuff you need when you're trying to interpret your results and you don't understand why it's showing what it's showing. Every time you read an article, you're reading it for a different reason. And if you, at the very beginning of your research project, are trying to anticipate every possible thing you might need from this paper, it's just a losing battle.

It's a waste of time. But you're doing it with a beginner brain instead of coming back and doing it with an expert brain later. The efficient thing to do is to read the article for the purpose you need to read it right now and keep a record of where that article is. So that later, when you need to read it with your more educated, more informed brain or with a specific goal in mind, you know where to find it, right? But you don't have to make notes that cover all of those eventualities.

The same is true with writing. When we put pressure on ourselves that we have to have a good first draft or I'm going to spend forever editing, what happens is you instead spend forever reading and faffing about and not getting on with doing your writing because you don't quite know enough yet.

Okay, that's the inefficient bit. Not starting writing is the inefficient bit. Not just because it will get you going, but more importantly, because writing is part of the thinking process. I'm going to say that again because it is absolutely crucial. Writing is part of the thinking process. Writing is not something you do in order to record your kind of final, perfect thoughts.

Writing is a tool that you use to work out what your thoughts are anyway, to work out what you do understand and what you don't understand and what you actually think about it anyway. Cause there's nothing like seeing it written on a piece of paper or on your document for you to go, Oh yeah, I really don't understand that concept.

Do I? Or, Oh, actually, yeah, I do think that I have an opinion about this. So what the most efficient thing to do is, is start writing immediately. Not with the intention of any of that text being in your final article, but with the intention of that text helping you learn to write, helping you figure out what you're thinking, helping you keep track of what you're reading, and what thoughts you have about it.

I'm going to give you an analogy from my own hobbies. You, those of you who know me know, I love a good hobby and I have all the stuff, all the hobbies at the moment, it's kind of collage and abstract art and lino printing and gelli printing. That's exciting. I'm getting distracted, focus Vikki. But I used to get really cross that I wasn't better at art.

I do stuff and it wouldn't be that great. And I'd look at other people's and I'd be like, oh, that's disappointing. And then I realized the problem was I was. Trying to paint a painting where anybody who's good at art knows that way before you paint a painting you do like 50 different little squiggles of what might it look like and a page of 10 pages of like what colors might I use together and what happens if I do this and what shapes do I like over here and what materials might I use that's why it's so fascinating to look at like real artists sketchbooks and stuff because you can see where all this stuff came from. My uncle gave me an amazing book about architecture sketches and seeing these like incredible rough sketches of buildings that ultimately became these incredible architectural detailed drawings but seeing them at that very early stage.

That's the process. It wasn't inefficient for that architect to not start with a technical drawing. You know, that's the equivalent. We think when we go, I want to start with a good first draft. It's like, Oh, well, I want to design a building. Better get into my building computer program, whatever architects use.

Um, and start drawing up some architectural plans. They don't do that. They just grab a sketchbook or a virtual sketchbook and start squiggling. There might be a little tower here and some doors over there. They come up with concepts and they come up with loads of them. And that's how they figure it out.

If there's any architects listening, I apologize for that very un technical explanation, but hopefully the analogy works. So what I want you to do is recognize that a lot of the things that you are calling inefficient are actually the process. They are actually research. Making mistakes is not inefficient.

Making mistakes is part of the process. Going down a way and then realizing that you're wrong or that the argument doesn't stand up. isn't inefficient. It's research. That means we've eliminated that version or we've come up with an argument as to why and now we're going to do this version instead. This isn't inefficient.

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If I can be really, really frank with you, regular listeners, you're used to this. Everybody else, remember it comes from love. If I can be really frank with you, the bit that's inefficient is you keep telling yourself you have to do it perfectly. It's inefficient to keep telling yourself you're not good enough to do this. It's inefficient to tell yourself that at some unspecified point in the future you're going to know enough to do this well. It's inefficient to keep telling yourself that your supervisor's useless and everything's awful and if only things were better you'd be able to do this really well. That's a bit harsh. That is not making excuses for bad supervisors. If you have a bad supervisor, find my podcast episode about how to deal with a toxic supervisor and check it out. This is not that. But when we use up our brains on worrying about us not being good enough. That's the inefficient bit.

When we go and do some pointless bit of, like, color coding or labeling or scrolling on social media because we're not ready to write yet, that's the inefficient bit. If you want to be efficient, I prefer the word effective, but if you want to be efficient, you want to get stuff done in the timescale you want to do it in, the best thing you can do is get on with it imperfectly.

The other thing that's inefficient is spending more time looking for answers in other people's writing instead of in your own brain. I am, once again, I always have to put my, my caveats in. I'm once again saying, not saying, you don't need to read. Of course, I'm not saying you don't need to read. Of course you need to read but if you don't know what argument you're going to make or you don't know how you're going to write something and you are looking for the solution in somebody else's article you are looking in the wrong place.

You need to read that stuff but the answers to what you're going to write are in your brain and you just need to decide them. So stop being inefficient by looking for your answers outside of yourself. Do your research, read the stuff, but then spend time in your own brain making decisions about what argument it is that you're making in your article.

The other, here's a little bonus one for you. The other thing I see when people are focused on being efficient is that they don't engage with some of the extras that are on. They don't find time to come to coaching sessions they have access to. They don't find time to go to research group seminars or to just hang out in the department and chat to people. They don't find time to talk to other people about their research because they need to be efficient. They need to use it. I haven't got much time for this PhD. I need to fit it all in. I need to focus on the important stuff. Sometimes those connections are the most efficient thing you can have.

They are certainly the most effective thing you can have. When during the pandemic, I really limited myself in terms of how much time I spent talking to staff because I had so much to do. It backfired horribly. It meant I was out of touch with how people were doing. It meant I was miserable. It meant I wasn't getting the support I needed. I wasn't giving the support that I was able to give. My attempt to be efficient made everything work less well. If you are missing the social community things because you're like, Oh, I don't really have time. I should probably just get on with my writing. Please reconsider. The community will strengthen your work.

Having connections with others will give us the kind of strength and knowledge and feeling of relatedness that we need in order to complete our work and to enjoy our experiences. Being efficient is not about knowing what the most important things are and only doing those and never doing anything outside them.

Being efficient is getting on with tasks that are core parts of your research. And that's talking to people, telling people about your research, writing reams of drafts that will never do anything other than clarify your brain and making notes on papers that are what you need to know from that paper right now.

Let's stop aiming for this kind of clinical structured sort of efficiency and go for the kind of efficiency that makes up this actual messy fun academic process. I hope that's useful. I think it's crucial. I am so grateful to the student who bought it to my group coaching sessions. I know everybody in the room really needed to hear the conversations that we had about it. I know they got a lot out of it and have already been telling me about the ways it's changed their practice. Make sure you let me know To, um, if you're on my newsletter, you can always send me an email. Let me know how you've applied the stuff you've learned in the podcasts. If you have any questions, just email me too, and I will answer them in future episodes.

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.