4.09 Why you are more than a Gantt chart

Sometimes it can feel like the only thing that matters is whether you are “on track” or not. We measure our self-worth in progress, we report to our supervisors about where we are against our plans, and the only answer we can think of to “how’s it going?” is “busy”. In this episode I talk about why you are so much more than a Gantt chart and how believing that can change the way we interact with our supervisors, our friends and families and, most importantly, how we treat ourselves. This is perfect for anyone who is fed up of feeling behind all the time.

If you liked this episode, you should check out “how to cope with annoying comments at Christmas” (even if it’s not Christmas!)

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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

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast and this week's topic, I'm gonna tell you the truth. I hadn't planned anything for this episode and I, I was kind of working towards my launch and I'd cunningly planned out which episodes I was gonna talk about when in the run up to the launch, which was last week, as you'll remember.

And I then realized I hadn't planned today. I was in this quite unusual position. I'm getting quite better at kind of planning all these things ahead. I was in this unusual position of sitting there going, Hmm, I need to record a podcast. I wonder what to talk about and my brain throws out 47 million things as usual, and I start getting in my head a little bit about what would be most useful, what haven't I spoke about for a while, you know, what will be the thing that they really need that will really help them right now?

And then I reminded myself of the most important thing in everything [00:01:00] I do, which is the students that I work with. And so I thought back to the coaching I'd done literally yesterday, so I had two different coaching sessions yesterday. I run them at different time zones, so they worked for people all around the world, had two coaching sessions, and I thought, what was particularly interesting. What was particularly universal? What got everybody going wild in the chat going, oh my goodness, this is me too. This is me too. And a couple of different things sprung to mind. And as I pondered those things, I realized that they were all part of the same problem. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is kind of true for almost everything that I coach on. And a little phrase sprung into my head, and that little [00:02:00] phrase became the name of this episode, which is that you are more than a Gantt chart.

So in case you're not familiar, a Gantt charts are those graph things that kind of show where you'll be by when during this time block i'm gonna work on this stuff until October, and then in October till November I'll be doing this stuff and so on. And they're a crucial part of project planning, right? But people get really stressed out by them because they get really stressed out by how on earth am I meant to know how I'm gonna do things, in what order, and how fast and whatever. And then they get really stressed out by being behind.

So I coached somebody who'd had a period of illness during the quarter and was beating herself up about being behind the curve as she put it. I coached somebody else who was, finding it really difficult. She was very much at the end of her PhD and people kept asking her how it was going and when she'd be finished, and she was finding those questions really hard to answer because she felt like she kept saying, oh, [00:03:00] next month. Next month. And they were like, hang on, you said that last time. And she was really judging herself about that.

And then I looked at my podcast episodes, right? If you guys are familiar with the podcast, you'll know this. But for everybody else, I've got like a hundred and something. I don't even know how many 'cause I do them in seasons, but like 150 probably episodes at the moment. And in my little podcast host thingy, I can rank them by most popular. And the two most popular are two of the very, very early ones, which is kind of understandable. You know, gotta love a thorough PhD student. Going back to the beginning with the, I going to listen to them all attitude. So I kind of get that. But then after that, which are the most popular? How to plan your academic writing, how to read academic papers more quickly, how to get ahead when you are behind, how to make your week more effective. What to do if you feel stuck. They're all about progress. They're all about sticking to your plans and smashing through and making [00:04:00] progress.

Now, I'm not gonna tell you not to listen to these episodes. They're really good episodes. Make yourself a little list, go listen. But today I want to talk about why I think it's so important to remember that you are so much more than a ganja, and I'm gonna have three sort of demonstrations of this.

One about why it's important for your self-worth. One about why it's important for your interaction with your supervisors, and one about why it's important with your interactions with your friends and loved ones. Okay? So let's go. Why you are so much more than your Gantt chart. 

So let's think about the first one, how you think about yourself, not just in terms of kind of self-worth, but also in terms of imposter syndrome, which is what we're focusing on in the membership this quarter. And in terms of actually enjoying this PhD process that you're putting yourselves through, that you leapt on into enthusiastically. And [00:05:00] when we solely think of ourselves as somebody who is on track or not on track, somebody who is where they're meant to be in their Ganttt chart or not, where they're meant to be in their Ganttt chart. Or their Ganttt chart is in a drawer over there somewhere that they haven't looked at for four months because they know they're not on track, and therefore they don't even want to look at it anymore.

If that's you, I get it. Okay. I used to do that too. In fact, I'll tell you, I'll tell you why I'm feeling particularly good about this at the moment, so I have a wonderful coach called Karen Nordin, who I've waxed lyrical about many, many times on the podcast. If you don't follow her already, you should.

She is at Karen Nordin, N-O-R-D-I-N, on Instagram. She's a behavior change expert. She's got a PhD. She's brilliant. Love her, and, i'm in her change academy and one of the things that I set myself as a goal this year, which she set herself too, actually, is 3 million steps. And when that breaks down, [00:06:00] it breaks down to like 8,200 a day.

Now do not come at me, right? I'm a sports scientist. I know better than anyone that arbitrary numbers, like 10,000 steps are made up by manufacturers of pedometers. Don't come at me, but I know that my walking has dropped off massively, had dropped off massively, certainly since the pandemic, and especially working from home. Right. I spent a lot of time, you guys will see me with this background. I spent a lot of time in this room and I wasn't aiming for any kind of particular arbitrary number, but I wanted to increase it. 3 million steps seemed nice. And then those of you have been around for a while. Well, no. I broke my ankle in June.

I was pretty much on track. Not entirely. Certainly wasn't doing it perfectly every day, but I was pretty good. I was pretty much on track and then I broke my ankle and that sucked. And I could have said, I, oh, I'm gonna sack that off, 'cause you [00:07:00] know, I had a six weeks where I was barely walking. I'm gonna sack it off entirely.

And I really spent some time, and this is where you can see that I've worked on myself through my own coaching and things, that is exactly what I would've done. I would've either forgotten this existed and not been tracking it at all, which was my usual thing. Or I would decide it was rubbish, decide I couldn't achieve it, and therefore not think about it because it made me feel bad about myself.

And this time I thought, you know what? The version of me that I want to be is someone that when things go wrong, I kind of recalibrate, and crack back on. And I don't mean sort of forcing myself to do a hundred million steps in order to try and hit an arbitrary target that's got squished in the middle of the year, but there's no reason I shouldn't be building back up to and then trying to do at least the daily average that I'd been intending.[00:08:00] 

And so I've actually spent the last few months still tracking my steps, and I don't just mean looking at them in my app. I mean, I have a little Google Sheet with them all in where I can see how many I've done each month and that sort of thing. And actually reflecting on it and learning from it.

I've continued doing that even though my June and July stats really annoy me. I am learning to tolerate that because it has meant that I am actually engaging in that walking behavior more than I thought. Now. I'm also diving in on weekends a little bit more, too extra steps and I'm, it's possible I'm gonna put it out there. It's possible I might even hit my 3 million, but that is not the point. The point is that I'm staying with it because I haven't made it mean something terrible about me. Now you might say, yeah, but you had a good reason. But I know lots of you guys had good reasons. The person I coached had a great reason why she was behind and she was still beating herself up for it.

When we put our entire [00:09:00] self-worth on, whether we are on track or not, suddenly that's a very fragile place to be, 'cause there's a whole bunch of things that could take you off that track. I went back to, I want to be somebody who walks more than I am at the moment and walks more than I have been for the last few years.

And so as I've been able to, I've gone back to that core reason for setting that goal. And this is what I want you to think about. I decided this didn't mean anything about whether I was an undisciplined person, whether I should have pushed myself, whether I should be making up for it now, I didn't mean mean any of that stuff.

I just make it made it mean there was a period of time when I wasn't walking as much, but now I can walk more. So let's go. My self-worth as somebody who exercises, somebody who gets outside is unaffected by the fact that I had a blip where I broke my ankle. I want you to really ponder [00:10:00] how does getting behind or not reaching the goals on your Ganttt chart affect the way you think about yourself as an academic? Because if you are somebody who makes that mean that you are maybe not good enough to be here, or that your supervisor will probably be regretting appointing you or that other people are on track and therefore you are not as good as them.

If that's you, I get it. I'm here with you. I understand. But I really, really want you to notice that. Notice that you are equating yourself, your self-worth, your ability to do things with some Ganttt chart you decided on. And you don't have to, your self-worth, your abilities are measured by so many other things than just whether you are on time or not.

Another reason we know [00:11:00] that to be true. Here's a little bonus for you. Another reason we know that to be true is your Gantt chart, your plan. You might not have a full Gantt chart, but you take the metaphor. Your Ganttt chart was designed by a version of you that didn't know what was gonna happen and didn't know as much about your research as you do now. Often we design these things at the beginning of our PhDs or at the beginning of the academic year. I didn't know I was gonna break my ankle and that wasn't on the Bingo card for 2025. I actually, I actually have a 202 5 Bingo card. That's a story for another episode. I'm sticking to that too. Very exciting. It wasn't on, I didn't put brief ankle tick. When you designed your projects, you didn't know the things that were gonna come up in your personal lives. You didn't know that the piece of equipment in the lab was gonna break. You didn't know how difficult it was to recruit participants. You didn't know that the British Library search engine went down for however long it went down. You didn't know any of these things. You didn't know how long things [00:12:00] take. You put in there. Really have Oh, right. Introduction between middle of January and the beginning of February and went, oh, that's actually way harder than I thought. You are holding yourself against the standard that you set when you knew less. Now, does this mean we should have thrown out the window? No. Plans are meant to inspire action. That is what they're there for. They're there to help us prioritize. They're there to help us make decisions, to force us in some ways to make decisions. But they are also flawed because they are supposition. They are things that are gonna change as we learn more and we experience more. So pinning your self worth to something that was designed when you were less knowledgeable than you are now is simply not fair on you. Please, please don't do it.

The second time that you are way more than a Gantt chart is when you're meeting with a supervisor. And I've been talking about this, so over the last quarter in the membership we've been talking about improving your relationship with [00:13:00] your academic supervisor among other things. And one of the things we've talked about is how to have more effective meetings with your supervisors. And one of the biggest problems I see when I talk to my clients is people who have regular meetings, that's great. Love a regular meeting, but who use those predominantly as progress updates. I've done this bit and next I'm going to do that bit, and the supervisor goes, well done. Or maybe you need to hurry up. Or any version in between that.

If you are only using those meetings to tell them where you are up to and to then tell them like, commit to for accountability, what you are gonna do next. You are missing so many parts of that interaction. You are more than your Ganttt chart.

So what I want you to be using those meetings for are three things.

- Moving your actual project forward.

-Learning, developing your own learning and understanding,[00:14:00] 

-and developing a collaborative relationship with your supervisor.

Those are the three purposes of any communications, whether it's meetings, emails, whatever you need to move your project forward. You need to develop yourself as an academic, learn more, and you need to build a collaborative relationship with your supervisor. If you are solely updating them on what you have done, what you haven't done, and then making further commitments, you are barely doing any of those things. You are using them as a checkpoint and checkpoints are just not that helpful.

So when you think I am more than a Gantt chart, I want you to think what conversation can I have with them that will actually move this project forward? What hurdles are in my way? What am I finding it difficult to make a decision about? What am I worried isn't clear at the moment? How do I get them to help with that?

What do I not know how to do? Whether it's about evaluating your own work or actually conducting a particular technique. What do I need to learn in order to move my project forward? Or just in my kind of professional academic [00:15:00] journey? What do I need to learn? How can I get that?

And how can I build a collaborative relationship with my supervisor? Now that doesn't mean being friends with your supervisor. Some of you will be, some of you won't be. That's not a prerequisite. But having a collaborative relationship is, and one of the examples of that is if you focus on what's interesting or curious or like unusual or hard to explain in your research, and you have a discussion about that stuff. That's where you are doing the real stuff. That's what your supervisor came into academia to talk about, right? No one became an academic because they love Ganttt charts. If you love Ganttt charts and that's all you wanna do, go be a project manager and you'll be amazing. Trust me, we need people who can run clinical trial unit and keep all this stuff on track. If that's your baby, perfect. There's a billion careers out there for you. But most people didn't come into academia because they love Gantt charts. So if in those meetings instead of saying, oh, I'm, [00:16:00] you know, I said, I'll have done the draft, but I haven't. And then everyone feeling a bit bad about it, if you come into the meeting going I know I said I was gonna have a draft, but I've come across this thing and I just dunno how to explain it. Like in the data, I can see this, this, or in the archive, I can see this, this, or I found these two different arguments and I just can't work out how they fit together because one's saying this and one's saying that, and you know, and then suddenly you are having an intellectual discussion. That's what we wanna be doing. That's what we wanna spend our meeting times, doing, not updating a project manager about why we are not where we said we'd be. Okay. So that's the second reason. We are more than a Ganttt up because it helps us to have more effective meetings and communications with our supervisors if we remember all the things we are on top of that. We're an academic conducting a piece of research. We're a learner, we're a human being. If we remember those things, meetings so much better.

Then the third sort of [00:17:00] circumstance that I want you to remember, your more than a Gantt, chart, is when your friends and family ask you how it's going. Now, I have a whole episode on this, which has got a title that slightly puts people off. It's called How to Cope With Annoying Comments at Christmas. There's nothing specific about Christmas. I might change the title of it at some point but it is about why it's so triggering when somebody asks us, how's it going? When are you gonna finish? What are you gonna do after your PhD?

In fact, I'm just gonna tell you a story. So in my membership, they people come on for one-to-one coaching, right? They appear next to each other, but then in the chat they're all like cheering each other on sharing

 their experiences. If you're not watching YouTube. I'm doing like typey typey hands at the moment next to my face. Dunno why. Anyway, go with it. Um and somebody said, you should produce cards, Vikki, that just say, do not ask how my PhD is going. Give me money or food. And I'm just like, you know what? I think I can make a fortune selling those. And then when somebody asks you just [00:18:00] hand over, gimme money or food.

Anyway, I have advice beyond that, but. When somebody asks you how something's going, if you are thinking of yourself solely as a Ganttt chart, that your worth is only if you're up to date on your Ganttt chart, then suddenly it's like, oh no. They wanna know when I'm finished and I dunno when I'm gonna finish 'cause this has happened and I thought I'd be finished already and I'm not. And all this drama spins off. Right?

But it doesn't have to because you are more than a Gantt chart. What that means is we can remember a, as human beings, we are allowed to not share our heartache with anyone we don't wanna share our heartache with, which is, this is Mama Vikki, giving you full permission to lie. Okay. If somebody says, how's your PhD going? Your PhD's going crappy and you can't be asked to get into it because you don't like this person, or because you can't be bothered to explain or in a public place and you don't wanna cry, you can just say, fine. You can say fine. Great. Thanks for asking. How are things with you?

You do not owe everybody [00:19:00] your truth. I'm not saying hide it. I'm not saying lie about it like because it's something shameful. You don't owe everyone your truth. You can choose what you share with who. So first thing, if you can't be bothered, just lie about it.

Second thing though, is to ask yourself, what is that person actually interested in beyond me and my Ganttt chart? Because if it's a fellow researcher, they're probably interested in your actual findings. They're probably not interested in the timelines. So they're prob when they're saying, how's it going? They don't wanna hear, oh, I've handed in my results section on time, but I'm a little behind on my discussion.

They don't wanna hear that they wanna know what are you studying, what have you just found out? What's the new data showing? What have you just uncovered? What's the new thought that you are grappling with right now? They wanna know that stuff and if they're your friends and family, they might wanna know that stuff, depends on your friends and family, but they definitely wanna know, are you enjoying it?

Are you enthused at the moment? What are you finding overwhelming? Which bits do you like? Which bits [00:20:00] don't you like? They wanna know that stuff. They're not there to check up your positioning on your Ganttt chart. They're asking how it's going. So you get to decide to recognize I'm a human being who is way more than a Ganttt chart, which bit of that is this person interested in? And you can share that bit with them.

So those are my reasons, my three situations where I think it's super important for you to remember that you are so much more than a Gantt chart. I wanna finish by saying this is no shade to Gantt charts. I think it's actually really useful not just to decide when you are gonna have done things by, but the most important part of a Ganttt chart is to notice where you've got conflicts and where you're trying to do too many things in a single block of time.

So I actually love a Gantt chart because I think deciding what things you are doing in a period of time and what things you are not doing during a period of [00:21:00] time is a really important part of prioritization. I know prioritization is something we'll struggle with. That's a topic for another day. But a Gantt chart helps you to think those things through.

It helps you see where you've got three bars all happening in the same month, and assess whether that's plausible or not. So this is no shade to Ganttt charts. I love you Gantt charts. You're not perfect, but you can be very useful. But you are so much more.

So when you're listening to this on a Monday morning, you're thinking, oh my goodness, I'm already behind. I want you, in fact, I might even, should I make a sticker? I think we need stickers. Let me know. Reply to, if you're on my newsletter, reply to the email that you'll get about this podcast and tell me that you wanna buy a sticker that says, I'm more than a Gantt chart. Um, we are gonna do it. Merch is definitely coming. I hope you find today useful. I hope it reminds you quite how much more you have to offer this academic life and how I want you to be focusing on all of those things, not just on the extent of your progress. Academia is not a productivity wheel, even [00:22:00] if it feels like that sometimes, even if the sector feels like that is the only thing it cares about.

We are here to do important interesting research and to enjoy the process and to love working with other clever people who are interested in the same things. So let's focus on that stuff and let our Ganttt charts just sit over there as one of many tools we use to make that all happen. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.