4.22 What to do when your task is taking longer than you thought

Do you have a piece of work that is taking way longer than intended? This episode will help you figure out why AND what to do about it. When things take longer than we thought they would, it throws off our schedule and other tasks, and can lead to us spiralling into a panic. Often we feel like we can’t stop long enough to decide what to do - we “just” need to get it done. In this episode I’ll explain why it’s not that easy, and I’ll give you a series of quick questions to ask yourself to understand what has happened, why and what options will help you address it. Crucial listening for anyone who finds their timelines get out of control and/or for anyone who supervises someone with these issues. 

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on What to do when you can't judge how long things take.

****
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 if you are listening to this live, it's launch week of the PhD Life Coach membership for PhD students. So give me 30 seconds of your time and then we'll get on with the topic, which is an absolute cracker for everybody, but I wanna make sure nobody misses out on the opportunity to get the support they need. If you are a PhD student who finds this podcast useful and listens to it going, yeah, I feel better. That's great. You really see me. You understand what's going on in my head. And you're like, right, I know what I need to do this week.

But then during the week you find yourself kind of getting caught back up in your old habits or in not exactly doing what you intended to, or thinking, Ooh, I should set up that system. I should do something more like that. And then not quite doing it. You are exactly who I'm looking for.

There are some people, not many of you, but kudos to you. If it's you. [00:01:00] There are some people who can listen to the podcast, take the bits they need, and just apply them out in their life. Most of us, and I definitely. Would be in the most of us section. Most of us need a little bit more structure, a little bit more guidance, a little bit more kind of taking through these changes in order to actually implement them in your life.

I am particularly gonna talk to people now who listen to my podcast and other podcasts about how to be a better person and who read self-help books and watch people on YouTube telling you how to set up all your systems and those sorts of things. If you spend as much time consuming content about how to organize yourself as you do, actually doing the things, then this is for you.

I'm actually on a mission this year to not [00:02:00] listen to any self-help content except for one membership program, which I pay for as a participant for more kind of health end of things. So I pay for that membership. My resolution for this year is that I'm gonna engage in their material, do their curriculum, and I'm not gonna spend my time reading lots of other things because listening to content, even this podcast, and I love that you love my podcast. Listening to content can be a form of procrastination, if you don't then implement it in your life. Okay. I don't want you to stop listening, but if you are struggling to implement, I do want you to take a minute and go and look at what's involved in the membership program.

It's open for any PhD student, even if you are kind of masters, as long as you've got a big research component. And to be honest, if you are a postdoc or very early career researcher, I can probably sneak you in there too, because several of my regulars have passed their PhDs and appear to have hung around, which is gorgeous. So, if you are unsure [00:03:00] whether you're eligible, just drop me a message and let me know.

This quarter in the membership, the quarter runs February, March, April, we are gonna be focusing on time management, on task management and all the drama that usually underpins all of that. So if you're somebody who starts with good intentions, plan something that looks a bit ambitious but doable and then ends the week going well, I dunno what happened there, but it wasn't what I planned. That is exactly what we're going to be working on.

It's gonna be a week by week, step by step, getting the systems in place, implementing them, practicing them, iterating them so that they work for you. Alongside all that you get opportunities to ask me questions, which I'll answer in a private podcast, to take part in the co-working sessions with all the other members, um, to get coaching on anything that's challenging in your academic lives at the moment. And of course to see other people getting coached. Hopefully lots of you came to my free coaching that I did last [00:04:00] week, so you could sort of see it in action, but if not, why not dive in anyway? Have a double check on the website.

You can sign up for three months at a time, which costs 149 pounds. They're not gonna hide the prices. It costs 149 pounds, or if you sign up for six months or 12 months upfront, then it costs a little bit less per quarter. We would love to see you in there. It is a gorgeous, wonderful community. They are super supportive. Lots and lots of people say that it has fundamentally changed their experience of their PhDs. So please do go and take a look. We are open now, but we're only open till Friday, and this is the last time we're taking new members until the end of April, and I'm quite strict on that.

Every quarter I get asked, oh, it's halfway through the quarter, can I sneak in? And I'm afraid you can't. 'cause it's designed to take you from beginning to end in a kind of coherent cohort so that you feel part of something and so that it feels consistent and that's why people can't come in in between. So this is your last chance till spring. If you'd like to [00:05:00] join, go to my website, the PhD life coach.com, and you'll find all the information there.

Now you might say, Vikki, you might say that. You might say It's all amazing. We should definitely do it. But how do the members actually experience it? And I don't usually read out testimonials on the podcast. But I literally received this one yesterday. The student in question has given me permission to share it anonymously, and frankly, it made me cry.

So I thought I would tell you guys about it. This student said, "Vikki, being part of this membership, completely transformed my experience of doing a PhD over my final year. I felt so scared, isolated and disillusioned with the whole thing, and I wasn't really sure if I could finish this thesis. The little world you've made kept me afloat, gave me structure and support, and renewed my faith in myself and this whole process. Your wisdom and encouragement made it possible not only to complete this project, but also to enjoy it while growing, both as a researcher and a person. The [00:06:00] warmth and camaraderie of every member celebrating the shared journeys and all our ups and downs that made my final year the best year and made it all feel welcome. I really looking forward to staying in the membership for as long as I can and seeing you all soon." This was a message that, that she put in our community. And hopefully you can hear the emotion in my voice as well. It is such a beautiful, beautiful community and I hope that many, many of you will come and have the same experience, upgrade how you are experiencing your academic life at the moment, and achieve all the things that you want to achieve. 

Anyway, on with the podcast. I sound like I listen to No Such Thing As A Fish. Do you guys listen to the podcast? No Such Thing As A Fish. If you don't, you -should. It's really good. It's like, uh, random facts by the people that do the QI television program. Anyway, whenever they promote their live shows afterwards, they go and anyway, on with a podcast, so I felt like I was channeling them for a second there.

Anyway, actually on with a [00:07:00] podcast, what we are going to be thinking about today is something that comes up all the time in coaching, which is this task is taking way longer than I thought it would. What do I do?

And this is gonna be useful for anyone at any stage of their academic career, but supervisors, academics, I wanna particularly talk to you because this will be useful for yourself, but I think it will also be some really helpful supervisory guidance for you.

If your students come to you and say, this is taking way longer than I thought. It will give you a process by which you can ask them questions and help them come to some sort of resolution as well. So for some of you, you will be doing this on yourself, others will be doing it on yourself and potentially on the people that you supervise.

So what specifically do I mean? You know, we all set ourselves like the tasks that we're intending to do. You might have different systems for that in the membership. We do it quarterly and then break that down into half quarters [00:08:00] and then weeks. So you notionally know what things you're intending to do.

Maybe for some of you it's you get up in the morning and pick the next thing off a list. Great. That's fine. And then we do it, and then we realize that this thing we said we were gonna do in a week is taking way longer than that, or this thing that we said we were gonna do in two hours, taking way longer. So this could be like little mini things or it could be bigger tasks that, you know, you thought you would take a week, two, three weeks over, that you are towards the end of that and the time has run away with you, and the task is absolutely not done.

And it's a horrible feeling, right? It feels like everything's overflowing. It feels like you're outta control. It feels like you are never gonna get it done, or that everything else is gonna be inevitably delayed because this thing is taking longer and in a way that you don't have any power over. So what we're [00:09:00] gonna do in this episode today is take you through a process, take you through some questions you can ask yourself as soon as you notice this is happening. So as soon as you hear yourself say, oh man, this is taking way longer than I thought it would, that's your trigger to ask yourself these questions.

The first step, the first thing we are gonna do is talk ourselves down from the spirals, because usually what happens when we notice this is taking way longer than I thought it would, is that very rapidly leads into a whole bunch of panicked thoughts, whether that's about what your supervisor's gonna say, what your boss is gonna say, what it means about you, and how you always take too long and you are always so slow and you never hit deadlines and all those big, generalized dramatic things that we sometimes say to ourselves, I want you just to take a big breath, pause.

Whew. Breathe out. Take a second. Put both feet on the floor if you [00:10:00] can, and just take a moment. Remind yourself, this thing is taking longer than I expected. That is a neutral situation, and we don't have to add all the other drama. Okay. It is easy. We get in this habit of this means this and that means that, and off our brain goes, no, breathe with me.

If you are in this situation right now, just take a second and breathe with me. This taking longer than you thought it was going to, means nothing other than this is taking longer than you thought it was going to. And the way we reassure ourselves is not, it's gonna be fine, I just have to get on with it.

The way we reassure ourselves is I'm gonna figure this out. I'm capable of figuring out what my next steps are, my consequence, my situation. Sorry, my circumstance, my situation is that this is taking longer than I [00:11:00] anticipated, and I'm gonna intentionally think the thought I can figure out what my next steps are.

Because we've got a whole bunch of options, right? If something is taking longer than we thought it was going to, then we have a whole bunch of different options ahead of us. But usually when we're wrapped up in panic and stress about it, we don't even think about what those options are. So, deep breath, we're gonna figure this out.

Once we've done that, the figuring out is gonna be a quick analysis of exactly what's going on here. And just as a reminder, we always want to be good bosses to ourselves, right? Often what we're doing in academia, in these very sort of unstructured environments is that we are having to be both the boss and the worker. Were having to decide what to do and when to do it, and what to prioritize. And we're having to be the person that actually does it.

One of the things we do in the membership is kind of separate that out and learn to be a better boss to ourselves. [00:12:00] So when a boss is doing an analysis of why something is taking longer than anticipated, imagine that was your team. It's not you. Okay? It's taking longer than anticipated, a calm and thoughtful and reflective boss is gonna analyze why. Okay. Those of you who are supervisors who are learning how to do this for your students as well, if you are not feeling calm and reflective, you probably won't do these things automatically. Okay? Often the supervisor, the boss person, is a bit more stressed anyway, and a bit more like, oh goodness. This will lead to some delays and this will hold that up and then we won't get that done. And they're gonna get behind and I'm gonna get behind and da. And that's when supervisors end up putting more pressure on their students. I've done that myself when I was a supervisor, but whether you are talking about being a boss to yourself or to somebody else, we want to come at this from that sort of calm, [00:13:00] compassionate, pragmatic, curious even perspective. What is going on here?

So I have a series of questions for you that I want you to ask. The first question is, what makes you think this is too long? Now, for some of you it might be because the deadline is this time and this is how much time I have. Great. That is a good answer to that question as to why we think that's how long it should take.

Often the answer though is that we vaguely decided that that sounded about right based on very limited information usually, especially if it's not something you've done before. You know, your supervisor said, when can you get that to me? And you're like, oh, two weeks. without looking at your diary, without looking at the rest of your to-do list, without a good understanding of how long it's going to take and how much resource IE time you have to give it.

So often we're judging ourselves for not having got it done in an amount of time that we didn't put much [00:14:00] thought into in the first place.

This is like offering to cater a party, not asking how many people there are, not asking whether it's a main meal or not, not asking anything else, and then beating yourself up because you didn't make enough food. Okay? If we don't know, the information is really hard to judge. So are we beating ourselves up for not meeting some random deadline that we came up with based on very little information.

If so, I want us to take just a little bit of that kind of self-judgment off ourselves. The problem is not that you weren't doing it fast enough, or at least we'll try and uncover that in a minute, but the problem is probably not that you're just not doing this fast enough. The problem is probably that you didn't know enough or understand enough when you were planning it to accurately decide how long it would take.

Now some of you'll be saying, my supervisor gave me two weeks to do [00:15:00] this. And my question then, and I mean it with absolute love, is how do they know how long it will take? Often. Well always, supervisors are very, very busy people and often they don't necessarily put lots of thought into the amount of time that they suggest you take over something. Some will. If you're a supervisor out there who puts lots of care and thought into thinking about those things.

I love you and respect you and wish people like you were supervisors for everybody. But most supervisors don't. Most supervisors are two weeks. That sounds about right, and your supervisor definitely doesn't know what other commitments you have on what things are happening, but they often also don't know how long it will take you to do things, because they're often gonna be judging against how long it takes them to do things and things like writing your supervisor will likely do more quickly than you.

Things like reviewing the literature, they will likely do more quickly than you [00:16:00] because they're more experienced because they have that kind of initial grounding. So I could review the literature in my old research topic much faster than I could review the literature in some other topic because I know where I'm starting and I know the background.

I'm a few years out of date for sure, but I know the background and so it's much faster. Okay, so your supervisor doesn't know how long it would take you. This isn't dissing supervisors, right? This is nothing they're doing wrong, but when we kind of blindly take their amount of time that they suggested as the correct amount of time, then we can sometimes sort of dig ourselves into an unnecessary hole.

The other time that supervisors often get it wrong is when they're asking you to do something that they've either never done or they haven't done for a really long time. This is often the practical side of work. So I remember having co supervision arrangements with some PhD students where the other supervisor was very, [00:17:00] very optimistic. I love him so much. But he was super ambitious about what you could get done. Now part of it was that he was fast and he was really hardworking and so he would put in lots and lots of hours, but part of it was that he had been, it had been so long since he was doing that hands-on stuff himself. He'd forgotten the delays you got because equipment broke down or the delays you got because your cells are dying and you're not sure what to do with them. Or if you are in the more artsy things, whether it's something to do with access or how long translation takes or any of those sorts of practical things. Sometimes your supervisors will not recall or not judge it accurately how long something will take.

The other reason it goes wrong is because you are doing it to a different standard than your supervisor thought you were. So if your supervisor says, this should take about two weeks, and in their head they want to see a first draft, but you are determined to make it as good as you [00:18:00] possibly can, then it might take longer than they think it should 'cause you are trying to get it to a higher quality piece of work than they're actually expecting. So that's the other thing, right? Is when we are deciding how long something should take, we also need to be deciding to what quality are we attempting to do it? 'cause that is gonna influence how long it's gonna take.

And if we're sort of mismatched in that either that they're expecting us to do something rough and we are trying to do something much better. Or that we initially said we were gonna do something rough and now we're getting all perfectionist about it, then it is gonna take longer. And that's a really good awareness raising for us. So we're thinking why, what makes us think that it's too long? How has that actually happened?

The second question is, why is it taking the amount of time that it is? Okay. And I think there's three main ways that something takes longer [00:19:00] than you think it will that are outside of what we've discussed so far.

The first is that it is more difficult or more complicated than you thought it would, or something comes up that adds to it. So you thought it would take you three days to do your analysis, but when you started your analysis, you realized that all your variables are shambles. They haven't been labeled properly.

You can't work out which is which. So you have to go back and do a massive data cleaning exercise before you have to do it. For example, okay. Or it might be that it's just cognitively more difficult than you're anticipating. You are putting in the hours, you're spending time wrestling with it, but it's just harder than you thought it was gonna be. So that's sort of one option. It's more difficult, more complicated than you had anticipated it being. If you are picking that one, I want you to double check. It's only that one if you are engaging with it. [00:20:00] So if it's more difficult than you thought it was gonna be, so you are avoiding it. That's a separate reason and we're gonna talk about that in a second. But if it's more difficult than you thought it was gonna be, you are engaging with that difficulty, but it's just taking more time than you expected. That's one reason it's taking more time.

A second reason it might be taking more time is that it's difficult and therefore you're avoiding it. So in this situation, it's not that you are putting in all the hours you said you would and just not progressing quickly. It's that it's difficult and therefore you're not putting in the hours. Okay, this is the difference. Let's switch this to a running analogy. Okay. I got told in my membership, they like my sports analogy, so we're gonna stick with it. Uh, so imagine it's running in the first situation. The course is much hillier than you thought it was gonna be. You are still running, but the course is much hillier than you thought it was gonna be. Your pace is way down. You're not gonna [00:21:00] hit your race goal. In the second situation. The course is much hillier. It's much muddier. It's just unpleasant, and so you've got big chunks of time where you're just not running. You are stopping and going I don't want to, I'm just gonna have a little look at the view and scroll on my phone and hope it goes away. So in that one, for whatever reason it might be because it's difficult. It might be because it's boring. It might be for lots of different reasons. You are actually avoiding doing it. Full stop. You're doing something else.

The third thing is that for whatever reason. You are engaging with it, but you're not engaging with the difficult bits. This is where instead of writing the next section, you are twiddling with sentences, correcting your grammar, improving the flow, adding in some details, polishing the bits that you have done, [00:22:00] or you are reading a lot in a kind of unstructured, unintentional way, in a sort of, if I know more, the next bit will be easier. So you are doing stuff, but not stuff that's actually moving you forward. So in a race, this would be, I don't know, doing jumping jacks or deciding to reorganize the marshals rather than actually running. Okay, so have a quick analysis. What's making it long? Is it difficult? You're engaging with it, but it's just taking ages. Is it difficult? So you're avoiding it and not doing it at all, or is it difficult or unpleasant in some way? So you are twiddling around the edges instead of moving it forward.

Remember we are doing this from a supportive boss perspective. We are not beating you up for this. When you see that, you are probably gonna go, Ugh, I'm so stupid. Yes, it's taking so long 'cause I'm just not doing it, and all I need to do is just sit down and get on with it. No, it's not that straightforward. If you are avoiding it because it feels difficult and you don't feel [00:23:00] capable of doing it, it's not just a case of telling yourself to just sit down and do it. We've gotta work out a way to better support you. We've gotta figure out a way to make you feel competent to sit down, or at least willing to feel uncomfortable while you have a go at doing it. But we can do that best if we understand why.

Before we move on to the what to dos though, I have a third question for you, and this will help you better understand your behaviors. What thoughts and feelings do you have about this task at the moment? What are you telling yourself is true? Maybe you're telling yourself that you are not good enough. Maybe you're telling yourself you shouldn't have to do this piece of work anyway. Maybe you're telling yourself that you think it's good enough and it's only your supervisor who thinks it still needs work. Maybe you're telling yourself there's just no way you ever gonna do it. Lots of things I want you to really try. You can brain dump on a piece of paper if it helps. Really think about what thoughts am I [00:24:00] having? What emotions are they generating? Are you feeling anxious? Are you bored? Are you frustrated?

Because if you are feeling negative emotions towards this piece of work, you probably are going to procrastinate either by avoiding the work entirely or by doing the easier bits. Procrastination, as I've said many, many times, procrastination is emotion avoidance. We procrastinate when there's something about the task we don't like the feelings associated with it, and we want to do something that makes us feel better than that. So we've now hopefully got a much better understanding of the situation.

Supervisors, if you are doing this with your students, I want you to ask them all those questions. I want you to ask them what quality are they expecting this to get to? I'd actually even, and this is probably an addition, I'm gonna throw this in as an additional question for all of you. What are you actually spending your time doing? Because there were times when my students would tell me that something was taking too long, and I was a bit like, I really don't understand how it is. This [00:25:00] isn't a big piece of work. I don't understand how this is taking so long. And then they'd say, right. So I started by doing this, and then I was doing that, and then I did this, and then I did that. And I was like, no, you didn't need to do any of those things. No, no, no, no, no. Backtrack, backtrack, backtrack. Please don't do that. No, the reason this is taking you too long is 'cause you're doing a whole load of stuff that's not necessary. So I'm throwing that in. That wasn't on my original notes, but talking to you guys always makes me come up with new ideas. I'm throwing that one in. Whether you're thinking about yourself or you as a supervisor, find out what they're actually spending time doing. What are you actually spending time doing?

So now we know why we thought it would take this long. We know what we're actually spending the time doing. We know whether we are engaging with the difficulty, whether we're avoiding the difficulty, whether we are doing the easy bits, and we know what thoughts and feelings we're having about the task.

And from here we get to strategize. From here, we get to plan how can I [00:26:00] support myself and how can I make decisions in order to move this forward in the best way possible. Now, for some of you, this might be adjusting how you are thinking about the piece of work. It might be that if we can remind ourselves that we are capable of doing the next step, that we don't have to do all the bits at once, that it's okay to be bored. It's okay for something to feel difficult, that we might be able to reduce the amount we're procrastinating, and in doing so, it might still be possible to get the piece of work done by the original deadline because we're actually gonna work the hours we intended to, rather than procrastinating either by doing other things or by doing the basic things.

Have a think. What things would you need to say to yourself in order to be able to do the work that you intended to do, rather than avoiding it? [00:27:00] Some of it might be, especially if you're somebody who gets caught up in the kind of busy fiddling stuff, some of it might be about reassuring yourself that it's okay if it's not perfect.

One of my members just very proudly told us that she handed in her lit review knowing that it had some bits in it that could have been written more elegantly or that needed reference adding to them, and she just added a note for her supervisor saying exactly what she'd done. And that she'd then got comments and it was super useful 'cause even though she hadn't got it absolutely perfect, it was the right moment for her to get more input so that she could move forward more quickly. And now she's doing the bits that she knew she needed to do anyway, and she's doing the bits that the supervisor suggested and it's moving forward much more quickly than if she had sort of polished everything to perfection. So we get to adjust how we are thinking about the piece of work.

The other thing we get to think about is do we actually need to [00:28:00] adjust the parameters here? Because if you are thinking, you know what, I can talk to myself a bit better and I can probably reduce the amount I'm procrastinating, but I literally don't have enough time left to do this.

That's okay too. We get to adjust our plans, adjust our parameters, and what I mean by parameters is we're able to potentially ask for extensions. That can be an option, okay? But that's not the only option. You can also adjust the scope. So if you were meant to hand in your entire chapter. You could consider, do I want, by Friday, let's say, do I want to ask for an extension and still hand in the entire chapter at the quality I said I would. Or do I wanna discuss the possibility that I hand in a section on Friday of what I have done at the current quality -that's reducing the scope? Or do I want to hand in the whole thing, but at a [00:29:00] rougher level than I would've done previously? So letting my supervisor know, I'm still aiming for the Friday, but it's going to be rougher than I said it was gonna be. And this can be useful dialogue to have with supervisors. Some supervisors a bit like, don't send it to me till it's perfect. If you're a supervisor that says to your students, don't send it to me till they're perfect, then you are slowing their progress down.

If you are telling your students that until it's polished, you don't wanna read it. You are slowing down everybody's progress. I'm usually quite diplomatic on these and certainly with the students in the membership, I often try and explain the perspective of supervisors. That usually isn't big baddies, but the one hill I will die on is that if you want perfect drafts, every time you see something from your students, you are slowing down everybody's progress. I feel strongly.

Anyway, so you get to decide what options are there, and one way to identify which option works for you is so think about what's the ultimate goal here? Okay, why [00:30:00] are we handing this in now? What are we trying to get and what's the easiest and shortest way to get it to good enough for that purpose?

Because often we need it to be good enough that the person can give feedback on the kind of the nature of the argument or whatever, or how well, whether we've included all the content we need to, but it doesn't need to be polished in order to achieve that bit. Okay. It might be that if it's, I don't know, a proposal for a new study and you are originally gonna write a full formal proposal, but actually what the purpose of it is for your supervisors to judge feasibility and novelty and things like that, then maybe you can do something that's more like a precis. That's more of a bullet pointed summary rather than a full justified something. Will it still do the job. So asking yourself, what's the ultimate goal here and how can I get as quickly as possible to achieving that [00:31:00] ultimate goal? Rather than solely focusing on how can I do exactly what I originally said I was going to do?

The next question is, who do I need to either notify or discuss this with? One of the biggest holdups is when students say to supervisors or avoid supervisors, they just kind of miss the deadline and hope their supervisor doesn't notice. And that by the time their supervisor does notice, they hope that they'll have finished, and so they sort of avoid that conversation. Or they say to their supervisor, yeah, yeah, it's nearly there. It is gonna be a few days longer, but it's nearly there. And just sort of keep pushing it off. We avoid these conversations because we think it means something about us that we haven't done it.

We are embarrassed that we don't work faster. We're ashamed that we procrastinate as much as we do, or whatever it is, right. Because of those feelings and what we think they're thinking about them. Yeah. Students, how much time do you spend in your supervisor's brain? [00:32:00] Probably too much, guessing what they think about you.

Because of all these stories we make up about what they think about us and what it means about us and our futures, we often delay having useful conversations. This is taking way longer than I thought because X, Y, and Z. Are there ways we can clarify this? Are there ways I can do a bit at a time?

Are there ways someone can teach me this element? You know, you're coding or something and you're trying to work it out and it's taking forever. Is there someone who just knows how to do this that can smooth this? So we are thinking through what options we've got and who we need to notify and discuss.

The final thing once you implement that part is to then jot down somewhere, what are your lessons learned here? Because what we want to develop, and this is what we're gonna be working on in the quarter, that's coming up now in the membership, is we wanna build this relationship between boss you and implementer you. The version of you that makes plans and the version of you that has to implement it. And what we are doing [00:33:00] here is the implementer is going, I can't do all this. So they're going back to discuss it. Instead of just staying over here panicking, they're going back to their boss self, having a strategize, wondering why we are where we are, working out what options we've got, making a decision going forward.

And that's brilliant. Love that. But the other thing that a reflective boss does is they learn from this for next time they are planning work. Okay. If we find that the reason the deadline is where it is, is 'cause we underestimated how long it would take, or we forgot to put in time for breaks or we forgot to allow for the basic admin stuff we have to do every day, or we forgot to allow for that we always get interrupted at some point.

All of those things we need to make a note to bring that forward for our next time. We are planning for ourselves. So that we, any of you who have ever said to yourself, I always put too much on my list and I never finish it. You need to be in the [00:34:00] membership. You do, because that means your boss self is not taking on any feedback, they're just doing the same thing. Here you go, have too much. Here you go. Have too much. And then implementer you is going, I'm trying, I'm trying, but I can't. And it's just reinforcing that they feel useless and boss you next week's like, well, there's even more now. Here you go. We have to break this cycle.

So the implementer, you has strategies they can use to get through things as efficiently and effectively as they can, but where boss you actually listens and learns and actually looks at it and is willing to make decisions. One of the reasons we put too much on our plates is because we are avoiding making a decision about what doesn't fit.

We are going, I don't think it all fits, but with a strong wind and a lot of optimism, we maybe can. So let's go. And then you make it implementer's problem that it doesn't work. We need to be willing to make the difficult decisions. We need to be willing to turn around and go, you know what? I can't do the conference [00:35:00] presentation and the special issue.

We need to go, okay, if I am doing, this is something we talked about in a coaching session recently, if I am doing both the conference presentation and the special issue. They need to be on the same topic, so I'm not doing two sets of work. So it's essentially the same piece of work with two different outputs. So that we actually make those difficult decisions when we're in boss mode to give, implementer us the best possibility of being able to get their work done in the amount of time they said they were going to.

I really, really hope that's useful. I feel like I feel good about this. I love all my episodes, right? But I feel good about this episode. I feel like it's one that absolutely everybody needs. I hope you got lots from it. If you're not already on my newsletter, make sure you sign up and you'll get summaries of these.

You'll get access to my podcast archive, and you can ask me any questions that you have when the episodes come out and you get invited to my free webinars, um, so I spent time at the beginning of this telling you about the paid options. If you are [00:36:00] like Vic, that's fine, but I can't afford it. Or Vic, that's fine, but I'm not eligible for your membership. No worries. You've got the podcast, sign up for the newsletter. You'll get access to one workshop a month of free content. So there's one coming up in February in a couple of weeks time. So make sure you're on the newsletter and you'll get all the information about that. Whether you can pay or not, I want to try and help you improve your academic life.

Thank you all so much for listening, and I'll see you next week.