4.23 How to manage tasks that are not on your To Do list

If you end the week somehow having been busy but not having done the things you intended, then this episode is for you. I’m going to help you make more intentional decisions about how to deal with tasks that land in your lap during the week, so that you can feel more in control and accomplished. I’ll also share why adding tasks to your to do list retrospectively can be a great strategy for your motivation, organisation, and future development. Let’s get control of our tasks and our weeks so that WE decide what gets done. 

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on Why you should never cross things off your to do list and what you should do 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. 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. Now as I record this, I am in the middle of launch week for the new intake of the PhD life coach membership. By the time this comes out, it is gonna be day one. I am super excited. If you didn't join, then thank you for your patience with my launch emails and things. Hopefully you found that opt out button and so on. But I'm super excited to get that started. And we're gonna be thinking a lot about structures, about our time and task management structures. And so some of the podcasts this quarter will actually be kind of supplementing that, giving you little insights into some of the bits that we're talking about in the membership itself.

And this week is one that actually came up in a session yesterday, so I suddenly realized yesterday in a absolute illustration of how I'm not perfect. I realized yesterday, which is Wednesday, that I neither had recorded a podcast for Monday, nor knew what my podcast was going to be about. Now [00:01:00] I have got a lot, lot better at planning ahead, and in fact, I'm super excited about the fact that my quarter one is more organized than my quarter has ever been before. It's pretty much all there. I've got some fine tuning and updating that I want to do, but other than that. It's already, I'm gonna be like superhuman organized women. It is amazing.

But that did mean that somewhere along the line, my cunning organization for podcasting that I'd got into last year slightly slipped. But that's okay. I'm not gonna beat myself up. I'm gonna model that non-judgmental reflection. And thankfully I have my glorious members who are always a source of interesting questions and interesting comments.

So yesterday we were doing a workshop about how you can use your values to prioritize and make decisions, and that's not what we're talking about today. But what came up was people talking about things they were putting on their to-do list and how they were deciding what's on their to-do list. [00:02:00] And somebody made a semi jokey comment. , If I get distracted and do other things, I just then add them to my to-do list and tick them off anyway. And I think she mostly meant it as a joke. I think she did see that there was some value in that, but she mostly meant it as a bit of a joke, sort of saying, oh, I'm, I'm a bit chaotic.

In reality, she touched on something that I think is super, super important and something that I think when we don't have plans for this can really derail some of our organizational efforts. And so I was really excited that she'd brought it up and it was like, right, that's my podcast for Monday. You have just solved my problem. This is what we're gonna talk about.

So we are gonna talk about what do you do when tasks come up that aren't on your to-do list. We are gonna think about the decision making process, how we even choose whether we're doing them or not, 'cause remember, that is an option. That was something else that came up in my workshop yesterday. [00:03:00] Somebody going, passed how I decide, It's a bit of a revelation that I'm allowed to decide whether I do something or not. I just say yes to things. So we're gonna think about that and then we're gonna think about how we then handle the knock on effects of these new tasks landing in our lap. Okay, so let's go. 

We are gonna start with imagining this task has just landed. Now, it could be a task that you've just come up with. We are very good at inventing new tasks, especially those of us who've got these slightly rushing around brains. Inventing new tasks and deciding they're very important to do right now.

Other times, it's somebody asking you to do it, so one way or another, these have come towards you and we want to remember that they've not landed fully in your lap. They have not landed on your to-do list. They've been put in front of you as something that you are being asked to do.

And the first rule. That rule is a bit strict, isn't it? But let's go with [00:04:00] it. The first rule I'm gonna say rule is we never say yes immediately. Don't say yes to your own ideas. Don't say yes to somebody else's ideas. Say, and you can steal this sentence. I need to check against my commitments, and then we'll figure out how to make it work.

Okay. Because even if you are going to say yes to it, even if you believe you've got no choice but to say yes to it, you've still got to check the implications for your other tasks. And we'll talk about how to do that in a minute. Now those words might not sound like you. You might be like, I could literally never say those words. Think about what words actually feel human for you so that you could actually see yourself saying them. Often the reason we don't want to is because we want to present ourselves as somebody who can do everything, who's all coping, where there's no point saying anything because we don't think we've got any choice anyway.

But even in those situations, it's really important to take that [00:05:00] moment to say, I need to check my other commitments and work out when this can happen. Whether it can happen. Let me get back to you. Because even if you are trying to impress someone, and we all know we don't wanna be too motivated by just trying to impress other people, but even if you're trying to impress somebody, that actually, to me, when I think about it as a supervisor, that to me is way more impressive than somebody who just says, yes, yes, yes and then panics. Okay. I want students who remember that their time and capacity is a limited resource and who are choosing intentionally what they're doing with it. That is a student I don't have to worry about anywhere near as much as a student who just says, yeah. Because sometimes, frankly, if I ask you to do something as a supervisor, I haven't necessarily thought it through.

I love supervisors dearly. I've been a supervisor for a really long time. Most of my best friends are supervisors and even when we mean the best in the world, we're often overworked, overloaded, stressed ourselves and don't necessarily think through [00:06:00] all the implications or remember the things we asked you to do last week when we asked you to do something new. So you taking a bit of responsibility for that and being intentional is actually really, really impressive.

So we never say yes straight away. We take a moment. Then what we're gonna do is we are gonna assess that task against everything else we have to do. Now, I'm gonna add one caveat here. If it's an actual emergency, so, any of you who work in a wet lab, for example, and have minus 80 freezers, if the minus 80 freezer is breaking down and something needs to be done about it, we do that right now. Okay? If you are doing human research like I used to and a participant has fainted, you go and deal with that right now. So. If there's imminent risk, we go do it. We reassess afterwards. But unless there is imminent risk, then we take a moment to compare it against the things that we know we've got coming up and to make some decisions.

So what are we then doing? Why do we have to make decisions? We have to make decisions because whether it feels [00:07:00] like it or not, every single second of your life is currently accounted for. You are doing something in every second of your life. Whether you are doing work, whether you are doing eating, whether you're doing childcare, whether you're doing sleeping, whether you're doing scrolling, whatever it might be. And some of those things are more intentional, what you want to be doing. And some of them are less intentional and you don't wanna be doing them. But every minute is occupied. And what that means is that if we are gonna put something else in, we have to decide what are we not doing now?

Now, it might be you decide, okay, I'm gonna do it instead of scrolling, I'm gonna do it instead of something else that you consider currently to be a waste of time. But we have to then remember that we are swapping a low cognitive effort task, scrolling or whatever, for a higher cognitive effort task, and we have to check in as to whether that's reasonable or not. [00:08:00] If we are gonna do it instead of some other work, then we need to decide how we are prioritizing and whether we like the ways that we're prioritizing.

Please do not swap in tasks for other people at the expense of tasks for yourself as a kind of continual thing. Obviously, every now and again, we might have to. Do not make it the norm that you swap in doing tasks for other people over your own tasks. In fact, this came up yesterday in the workshop as well, so we were, uh, in a previous workshop we'd been identifying values and, one of the students in the workshop had identified accountability as a really important value to her. And one of the things she said in the workshop yesterday, which I thought was really, really insightful, was, I've realized I've got to stop always directing my accountability at other people, my accountability to do things for other people. And I've gotta start directing some of that towards work that I've committed to myself. To [00:09:00] my completing my own work. And not in a selfish way, but in a ultimately, other people care about that stuff too. Yeah, it's a very short term view to short term, please other people by doing their tasks for them. Where in the long run, it's in your supervisor's interest that you finish. It's in your department's interest, it's in your friends and family's interest that you finish your academic work on time, whether that's your PhD, whether you're further through your career.

So we get to intentionally weigh up this new thing against the things that we are doing at the moment, and that might mean there are some things that we stop doing. It might mean that we say, okay, this thing that I was gonna do is now gonna get intentionally delayed and I'm gonna do this instead. We might say, yes, I can do this thing you want me to do, but not until two weeks time because I've got these other things I need to finish first. So is looking at all the options here, are there things that we [00:10:00] cannot do? There are things we can defer. Can we do some of it, but not all of it? So as another example for you, I got asked to do a workshop for an organization, but they didn't have a budget. And it's an organization that I really, really like and that I wanted to support, but at the same time I can't do free workshops for everybody because it all just eats into my time. And I do this full time. This isn't the side gig. This isn't, you know, this isn't me trying to make money on the edges of academia. This is my full-time job. Anyway, so I was able to say, look, I can't offer a full workshop, but I can do an hourlong q and a because I really like your organization and what you're trying to do. So there's ways you can be like, I can't do all of that, but I could do this. That fits into my commitments. So we weigh it all up.

Now, there are a few warnings I wanna give you, and we're weighing this all up and this is where the kind of self understanding comes in really, really important. Knowing yourself compassionately. So [00:11:00] loving this stuff about ourselves, but being aware of it, for example. I know I tend, unless I cultivate it and I have been cultivating it, unless I cultivate it specifically, I tend to be more enthusiastic about new things than about things that I've been doing for a while. Now, I've got enormously better my, this year I have been really practicing throwing my enthusiasm at my long-term goals, the things I want to keep doing over and over. And that's been brilliant. It's been an absolute revelation. It's very exciting. But I know that new things always feel more exciting, more enthusiastic, so I have to have that in my mind. Is this just a new thing effect? Is this actually gonna be boring in a month's time? Is this actually gonna be no more interesting than the thing I thought I was gonna be doing? But it feels exciting 'cause it's novel, so I have to weigh against that.

I also notice that lots of people procrastinate with new things [00:12:00] because new things feel easier. You haven't got into the, you know, they might be a little bit intimidating, but you haven't got into all the details of how they're gonna be difficult. Whereas the thing you're in the middle of has got a lot of aversive stuff potentially, right? You're in the middle of the difficult bit, you're not sure what you're doing. You're a bit bored of it. It's not going how you want it to, you're a bit embarrassed. It's not further along. All of a sudden, this shiny new thing is super tempting as procrastination. So we have to, when we're checking up, when we're going, am I gonna do this new thing that I've been asked? Or am I gonna do my existing to-do list thing? We have to ask ourselves, am I procrastinating the thing on my list? Is this new thing a really good excuse to avoid this thing that is becoming a bit uncomfortable in a number of ways? And if it is, that is a very, very good signal to say no to the thing that you're being asked to do, and then get in and address why you're procrastinating the other task, how you can make it feel easier to [00:13:00] do the task that is already on your to-do list.

Now once we've decided, and this is part of my kind of general decision making plan, we have to decide that we've definitely decided, and this sounds strange. But what I mean is you now have to go into whatever to-do list system you use and change the due dates. We can't just decide we're gonna do this thing and we are gonna hold ourselves to the original tasks as well. We have to go in and change the expectations there. And it means that when we are organizing our weeks, when we are reviewing our weeks. And if you don't do that, that's stuff we're building up in the membership at the moment. That when we come to look back on the week or the term or whatever, we can't hold ourselves to goals that we set at the beginning that we decided partway through are no longer our goals. Let me explain what I mean. So if at the beginning of the quarter you said, I am going to finish this article and then partway through the quarter, you get [00:14:00] approached by your supervisor who's got a new collaborative project and you've got the opportunity to participate in it, and it's gonna take a decent amount of time and dah, dah. And you decide, you know what, yes, I can delay my paper. I'm gonna do this new collaborative project. This is exciting. Fine. Okay, so you decide to do it if then at the end of term, you look back at your goals and go, oh, I was gonna do that paper and I still haven't done it. Oh, I'm so useless. That's not fair. You literally told yourself you weren't gonna do it. We need a record of these decisions so that when you reflect back, you say No. I decided, I consciously changed my decision as to what I was gonna get done this quarter, and therefore I'm not on that track anymore. I decided to delay that.

Now you might look back and go, Hmm, not convinced that was my greatest decision ever. That's a different issue. Then we start looking into why did you [00:15:00] make that decision? But we can't beat ourselves up for not finishing it. It's like deciding, you know, going on a day trip and deciding partway, oh, we are not going there anymore. We're going here, and then getting here and being like, oh, I'm really sad we're not there. Well, of course we're not there. We decided not to go that way. Okay. We have to stop deciding we've changed and then also beating ourselves up about that decision. So we're gonna decide intentionally and we are now gonna action plan for this new decision.

And then the final thing, 'cause often these are kind of big-ish things, right? When you're asked, do you wanna participate in this? Do you wanna submit to that conference? There's this special issue, whatever it is. Often the issue is more little small things that come up during the day, and you can still do a mini version of this process. So if somebody's like, oh, actually could you just come and talk to this student for half an hour for me. Then that very mini thing of, give me a second. I need to check my diary. Checking your diary, deciding what you [00:16:00] are gonna do, what you're not gonna do. Deciding, okay, I haven't got half an hour, but I can give them 10 minutes or deciding I have got half an hour, but not till after four o'clock, so they're gonna have to come back. Any of those things, or I am going to, but that thing I'll do later or I won't get it done today. So we can still do like a mini version of it, but then we are going do what my student talked about in the class, which is we're gonna add it to our to-do list, and tick is done.

And it might feel like a kind of self-serving thing. Oh, I just like stickers. I just like ticking it off. But actually I've got four reasons for you why we should add things to our to-do list after we've done them if they weren't originally on our to-do list.

And the first one is that it feels good, right? That if you're gonna do it, you might as well give yourself that little tick of yes, got that done. Yes, got that done. 'Cause otherwise you sort of forget that you ever did these things. Okay? So part of it is that kind of gold sticker effect, but the [00:17:00] second reason. Is that it allows us to analyze our weeks because we wanna get in this habit where we are looking back over our weeks and deciding did we do the things we intended to do? Where are we at? What do we need to sort for next week? And if when you're analyzing your week, you're like, I didn't do the things I intended to do. I have no idea why this week has just gone past. It's been a bit of a blur. I have no idea what I've done, but somehow I didn't do any of the things I intended to do. Then it's really hard to analyze that week. It's really hard to kind of go, oh, is that 'cause I slacked off. I don't think I slacked off. I feel like I've been really busy. Do I like the decisions I made? I don't know. I don't remember what they were. I'm just rushing around and all of a sudden I haven't done any of the things that I said I was gonna do. Whereas if you are adding in the additional things you do that week, then at the end of the week you can look at your completed [00:18:00] tasks and say, were these the things I intended to do? If not, do I stand by my decision to do them or do I want to learn something, which will be another point in a second. So it allows us to analyze, looking back at our week, how do we actually spend our time? What sorts of things did we need to do?

The third thing it does, and this is gonna be particularly true for people who need to do things in a repeated way. So any academics who are delivering teaching programs, for example, anyone who is delivering one research project where you are gonna do another one similar to it, for example. So if you're doing your ethics application or anything like that, okay? Anything that you have to do more than once. So I'm doing this a lot with my launches. So I launch the membership once a quarter, for example. If you put in all the things you do, even if they weren't originally on your to-do list, it makes it much easier to replicate that thing in the future. So if you [00:19:00] are going to, in the future, gonna need to do another ethics application, for example, it's super useful to be able to look back and see what tasks did I do last time? I filled in that ethics application, for example. Or if you are organizing a know a one day conference like lots of people do.

Yeah. You tag it all as conference organization or whatever so you can find it. And then next time you're gonna organize a conference, you've got a whole list of the tasks that you did last time. Because often there's a whole load of stuff that we forget and that can make it easier to do it. It can also make it easier for you to decide, whether to do it or not. 'cause often we take on those things and we're like, oh, that won't be too much work. But we forget that we have to sort the catering and sort the purchase orders and sort the travel for the visiting speakers and sort the AV equipment and whatever else, right? We forget all the bits involved. The more we got an accurate record of what it actually took to deliver that thing, the easier it will be in [00:20:00] the future to plan.

One of the biggest things that holds people back from planning is a belief that they can't judge how long things take. If you can start recording what things you do, okay, and I'm not talking detailed time tracking here, although if that's your jam, it's gonna really, really help. But at least if you know what tasks are involved, it makes it so much easier to actually judge how much longer it will take.

And then the fourth thing is learning, because actually part of that review process is to understand what happened this week, but also it's to look forward and to decide exactly what do we want to do in the future. Because if you notice that every single week unexpected things come up and they're unexpected, you know, they're not the same thing every time, but every week, unexpected things come up that take 4, 5, 6, 7 hours of your week. Let's just allow 4, 5, 6, 7 hours in your planning for unexpected things. Put them in your diary as [00:21:00] kind of unexpected tasks. Because you can always use them for something else, right? If nothing unexpected comes up, woo hoo, let's go straight to our writing project or whatever. But if it's repeatedly happening, why would we occupy every hour of the day when we are planning and then suddenly act surprised that unexpected things happen?

Exactly what they are might be a surprise, but the fact that unexpected things come up is not unexpected at all. We get to learn from it. By looking back and deciding whether it was a good decision or not. Whether we're happy that we made that decision also helps us to look forward. I notice that there are things that I get caught up with.

You lot will laugh at me, but in launch week, I get very excited when I get an email saying, somebody's joined your membership. And then I go into my little Excel file and put their name in so that I can keep track of my numbers and everything. And there's much more automated ways of doing it, but I really like that.

I know that I spend [00:22:00] more time doing that than is efficient. I quite like it, so I'm probably not going to change it too much. But I do need to account for that when I'm planning my launch week. 'cause often launch week looks like I've got loads of time on my hands, right? Um, when in reality I spend quite a bit of it doing that.

So you get to learn and decide, okay, actually I often get caught out by that. Or actually I often get caught up in student drama that doesn't need as much time as I often end up giving it as a way of avoiding writing, for example. Ah, that's useful, right? How could I deal with that next week? How could I be even more mindful of that? How could I structure things so that I'm less likely to. Oooh I often get interrupted, so when I'm writing, I'm gonna go and write somewhere else on campus so they can't find me, for example.

So those four reasons for writing things on your to-do list after you've done them, if they weren't there before. Recognition, rewarding yourself, praise, all that good stuff. Analysis, allowing you to understand what happened this [00:23:00] week. Replication, if you need to do this task again, you've got a much better broken down list of what those things are and learning so that you can decide how you wanna make those decisions in the future.

So I hope that really helps. If you have unexpected tasks that come in this week and run them through that process, let me know how you get on. If you're not already on my newsletter, do go on my website, PhD life coach.com, jump onto the newsletter. You can always reply to me, tell me what's going on. You'll also get emails about the podcast and you'll get invited to my free webinars. And this is coming out February 2nd, and my next free webinar is Wednesday the 25th of February. So if you sign up, you'll get the opportunity to come to that. It's all about designing a morning kickstart routine. So if you struggle to get going in the morning, then that is gonna be the webinar for you. Thank you all so much for listening, and I will see you next week.