📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
this week's episode is called Everything Changes or What Worked Before Might Not Work Now, and Why? That's okay. This is one of the biggest hurdles that I see my clients go through. They turn to things that have worked for them in the past. Certain tools, programs, habits, routines, you name it, they've used it in the past.
It worked in the past, and then when they try and use it, now it doesn't, and that causes a spiral. Because What do you mean it doesn't work? What do you mean? That the scheduling tricks I've always used, or this habit or this routine that have always gotten me through aren't doing the trick right now. I first see this hurdle show up.
A lot of times when people are starting to prepare for their first like big end of semester push in grad school, they turn to what worked for them in undergrad, and obviously it worked because they're in grad school and so they turn to all of their tools, whether that is scheduling or time blocking or what have you, and then they find that.
It just doesn't work the way that it used to. Maybe they needed more time to work on those papers. Maybe they needed less. Maybe they were over focusing on readings. Maybe they weren't spending enough time managing their to-do list across all of their different responsibilities. It doesn't really matter what happens, but when what worked before doesn't work, now, it can cause panic because you're like, okay, I've always been able to do this and now I can't.
I must not be ready for grad school. I must not be able to do this, and I assure you that that is not the case. What worked before might not work now, but that doesn't mean that it won't ever work. It just might mean that you need new tools. The problem is that our lives, especially in grad school, especially as you get older, they change and they change in different ways than you're maybe used to.
You might have a different set of demands semester to semester, or honestly even week to week, depending on what your life looks like. Maybe there are seasons where you need to do a lot of research. What you need. The tools that will help you thrive in a season like that, most likely won't be the same tools that really support you through a teaching heavy semester.
You might also have changing resources. Resources like time or energy or childcare or access to research funds. Those things all fluctuate. And as they fluctuate, the tools that you need to manage and account for them are probably gonna change too. Now, you might also be of a brain flavor that sometimes just needs a little novelty.
So sometimes I work with clients and they are mystified because what was working before doesn't work anymore, and it's because it's gotten a little stale. It's gotten a little boring. Their brain needs that hit of dopamine, and they've gotta change things up purely for the sake of novelty.
Any of those changes don't mean that you're broken or that you're never gonna be able to figure it out. They just mean that new methods are needed to cope with new conditions. I think a lot of times when the tools that have worked before don't work anymore, we can feel like we're backsliding, like we are not able to handle challenges that we felt like we had under control.
It can be a really bewildering feeling to be like, man, I used to be so good at getting everything checked off on my to-do list, and now I'm terrible at it. Or to be like, I really knew how to write a paper and now I don't know how to write a paper. That feeling of this isn't working in the way that it used to.
Can feel like a personal failing, like I used to be good at this and now I'm not. I'll never be able to be good at it. And I just want to assure you again that that's not necessarily true. It often means that you're either at a new level working with a new set of conditions, or maybe you're just doing something new.
And when you're doing something new, you often need new tools and new support. The most important question to ask is not, can I do this? But is what I'm doing now, working in the way that I need it to, and I'll say that again because it's an important question, is what I'm doing now to support myself working in the way that I need it to.
And if not, that's okay. If yes, carry on. Feel free to skip the rest of this episode. If no, the answer to that question isn't a value judgment. It doesn't mean anything about you or your work habits or your dedication or your discipline. It just means that you need to change things up.
I'll run you through a short example so that you know what this might look like for you when it's not working, and what you can do to pivot. One of the tools that I have the most up and down binary relationship with is time blocking. Now, there are certain seasons in my life where time blocking is the most important tool in my arsenal for getting things done. It was essential for me in seasons and semesters where I had a really heavy teaching load because I had these irregular time patterns. My classes didn't always meet at the same time, and I had immovable commitments.
My class met whether I was there. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So I had to be there Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and there wasn't any, eh, I'll move this to Tuesday. I'll switch this around to to Thursday. It had to be what it had to be. So the only way for me to get my resources aligned when in these seasons, it often was like quiet time away from campus, away from my students who, bless them, always wanted more from me, more answers, more office hours, time.
I needed time. To myself with all of the supplies that I needed for my writing, which was often access to my research, access to my notes, different drafts, a computer that was pleasant to type on. I needed to get all of those resources aligned, and the best way to do that was to know ahead of time when I was gonna be writing.
So I would set up writing blocks often for the days that I wasn't on campus and wasn't teaching, and I protected them with a ferocity never before seen and probably not seen again. I was so committed to blocking off that time that it was the only way that I could get the writing done, and I knew it was in my schedule.
It was protected, and it made it easy for me to show up for those writing sessions and actually make progress even though my schedule was jam packed. Now, time blocking was beyond frustrating and almost useless when I was on fellowship because I had a much more open schedule and my phone would ring and it would say, okay, it's Tuesday at 10 time to do your writing.
And a voice in me would say, you're not the boss of me. And I would just straight up and not write. Not for any particular reason, not because I couldn't write, but because I didn't like my phone bossing me around and because there wasn't that intense time pressure around this or this or nothing at all, I just didn't do it.
And it actually became harder to make my writing happen in the beginning of my fellowship than it was when I was teaching and three times as scheduled. So I had to lean into other methods of making my writing feel inviting and actionable, which usually looked like a lot more detailed to-do lists. It looked like writing co-working sessions with friends that were scheduled, but had that.
Added hit of accountability and it looked like a lot more creativity, where if I wanted to spend the morning reading I did because it helped keep me in the world of the project. And as long as I did some writing, most days, I knew I was on track. It's not easy to switch tools. It's not easy to feel like there's no one magic routine or structure that's gonna work for you all the time.
But if you can give yourself permission to embrace the idea that everything changes, it can take some of that hit of shame and frustration. And I will never be able to do this out of these moments of reevaluation because I promise you, we all have them. Many of us switch up the ways that we work and live regularly for novelty reasons and because everything changes.
I hope that this gives you a little bit more permission to try something different. Try something new and give yourself a little bit of patience while you figure it out. See you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
