Taking control of your schedule
One of the great advantages of scheduling our deep work, is that is frees up the cognitive load and finite will power involved in forcing us to decide to sit down and write. Willpower, according to scientific studies, is finite for everyone. You have to limit how many times a day you engage it (don’t eat the bun, do your exercise, etc etc). You cannot endlessly take from the well.
Scheduling - automation of tasks - leaves the well of willpower replenished. You are not exhausting your finite reserves every time you have to force yourself to do something when you would rather watch Netflix.
The aim of this course is to automate writing so that you can become journalistic writers, anytime, anywhere, because it is not something to be forced or dreaded. But until we reach that point, we schedule and practice turning up to that schedule so it becomes automatic - like washing and brushing your teeth. No drama. And no will power involved.
Scheduling deep work also enables us to clearly see what time we have available for shallow tasks, and ‘batch’ them. The small gaps between teaching and unavoidable meetings are perfect for low intensity concentration like email tasks, but ill suited to deep work. In this time, you should batch your shallow tasks. Gather them up. Don’t do them at once - wait for a shallow task slot in your schedule.
My diary not only contains my teaching, writing, meetings and grading slots (scheduling grading is critical because we know when it is coming and if we are not doing weekend work we must put a time limit on how long we spend on grading) it also contains my ‘admin slots’. These are universal slots for unexpected events (can I just meet you this week it is really critical to X), emails, and other shallow work that inevitably appears throughout the semester. We must also treat these slots with care. If you have trouble prioritising your tasks, perhaps the Eisenhower matrix might work for you. This asks you to split tasks into a grid like so:
When you fill this out, it is crucial to ask, urgent for who? Remember your PhD is your priority. It is always urgent for someone, but here we are asking is it urgent for you? Is it urgent for your PhD?
Having a fixed schedule priority approach, I know when I am leaving / calling it a day. Because of this, I know exactly how much of my time I can devote to this shallow work and when I hit my limit, I say no to everything else. As a PhD student, everything that is not your PhD or PhD related is shallow work.
TODAY I WILL…
Write for 2 hours minimum according to my task list;
Review my schedule for times when I can batch shallow tasks and insert them into my diary. Not just for this week, but for the semester.