episode 9 - Why is it so hard to reset when your day gets off track?
Has your day ever been completely off the rails by 10 am? Do you have a tendency to abandon ship at the first sign of distraction, or stick with a task that's going nowhere way longer than you should? Resetting when we lose focus is so hard - but this week, I'll share all my best strategies for getting to the bottom of why it's hard for you, and things you can try to rescue some of that time back and work on purpose.
Video on pom timers here - and episode on gamifying the middle here!
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📍 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. We'll talk about why some of these things are so hard, and how that difficulty is showing up for you. Each episode has practical strategies to experiment with -- just because it's hard now doesn't mean it always has to be.
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Who among us hasn't said. I'll do that tomorrow. Or put something off until next week when the feeling of freshness is back or maybe started to plan earlier than maybe is necessary for a new here where everything is going to be fresh and clean, and we'll be the best versions of ourselves. One of the reasons that all of those coping mechanisms are so powerful and common, I have them, you have them, lots of people have them.
It's because we all on some level really like a reset. We love a new chance. We love a chance to start again. We love a clean and fresh slate. So let's talk about resetting as a grad student this week. What makes it hard and things that you can do to make it easier so that you don't need to wait for a new year, a new month or even a new day to make some progress.
Let's get into it.
Okay. So part of what makes resetting so hard to accomplish is that a lot of us have what is known. As the all or nothing, cognitive distortion. Now, I'm not going to get into CBT here, but I think this concept is really useful. And it's one that I see in myself and my clients all the time. If we can't do all of it, we're going to do none of it.
If we can't have a perfect eight hour Workday, what's the point of even starting to work at all? You know that feeling where unless we're going to do it, do it all and maybe even do it perfectly. We might as well just sit on the couch and watch Netflix.
I'm not knocking Netflix here. Goodness knows. I've watched my fair share of it in the last few weeks, but this sense of all or nothing becomes so tricky because if one little thing gets off track. If we lose focus, if we get distracted, if an unexpected task comes up, then there can be this really loud, blaring alarm in our brain that says, ah, you're off track. You're un- focused.
Better wait until you can start again.
Some of us hear this alarm more loudly than other people. But many of us have it. And that's what drives us to, to that sense of, I'll try this again tomorrow. Tomorrow's a , new day. It's not bad. It's just one of the patterns.
Another thing that makes resetting so difficult, especially for grad students, is that there's never enough time to do everything that we want to do. And so if there's never enough time, why would we spend even a minute of it restarting, refocusing, resetting, or caring for ourselves in a way that makes us get a fresh start?
We should just keep pushing. So if your habit isn't to abandoned ship at the first sign of distraction, maybe your habit is to chain yourself to your desk and say, okay, no matter what, I'm going to push through this. Even if my focus is dropping off, if I'm getting distracted, if I'm bouncing between task to task, I'm going to keep staying here because I don't have enough time to do this as it is. And every second that goes by, I'm wasting it. So I don't have the time to stop and start again. I only had the time to keep going.
Some brains have more trouble with transitions than others. , let's be real. This is one of those hard things that shows up differently and has different degrees of difficulty, depending on who you are. What your brain is doing and what your life circumstances look like. If you are a neuro-typical person who works in an office and loves the gentle accountability of everybody else working when you were also working.
Then maybe resetting or staying on task in the first place isn't one of your problems. Feel free to skip the rest of this episode and come back next week. But if you are a person who really struggles with transitions, maybe you have some executive focus, challenges that make it difficult for you to pick something to work on in the first place.
Then. Resetting can feel like adding more transitions, a notoriously difficult spot in the day for you. Into your schedule on purpose, which like many of these strategies can feel really counterintuitive.
No matter how this difficulty is showing up for you. Whether you need resets often or only occasionally. Let's dig into the questions that help you narrow down how this is showing up for you and what you might want to do about it.
Question one. What does distraction look like on you? How does it show up in your behaviors? Your emotions, your patterns, your habits, maybe your browsing history. What does distraction look like? And how do you know when it's happening?
Question two. What do you imagine that focus looks like. How close does that come to what your data suggests about what focus looks like on you? This is another way of asking, what are you expecting focused to look or feel like? And what does it actually feel like for you in your body? I know many people who feel that focus should look like working on one task at a time hand for their brains and bodies. They get a lot done bouncing between three projects at once. So what's the difference between what you imagine and what you actually experience?
And lastly, what is your most common reset interval? Are you a new day person, maybe a new week, a new term, a new year. What do you consider the marker of freshness where you get an automatic chance to try again?
For our experiments this week, I am sharing three of my favorite things that you can try that might help making that reset during the day, a little bit easier to accomplish. Experiment number one. It's something that I call a soft reset.
Soft resets happen naturally throughout the course of your day. All of the time. If you think about what a schedule for a kindergarten class looks like, there are usually different activities. They last a certain amount of time, and there's some chance for the students to transition between them. Maybe it's a clapping of the teacher's hand. Maybe it's a cleanup song, but each one of those moments of transition offer our young kindergartners, a chance to transition between tasks on purpose. You can make a soft reset, work in your life by doing that same thing, marking the transition between one task and another. This could look like a pom timer and check the show notes for a whole video about Pomodoro timers. They could look like timed work sessions.
Or simply switching tasks on purpose.
A soft reset is a great tool to use anytime that you catch yourself doing something that you didn't mean to. Some people call this task, drift. Some people call this getting distracted, but the goal of a soft reset as gentle as it is, is to give yourself a mental pause and say, okay, that's what I was doing.
This is what I'm doing now. A chance to try to do something else on purpose.
Experiment number two is the slightly more involved version of a soft reset. Something that I call a hard reset. These are for those days when you really, really need a chance to try again. Maybe you got up and by 10 o'clock your whole day is off the rails. You aren't doing what you meant to. You're completely distracted. You're getting really down on yourself. Perfect conditions for a hard reset.
Now there are two main rules. I think that make a hard reset. So successful.
The first feature of a hard reset is to get your body involved. I don't know about you, but if I just sit at my desk and say, okay, I'm going to look at Twitter for three minutes, and then I'm going to start my day again. The chances that something different will happen are very small. But if I get my body involved, if I go for a walk around the block or maybe take a break to do a workout or a yoga video,
Sometimes I even go full throttle and take a shower and put on a new pair of clothes. That signals to my body that a change has happened, a break between whatever happened before that I needed to reset from. And day attempt number two is real. I can feel it. I can feel it. From my head down to my tippy tippy toes.
And the second part that makes a hard reset so successful is giving your brain the full permission that it needs to do something different. For some people, this looks like getting a new page of their planner out. And planning the day what's left of it from scratch. I know people who use this technique and reset their task manager for the day.
Maybe they pull out a post-it note and write top three tasks that they want to accomplish in the reset, but whatever it is, you give your brain permission to work on something. Again. To make a barrier between what happened and what is going to happen.
Hard reset can be so successful because it takes whatever is left of that Workday, that work session, maybe that week.
And instead of saying, I'll try it again. Whatever the next reset interval is, you give yourself that time back, you take it back from the loss column and you say, what could I do with this? It isn't perfect. You know, you can't accomplish what you can in eight hours in three hours, but getting three hours and proving to yourself that you can reset that you can refocus that you can give yourself a chance to try again.
And move forward. That self-trust is so important and the more that you can build it and practice it the easier and the gentler it can be to reset multiple times throughout the day, whenever and wherever you need it.
And last but not least experiment three is for anyone who is finding the whole concept of resetting really sticky or difficult, like it means that they're giving into their distraction or it's something that they just feel. You know, I'm pretty sticky about in general, whether that's shame or guilt or whatever your soup of the day is.
Counting your resets. Can be an excellent experiment. This builds on some of the gamification techniques that we talked about in a previous episode linked in show notes, but the idea is that rather than tracking your poms or giving yourself a sticker for every 50 words that you write. You track the number of times that you reset over the course of the day or the week.
It sounds counterintuitive to say, why would I track this thing that in general, I would like to avoid.
But the idea is that you give yourself points and that little bit of a dopamine hit for the behavior that you want to encourage. So you want to encourage the idea that you can reset at any time that you need to, that no days wasted that no hour is so distracted that you can't bring yourself back and work on purpose. So you count the number of resets you aim for 50.
If you aim for 50 and you only hit 20 well that's 20 times that you brought yourself back from a place that you didn't want to be in, worked on something on purpose. That's 20 times that you didn't give up, that you restarted, that you gave yourself a chance to try again. You're counting the behavior that you want to encourage, which both makes it less shameful to do it and makes it easier and more fun to hit that reset button, to hit it quickly and gently.
So much of the way that I talk to myself and the way that I work with my clients changed when I stopped thinking about the goal of all of these strategies as never getting distracted or always staying focused or having these perfect. Perfectly consistent workdays. When I instead switch the goal to noticing when I'm off track and bringing myself back to what I wanted to be working on and doing that on purpose. So many things got easier because I wasn't afraid of getting distracted. I accepted that as part of the deal.
That was just going to be happening. So my job switched from being disciplining myself into focus and into supporting myself. When I noticed that I'm not.
And if this podcast makes it even 1% easier to switch from disciplining yourself to supporting yourself, then it's all been worth it. Yeah. See you next week. Oh,
📍 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. And if you're liking what you're hearing, please subscribe, rate, and review to help other people find the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!