everyone says they're trying to stay on top of the reading - but is that possible? and if so, how do you do it???????????
this week's podcast is all about reading - how to manage it, how to plan for it, and how to think about it so it doesn't bury you alive!
resources mentioned:
AI tools for mapping citation networks
oliver burkeman on reading piles
his book four thousand weeks
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Everyone says they're trying to stay on top of the reading. But. Is that possible? And if it is, what does it look like? Let's get into it in this week's episode of
📍 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. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And if you like what you hear on this podcast, you're going to love what I have cooked up for you in summer camp. More details in the show notes. Now let's get into it.
One day I'll get on top of the reading is something that I've heard a thousand academics say, and I've said it myself too. I can even feel that way about the rest of the reading that I would do for fun. One day, I'll catch up with that series.
Let's be real, the amount of things that we need to read versus the amount of time that we have available to read them - it's one of the biggest mismatches in all of academic life. There's just simply too much to read and too little time to do it. So in this episode, let's talk about some strategies for how to make time for the reading, how to figure out what to actually read and how to organize it all so that you're not doing duplicate reading when you don't need to.
The first thing that I want to say about reading is that the goal of reading as a scholar, as a grad student, as a person who is working in a specific field is not to memorize everything and be able to spit it back word for word, anytime anybody asks you about it. That's often how we think about reading, even if it's unconsciously, because that's how we were taught to read as undergrads, read this, it'll be on the test. Read this. You'll need it for your paper. As a scholar though, you're going to read it and you might need to use it later and you might not, or you might need to use it for six different things. And you're probably going to have to reread it for each one of those use cases, because what you need out of it, it's going to change.
With all of that different context, how do we know what the goal of reading is? I am here to propose that the goal of reading is actually to make a system so that you know how to find that specific piece of scholarship again, when, and if you need it.
Let me say that again. The goal of reading is to know how to find whatever you're reading again. Now, the reason that I frame it this way is because so many of us are obviously working under the fear of not being able to memorize things- totally legitimate- and probably also beside the point. Most of us outside of very specific defense related situations are going to need to spit back word for word or even all that accurately the main details of pieces of writing. Most of the time, you're going to be able to go back to your notes, go back and actually reread it. And knowing that is going to set you free.
The goal of reading is to know what you're reading so that you can find it again. Find it, when you want to teach with it, find it when you want to cite it, find it when somebody is talking about something and you have the perfect paper for it. You don't need to read so that you never need to look at your notes again. You need to read and create a system to organize your reading so that when you need something, you know how to find it relatively efficiently.
So the goal of reading is to find it again, how practically speaking, and this is a practically speaking type of podcast. Are you going to be able to do that?
So the first thing I'm going to share with you. Is, I think you should lean into your citation manager. And I'm going to link in the show notes to the episode that I did all about citation managers. But if there's one place that I recommend that you organize your reading. I tag it. Keep notes it's with your citation manager, because it's going to help you in a lot of different contexts. I myself have in my citation manager, tags for taught with this; could teach with this; in this specific chapter; in this research project; this is a library that I share with a collaborator. And I need to be able to find all of those things again, and for the way that my brain is set up, it's useful for me to go back and be like, okay, what was that thing? That I thought I might want to teach with. If I ever needed to find an example for X media theory. You're going to want to set it up the way that your brain works. Maybe that's by year of publication or by lab group that does specific things. You might tag it by kinds of protein. I don't know your project and your brain are yours.
But your citation manager can do a lot of that heavy lifting for you and bonus, that means you don't need to print out or store a whole bunch of physical notes, books, print-outs of articles. You can imagine how quickly that stuff adds up.
Now, if you want to stay on top of your reading, you do at some level need to schedule some time for reading. And if you need a permission slip, I'm here to grant you one. I -Dr. Katy Peplin founder of Thrive PhD and host of this podcast- write a permission slip for you to schedule some amount of time. -An hour a week. An hour a week. A half day a month, your schedule is going to be your own - I give you permission to schedule time to do reading that isn't necessarily linked to any specific project writing piece that you're working on, class that you're teaching, et cetera.
A lot of us need to read more broadly than we have time to. And the only way to have time is to schedule it in and protect it. Now. For every three wide reading blocks that I schedule in, I probably worked through and did something specific for two of them. But that one where I sat down and I read that book, I was really interested in, or that article that everybody was talking about in variably enrich my scholarship.
Yes. I might not have directly cited it in the piece that was due in another week, but an informed, I thinking gave me something to talk about at conferences. It let me know where the conversations in my field were located and it was fun to read. In a way that reading for a specific paper or for a syllabus can often feel really purpose-driven and dry. This felt more like why I went to grad school in the first place to read cool ideas and have a little bit of time to sit with them.
Another way to stay on top of your reading is to follow the footnotes and see what other people who are writing things that you're interested in or citing themselves. Now I'm not an AI expert, but I will link in the show notes to a variety of different tools that might help you map this kind of footnote or citation.
Desk density. Footnote or citation density. This is more effective in some disciplines than others. It really depends on sort of the mechanism of how your various different journals of note organize and tag and make things searchable. But if you want to look for clusters really quickly, so that you're concentrating your more, expansive reading efforts into places where there's a lot of activity. Some of these AI tools are going to be really useful and helping you map that and locate really rich areas to read.
And my last tip for staying on top of the reading is to reduce the amount of effort that you need to. Put in when you're reading. Is to reduce the amount of labor that you're expecting of yourself. When you read in this sort of more broad, more expansive. More general way. If you have a system where every single PDF you read, you have to create a one page summary and outline all of the notes and color code it and tag it in six different ways and make sure that everything gets then re uploaded into the cloud.
Then, yeah, nobody's going to really want to sit down and do that with their quote unquote fun brain power on a random Friday afternoon. But if you build a note system, as you go. Where you download something, you store it in a folder in your citation manager. You read through it and add a couple of content tags after you skim it so that you can find it again when, and if you need it.
Now that's not zero labor, but it's also not so much that it's going to put you off the task. When you shift and think about the goal of reading is not to perfectly document every single idea in it so that you never have to reread it again, but to make it so that you can find it when, and if you do need it again, can really help you limit the amount of extra labor that you're putting in and give you a chance to read a little bit more quickly, a little bit more playfully and stay on top of that reading a little bit more easily than you might've when you were expecting yourself to do two hours of labor for every PDF that you touch.
The last thing that I'm going to leave you with in this podcast is an idea that I have taken from Oliver Burkeman, who wrote a very interesting and provocative time management book that I will link to in the show notes, but he talks about the reading pile and he's not specifically writing to academics here, but I think that there's a lot that's really useful for academics in that is to think about your reading list as a river, rather than a bucket. So, so many of us have carry around big buckets of things that we want to watch, do, read. We have huge bookmark folders. We have systems. We have lists. We have phone apps to keep track of everything that we want to consume information wise.
And when we think about it as a bucket, we think that we have to either empty that bucket before we can add new things into it. Or we have to, you know, always be dipping from that specific pool that we've preselected ahead of time. And if you're anything like me, the bucket only gets heavier. As you read new articles, read new books, explore new areas. There's just more and more things to read.
He instead, counsels people to think about these lists as a moving river that you're going to pop in and out of said river at various times in places. And the goal is to select things that feel relevant to the you in that river, in that moment. So say you're having a really big sort of interest level in a specific area in your field.
You dip into the river of literature available, you read a couple of things in it, and you don't worry so much about what you were interested in two weeks ago or what everybody else is interested in. You come in, you feel like the water is fine. You feel the current moving and then you step back out again.
That can give you the permission that you need to not feel like you have to catch up or even necessarily stay on top of the writing.
And that is how you know that this particular episode title was a bit of a bait and switch by me because I actually don't think that you can stay on top of the reading. I encourage you to think about reading as a type of professional development for yourself. And a little gift to that inner scholar, that little kid scholar inside of you that really just likes to read and likes to think about these things in the field and started this degree in the first place.
When we think about the reading as not something that we have to quote, stay on top of, or that is a to do list that never actually ends, but instead something that we engage in when we want to feel refreshed, when we want to think about new ideas, when we want to connect with the larger conversations happening around us.
Then reading gets a little bit more fun.
And if you like the idea of taking some of the regular scholarship labor that we all have to do and thinking about it in a way that increases fun and reduces guilt, and you're going to love summer camp. I invite you to click the link in the show notes and learn a little bit about the program that I have created.
Summer camp is built around two weeks, sprints that are going to help you work more intentionally and also rest more intentionally. Join us for the sessions that work for your schedule. Skip the ones that don't and know that there are all sorts of benefits and perks. There are planning courses, live events, small group cabins, so that you can get to know people, A camp fire to work around chat, share resources and much more. The link in the bio has all of the information about various packages. That'll save you money, sliding scale payment plans.
Session one is already underway, but session two starts on May 29th. And like I said, these are going on all summer long. If you are interested in joining us. Use the code podcast for 10% off. Any sliding scale level or payment plan. Thanks so much. And I hope to see you around either the camp neighborhood or back here in this space 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!