Now what? (How to get started)
Welcome back! Hopefully you’ve had a chance to at least think a little about the questions at the end of the last post (and if you don’t know what I’m talking about check it out). Or you’ve already sat down and gotten your answers to those questions worked out (if that’s you: WAY TO GO!)
If you are anything like me, you’re probably feeling excited, and maybe energized, but also probably a little overwhelmed, and maybe worried. I know I feel that every time I’ve pivoted my research program. It’s always exciting to get started on a new pathway. BUT at the same time, we’ve all started and stopped enumerable things (i.e. diets, exercise plans, writing goals, professional development trainings etc…) in our lives, and I know I am always left feeling disappointed when that thing doesn’t work out. Furthermore, very few of us get to make a clean break from our current responsibilities to get started on our new pathways. So where does that leave us?
First things first – it is important to recognize that this is a totally normal feeling, but that we can’t let it stop us from moving forward. So, in the next few paragraphs I am going to outline the first big task that I go through in restarting this process for myself. While this might not work exactly for you the same way it works for me, hopefully you will see something that sparks a set of steps that will work for you!
Our first big task is to get really clear about your current responsibilities and the associated time commitments. Though I don’t think “hustle culture” is new to academia, this current iteration has many of us trying to turn ourselves into the Energizer bunny 🐰 and believing that if we just had a few more hours in the day that “to do” list would get done. It won’t, the to do list is never ending, largely because we just keep adding crap to it. Looking at your response to question #1 from last week, what are the actual hour commitments needed for your current position? (i.e. How many hours do you teach each week? How many standing meetings do you have each week? How much dedicated writing or mentoring time have you allocated?) These should be things that CAN’T be moved around easily.
The next set of work items to think about are the looming teaching, writing, research deadlines do you have in the next 6 months? This is where you catalogue current projects and plans that you’ve started but are still working through. Once you have them listed assign an estimate of hours/week that it will take you to complete them fully.
Next, write out how long you sleep, when you eat, exercise, relax, walk the dog, hang out with friends, when you have to get kids, parents, other dependents and run them to various activities etc… . Again, assign amounts of time each of these activities.
I like to do all of this in a spreadsheet so it can do the math for me. Once you have this all complete, look at your numbers. How many hours a week are already taken up by your current responsibilities? How does that number make you feel? Maybe you have a good amount of flex and can skip ahead to next week’s post (see you then), but maybe you can see now that there isn’t too much flex at all.
That’s okay, consider this your “let off the hook free” posting. I think many of us are striving to make changes in our lives so we can be better aligned with what matters most to us. We are also all being sold a bill of goods that you can make these changes easily, with the right, system, training, or product, and once you have that “thing” those changes will happen easily. But when this doesn’t happen, because that just isn’t possible, we are all left feeling let down and disappointed in ourselves. I don’t want that for me anymore, and I don’t want that for you either.
Full transparency moment – I’ve been toying with the idea of starting this project that you are reading right now for at least 4 years, cycled through rather different ideas of what this project would be, been working on a website for at least a year and a half, and only published my first blog post two weeks ago. Do I lack focus? Sometimes. Am I lazy? You could probably argue that sometimes too. But I also lacked bandwidth. I still have a full-time job and household responsibilities, each of which comes with demands on my time and energy. So, I started small, first committing to some business building training (because I can always find a way to commit to schooling). Next, I made time for small advancements as often as I could (i.e. writing a paragraph of text for my website, figuring out how to track spending, researching products that would help me as a solopreneur). These pockets could be anywhere from 10 minutes to a couple of hours. But honestly there were whole weeks when I didn’t even think about this. Not because I’m not committed to making this work, but because other stuff needed me more in that moment.
Your weekly time scan is just data. It is meant to help you calibrate your expectations for how taking control of your research program is going to go, what you have time for, and where you can start building up that momentum. This data also helped me to get REALLY focused on where I said YES. If it was something that helped me advance my goals and objectives or provided experiences or connections I could leverage, then heck yes. If it was something that I could do, but only benefited the other party, or something that anyone else could do, then I’m a no. This process gave me permission to manage my time in a whole new way and empowered me to divest myself from various other committees and time commitments that were no longer serving me. Happily, this freedom allowed me to carve out even larger chunks of time to work on this project 🤗.
Taking control of your research program will not happen overnight, but I promise you this process will be worth it. Please let me know how you make out with tracking your time.
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