#79: My imperfect but adequate working day
I keep getting asked what my working day looks like. You know, as if I've cracked this whole productivity thing. I definitely haven't, but I have managed to make positive changes over the past few years as a result of making the sorts of changes I talk about on this podcast. Let me tell you about how it's all gone - not so that you can do things the way I do them (please don't!), but so you can see that change really is possible. Oh, and I'm also going to tell you about Simba, our community cat, who has been CATapulted to fame over the past week or so.
Donate to help look after Simba!
Episode transcript:
Let me tell you about how making this podcast has changed my working pattern.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi friends! Hey, guess what? Since the last episode, I’ve acquired a share in a new cat. His name is Simba, and he’s a sort of community cat in my neighbourhood. He goes into the local shops, where he causes a lot of trouble by tearing into cat food packages, sitting on the checkouts, and taking swipes at people walking past. He turns up in the hair salon too, and at the local schools and the nursery. As far as everyone knew, he had an owner. Then the people in the local shop tried to contact his owner about the mayhem he was causing in there, and they found that his owner has moved away without taking Simba. So, the manager of the shop took him to an animal shelter about an hour’s drive away. When people in the neighbourhood found out about this, everyone went mental. The guy who sent him away ended up having to go and get him back, and a lady who lives at the heart of his stomping ground offered him a home. But he’s really a group project. We’re all contributing financially to his food and care, and we’re working closely with the shop staff to keep him out of trouble. He has his own Facebook page now, a Whatsapp group for a handful of his most devoted support team members (including me, of course), and a Gofundme page - I’m going to stick a link to that in the episode notes in case you have any spare cash burning a hole in your pocket that you’d like to send Simba’s way. Even more excitingly, a journalist from the local newspaper covered his story. Then a journalist from a national newspaper got in touch too and he was in the Express a few days ago, where he was called ‘chaos cat’ in the headline. Yet more journalists want to come and do some filming - although I doubt he’ll keep any appointments made on his behalf. I noticed that, along the way, he’s started pretentiously describing himself as a ‘Bengal tortoiseshell’. Don’t be fooled - he’s just a silly old tabby. He gave us all a scare yesterday when he hadn’t shown up at his new home in a while. Thankfully he turned up in the textiles department of the secondary school this morning and was lounging in a box of fabric with his tongue sticking out. Drama over - for now.
Interestingly, Simba was profiled in our community newsletter a couple of years ago, in their ‘Meet the Resident’ column. For the next edition of the newsletter, I had the honour of being the resident that everyone got to meet. I proudly showed the newsletter to my kids when it came through the door and they were … well, disgusted, frankly. ‘We thought it would be another cat!’ they complained. And then one of them asked, ‘Why did they interview you? Do they just ask anyone?’
Anyway, there are some interesting parallels between Simba’s adventures and our topic for this episode. Only joking, sorry - there’s no link whatsoever, I just thought you’d be interested to hear about Simba. And, if I’m honest, I feel a bit awkward about today’s topic: my own working day. You see, sometimes coaching clients will ask me about what my working day looks like. I’ve been asked the same thing in interviews too. It always makes me feel a bit cornered. It’s not that I’m secretive about what my days are like - in fact, I’m far happier nowadays to be open about things than I was a few years ago, when I was still convinced that I procrastinated more than anyone else in the entire known universe and that the world would come crashing down if anyone were to find out about it. It’s more that I’m thinking: they’re asking me this because the podcast has made them think I’ve cracked this whole ‘productivity’ thing, and I definitely haven’t but it’s my fault they think I have, so please don’t do what I do, I’m still trying to work it all out, ask someone who has totally nailed efficiency instead! Which is all just another form of perfectionism, isn’t it? It’s not like I’m getting asked this question because people are under the impression that I have everything sorted. If that’s what they were after, they can go and read one of those ‘5 things that billionaires always do before a yachting minibreak’ articles, or ‘Mark Zuckerberg’s inbox zero Peloton workout’. They’re asking me because they know I’m not perfect, and they want to know what progress looks like for someone who is trying to muddle through anyway, dragging her procrastination problem and her sense of inadequacy and her inner critic with her. So, I’ll start off by telling you about how things were around 5 years ago - before I started the podcast, before I started coaching, before it occurred to me that maybe I didn’t have to say horrible things to myself constantly - and I’ll focus on the problematic thought patterns and behaviours that I ended up having to address in order to settle into a better working pattern, and then I’ll tell you how things are now.
5 years ago, then. I had big problems with writing. I was ok with other aspects of my job, but getting the writing right was what I cared most about, and that’s what was giving me the most anxiety. The problems were mainly centred around my book, For F*ck’s Sake - that’s the title of the book, not just me expressing frustration at the writing process. It was finally published in November last year, 8 years after I started writing it. I talked about the process in episode #40: Why I took SO BLOODY LONG to write my book. Feel free to go and listen to that if you want the gory details. What I’ll say about this, for now, is that in retrospect there were 3 big problems with the way I was working, and which over time I’ve managed to address.
The first problem was anxiety. I was terrified of, among other things, writing something bad. That was a good motivation for avoiding trying to write. It also made the problem worse: the longer I took, the better the end product needed to be, in order to make up for how long it was taking, and that piled on the pressure and made me feel even more stressed about it all. The result was that, whenever I sat down at the computer ready to write, I felt an overwhelming urge to do something else instead. Almost anything else. But I didn’t realise anxiety was involved. I just felt like I was in the grip of a mysterious power that would pull me away from what I needed to do.
The next problem was my ridiculously unrealistic ideas about what a normal writing day should look like. I say ‘ridiculously’ unrealistic because I wasn’t new to writing philosophy - I’d been doing it for decades by the time I started working on my book. I ought to have known better. But even so, I thought that a normal writing day should involve hours on end adding words to the page. I thought this is what everyone else was doing. It didn’t occur to me to wonder whether writing should involve doing things other than writing - writing-adjacent things like thinking, reading, making notes, sketching out plans, working out how everything was going to fit together. This idea of the normal working day was always present in my mind - it was the standard by which I judged myself, and because it was an unrealistic standard, of course I always fell short.
Which leads me to the third problem. My tendency to say horrible things to myself all the time. Like many of you, I didn’t think of this in terms of an inner critic - an exceptionally mean voice that i could work on and possibly replace with a more compassionate perspective - an inner mentor. I just assumed that the mean things I was saying to myself - that I was lazy, incompetent, ill disciplined, stupid, weak-willed - were true, and because they were true, it was completely reasonable for me to say them to myself. It took me years to notice that they weren’t true or reasonable, and that they were often contradictory or at odds with the evidence. For example, I’d tell myself that I wasn’t going fast enough and that therefore I was lazy, but on the few occasions when I did sit down and make progress, I’d tell myself that I was going too fast and that therefore I was careless. I couldn’t win. And anyway, I couldn’t really be lazy when I was up early every morning and spending hours per day at the computer, and I couldn’t really be careless when I would read and re-read the things I’d written, scouring them for mistakes or possible argumentative missteps. I didn’t see any of this - I was too busy being mean to myself. My meanness stopped me from thinking clearly about my progress.
Now, these 3 problems interacted to make everything worse. My unrealistic ideas about what progress should look like fed my anxiety about not being good enough or fast enough, which slowed me down even more, which gave me even more reasons to criticise myself, and so on. A big part of my route out of this tangle was simply noticing what was going on. Working out, for example, the role that anxiety was playing in my problems. That wasn’t straightforward, because I didn’t feel anxious. There was no churning stomach or thumping heart or shallow breathing. Which is how anxiety feels sometimes, but not always. Sometimes it’s more low-key, and it can creep up on you without your noticing. That was what was going on here. My anxiety was manifesting as an urge to get away from the thing that was making me anxious: my writing. That mysterious power that was pulling me away from what I needed to do was, in the end, not particularly mysterious at all. It was plain old anxiety.
I noticed, too, that I was wrong about what writing was supposed to look like. That one seems completely obvious when you think about it - of course nobody writes a book by sitting down and writing the words non stop, without stopping to think. At least, nobody writes a good book that way. But I wasn’t stopping to think about the writing process. I was just assuming, unreflectively and unquestioningly. Again, noticing what I was doing - specifically, noticing the daft assumptions I was working on - played a major role in making progress.
And then the horrible voice. Eventually I worked out that it wasn’t speaking the truth. It was just one perspective, and it was a nasty perspective. I could choose not to listen to what it was saying. I could choose other, more positive perspectives. I didn’t have to convince myself that the positive perspectives were the correct ones. Even just noticing that there are different perspectives, different stories we can tell ourselves about what we’re doing, helped me get some distance from the mean one. Journaling was a big part of this, as I’ve said on this podcast before. For a few weeks, I’d keep a notepad next to me while I was trying to write, and I’d stop and write down every mean thought I had about myself. That helped me notice just how many mean thoughts I was having, which itself was a new thing - they really were relentless. And, written down, the thoughts were much less credible than when they were slipping, barely noticed, into my consciousness. Written down, they were the self-contradictory rantings of a madwoman. Truly deranged.
Now, I’m really summarising here. The shifts in perspective that I made in order to get out of that really stressful, horrible place in which I was making almost no progress and feeling increasingly stressed about it, is pretty much the story of this podcast: the episodes I make are, as I’ve no doubt said before, as much for my own benefit as they are for the benefit of anyone else who chooses to listen. But if I had to choose just one thing that made the biggest difference - one thing that made all the other positive changes possible - it would be my efforts to be kinder to myself. If you’re not kind to yourself, you need to try it. Make it a priority. Honestly, it’s hard to implement any positive changes in your life if you are absolutely wedded to the belief - as I used to be and as I know plenty of you still are - that the root of all your problems is your own shameful inadequacy as a human being.
So, what does my working life look like these days, after a few years of working on myself and trying to improve? Well, I’m nowhere near as productive as I used to tell myself I ought to be. But I think I’m productive enough. And, honestly, I can’t imagine being willing to say that about myself a few years ago - I didn’t use to think that I was enough at anything. But these days I’m more realistic and accepting of my limitations. I’m never going to be a machine that sits down and pounds out thousands of words without trying. Some people are, but not me. But, most days, I can get out a few sentences on whatever writing project I’m working on. Sometimes more, sometimes less. For around a decade, on and off, I’ve got up at 6am so that I can make coffee and have some quiet writing time before the kids are awake. That doesn’t always come easily, and it’s taken a lot of trial and error to work out that in order to make it happen I need to set 2 alarms: a vibrating one on my watch that goes off at 6am exactly, and then a loud one on my phone on the other side of the room that is set to go off a minute later. The temptation to switch off the one on my watch and go back to sleep is huge, but it’s outweighed by my desire to ensure I switch off the alarm on my phone before it starts, which would probably wake the kids, who would moan about it, and then my nice peaceful solitary morning time would be lost. So, I’m up and out of bed, and then I go downstairs to make coffee, ensuring that I say good morning to all 7 cats individually, with accompanying cuddles, as I go. I take my coffee up to my desk, which is at the top of my house. On a good day, I’ll get a bit of writing done - and by ‘writing’ I don’t necessarily mean typing but simply thinking about my writing project or doing something related to it rather than doing something else. That stops either when it’s time to go and wake my daughter - I have another alarm set on my watch for 6:55 for that - or when I start to lose focus and feel like checking Facebook or whatever. If I feel like doing that, I don’t give myself a hard time about it. I’ll usually try not to cave to the urge immediately, but if it gets persistent I’ll take that as a signal that my writing for that session is done. I’m trying to keep it relaxed. I’m trying not to exert willpower, as I’d end up doing if I were to hold out and try to force myself to remain focused for a bit longer. In fact, I try to avoid exerting willpower in general, at least with anything I want to be doing regularly - not just writing, but also running and trying to eat reasonably healthily. Because I’ve learnt that relying on willpower is not a long term strategy. I might be able to use willpower to squeeze an extra 15 minutes writing out of myself for a day or two, but every day for weeks or months on end? No chance. Instead, my strategy is to make the experience as stress free and pleasant as possible. That way, I’m less motivated to avoid it.
Which brings me to how my early mornings look on days when things don’t go so well. That’s about a third of the time, probably. On those days, I sit down at the computer ready to write, and I get distracted by something pretty much immediately. In the bad old days, I’d beat myself up about that, but I don’t any more - and the fact that I don’t do that any more makes it much easier to get myself back on track. Some days, I don’t get anything written because the previous day has been exhausting. Some days, I struggle to write because I’ve taken a wrong turn and I need to pause and rethink what to do next. These explanations - unlike ‘I’m not writing because I’m an awful person’ - are useful. I can work with them and use them to see how to put things right. So, on the days when I’m exhausted, I can notice that and decide to work on something less demanding and pick up the writing the next day. When I’ve taken a wrong turn, I can tune in to whatever doubts I’m having about the way I’m headed, and do some planning and brainstorming to work out how to put things right. There’s no anxiety involved here. There’s no feeling like I’m falling behind. In fact, it’s progress. Being able to identify when I’m not on form for writing, and switching to something else instead, is a much better use of my time than just getting annoyed with myself and avoiding work, the way I used to. And noticing when I’ve taken a wrong turn is really valuable, even if it does sometimes get expressed as reluctance to get on with stuff. It’s a skill that comes - in my case at least - only after many years of writing. Misinterpreting it and attacking myself would be a way to miss out on an important opportunity to make an insight into how things are going and where they need to go next. All of which is to say that great things happen when you’re willing to be kind to yourself.
And this brings me to a problem with the ‘What does a typical day look like for you?’ question. There is no typical day. I have certain habits I try to stick to, like the early morning writing sessions, but sometimes it flows and feels productive, and sometimes it doesn’t. I expect that, now. I no longer say to myself, ‘Today has been a failure, but tomorrow will be different - I’ll work even harder to make up for it!’ - which is a recipe for avoidance and stress. Am I letting myself off the hook? I know a lot of you have this fear, because you tell me about it in coaching sessions. ‘I need to be mean to myself otherwise I’m letting myself off the hook!’ I’ve heard it many times. But, friend, you don’t belong on a hook in the first place. The more appealing you can make it to return to your project tomorrow, the better, and that means being nice to yourself. I’m proof of this: the better I got at being kind to myself, the easier writing became. I started working on a new book project a few months ago, and it’s going well. I’m not working on it every day, but it’s steadily growing even so. That’s a world of difference from the tortuous progress on my last book.
Right. Here I am, waffling on, and I’ve only covered what my day is like up until about 7:30am, by which time - on a good day - I might have got a couple of hundred words down. Then I’m plunged into domestic stuff like making packed lunches for the children. I’ll usually sit down with another coffee around that time too, and do a bit of knitting. Maybe I’ll do a bit of emailing. Then, at some point during the day - early on if I’m not procrastinating too much about it - I’ll go for a run. The rest of the day is pretty unstructured, or rather, it just fits with whatever the demands are. It depends on what deadlines I have, whether there are meetings, and so on. Sometimes, there will be a nap. Most of the time, if there’s not a pressing deadline or something scheduled, I’m done by about 3pm. So, it’s really only the early morning writing - or the attempt at it - and my run that I’m reasonably consistent at. Prioritising the morning writing time has come from realising that I’m sharpest, mentally, first thing in the morning. That tailoring my schedule to make the most of when I’m at my sharpest is something else that has come with taking a kinder attitude towards myself, too. It’s something I only managed to do once I accepted, without negative judgment, that after the first hour or two of working, I’m not on top form any more, and that I can work with that. I might not be able to achieve The Perfect Working day, whatever that might be, but I can achieve an acceptable working day, for me.
Now, I’ve focused here on the days when I’m working at home. That’s not always the case. When I’m teaching, I need to travel, and I end up wiped out by the whole thing. I have a very boring commute - around an hour and a quarter each way - which I can’t do by public transport, so I have to drive. Then it’s a few hours of teaching, followed by the drive back. Believe it or not, I used to give myself a hard time for being tired at the end of my teaching days. It’s not like teaching in a nice warm classroom and driving in a nice comfortable car are like working down a coal mine, after all. These days, though, I accept the way it makes me feel. I don’t expect anything more of myself on teaching days than simply to get done what I need to do, and survive. I try to do things to make it a bit easier. I listen to interesting podcasts in the car, take walks between classes, and I drink lots of water because for some reason teaching makes me very dehydrated, which probably means I talk far too much. In other words, I try to look after myself and support myself the way I’d try to look after and support a friend who was facing a tiring day - not by challenging their right to be exhausted by it in the first place, but by doing small things to make things a bit easier. Once I’m home after a teaching day, I’m not capable of doing much other than lying around and uttering words of one syllable when people speak to me, before heading off to bed early. And as I’ve mentioned already, the exhaustion usually continues into the next day. It probably takes a full 24 hours to recharge properly.
That’s pretty much it. And it’s just weekdays, mind. I never work on weekends, ever, although I used to. Weekends are for taxiing my kids around to their important appointments - and for resting, of course. I’ve learnt that trying to push myself and do too much is likely to backfire. I end up ill, or miserable, or both. And, regardless, doing nothing is important. It’s what all the effort is for. I talked about this back in episode #17: The importance of wasting your time.
I hope you enjoyed nosing around my working patterns. Don’t copy me. I haven’t cracked it. What I do hope you might draw from this is a sense of the sort of positive difference you can make if you’re willing to invest in understanding yourself, questioning your assumptions about yourself and your relation to your work, and explore new ways of doing and thinking about things. Next time, friends!
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
Enjoy the show?
Please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.
Don’t miss an episode - subscribe using the links below!