#91: Sartre, 3pm, and writing off writing days
Does your writing time ever turn into a stressful nightmare? You don't make the progress you hoped in the morning, which means you need to be even more productive in the afternoon, but then you end up too stressed to start, and then it gets so late that you write the day off as a failure and promise to do better tomorrow ... except you start tomorrow stressed about how little you accomplished the day before, and the cycle repeats itself. Take a deep breath, friends. The Academic Imperfectionist is here to show you a way out of this nastiness.
Episode transcript:
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.
Hello, everyone. School’s out here in Academic Imperfectionist land. I don’t mean my students - term finished for them some time ago - I mean my own children. There’s plenty to love about the summer break, but it always comes with its own brand of anxiety. (I have a brand of anxiety for every time of the year. Do you remember those Brambly Hedge kids’ books? There was Spring Story, Summer Story, Autumn Story, and Winter Story. I could do my own version, and the mice would all be on SSRIs.) This season’s anxiety is something along the lines of: how do I manage to make progress with my own writing projects, while also ensuring that the children are moderately entertained or at least not stagnating in front of screens for the entire time, oh and I suppose I should try to fit in an actual proper break to relax too. When the kids were younger, it was more like: how do I get my own work done while keeping my kids alive and entertained. Before the children, my summer anxiety was a bit different. I’d start out full of hope and enthusiasm for how extremely productive I was going to be over the summer, without my time being broken up by teaching, meetings, and other scheduled things, but in the end the lack of structure meant that the days would run away from me and I’d end up losing hours, days, and weeks to directionless faffing, with work and non-work blending unhelpfully together in the way I warned you about in the previous episode, and then in September the new academic year would roll around and I’d have little to show for it. Everyone else, I was sure, was locked into their own super-productive flow states, effortlessly churning out entire articles and book chapters in the time it would take me to finally get around to opening the Word document I was meant to be working on. I now know that that’s not quite true, and that striking an acceptable balance between being productive, resting, and family or other non-work commitments is something that lots of people struggle with. With schools in the UK just out for the summer, this seems like a good time to talk about it. I’m a month or so late for listeners in the US, where the schools finished some time ago. And as for the structure of the academic year in the southern hemisphere … well, that’s a mysterious world I don’t dare venture into. If you don’t have a long stretch of unstructured time ahead of you at the moment, don’t worry, though - the core message here will be relevant for any stretch of dedicated writing time, whether that’s an entire summer or just a day or two. What I want to talk about in this episode is not, specifically, how to use long stretches of unstructured time effectively. There’s lots of advice out there about this. The famously distraction-resistant computer scientist and time-management writer, Cal Newport, advocates planning out every moment of your day, giving every minute a job - so, if turning unstructured time into something more regimented is what you’re after, I recommend checking out his work. Instead, I want to talk about a problem that arises on those days when you don’t have anything significant scheduled, those days that start off full of hope and almost trembling with yet-to-be-tapped (by you) productive potential. You wake up announcing to yourself that you are going to get so much done today. But then the reality doesn’t live up to the expectation. The dazzling laser beam of focus that you planned to direct relentlessly at the task in hand fizzles and dims. Minutes and then hours slip disappointingly and unproductively by. At first, you refuse to give up on the idea that you are going to get an absolute ton of stuff done - you may be a few hours in with nothing to show for it, but you’re going to make up for it by absolutely killing it after lunch. And then you don’t. And at some point in the day you give up. The day is beyond hope. There’s no point starting now. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre captured this feeling in his novel, Nausea, where the protagonist ponders: ‘Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do’. So, you give up on the things you’d hoped to accomplish, write off the day, and spend the rest of it feeling disappointed in yourself. But not to worry - tomorrow is another day, and you’re going to be absolutely on fire, right? Except … not necessarily. Oh dear. Before you know it, the new term is coming around, your schedule is filling up again and all that time that seemed like productive sunlit uplands when looked at it from the start now looks more like a dingy, smelly swamp in retrospect. If you’re nodding your head here, you’re in good company. This is a big theme in my coaching sessions, and it’s something I have plenty of first-hand experience of too. I find it a lot easier these days to understand why it happens, although for many years I was puzzled by it and had no idea how to fix it and - unlike my coaching clients - I wasn’t brave enough to tell anyone else about it, let alone seek help with it. If it resonates with you, then I expect you have mixed feelings about any stretch of unstructured time in which you hope to get stuff done. I expect that, on the one hand, you’re full of hope about the progress you’ll make, but on the other, you’re terrified because you don’t trust yourself to follow through on that hope and get the stuff done. Let me tell you a bit about what I think is going on when we end up writing off our writing days like this, and then I’ll share some ideas about how we can prevent it happening in the first place, and how we can salvage things if it does start to happen, so that it doesn’t end up snowballing out of control. I think there are two unhelpful patterns of thinking at the heart of what I’ve described here: perfectionism and binary thinking. These things aren’t completely separate, they’re intertwined. Perfectionism is a form of binary thinking, after all: things are either perfect and therefore acceptable, or not perfect and therefore rubbish. But it’s helpful to keep them both in mind when approaching this problem. So, let’s say you have a stretch of writing time ahead of you. It might be the summer break, or it could be a week or even just a day you’ve set aside as dedicated to writing. You’re looking forward to it, full of hope, excited about what you’re going to get done. Here’s an important question for you, before you start: do you know what it is that you actually want to accomplish during this time? I mean, specifically. So, you can’t just say ‘a lot’. Try to make it quantifiable in some way. Use SMART goals. Make it bureaucratic: imagine you have to fill in an application form to get this writing time, and you have to list the things you expect to achieve during it, so that when someone comes round to check at the end, you can prove that you’ve done what you promised to do. In essence, it needs to be possible to tell, at the end of the period of time, whether or not you’ve been successful in whatever you set out to achieve. This might seem so obvious as to be hardly worth stating, but it’s actually hugely important to be clear about your goals, and surprisingly easy to overlook. One reason is your habit of moving your goalposts, which is easy to do when you’re not clear about what you’re setting out to do. For more on that, go and listen to episode #16: Stop moving your goalposts, which comes with a worksheet that you can download from the Resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website. Another reason why it’s important to have clearly defined for goals is … surprising. It’s something I became aware of only fairly recently. I noticed that sometimes, when coaching clients talked about times when they were trying to achieve poorly-defined goals, it turned out that they weren’t even aiming at any particular outcome. So, someone might begin a period of writing time with the poorly-defined goal of ‘be really productive’. And at the end, when they looked back and reflected on how they’d done, their sense of achievement wasn’t linked to accomplishing anything in particular. It was linked to how that period of time felt. If, looking back, they remembered that time as one in which they were really busy bustling about getting stuff done, then they were satisfied. That was time well spent. But if, on the other hand, they look back and remember lots of time spent staring into space, faffing about, procrastinating, going for coffee with friends, then they’re annoyed with themselves because they decide they wasted all that time. They don’t realise they were evaluating their time based on how it felt - this is something that emerges only after a lot of reflection and discussion. It’s not like they went into their writing time with the goal of ‘keep busy’. They do care about outcomes - by which I mean, having something worthwhile to show for it at the end of the time - it’s just that they assume that feeling busy is a reliable proxy for being productive. And that’s not always true, for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s very easy to feel busy without getting anything useful done. You can check your emails every 10 minutes, you can organise your desk, you can browse Pinterest for the most attractive-looking daily planners, you can check to see whether there’s a more attractive font you could be using for that thing you’re quietly managing not to write. None of this helps you make any progress with the important stuff, but if you haven’t paused to ensure you’re clear about what the important stuff is, then you’re not necessarily going to realise this. Another reason why feeling busy is a poor proxy for progress with the important stuff is that - especially when it comes to writing - progress often doesn’t feel very busy. Sometimes you have to spend time staring into space or going for a walk or standing in the shower in order to get the ideas flowing and to get your thoughts in order. Busying yourself with trivial nonsense is a distraction from that. Which is not to say that you’re a miserable failure if you busy yourself with trivial nonsense. I do a lot of that myself. The important thing is that you don’t deceive yourself about how much progress you’re making. Be clear about what your goals are, and be open to the possibility that progress towards them might not feel the way you expect. Ok. So, you have your clearly-defined goals for your writing time. If you’re a Cal Newport type, you use those goals to plan out every moment of your writing time. I have to admit that I don’t, although I wish I could. I expect the reason for this relates partly to my having got myself into all sorts of bad habits over the years - the unravelling of which is a long and ongoing process. But I suspect it’s also ADHD related. I’m mentioning this in the hope that it might help prevent my ADHD listeners from thinking that their difficulties with time management is due to them being terrible humans. There’s lots of information out there about ADHD and time management, but from my point of view the long and the short of it is this: I am capable of working out when I should be doing things and how long they are likely to take and what needs to happen before and after and all the other usual time-managementy stuff, but I can only do that effectively if I pour every last ounce of my cognitive energy into doing it, which leaves me too drained to actually do the cognitively-demanding stuff, like writing, that I’ve planned to do. Cal Newport has said that planning out his week on a Monday morning takes him over an hour. If I did that, I’d need a big nap afterwards. But more likely, I’d end up getting really into it and take it to an obsessive and completely counterproductive level. If this ever changes, I’ll make an episode to share my time-management redemption story. I’m not telling you this because I want to encourage you to follow my lead, but to reassure you that if you have problems with structuring your writing time, you’re not alone. Anyway. There’s another problem with this plan-every-moment strategy. When it comes to time - an afternoon, a day, a week, whatever - that you’ve set aside for writing, often the whole point is that it’s just for writing and nothing else. So the plan contains only one thing: write. Sometimes we can add a bit of useful detail, like if we know we’re going to need to spend some time reading x or y or z, we can allocate time for that. But often, we don’t know. Sometimes we don’t know how the time needs to unfold until we get started. And this is where we run the risk of that Sartrean three o’ clock danger. We take too long to get started, and the longer it takes us to get started the less likely we are to start, until we reach that tipping point in the day when we decide there’s no point and we may as well try again tomorrow, by which time the stakes are even higher because then tomorrow we need to do a full day’s work and make up for the previous day that we wasted, which makes it even harder to get started than it was before. Interestingly, scientists have recently discovered what causes this horrible cycle. Analysis of the brain activity of writers who get themselves into this sort of pickle produces graphs that spell out the word ‘anxiety’. They have cat memes where their prefrontal cortex should be. Their amygdala are on Google researching temperature-controlled pillows for effective power naps. Cross-section images of their brain stem show sad face emojis. I’m not sure I’m getting the brain anatomy right here, but I’m basically telling you the truth. You start your writing time full of hope for how much stuff you’re going to get done, but you’re absolutely primed to sound the alarm at any sign that you might in fact not be a productive and diligent person but instead a useless waste of space, and so the second you do something that doesn’t fit your perfectionist Platonic form of productivity, you view it as evidence of your awfulness. Get distracted for 5 minutes looking at your phone while you’re making your morning coffee? Oh jeez, says your inner critic, it’s not even 8am yet and you’ve binned the day to fuck. Put the phone away and get started, idiot. Looking out the window at next door’s cat while you’re opening your laptop, are you? That’s not in the rule book. Why don’t you do something useful for a change, you pathetic work-shy amoeba. And so on, maybe without even realising how you’re treating yourself. My point is that your productivity anxiety has put your inner critic on a hair trigger, and that makes it hard to get started, because you’ve basically created a toxic work environment for yourself in your own head. And the longer it goes on, the worse it gets. You thought you were going to be working non-stop from 9am, but it’s now 11:30 and you still haven’t started, which means that you need to work even harder for the rest of the day to make up for it, but that added pressure makes it even less likely that you’ll do anything useful - and then it’s 3pm and you give up, miserable and hating yourself, and the only way you can think of to make yourself feel better is to reassure yourself with all that ‘tomorrow is another day’ stuff and promise that you’ll catch up and then some tomorrow, but when tomorrow rolls around your anxiety is even worse … and so it continues. Stupid, perfectionist ideas about what a ‘productive human’ looks like, and stupid binary ideas about what time well spent looks like. I’m hoping that just by articulating what (according to me) is going on under the surface on days like these is helpful: seeing how unrealistic expectations about productivity, negative self-talk, and snowballing anxiety contribute to having an increasingly disappointing time can give us things to work on. Tackle any one of these - reign in your expectations of how productive you’re going to be today, talk compassionately to yourself, even when you’re disappointed in yourself (especially when you’re disappointed in yourself), and take your anxiety seriously by doing whatever it takes to soothe yourself - tackle any one of these things and you stand to see improvements. Now, those are all useful things to work on, but let me bring in a couple of things into focus, things that are incredibly helpful at that 3 o’clock moment, that point where you decide that you have made such an irretrievable pig’s ear of the day that you may as well forget it and try again tomorrow. This itself is a perfectionist impulse. It seems to be motivated by the thought that you can’t possibly get a full day’s work done now, at this late point in the day, when you’ve wasted so much time. And perhaps that’s true. But in between ‘doing a full day’s work’ and ‘doing absolutely nothing’, there is a huge spectrum of good stuff. If you find yourself at the point of feeling like writing off the whole day as a miserable failure, here’s something you can do. Ask yourself: what’s one thing I could do now that would enable me to go to bed tonight feeling like I’m a little further ahead with things than I was this morning? That’s a much more manageable goal than the one you had that morning. In fact, reaching that point in the day where you’re tempted to think ‘There’s no point starting anything now’ is actually a great opportunity. I’m going to disagree with JPS here and say that 3pm, or whenever that ‘too late to start’ point comes for you, is the best time to start. It’s late enough that you have low expectations of how much you’re going to be able to achieve, for a start, and that’s a great anxiety-dampener. Squeezing in a quick burst of usefulness before dinner is much less scary than having hours stretching out ahead of you that you’re secretly terrified of wasting. I talked about this back in episode #71: The best time to write is the worst time to write. And also, what else are you planning to do with that time? Sit around hating yourself, right? Go on. Give it 15 minutes. It’s the best therapy you’ll get today. Speak soon, pals.
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!
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