doing about half work I should be doing.... help

[memyselfandcoffee]

Basically I'm not sure exactly what my problem is... I have great intentions and like my research area. My supervisor is nice and we meet weekly.

I make plans to work, to record my hours ect, but every week I get practically nothing done. last week was best week I did a little over 30 hours, this week was a disaster

after my meeting on Thursday I felt motivated to actually do some work and start impressing my supervisor. I made a plan of my research and spent

about an hour looking for articles. I went out with a friend who was coming to visit, which I thought was good idea for my sanity since I'm in a new city and wanted to see a familiar face. I was good though we went for dinner and I only had 1 cocktail and 1 beer. But i felt wored when i came home and a bit sick and couldn't sleep for ages.

On Friday i got up late and felt very tired, I went for a brisk walk but just felt even worse, so I ended up doing nothing. then on Friday night my flat-mates woke me making noise twice during the night and it took me ages to get back to sleep each time. we were forewarned about electricity being cut and maintence work being carried on Sat, so I had decided that would be my day off and had made a hair appoint, which i had to get up early (for me) for. spent the day at the mall. then on sat night my flatmates woke up again.

I made the mistake of getting up really early on sunday to study, but after 2-3 nights of bad sleep I was wreaked and only did about 2.5 hours.

then on Monday I went to a talk and did about 4 hours hours work. i decided to go to a dinner i had been invited to with the dept, as I wanted to get to know my colleagues, which i felt would make my life easier in the long run, eventho i knew i had work to do

then Tuesday i had class from 10-4.30 and the i went for jog and i only did about an 1.5 hrs.

I couldn't sleep for some reason, mainly lying awake thinking about what I'd say to my supervisor and making plans to come clean with him but promise to cop on ect. i was also stressed as one of flatmates is being a total dick.

anyway I got up late then today and did about 4 hours, and thats it-- 8 hours study done this entire week and I had planned on doing 45!!!

i can get 9 hours done by meeting tomorrow, but i am depressed and pissed off, because i feel like I am blowing my one shot at this

I'm sorry this is so long, but there's my week.... I had a plan for doing 40+ hours and it totally went out the window, how do I cop on, it realy is becoming groundhog week for me and i will be asked to leave if i don't cop on.

( re noisy flatemates, I asked them to be a bit quiter and they basically told me f*** off and are now not talking to me so thats a whole other kettle of fish

fortunately I have one nice fatmate who thinks the others are being idiots, so i guess thats the silver linning.

anyway, please advise me,

thanks

Edited October 24, 2012 by elise123

[mandarin.orange]

Can you be honest and up-front? Emphasize what you have done, but mention, "I'm struggling with time management and getting enough sleep." Don't immediately follow with apologies and promises to work -- see what he says and if he has advice to offer.

It sounds like you set an ambitious plan that becomes insurmountable. Is there a way to break it into more doable, day-by-day chunks? On days where I don't sleep well (and there are a frustrating lot of them), I try to take on the more low-key tasks -- like reading shorter papers, skimming/organizing my papers, outlining (but not actual writing), more routine tasks (if in lab), etc.

[rising_star]

What are you planning to do 40+ hours per week on and why? Because, I think you're expecting too much of yourself. RAs are typically 20 hours/week. Sure, you may have to do more but, 40+ hours in addition to a full course load is A LOT and way more than I've ever heard of...

[ktel]

I think you're focusing way too much on how long you should be working, rather than the quality of the work you should do. I know some grad students who may sit at their desk for 10 hours a day but frequently gossip, go on Facebook, read the paper, etc. They are "working" for 10 hours but it's certainly not quality. I assume you're pretty early on in your project, which can make it tough to work a lot because you're still feeling things out.

[Eigen]

What are you planning to do 40+ hours per week on and why? Because, I think you're expecting too much of yourself. RAs are typically 20 hours/week. Sure, you may have to do more but, 40+ hours in addition to a full course load is A LOT and way more than I've ever heard of...

Depending on the area of psychology, some of them function a lot more like the lab sciences, in which RA work is also your dissertation work. In those cases, 40+ hours a week is very common.

That said, I encourage a lot of our new students to set both "time" goals and "work" goals- sometimes one or the other is unrealistic. Either you think you can get X amount of work done in a few hours, but something happens and it ends up taking much longer. Or, you finish up the work you had laid out for the day way faster than you'd thought.

Setting say, 8 hours of work for the day as well as a range of tasks you want to complete helps balance out your expectations. If you finish the tasks before the time you allotted, go home early. If you're struggling to finish but you've already put in 8 productive hours, go home and take a break, and go back to it with adjusted expectations tomorrow.

Personally, I find around 50 hours a week a happy medium that lets me feel like I'm making good progress, and still have a life. Depending on the week, more of that might balance to a weekend, or I might work a few long days and take the weekend completely off. And then, of course, there are insane weeks where 80 hours is more common than not, but those usually get balanced out with some time off.

[nessa]

If I'm way off about your problem, sorry, but I'm in clinical psychology and when all you have is a hammer everything is a nail ... but have you been feeling depressed at all? was staying on a schedule and getting things done a problem earlier in school? If this is a new problem, then I would recommend looking at when you started having it, and seeing why your motivation has dropped off so much. There might be more going on.

If it's always been an issue getting things done, but you've been able to cover for it up until grad school, then the above advice is good. Regardless, if you think your supervisor would be sympathetic, it might not hurt to get feedback from him on how to improve- or if it's even as big of an issue as you see it.

[juilletmercredi]

I agree that it could be depression (I went through a few bouts and I couldn't get anything done), but if OP is a new grad student it could also just be adjusting to a new workload and not being familiar with how many hours one needs to realistically work to get things done - as well as just being unused to making one's own schedule. That's my biggest struggle, not depression (which is rough) but scheduling myself and actually sitting down and doing what I said I was going to do when I said I was going to do it.

I've found that it helps me to make deadlines and find people who will hold me to them. I'm really bad at structuring my own time when I have vast swaths of it (weeks or months) and very big projects (write this paper!), but I am exceptionally good at making deadlines if they are for short chunks of time (1-2 weeks) and pacing myself when I have smaller tasks (write intro section; finish preliminary analyses). I'm very tasky and not at all big picture. So when I'm writing a paper with someone else, we talk about deadlines and I set some, then turn in the work to the person at the deadline. Even if that person doesn't even look at my draft/work at that time, just knowing someone is expecting it is enough for me to get it done. My advisor is great and has helped me by holding me accountable to my deadlines, but it's very independent - I give him a reasonable deadline, and I email the work to him, but he doesn't check on me. So maybe you can work out something independently with your advisor, or create a writing circle with another student(s).

[memyselfandcoffee]

no I'm definitely not depressed, I'm just struggling with getting used to structuring my own time, I found the advice about setting task and time goals very useful, thanks Eigen. However I do love what I'm doing but sometimes I feel so daunted by what I need to get done, i guess just a little overwhelmed at times , that I do what's termed 'experiential avoidance', which is basically do anything to distract from myself from thinking about or actually doing work, as it is anxiety provoking. so I think that's my problem at the moment. anyone else do this? any more advice?

I notice that if gets too late in the day, I just feel like giving up, like i feel I've way too little time to anything productive and I feel either anxious or despondent and then I am really tempted to just put off thinking about the whole affair. this is really annoying, because I used to my best work in the evenings.

thanks

ps. i ve gotten somewhat better since i started this thread

[fuzzylogician]

What works for me is to have a detailed plan of what I'm doing - (1) today, (2) this week, (3) this semester, (4) this year, and (5) for my degree. You're probably not a stage to map out what you want to do before you graduate but you can look up some milestones in your program (quals, prospectus, etc) to have an idea of the overall structure of your program. Then it's useful to think about your semester and/or year. What classes are you taking and what kind of work do they require? When are papers for your classes due? Are you going to any conferences? Are there abstract deadlines or talks scheduled? Are you presenting in your classes or departmental reading groups? These questions can help you map out your semester. From there you can identify busy weeks and less busy weeks, and try to have realistic goals for each week. In a busy week you might get less done beside the absolute crucial tasks, and in other weeks you can try for more. Eigen's suggestion to schedule "time" goals as well as "work" goals is very useful to help prevent you from going overboard.

Two important things to keep in mind: First, things take more time than you think. Budget for spillover time, because you'll need it. Second, everyone has off days, and besides adjusting to this kind of workday is quite difficult. Allow yourself time off to recover from your work. Don't be disappointed with yourself if you don't get everything done exactly according to plan. If you get very much behind, it's a good idea to take a moment to review your plan and draw conclusions. Falling behind may mean that you've made unrealistic plans.

Also, structured procrastination. I do all kinds of less-important things on my to-do list to avoid the one major thing I'm dreading. Sometimes it's how I get anything done for some weeks.

ETA: crossing items off (multiple) lists can be extremely satisfying..

I've recently started using workflowy to organize my lists, and I absolutely love it!

Edited November 6, 2012 by fuzzylogician