Exciting Announcements

• Surprise! I have a spot open for a new Success & Accountability Coaching client to start working together in March! If you’re looking for support as you prepare for tenure, work on your dissertation or book, or would just like some accountability and help with project planning for your writing project, I’d love to support you. You can learn more about coaching here and schedule in for a 30-minute Discovery call here.

• If you missed my recent workshop with Dr. Katy Peplin, “Will That Work For Me? Experimental Approaches to Scholarly Life,” the recording and 60-page workbook are now available for purchase.

• I was honored to be interviewed by Bailey Lang for The Writing Desk’s newsletter, Word to the Wise! Check it out for musings on my experience writing Tend to It, public scholarship, procrastination, and what my writing practice looks like.

• Finally, I was consulted as an expert for Alyssa Town’s article for The Everygirl, “Experts Say to Make These 5 Routine Tweaks for a More Productive Spring.” Check out the article now!

Just like a pie plate can only hold a certain amount of flaky crust and yummy filling until it overflows and plummets to the floor, our schedules are limited to finite units of time that can go towards a limited number of projects.

If the concept of a productivity pie feels weird, know that when I say “pie” I mean the total amount of time you have in a week. This means that our week is built up of many “pie pieces,” and some will be bigger or smaller depending on our deadlines and priorities.

Productivity is not one-size-fits-all. What works for me today might not work for me next week, and what works for you might never work for me. And that’s okay! You have my permission to hack productivity tools to make them fit your unique life experience, which means using ones that help you feel empowered and skipping the ones that you feel you “should” do but actually make you feel worse.

For example, I very rarely schedule when I’ll work on particular tasks because it makes me feel too constrained—but I know time blocking is a helpful tool that truly does work for many people and I do find it useful when I’m on a deadline and I need to be strict with how much time I spend on different tasks.

I know that the concept of a static pie that we can divide up neatly into 6 or 10 or 28 equal pieces may look fancy on paper, but in real life, our actual allowance of time and energy and focus are shifting all the time. Plus, as I shared in my recent Honing In episode about setting more realistic goals, it’s easy to overestimate how simple or quick a task may be to complete, which means we can set ourselves up for undue stress if we don’t allocate enough time or energy for our projects.

Here are some examples of how I might use the pie piece metaphor to plan out my weeks:

• When my spouse Kris is away on a business trip, I need to allocate slivers of time to take our dog Friday outside. And when the weather is nice, these pie pieces expand into longer walks around town.

• If I have a big deadline coming up for work, I know I’ll need to block off chunks of my week for deep work, which means other projects may need to be postponed or condensed.

• When I take a vacation and have a luxurious pie/schedule full of reading and relaxing, the tradeoff is stacking the weeks before and after with meetings and calls. The idea of a pie plate with many different slices (or quickly switching between tasks) stresses me out, so planning for a 1-week vacation might mean adjusting my schedule weeks in advance to chip away at things so I have time for extra meetings.

What about you?

I invite you to get curious and play with the metaphor of a productivity pie for planning out your weeks. Here are a few questions you might explore if you want to try it out:

• How are you currently allocating your time and energy for different domains in your life, like work, rest, creativity, exercise, etc.? I’ve found Rachael Stephen’s Constellation System helpful for framing this reflection in the past.

• Are there any time-consuming tasks that you’re working on that you don’t usually account for in your schedule, like commuting, doing chores, or answering emails? I call these kinds of necessary tasks “behind the scenes labor.” Consider: How might you account for these in your plans?

• If you were to run an experiment using the productivity pie, what would that look like? Tracking your time? Trying out time blocking? Allocating more breaks? Something else?

• Is it possible to keep a piece of your pie plate vacant for protected rest time or as a buffer, so when something comes up and you need to do a little extra work, you don’t spill off the pie plate entirely?

Curiosities

• I recently recommended a gorgeous newsletter by Luca J. Davis and was thrilled to see that they’ve been working with Erin Shetron! I’ve worked with Erin on my own newsletter (she’s an expert on Substack but also helped me with my approach for Buttondown), and I wanted to let folks know that her Brain Flow Sessions are open. On my brain flow session with Erin, she recommended actionable and effective changes, and she’s truly a delight to work with. If you’re looking for support on your own newsletter, publishing more consistently, taking your creative work more seriously, or reaching new readers, check her out.

• Thanks to my pal jess herrera (an awesome graphic designer whose work I’ve recommended here before) for recommending this beautiful newsletter by Page at Mood Salad. I was so moved by the way Page wove together gardens, real-life characters, archives, and what it feels like to write history. A favorite line: “I’m not a historian, I’m just someone who has taken many walks. At this, the archivist took me down to the archives and showed photographs of places and people.” Swoon!

• I enjoyed the Grey Area podcast interview with philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, author of The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. The episode is called “The Problem with Gamifying Life” and you can watch the video interview here or listen to the audio episode here. I think gamification can be a helpful productivity tool for boosting momentum, and I’m also a huge fan of video games, so this was a fun listen for me.

Take care and talk soon,

Dr. Kate

Email: kate@katehenry.com

Website: katehenry.com

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