Long ago, I took a class in HR Management.
We all try things.
To this day, the class in HR Management remains one of my favorite classes of all time. I have dozens of good memories from that class and one not-great memory from that class. Guess which one I’m gonna tell you about today?
The professor of that class told us that everyone had the same amount of time in the day. At the time, this didn’t quite sit well with me but it took me YEARS to figure out why.
In fact, it wasn’t until I heard about spoon theory that I fully understood what made me so uncomfortable with the statement that everyone has the same 24 hours in a day to get stuff done. If you haven’t encountered spoon theory before this image explains it:
Essentially, people who live with chronic illness do not have an equal 24 hours in a day to get things done. They have as much time and energy as their illness will let them, which is not always predictable but is non-negotiable.
And while talking about chronic illness in grad school is important it is not the only thing that can inhibit your ability to get work done. As we mentioned in a previous post, thinking about budgeting or where your next meal is going to come from takes up brain space you can’t give to academic tasks (you can also see here and here). In addition, stereotype bias can inhibit academic performance (see here, here, and here).
What I’m getting at here is the incredibly obvious point that how many usable hours you have in a day is a function of your privilege. In fact, I often introduce the concept of privilege to my students by asking them to think of reasons why the same activities might take different people different amounts of time where less time to task completion = more structural privilege.
This is obviously correlated to the fact that the more energy you are required to spend on one task the less time you have for other tasks.
And guess what? We all have finite amounts of energy.
When it comes to rest, and how much you need, or what type works for you there is only one expert: you.
The key to surviving graduate school with a modicum of sanity is to allow yourself to take the rest you need without guilt, shame, or comparison.
The simple fact is we don’t all have the same 24 hours in a day. We never did.
I would go insane if I compared my productivity to my colleague who doesn’t need more than 4 hours of sleep a night. I typically need at least 10 to function. I could waste time thinking about those 6 hours I wasn’t writing or I could acknowledge that I do better work in less time when I’m well rested.
So, from this post to the next, I’m giving you a bit of homework: Think, really think, about how much rest you would like to have in your day, your week, and your month.
On Friday, we’ll be talking about what rest is and what it isn’t.
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