[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 360 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Eva Lantsoght talks about big rocks productivity.

[00:00:13] Production Credit: Produced by Elevate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:22] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m, Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. Eva Lantsoght is a professor of civil engineering in Ecuador and the Netherlands.

She’s a blogger, author, and podcaster. She has published books on the process of doing a PhD, is fascinated by research methods and research mechanics, and loves exploring new ways of reaching her students and increasing engagement. In her free time, Eva enjoys hiking with her family, reading, practicing yoga, and exploring the world through cooking recipes from different countries. Eva, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:31] Eva Lantsoght: Thank you so much for having me, Bonni.

[00:01:33] Bonni: Sometimes when I’ve talked to people in the past on the show who have gone through really immense grief, we, once a long time ago, had someone talking about being diagnosed with something, in that particular case, being diagnosed with cancer and all the grief. There’s so much going on right now in people’s personal lives and then, of course, that’s being compounded with the pandemic.

It’s important for us to think about how we measure our “success,” and I want to put that in air quotes a little bit that how has your thinking about measuring success shifted specifically with regard to the pandemic?

[00:02:13] Eva: Yes, it’s a great question, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about. 2020 was supposed to be the year if I would keep up my rate of publication, would be the year that I get to do 100 publications, and I was looking forward to that for the mythical aura that is around that here in Ecuador, where I’m based because I remember when they started the new technical university here, that they said we have to bring people from outside the country to manage this university because there’s nobody here who has more than 100 publications.

I always tried, maybe I can try to get to that and then say, “Okay, can I become a lecture of this university? Where is my spot?” All joking aside, that was my expectation for the year 2020. Looking back on that, the fact then I have survived the year, that none of my projects have suffered major damage, that my family is healthy and well, and that we’ve just made it through the year and are still making it through this pandemic has been a success in itself.

Going through this pandemic and just being cooped up at home and spending more time with my immediate family, my husband, and my daughter has made me appreciate, then, being able to spend more time with my daughter, in particular, and having to step up in her teaching and all that is a success in itself as well. That’s something that I’ve been seeing as a success now, reflecting back on it.

[00:03:55] Bonni: Oh my gosh. You just said so much there that we really have had such a shift. I don’t know that we all have. So many of us have had a shift in terms of how we’re measuring success. I had the odd thing where I applied for full professor, and while that actually was awarded to me during the pandemic, all of the work came before we were facing those things.

Yes, we do have to revisit those things and especially something that is both arbitrary but also important of reaching something like 100, that’s such a big thing, but yet wanting to be gentle with ourselves and with our colleagues in some of those ways while still wanting to celebrate what has gone on, it’s really harder some days than I think maybe we sometimes realize.

[00:04:53] Eva: I think it has been a very good time, as well, to reflect on what we value most. I’ve gone through that exercise for my teaching and how I supervise my students and really thinking, for example, the PhD students that I supervise, I may be sometimes very driven and wanting to take on things, and I’ve had to slap myself on the hand and say, “No, no, no, just give them their space to be and grieve and digest everything that has happened this year and try to find much more, teach them to be more self-compassionate and be more compassionate with them instead of trying to push for another paper or another side project or something in those terms.”

[00:05:41] Bonni: What I’m hearing, and also from visiting your blog and getting to examine some of your work while you may have adjusted some of your own self-imposed expectations downward, I am not getting the sense that you have stopped, is that a correct assumption? You mentioned the projects. Things are still moving forward. How have you thought about the approaches that you use to keep things moving forward toward goals? Even if those goals have been modified and adjusted in some ways, how have you seen your approach has changed with the pandemic?

[00:06:19] Eva: I think the first thing that I would want to say here to anybody who’s listening, who may have come to a complete stop, that is fine too because everybody has had a different experience in this pandemic. Mine has been– I was reflecting on this the other day with my husband saying, “I’ve been really privileged. I’ve been able to work from home. I don’t need to go out, be in touch with people.”

It sounds a little bit sad because I haven’t had much human interaction in all of this pandemic, but I’ve been able to work from home, organize the setup. For other people, this has been devastating in not being able to go to fieldwork or not being able to be in the laboratory. For me, that limitation was not there. In addition, I know that I’m in a privileged position that I still have a job that I can still work and all that.

If anybody is listening who came to a full stop for any of the potential reasons of the pandemic, the economic crisis that has come with the death and grief and loss in so many families, I completely understand that. I wanted to have that set first before I speak a little bit, trying to set the priorities to move work forward. What I’ve done, as I said with my projects, of course, I also have my graduate students who work on these projects.

There is not all the work on me, but I’ve tried to prioritize less projects, less papers. In addition to that, I’ve been privileged that even though the schools have been closed here in Ecuador since March 2020, my mother-in-law has been very helpful, and my daughter is with her during the days. I also understand that for other people, their experience is very different, but I’ve been able to have the time to work a normal day.

What I’ve done there or what I’ve tried to do in order to keep moving forward with work and research and teaching is to focus on what is really necessary, and of course, there has been a shift to putting much more time on teaching and, as I said, less time on writing journal articles, for me, it’s also been the time that I took on a project on how COVID-19 has impacted academic parents, and that is, of course, very much outside of my regular research, but for me, it was a project in which I could bond with other academic parents and carry out a project together that we are passionate about, and that brought joy, I should say, to my work experience.

[00:09:22] Bonni: I’m hearing a number of things in what you shared. You started out just by saying priorities. Every year, I teach a class that’s called Personal Leadership and Productivity, and we read the book seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I first started getting my beginnings in management, reading his book but also hearing him speak, and he would put a big glass jar out on the table where he was speaking, and he would start out.

I’m probably going to get this example all wrong, but he’d start out by putting gravel in there and sand, and then he’d have these big rocks and try to shove the big rocks in with the gravel and the sand. Of course, if you put those things in first, you can’t get the rocks in there, but if you put the big rocks in first– [laughs] He’d show this all visually, it was a big showcase that he would do as a public speaker. He’d put the big rocks in first, then the gravel will fit in there, and then so will some of the sand, and then even some water.

That imagery has stayed with me for so long that if we spend the time– and it’s counterintuitive, but spending the time thinking about those things that we want to say yes to, in terms of that they really are important to us, to me, there’s no way I cannot do that. I don’t get to skip that part of the reflection because we’re faced with so many of these choices every day.

You mentioned having a daughter there at home with you. I’ve got our son and my daughter, too. I’m going to be celebrating a pretty big life birthday here in a couple of days as of this recording. When they’re upstairs and they’re like, “Oh, we had been planning this surprise for you. You’re not supposed to be here,” they didn’t want me to come up into my office, those are not things that you want them to remember that you’re like, “Oh, get out of here. I can’t talk to you.”

I have been very conscious about, while we do good, healthy boundaries, I think that’s not necessarily always a bad thing, but if I have that snap, rush to judgment, and losing my patience versus meeting them in the moment, just all that that can bring, while it can seem like an inconvenience that I will not kid myself to say that I don’t have days where I go, “Oh my gosh, if I could just escape to somewhere that didn’t have the constant interruptions” and that kind of stuff.

I suppose the other thing I heard in what you said is just that if we can find ways to treasure it as we are going, that sometimes that works, too. It sounded like, based on your head nods, you may have heard that analogy of the big rocks. How do you see that showing up for you? It seems like it resonates with you, too.

[00:12:13] Eva: Yes. For me, I subdivide my activities in really five categories. I have my writing, my research, my teaching, my service, and then the smaller admin things that tend to pile up. I really look at these as the things that need to happen to move everything forward. The ones that I prioritize or try to prioritize are teaching and certainly, anything that is within the research part, the supervision of my students.

Especially now in these times, I really want to be there for my students, whether they are my undergraduate students in class or my PhD students who are working through their projects in a much more difficult situation now. I want to get that in first. The way that I do that practically is by looking at the landscape of my week with a sort of weekly template. At the beginning or before the start of every semester, I look at my teaching schedule, of course, that drives the beginning of my schedule.

Then I try to see there, “How am I going to lay out a landscape of my week?” I use a weekly format because that’s so conducive to academia with teaching that is on a weekly basis. I’ve learned this technique of the weekly template from Get a Life, PhD blog of Tanya Golash-Boza. I’ve been using it since I was a fresh faculty member. I really look at, first, my teaching hours.

Then I want to make sure that at my best time of the day, which for me is in the mornings, I get in time for writing as well as for research. Now, I have to say there, because I work for two universities and I have my graduate students all in the Netherlands, the mornings when I’m in Ecuador is a time that overlaps with the afternoon in the Netherlands. A lot of my time of the mornings gets taken by supervision meetings.

I try to really have, as well, a regularity of these meetings, to have them in there to know, “Okay, these days is when I have meetings with my students, and then where can I put in the larger chunks of time to look at data, to have the tranquility to write so that I have those larger blocks in my agenda and, from there, start to put in the smaller service tasks?” I try to bunch of admin things so that I don’t have to do one thing and then the other time another thing.

That has been very helpful in making sure that I put that time in there. That ties, very, very much, together with those priorities to know when you see your time, visual, I use color-coding to really see my different responsibilities. When you see your time, you can also say, “Well, I’m not going to apply for more funding now because all my research time needs to be dedicated to either supervising the students on this project or putting in some of the research myself.”

That has been helpful for me to deal with requests, also smaller things, service-related, that I can say, “Well, I can review this paper, or I cannot review this paper,” depending on how much backlog I have and how much time that I have in my service time blocks to really address such a request.

[00:15:58] Bonni: If I were to look at your time-blocked week, would I see things not related to work on there that were also color-coded?

[00:16:07] Eva: I have a time block, for example, for addressing personal emails, and I have time blocks for anything that is related to my blog and podcast. Those I put in there. I used to, as well, put in “Now is dinner time” and et cetera. I’m not having that in there anymore, but for the time that I spent with my daughter in the afternoon, evening, I do try to put in every day, actually, I have a weekly template there as well.

I’ll add it to my weekly template that every day I try to do a special activity with her. Of course, right now we are at home, and we are not going anywhere, but I still try to think, “Okay, Mondays, we do, for example, something with songs and movement. On Tuesdays, we’re going to cook something nice together, et cetera.” I have that on the template, as well. I think it through in advance, as well.

[00:17:03] Bonni: Yes, I’ve heard from a number of podcasts and books, just that kind of structure, how it can benefit, I would say, all people, at all ages. Anyone that has had little itty-bitty-betty babies [laughs] knows the importance. I think you can get too legalistic on some of these things but just routines, this kind of blocking things out as long as we are also able to take advantage of things that come up spontaneously, that sounds lovely and something that she probably really looks forward to and helps her feel more of a sense of normalcy and knowing what to expect, which is good for all of us.

Yesterday, we were talking to some of our student leaders at our university. I, of course, think so much about teaching. I’ve been part of helping more of our faculty become more adept at teaching online and all of that. They were bringing up some things about this coming semester, which where we are in the United States, it’s been pretty mixed, depending on where you are, geographically.

There have been some colleagues in other states who have been back teaching in-person for a long time, all the back, too, and forth and all of that. [laughs] They were bringing up issues that I hadn’t really been thinking as much about because I’ve been so focused on the teaching elements. They were talking about– One of them is what we’ll call a first-year student. This is an undergraduate program.

She was describing how she’s really worried about the next academic year, feeling like it’s like she’s going to be a first-year student again and what will that be like to go into a classroom and see other people and how will she make friends and all of that? I just thought, “Oh gosh, I think so much about the teaching.” That’s both so simple but also fundamental.

I’ve so appreciated their stories and just being able to put that lens on of almost, in some cases, feeling like not repeating a year per se but repeating a sense of going into an entirely new environment. She talked about going from high school to college now feeling almost like, “Okay, I’m going to college again.” There was a sense of fear that I hadn’t felt so viscerally until they had a chance to share some of that.

[00:19:43] Eva: That resonates with me that listening to students is one of the things that, now with the pandemic, I’ve put much more focus on. For example, my PhD students, I’ve told them, “What serves you most, and tell me how I can support you” because I could be thinking maybe, for example, we need to be pushing for extensions on their projects. Maybe they are homesick and say, “Well, maybe let’s reduce the project in scope and see if we can get support from another graduate student or additional manpower in there so they can graduate on time and go home or go somewhere else.” I think that being able to listen to students and their lived experiences is more important than ever.

[00:20:30] Bonni: I’ve used this time-blocking week. Actually, I didn’t learn about it from the Get A Life, PhD blog, but I’ll definitely put that in the show notes. Also, a link to your blog post as well would be great. The person that I heard about something like this, his name is Michael Hyatt. He describes this as the ideal week. I’ll put that in the show notes, as well. I’ve done it many, many times.

That’s a routine I’m accustomed to. If I looked at the last 10 years, I probably, 8 out of 10 years, semester after semester, do this. I didn’t do it this semester. I am going to tell you that I don’t do as well at getting real on how long it’s going to take to grade because a greater percentage of my job now is administrative leadership. It’s still so important to give good feedback and provide that, and I know that.

That’s one of those things that, because I know how important it is, can take substantial time, but yet it feels like, “Oh gosh, how do I balance all these things?” Sadly, those kinds of things just creep right into the weekend or right into the evenings, so I’m not getting my big rocks in, or I’m just maybe selecting too many big rocks, and you just have to get real that you just can’t have it.

I wanted to ask you one more question about that before we go to the recommendations segment. I mentioned the analogy of those rocks. I talked about gravel, I talked about the sand. What do you think, maybe either for yourself or for other colleagues, is more of the challenge in terms of saying yes to too much gravel or saying yes to too many big rocks, or it’s impossible to know or depends on the person? Do you know what I mean? Is it that the gravel can sneak up on us so much? What are your thoughts on the challenges there?

[00:22:23] Eva: Yes. I think there’s a lot to unpack here. I think one of the things is there is, I know for myself, I tend to say yes to too many things, especially now with the pandemic. I had a much better structure before the pandemic. I had much better physical boundaries between work and home life. Just as you said, I’ve seen my work creep into the evenings and weekends more than I would like to admit, for somebody who has been thinking so much about her time.

That’s my current struggle. I have to state, honestly, with this pandemic, … My computer is right there in the bedroom. It’s just so tempting to quickly check an email, answer something, and before I know, I’m doing a few more things. There’s been more, I would say, emails, et cetera, there’s just been more email as well from not being able to see people.

I think that can be really cutting into concentrated focus time. That’s one thing that I see as more gravel. Then as well with the uncertainty of the pandemic and the uncertainty, for example, in my case, the ability of being able to get funding, I think I’ve put in more big rocks as well, for example, trying my hand at a proposal, just in case it gets granted and just in case I can secure a bit more funding for a few more years, just to have that security to be able to keep providing spaces for students.

I do know that something that’s been in the back of my head. If I just look at the projects that I currently have, actually, I shouldn’t be applying to anything because all my research hours are booked until, what is it, 2023, 2024. I still feel the need to have that continuation in there and, of course, to make sure that I can keep having funding for students. I think it’s a common struggle, as well.

[00:24:31] Bonni: I so appreciate your candor on that and willingness to admit. This is one of those things that shows up in a lot of areas in our life where people make assumptions that I think aren’t probably helpful in the sense of, “Oh, look how much they’ve got it together.” I’ve written a book about productivity, so surely I must have it all figured out. That’s not really helpful to know that this is a really natural, normal struggle to go through.

I think if we’re not transparent about that, then we’re actually not being as helpful as we might be able to be. I also think that sometimes, and you spoke about this so much with nuance as you were sharing earlier, we find ourselves in so many different places. Sometimes what we need to say is, “Gosh, you should really guard that time more closely.” I know for myself, I need to be better at that. Yet I don’t want to get locked into a thing of shame around that because there’s many times when I really enjoy working, and I take on things, and I’ll have a podcast.

I sometimes will do things that may not technically fit– I’m not being compensated by my institution for doing but definitely make me better at what I do. I think when we get the guilt and the shame around productivity, and it goes back to what you spoke about, just when we started, around measuring our success if we’ve thought through, “What does success look like?” and recognizing that that’s going to change in different seasons of our lives.

Right now, we’re all experiencing that, collectively, of really having to make fundamental shifts in how we define success, yet that even when not in a pandemic, having to think about how to measure our success, that’s definitely something that comes up a lot for PhD students, a lot for academics. That’s also where perfectionism can come into play, too. I guess before we get into the recommendations segment, I’d love to hear your thoughts about perfectionism and the way that that gets into things. For me, we just have to recognize when good enough is good enough. How have you seen perfectionism holding people back from whatever success looks like or productivity?

[00:26:50] Eva: I’m a recovering perfectionist as in that I used to find it much more difficult to put my work out there. I would second guess everything. I would put my work out there, like my blog or my papers. The moment that I hit “submit” or “post,” there would be always that “Oh, no. What have you done? Who are you to–” It’s more imposter, as well. They’re tied together. There’s the “Who are you to speak up? Who are you to think you’re ready for writing this paper?” as in, it’s not good enough, it’s going to get rejected.

Certainly, those feelings are less now than they used to be in the past. I think I have a better grip on the measure of what is good enough. Going through this pandemic with my teaching, I have had to put boundaries on myself to say, “Okay.” The first semester of emergency teaching, I had to just go with what I had and accept that I didn’t have the material and tools in place to give the best online experience and take it from there and try to improve bit by bit and give myself grace and self-compassion as much as possible.

[00:28:14] Bonni: So true. Oh, that’s so true. Before Eva and I talk about our recommendations, I wanted to take just a moment to thank today’s sponsor, and that is TextExpander. With TextExpander, we’re able to keep our language consistent and accurate with TextExpander, both for ourselves as well as when we’re working in teams. What TextExpander does for us is it allows us to type in just a few letters that we designate, it’s really easy to set up and create what they call snippets.

They expand to larger sections of text or text that is hard for us to recall, like my own work phone number, for example. It’s just not one I dial very often or even give out that often either. We can have fewer errors, we can have greater consistency, it’s very easy to use, and it lets us have just a few keystrokes, allow ourselves, as well as teams that we work with, to be able to have our content stay consistent, current, and accurate. I use it for all kinds of things.

Like I mentioned, I use it for short things I might forget, like a phone number. I use it for longer things, like show notes. I have used it with some text that I just commonly have to have, but there’s variables that are in there, which you can either insert as you go, what’s the episode number, for example, or have automatically inserted like what’s the current date, for example.

Really, your imagination is the limit for what’s possible with improving productivity and saving time with TextExpander. If you head on over to textexpander.com/podcast, you can get 20% off your first year. Please, let them know you heard about them through Teaching in Higher Ed. Again, thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring today’s episode. Well, this is the point in the show where we each get to give our recommendations.

I didn’t plan it this way because I wasn’t entirely sure what we would talk about, but I think mine actually fits nicely. Our recommendations don’t always fit with the topic, but I think mine do. My first recommendation and this has come up before on the show, but I just wanted to recommend it myself instead of listening to a guest recommend it. The first one is just the practice of journaling that, especially speaking of perfectionism, I have different kinds of journals that I’m keeping right now, even just a really short list of things that we’re grateful for.

The journal doesn’t necessarily need to be digital although I’m going to talk about one that I’m using that I’m getting a lot of benefit out, but we also have this big glass jar that says “Gratitude” on it. As a family, we’re filling out these little thin strips of paper that we just write down one or two things that we’re grateful for, and we’re piling them all up once a week in this big jar and then in New Year’s of the end of this year, we’ll go back and take all of those slips of paper out and review them and just really celebrate all the goodness that has come during a very difficult time.

That doesn’t take more than three or four minutes to do and is a really nice practice and keeping a journal and keeping it more so that you can do it in a sustained way versus that you have to write super-long entries and thinking that’s the only way to do them. Then I wanted to recommend, specifically, a digital tool for those of you who are on the iOS operating system and/or a Mac.

There’s an app called the Day One app. I’ve been using that. I had paid for the pro version, there’s a free version and a pro one, and then hadn’t used it forever and ever and ever. I had to get real, and I really am making good use of it. I’m really enjoying it. If you want it to, it can connect with social media. Every day, I’ll get a little thing. Again, this is because I have it set up.

You don’t have to turn this on, but I’ll get a little thing of “Here’s five entries from this day” over as long as I’ve been keeping social media. It’ll pop up a consolidation of social media posts, whether that be Instagram or Twitter or whatever. That’s always really interesting to see. Then if I had journaled on a prior year, it’ll pull that back up and resurface it. I’m doing something called the big three.

This comes up a lot in productivity books and blogs and things like that, but at the beginning of a day, identifying the three most important things, the big rocks are back to that again, that I want to do in a day. I don’t do it every single day. I see a marked difference in being able to the most important things when I commit to it and writing than when I don’t. It’s just night and day, how I can make such better choices when I’ve really decided, in advance, what is important to me.

I also keep off and on a gratitude template, just not trying to have really long entries but just listing some of those things off, and that’s really fun, and then adding in any photos that I want to, that I think are representative so I don’t, again, feel like I have to write a long post. Those are my recommendations, and I’m going to pass it over to you, Eva, for yours.

[00:33:33] Eva: Those are the lovely recommendations, and that actually made me rethink what I was going to say here because, as you were speaking about your writing down your priorities, I can show it on the video here, and I will talk to it, but this is the paper planner that I use, which has, in there, my timeline for the day, which I write down every evening at the end of every evening.

I have a block in there for priorities, and having that paper planner, the nice, big, pretty planner with the stickers and stuff has actually given me some fun to do and with the colors and everything so that I was using everything digital in the past but now that I’m not traveling and I’m not shifting between two countries, I thought, “Well, for this year, I can get a nice big paper planner and write more by hand.”

That would be my comments to that. The recommendation that I had thought of before ties in, too, with what we’ve discussed, being very compassionate with students, as well as practicing self-compassion. I’ve done a lot of thinking and tried to more reading on the topic of compassion itself in the past year. I identified it as a value that I want to hold high and that I want to center the way I teach and the way I deal with my graduate students.

I want to have that as a core value, and a practice that I found very helpful for that is the so-called loving-kindness meditation, sometimes also known as Metta. You can find on any platform, whether it’s YouTube, or a free meditation application, or a paid service, you can find ways of these meditations. I would say for those of you who are struggling with, first of all, being kind to yourself and forgiving yourself for what has gone wrong and then extending that kindness towards others, that can be a very soothing and soul-filling practice.

[00:35:47] Bonni: Oh, that sounds lovely. I’ve never heard of this before other than the principle of being more gentle with ourselves, but this sounds like a very practical way to put that principle into action. Thank you so much for both of these recommendations. I love stickers so much. I think it’s just something about revisiting my childhood. I don’t know what it is, but I have been known to buy paper planners, goal-setting planners, and then not use them but really love the stickers.

They’re overpriced stickers by the time you do that, but no, it can be so, so great, another way to slow ourselves down to think about those big rocks, by that analog processes, these are great recommendations. Thank you so much for those and thank you so much for coming on the show. What a joy it is to have you here. You do your own podcast, you also do blogging, and we will have the places where people can find you in the show notes. Is there anything else you’d like to share about your platforms and ways that people can reach out beyond just going there and clicking the links?

[00:36:52] Eva: Sure. One thing that I can add there is that on my website, there is a box to subscribe to my newsletter, and for those who subscribe, there is a download of templates that help with both planning a month and, as well, learning to reflect on what they have achieved in a month and what went well and what did not go well and why. That is as well as a template for keeping a research diary, to have that reflective practice on their research process, and a template for meetings with a supervisor to have more structure and to get more out of their meetings. That’s a resource that is there for those who may be interested, for either yourself, your students, or anybody who may find it nice to look at.

[00:37:38] Bonni: Oh, that sounds wonderful. Eva, thank you so much for coming on Teaching in Higher Ed. I am so looking forward to staying connected with you and just thanks so much for how much you contributed to today’s episode.

[00:37:49] Eva: Thank you so much for having me.

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[00:37:55] Bonni: Thanks once again to Eva Lantsoght for joining me on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. If you would like to check out the show notes to the episode, they’re probably already in your podcast players since that’s how most of you listen. They’re also available over at teachinginhighered.com/360. I also encourage you to sign up for the weekly Teaching in Higher Edupdate, which we’ll send you the show notes straight to your email, along with other resources, quotable words, some recommendations, and other good stuff. Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe to subscribe. Thanks to all of you for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.

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