Postdoc overwhelmed by incomplete work

Question

I take on more than I can handle and everything is left incomplete. Constant reminders from my previous supervisor, my current advisor, and colleagues, increases my anxiety level and sometimes I end up entirely avoiding work. I haven’t completed a paper as first author in the last two years, although I have two papers ready for submission for the last two months and two more I could complete with a week of uninterrupted work on each paper. These papers have been dragged so much that now I am losing interest in making any more changes. I will appreciate any suggestion for dealing with anxiety regarding works that I should have completed more than a year ago.

Answer 1

This is a well known problem - and depending on your personal situation you should consider getting professional help by a psychologist. It's not a shame and it might prevent further harm. They could assist as well in creating a step-by-step program.

If you are willing to handle the situation by yourself, you'll have to do "a few" things (which are a lot to do!):

1. Learn to say "no" to specific tasks. Do not accept any new assignments unless your papers are done.
2. Figure out, why you are procrastinating - your mind has a reason for it and you should figure out what it is.
3. If the overall workload is too high, cancel some things forever. Eg. decide not to submit one of the "old" papers. How does this thought feel? Better or worse then the actual situation?
4. Go on step-by-step. Focus on finishing one of the old papers. Submit it. Take a break! Choose the next step of work.
5. If needed, be disruptive.
   • Take a longer break (e.g. 4 weeks of vacation)
   • Move your whole inbox to a subfolder "old" and never ever look at it - important mails will be re-sent.
   • ...
6. If you are having a good relation with your supervisor(s), involve them in the process.

Answer 2

I am trying to overcome the exact same situation. I am a 3rd timer postdoc. I believe the major cause behind postdocs quitting science relates with exactly what you describe. I am adding my general recommendations below, based on what I have been doing.

The root of the issue is at not being able to publish results between starting new projects. This is surely due to taking on more projects that one can handle, but I see this as also not getting enough support from collaborators. Thus I suggest you to concentrate on these two main problems. My advice as below:

• Stop acquiring new data. I am sure you're are right worrying about some exciting new idea and results that could be scooped at just any minute by your peers. That you're itching to look into the details of something apparently groundbreaking you came across a few weeks ago. That you have 'supervisors' (people you grew to call 'bosses') trying to squeeze out more data and analyses out of your expertise. Just don't.

• Take your time to list your unfinished projects, organise your files accordingly, backup all the raw data, and get notes in order in your computer. Back everything up as if you're ready to hand all of it to someone else to finish. This will help you line things up in your head and establish priorities.

• Do not overwork yourself, and that is mainly mentally. Take at least one day completely off work, every week. Take vacations. During rest you must not think about any of this (have fun, hobbies, relationships). You must be able to forget in order to return to a task in any productive way.

• Commit to a routine of exercise, stretching, meditation. Fulfilling tasks depend on good health, and a sane body. Understand you're making yourself sick. Whenever you feel heavy, go for a jog, take 30-60mins in some empty room for intense stretching, go trekking, swimming, whatever makes you feel empty again. This will help you sleep and heal.

• Cold showers and waking up very early will wire your instincts back to physical awareness and make you feel stronger. This is too physiological to explain logically: just do it as if you're camping, and within few days you'll feel a big difference.

• Focus on self-improvement and (implicitly and politely, but only if possible) tell your peers to bloody sod off. Too many professors nowadays will suck postdocs and PhD students dry, while sitting comfortably on a fixed income, pretending to be busy around empty/ghost meetings, random signatures, staring at some computer screen. They are just waiting. They are vultures waiting over you to offer papers and data for them to claim as their own. Do not dance for them. Almost any parasitic professor and collaborator is actually deadly scared of losing hosts, so as soon as you seem like dropping out, they'll give you space.

ONLY AFTER ALL OF THE ABOVE (should take few months):

• Think of your savings, family situation, and alternative careers you could take up with your skills to decide on what to do next. Are you really sure you want to finish any of the projects you listed? Why do you want to finish them, objectively? Make a career choice here. My main advice at this point: make yourself ready to quit anytime. Having nothing to lose makes you ruthless.

(a) You want to finish some project(s). Focus on that one while following a strategy to finish it. Be selfish. Take your time, work only on this until it's finished. Do one single small step at a time, do not stop to look at the whole picture. This project must be personal, not for pleasing anyone or showing off. Contact your peers and demand help. If they are your co-authors they must help you with something according with your strategy. Should they refuse do get angry make it clear they are not legitimate partners on this. If you feel no-one is really helping and you're just dragging, kill this project and move on to the next one, or (b).

(b) You decided there is a better life for you elsewhere. Contact other postdocs and ask what they have in mind. Contact your friends and enlarge your interests network. Read a lot of books. Take a look into transitioning to other careers with your expertise, e.g. Industry, Coaching, Private Consulting, Teaching, Start-ups. Tell your peers you're moving out, and start negotiating whether they are interested in finishing projects using the data you organised. Wish them good luck.

You must keep in mind that you live for yourself. You do what you want. As a PhD you have skills which are highly sought for. The best way out of inertia and depression is through bold action. Do not worry about being gentle: take what you want and screw the rest.

You might appreciate reading this: http://www.benchfly.com/blog/lessons-from-a-recovering-postdoc/

Answer 3

Thanks for posting this question. I'm a postdoc who ended up in a very similar situation as you have. At some point, it caught up to me, I had a mini breakdown, ended up with a short hospitalisation followed by anxiety that was intense enough that some days I was afraid to leave the house. I'll tell you what helped me, both in terms of changes in my personal and professional life.

• Find support. You hopefully have friends, family, or coworkers in your life with whom you can share what you are going through. You might feel embarrassed or awkward about sharing this very personal part of your life. This is normal, but try your best to proceed anyway. I once found myself so tense I didn't know what to do with myself. I reached out to a friend despite my every inclination telling me to just deal with it. The feeling of relief that came just from making the decision to talk to someone was so intense I cried for 10 minutes and then slept for an hour.

• Find professional support. This is step 2 because it's harder than step 1, and can be hard to find someone with whom you work well. For myself, the key was finding more body/mindfulness-based therapy, but traditional talk therapy can be great to. Depends on you and your therapist.

• Make time for yourself. For me, I found taking 5-60 minutes per day (busy academic schedule, eh? what can I say, it's the effort that counts) to be calm and quiet worked wonders. I found some resources for incorporating yoga and breath meditation into anxiety treatment, and these were very effective more me. For others, more physical exercise does it. Be open minded, willing to experiment, and find what works for you. Making sleep a priority was also key.

• If it helps you, take a break (short or long). But don't force it. I found a longer break when I wasn't ready made it worse. I suddenly had no structure, and that just made me more anxious. But a day off to go the mountains when things got to be too much was perfect medicine.

• At work, take things a step at a time. Don't worry about the paper you have to write. Focus on the paragraph you have to write. On the one analysis you are going to do before lunch. One the small and concrete steps that get you where you need to be. The big picture will come together. If things don't proceed as fast as you like, be kind to yourself, and let go of the expectation that it should have been faster. As others have noted, take regular breaks. I work for 30, then walk for 5.

• Seek affection (if you are someone who is comforted by this). If you are lucky enough to have someone (human, animal, whatever) in your life who gives hugs on request, take advantage of it. It sounds corny, but seriously, it's helps a lot more than we give it credit.

• Finally, accept that it's just a job. Whether you know it or not, you have other options, and even if the career train you are on doesn't work out, you will be ok. Your life and your mental health are more important than the career.

Take care of yourself, and I wish you luck on your journey.

Answer 4

Get help. Speak to a psychologist, it will never get better on its own. I have ADHD and Asperger's and I identify with your problem. I get the usual rush that you get starting something new or trying a new sport or activity as your body responds to the new and exciting activity but my body just does not generate the same response that other people have after the rush period is over and the satisfaction response starts.

As a result I start loads of things but never finish as my motivation goes. My average life of a hobby is just under 6 months and my attic is full of gear from abandoned sports and games.

After getting help I now have a rigid structure that allows me to complete my tasks. My personal structure is a half hour work period, 10 minute break and another half hour on a different project. The switching helps me to avoid boredom and finish tasks. I also have rigid planning and defined goals to stop me meandering off topic.

This is tailored to me, you will need to find out what works for you but you WILL find something that works with the help of an expert.

See an expert now and things will improve.

Answer 5

I can very much relate to your problem. However, I have learned to handle this problem (although it took me some time), and I believe that you can learn that too. Now, I don't know how much you avoid the work. I took it to the extreme, and avoided work for long periods of time. So my advice/comments focus a lot on that.

• I saw a psychologist once a week, which really did help.

• For me, the most important part was to learn how to accept the presence of anxiety and not respond to it by avoiding whatever it is was that made my anxiety levels rise. Anxiety is a feeling, but avoiding something is an action, i.e. they belong to two completely different categories. It is possible to learn to immediately respond to increasing anxiety levels by acting and confronting rather than avoiding. The old way of responding for me was to try and distract myself by doing or thinking about something else. My new way of responding is to ask myself: What will happen to my anxiety levels if I sit down and work for four hours with a ten minute break each hour? Then I "experiment" by doing just that, and I always write down the results (that is, what actually did happen to my anxiety levels). Sometimes the anxiety persists, but often I forget about it once an hour or so has passed.

• I noticed that things started to change when I started to open up to people. For me, avoiding work made me feel ashamed of myself. And unfortunately, I had a person in my life who told me that I was avoiding work because I was lazy, which made me feel even more ashamed, and I didn't trust that there could be people in my life that would understand and support me. But eventually I did open up to my parents and to my supervisor, and they were very supportive. Not everyone will be, but some people will be, and those are the people you should talk and listen to.

• Take the evenings off. Because I was worried that I was in fact simply a lazy and worthless person, I didn't think I deserved evenings off. I was behind on my schedule, and it seemed strange to me to allow myself to relax in the evenings while that was the case. But I know now that if I want to function normally, I must take care of myself.

• This point is related to the previous point. I don't know about you, but I had a tendency to think that I had to "catch up" with the time I had waisted on avoiding work. So I would make plans that were impossible for me to follow and finish. The thing is, if you haven't been able to work 8 hour days lately, you won't suddenly be able to work 13 hour days starting tomorrow.

• Write a list (or several) of what needs to be done. Don't give yourself deadlines, instead give yourself hours that you should be working. Start at the top of the list, and move on to the next point once the previous has been completed. Giving yourself a deadline puts pressure on you, but I don't think that more pressure is what you need. Sometimes you might feel the need to move on to the next point on the list even though you aren't finished with the previous one. Sometimes, that is necessary and justified, other times you are just avoiding something that gives you anxiety, or are simply too unfocused to stay with the task that you've given yourself. You need to be honest with yourself: Why do I want to move on to the next point despite not having completed the point I am currently on? If the reason is anxiety, then fight that urge.

Lastly, good luck. It might seem impossible right now, but these things can change quickly. Once you have managed to complete some of the work that is currently incomplete, you will already notice a big change in motivation and how you approach your work.

Answer 6

There are many great answers above, mine is just an addition and not an alternative answer.

I face similar problems and what helps sometimes is to classify work to:

----------------------------------------------------------
|            |     Important     |     Not Important     |
----------------------------------------------------------
|   Urgent   |         A         |           B           |
----------------------------------------------------------
| Not Urgent |         C         |           D           |
----------------------------------------------------------

Classify your tasks into A,B,C, and D.

Priority is given to tasks under A, there are no disputes about this.

But then actually we are often tempted to look into the tasks under B. But what you want to do after you are done with A tasks, is to focus on the tasks under C before they find their way to A.

For example, as a final year PhD student, conference deadlines fall under B, while a PhD dissertation falls under C.

Answer 7

I've had the same problem all my professional life. The only solution that worked for me thus far was to make a list of the stuff to do, and start doing the most urgent research task, while putting off everything else.

Right now, I have to worry about a project starting, an ongoing one and a grant I plan to apply for. I also have a paper to finish. I decided to put the paper at the top of my list and 80% of my efforts every day go into completing that paper. I don't do any other serious work right now, and I reject any other task until that paper is done.

I removed from my work environment anything reminding me of the other research stuff unrelated to the paper. I blocked SE on my computer at work and everything else that could distract me from the writing. When I'll finish with the paper, or get seriously stuck, I will go to the next research task in my list.

Answer 8

A few comments on the the fly, hoping they help. Hope and help are key words, indeed.

• Take care of yourself: by the way, try make a conscious, but not stubborn, effort of defining to your mind who the 'yourself' needing care is;
• For many organizational problems, a commutative rule applies: the order in which you solve them does not matter. It doesn't matter if you publish the second paper first, or the third paper second, and so forth. Go for the most ready or inviting ones: low-hanging fruits first. These tips break the analysis-paralysis situation;
• You are already asking for help in this forum. I see valid and compassionate answers here. You are already being helped out, it's on you to weight those reactions and proceed (at your own risk, naturally, but in no solitude);
• Pause, revise, reverse where needed. You are already able to describe your distress, which is key. You did pause. If you don't know whether the bottle is half-empty or half-full, turn the question into what you should do with that bottle: staring at it, filling it, drinking it, emptying it, throwing it away, changing focus of attention altogether, collect more bottles, ...
• Be accepting of your weakness. Strength is most frequently developed in steps and through training (at least, leaning on what physical exercise teaches us). You might have been lazy on the first signs, map back what happened this far. The tale of Little Thumb is profound there: he's smart because he keeps tracks of his path into the dark wood using breadcrumbs (a term now also used with the most confusing of experiences: Internet surfing);
• Unless it is organization what you deeply hate and hurts your true self, consider evaluating your intents according to the SMART criteria (many others may be a better fit to your personal situations).

Answer 9

I suggest using Scrum and Agile techniques to plan and organize your work before actually tackling it. If you can setup a kanban board of tasks for each project, and try to break down tasks into something you can accomplish in less than a day, then it will visually show you progress toward your goal. For me visual progress is one of the keys to motivation.

Answer 10

I have two papers ready for submission for the last two months and two more I could complete with a week of uninterrupted work on each paper.

Pareto rule: The last 20 percent take 80 percent of the time. Leave some work for the reviewers! If you can't let go, you can still polish and edit after you've submitted your draft. It will be a draft, because there is no such thing as "finished" in academic writing. In the words of Tara Gray:

Kick it out the door and make them say "No"

Feel the relief. Then move on to the next project. Only look back once you've gotten the reviews; then work them into the draft and submit to the next journal.

At this point, you don't have to target A+ venues. A finished B publication is better than a non-finished A publication.

Answer 11

Although a psychologist should help you with the emotional part of the problem, I think you should get a coach to help you create a plan and stick to it until you objectives are accomplished. It is a more pragmatic way to solve the productivity part of the problem.