71. Task Management Gaps and Grad School Overload (Q&A)
Episode 71
In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I’m answering two listener questions that both come down to this: good intentions aren’t enough without the right systems.
First, I answer a question from a working professional who says he writes everything down but still forgets the little things — tasks, ideas, follow-ups. We talk about what might be going wrong in his system, how to tighten up her capture process, and how to build a daily and weekly review habit that actually keeps him on track.
Then, I answer a question from a graduate student who’s overwhelmed by the reading load in her master’s program. She describes falling behind, avoiding the reading altogether, and getting totally stuck when it’s time to write. I explain how to manage reading when you're a slow reader, how to use my three-layer reading strategy, and how to build a paper-prep document while you read so you’re not scrambling later.
These are real-life scenarios that so many students and professionals experience — and in this episode, I’ll give you practical, science-backed strategies you can apply right away.
What You’ll Learn:
✅ Why your system might be “leaking” — even if you write everything down
✅ How to build a reliable capture + review process
✅ What’s actually happening in your brain when you’re overwhelmed
✅ My three-layered strategy for grad school reading
✅ How to prep for writing while you read
🎙️Other Episodes + Resources Mentioned
Episode 05: Secrets of a Good Task Management System
Episode 10: Task Management Q&A
Episode 48:: Student Task Management Q&A
Episode 65:The Sunday Reset
Blog: How to Annotate a Textbook
✏️Enroll in SchoolHabits University (Curious? Check it out!)
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them 😉
71 Task Management Gaps and Grad School Overload QA===
[00:00:00] Well, hey there and welcome back to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. I'm Katie, and today we are doing one of our monthly q and a episodes where I answer questions that were submitted by listeners of the show. If you wanna submit your own question for a future episode, just head to learnandworksmarter.com.
Right there on the homepage, there is a form where you can just. Drop your question as always. Even if I'm not answering your specific question today, I'll bet you'll find something helpful because most of us are dealing with versions of the same challenges, feeling [00:00:30] overwhelmed, struggling to keep up, and trying to figure out why our systems still feel leaky even when we're doing our best.
All right, let's get started.
[00:01:00]
Okay, so we have two listener questions today. One is from a working professional and one is from a student. I love when it's a good balance like that, and I have the first question right here.
Hi Katie. I write everything down, but I still forget things like small tasks, follow ups, or ideas I had during meetings or randomly throughout the day.
I think my system is pretty good, but then it feels like it's full of holes. Any tips? If it's helpful. I work in the financial sector and I am in the office [00:01:30] three days a week working from home two days.
Such a great question and I really appreciate the way that you phrased it, especially that last part there, that my system feels like it is full of holes because that's exactly what it feels like when we're trying to do the right things.
We're writing things down, we are capturing tasks, we have the notebooks and the intention, but we're still dropping the ball on the little stuff. And often it's the little stuff that creates the biggest sense of failure and frustration [00:02:00] because when it's the. Big stuff. We usually know what we did and what went wrong and we can name it.
But when it's all the little stuff, sometimes we don't even know that we've dropped the ball or that our system is leaking or you know what all the little stuff is that we're forgetting. So in many ways, I think that can actually be more stressful. So I have a few thoughts here, and I'm going to break this tip down into two parts.
One about capture and then one about [00:02:30] review. So we're gonna start with capture. If any of you are listening today who are my age or older, you may have heard of David Allen's Getting Things Done System, um, also called GTD, getting Things Done. If you are younger than me, then bless your little heart, then please ignore that reference.
But David Allen was the OG productivity guy who really put a name to the concept of Capture. In fact, he, well, he named it Capture. [00:03:00] That was the backbone of his entire Getting Things Done system. Now, the idea here is that if we don't have a place to document and collect and note everything that comes at us throughout the day, then we are just gonna lose it all and never get anything done.
Now, just because you are writing things down doesn't mean that you're capturing them in a way that's reliable. And I say this gently because I know you feel like you're capturing things and you probably are. You said you [00:03:30] are in your question. But the key question here is, are you always capturing things in the same place if you are using multiple tools, sticky notes, voice memos, random napkins, random notebooks, back of the envelope list, whatever, that's often where the system creates a leak.
So one quick win here is choose a single inbox. I don't mean your email inbox, I mean a single location where everything goes, no matter what format you use. For example, if you have [00:04:00] a notebook, that's your inbox. If you use a digital tool like Notion, that's your inbox. The idea is that whenever you're in a meeting on a walk or you know, cooking dinner and a task or an idea pops into your head, there is one place where you always go to write it down.
Now, the other important thing to note in your is that in your question, you said that you're in the office three days a week and you're working from home two days a week. That flexibility is awesome, but if your time is split between two locations, it's really important [00:04:30] that your capture system can come with you.
Obviously if it's digital, then it's with you wherever you are, but if you're using something like a notebook or a planner, it's important to bring it with you from home to the office, and vice versa. I just wanted to emphasize that- you're probably already doing it.
Now, the second part of capture is making sure that you actually capture the action or the task and not just the thought around it. So writing follow up with Bob isn't helpful. If two days later you can't remember [00:05:00] what that even means, like what are you gonna say to Bob? Right? So try to get in the habit of capturing the next step, not just the reference.
So something like follow up with Bob about the account. Even better if there's some kind of urgency or deadline involved, you would add that. So it would be something like Follow up with Bob about the account by Wednesday.
Alright, now another thing I wanna check in about is the importance of not relying on our working memory.
Sometimes when we come [00:05:30] across a task or a thought or an idea, and we're quick to judge that it's just really minor. Our first instinct is to think, okay, well I'm just gonna remember this. This is so minor that I don't need to write it down. But from your question, it sounds like those are actually the exact kinds of things that you might be forgetting, and that's to be expected if you're not writing those kinds of things down.
So it isn't our job to judge whether or not something is too small to be written down. It is our job [00:06:00] to write it down regardless. And then when we review our list, which is actually the second part of this strategy that we're gonna get to in a minute, then we can be the judge of whether or not that thing we wrote down is important or not.
But we don't make that judgment call in the moment. Everything gets written down. Because it's, there's friction enough to stop what you're doing to go find your notebook, to go get a, um, open up your notion template or [00:06:30] whatever it is, wherever your inbox is. It's friction enough in the moment to, to pause what you're doing, to go write the thing down, let alone to, let alone, to ask yourself to say, well, is this important?
Should I write it down? Like, you, you got enough to do in the moment just to write the thing down. So remove the decision, write everything down, make the decision about whether or not it's important at a later point.
Then my next question to you is, is there too much friction to write down these things? Especially if you're quick to judge them as minor? Let me give you a [00:07:00] personal example. I am a very analog person. I mean, I run a digital business and I'm on like the computer all day long, but throughout the day, my personal inbox is a paper planner.
When I say personal inbox, that's the type of thing that I'm talking about right now, like my capture system. It is a very simple system. It's just an ongoing list that I add to throughout the day. Then I process it, I try to, for about five to 10 minutes at the end of every workday. But when I'm in my office for seven hours, [00:07:30] like my actual physical office outside my house where I'm working with clients, right, and I'm working, you know, seven, eight hour days, back to back with seven or eight clients an hour each, like, nope, I'm not even drinking water in between my clients, even the simple act of opening my planner and flipping to a blank page is too much friction in the moment when I'm like working with someone. When I'm like making eye contact with someone, it's just too clunky for me to be like, oh, hold on.
Let me just, you know, go over here and flip open my trapper [00:08:00] keeper to like the right page. Right. So what I do is I take out a large sticky note, it's something like a six by four, I think. I actually measured it at one point, like a six by four sticky note, and I slap it to the front of my planner at the beginning of the week.
And that way I don't even have to open my planner to write the things down. I don't have to flip to the right page to try to find a blank sheet, right? I just add it to my sticky note, and then at the end of the day when I'm processing things, I will move those things, into my actual task management system [00:08:30] or my planner, if it's like deadline or date related. Right. Okay. Or actually I'll just let them go if they just happen to be junk that my brain was serving me in the moment. Again, this is the review part that I'm gonna get to, but my point here is I want you to ask yourself if there's too much friction for you to even write these minor things down, and if so, then remove the friction.
Okay, so the second part of this tip is review. So [00:09:00] even if our capture system is great, things are gonna slip through if we don't have a consistent review habit, and this might be where your holes are. Maybe this is where you get your leaky bucket, as you said in your question. So the fix: I suggest a review loop. I recommend two types. Don't worry. This is simple. This isn't a complicated strategy, and I've kind of just already alluded to it when I was talking about part one, which is the capture.
[00:09:30] So first, a quick daily scan, literally five to 10 minutes at the end of every day or at the end of every work day two, scan your inbox or your task list and make sure that nothing is floating out there unaddressed.
Let's say that you were on a phone call and you were taking notes and you couldn't find your trustee notebook, and so you used a napkin or a sticky note. That's fine because that's just, you know what we have to do in the moment, and that's how life works.
But at the end of the day, you would transfer this stuff into your one source of truth, [00:10:00] your single capture inbox that we talked about just a few minutes ago. There's also the weekly reset or review, and this is when you process all of the random ideas and unprocessed notes and either turn them into tasks, schedule them in your calendar, or just get rid of them all together if they no longer matter.
Alright, so the daily one is like five to 10 minutes of like, okay, did I capture anything today that's like super urgent that I need to handle tomorrow? So you're just sort of looking for like the urgent things that you definitely can't [00:10:30] miss, and at the end of the week that's a more thorough review of what you wrote down saying, okay, what are the things that are like really important that I need to address next week that I need to prioritize?
Right.
If you want help doing this, check out episode 65, the Sunday Reset. Or how to do a Sunday reset. That one walks you through exactly how to do this sort of like reset process on Sundays and then how to plan your ideal week. So weekly planning tips.
That is episode 21. Okay? Everything will be linked below.
But it's one thing to have a notebook [00:11:00] or an Apple note full of tasks and ideas and notes from meetings, but you never look at what you wrote. That's where you end up in trouble.
The super urgent things you should be processing in your 10 minute review or five minutes if that's all it takes at the end of each day.
But the less urgent things you can probably save for your weekly review.
Now, it might also be that when you go through your notes and what you wrote throughout the week, you find that a whole bunch of what you wrote, you just don't actually [00:11:30] need. Maybe you took notes at a meeting, but you don't actually need to follow through with anything.
Well, in that case, you know, taking notes at the meeting probably still serve the purpose, purpose. Purpose was probably to help you stay focused and engaged and look like you knew what you were doing during the meeting. But it's absolutely okay if you never come back to what you wrote down in a useful manner, because sometimes the purpose of what we're writing down and what we're taking note of is to, you know, reduce the distraction in the moment to get something off our brains so it doesn't, [00:12:00] you know, distract us from the real task that we're doing.
It's not necessarily that we need to address that or do something with that thought, but that thought maybe just intruded while we're doing something else. So writing it down in the moment said, okay, I don't need to think about this right now. I'll get back to you. I wrote you down. I'm gonna continue what I'm doing helps you concentrate and stay focused. Then later when you look at your list, you're like, what? What was I worried about that for? That's nothing, right?
The important thing though is to actually make that decision with intention. So that we always [00:12:30] look at what we wrote. Okay? But it is okay to say, well, you know, I'm not gonna do anything with that information. That is always totally fine, and that's just totally your judgment call. All right? So to wrap this one up, it's not that your system is broken, but it likely needs a tighter capture process and a more reliable or consistent review habit.
And when those two things are working together, the holes start to close up really fast.
It's not about time management per se. It's about capture and [00:13:00] review, which is an overlooked piece of productivity. All right, so I hope I answer that question in a way that's helpful. If you need more step-by-step instructions for building a task management system, I'm gonna direct you to episode five, which is Secrets of a Good Task Management System.
And then there are two other q and a episodes where listeners also asked questions about task management. That's episode 10, and that's episode 48. I'm gonna leave everything linked in the show notes at [00:13:30] Learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/71. Okay, but task management seems to be a common theme of people who are submitting questions, which is totally fine 'cause I love it.
Alright, I have the second question. This one's, uh, submitted by a student. Hi. Hi there. Hi. And thanks for answering my question. Mine is about reading. I'm about halfway through a master's program and there is way more reading than I ever expected. How do I keep up with class readings when I'm a slow reader?
Sometimes there's a [00:14:00] few hours of reading a day. I fall behind quickly and then avoid it altogether 'cause it feels pointless to try to catch up. But the main problem is when I don't do the readings, my papers are practically impossible to write. Thanks Katie. Love the show.
Aw, thank you for this question and thank you for your kind words.
Um, I love when you guys tell me that you like the show, because if you think about it, I'm just sitting here talking to a camera. I'm not, I don't see you. I need, I need some feedback. And, and, and that's really, that's even just like I love the show makes me so happy. But first of all, I wanna [00:14:30] acknowledge what you said, that you're not just struggling to keep up. You're also trying to protect your capacity. Okay? And that's really smart. And you didn't use those exact words, but like that's, that's the gist of it. I'm reading between the lines, my friend, because when you're behind and everything feels hard and slow, our brains shift into this is like oversimplifying it, but like avoidance mode. I'm just gonna call it that. Basically our brains say this is too much. Then they shut down. Some of them depends on who we are and like our neurobiology and our [00:15:00] situation and our coping tools and all this and, and you know, the amount of tasks that we have, but some of us fully shut down and some of us just feel more resistance and are still able to proceed.
It's kind of like a spectrum of responses. Okay. But honestly, this isn't a, a failure, it's not a personal thing. It's that cognitive response. So we need to meet that reality with actual strategy. Okay, we're gonna break this down into four key ideas. I put a lot of thought into this answer, but why? I always put a lot of thought into these answers, into to what I say here, but I, I mapped this one out.
Okay. We're gonna break it [00:15:30] down into four key ideas. One, what's actually happening cognitively when we feel overwhelmed by reading or by a lot of tasks.
Then we're gonna talk about how to redefine what keeping up means in grad school. Grad school. Okay.
Then strategies for reading. When you're a slow, I'm using air quotes here, you called yourself a slow reader.
I'm not judging that. Maybe just a not fast reader.
And then how to connect your reading directly to your assignments so that you don't get stuck when it's time to produce the work, when you, it's [00:16:00] time to write your papers. Okay, so that's our little roadmap here.
Number one. First, let's talk about what is actually happening in the brain.
I can't avoid the cognitive piece behind this stuff. When we are faced with too much to read or just too much to do and we're already feeling behind, urgency kicks in and the brain's default response is to shut down. Now, this is actually our amygdala getting activated. It's a cute little nugget piece in our brain that is our brain's threat detection center.
It's like fight, flight, or [00:16:30] freeze, right? And your brain's just like this task is dangerous. Run Now is the task dangers? No, it's not okay, but it's wired to perceive danger, whether it's an email or like some, you know, creature in the Savannah whatever. And when the amygdala is activated, it pulls resources away from our prefrontal cortex.
Now, if you listen to last week's episode about, um, executive functions, I talk a lot about the prefrontal cortex that is like the main character that's responsible for planning and [00:17:00] analysis and reading comprehension and self-control and thinking, and time management and task management and like sequencing and all the things that are required to like function.
Okay? So ironically, the more stressed you feel about the reading, the less able you're actually gonna be to do it. And this is why a reading strategy has to start with reducing the threat. And we do that by creating structure, clarity and small wins. If any of you have listened to the show. Before, if you're new, welcome, that's awesome.
But you know that I'm a [00:17:30] huge, huge proponent of clarity, okay? And structure and small wins. Alright? Anyway, that's what the next few strategies are gonna help you do. Okay?
So the next strategy, which is to redefine what keeping up actually means. And this is gonna help reduce the threat that your brain feels about the reading so that you can actually do it.
Do it strategically. Okay. I'm not gonna tell you to do all your readings, just, just sit tight. I really appreciate your efforts and your intentions to do all of the [00:18:00] readings that you're assigned, because that shows that you are devoted to your program and your education, but you're gonna burn out. Okay? I also went through a master's program and I am a good doobie and I'm a fast reader, and I love, and I still couldn't do all the readings.
It is a myth to think that a good grad student means reading everything in order. Full comprehension on time all of the time. And I'm just gonna say this bluntly, it's also nearly impossible. In graduate programs, professors often [00:18:30] assign way more reading than any human could fully absorb. And it's not because they expect you to finish it all, but because they want to expose you, expose you to a full body of knowledge, and it's your job as a student to be strategic about what you focus on.
All right, so first the mindset shift is this. Keeping up does not mean doing everything. It means extracting what you need when you need it, to the degree that's just necessary, right? So we're not gonna aim for completeness, okay? We're gonna aim [00:19:00] for utility.
Okay. Number three, tactical strategies for reading when you are a self-proclaimed slow reader. Okay. You mentioned you're a slow reader, and I just wanna normalize that right away. Speed is not the same thing as comprehension. And being a slow reader often just means that you're somebody who's trying to understand something deeply, which is a really great thing.
That said, when time is tight, we need a way to get through the material with intention and like more [00:19:30] practically, right? And so here's where I recommend something called a layered reading. It's a three pass reading strategy that can help you read smarter, not harder, blah, blah, blah. Okay?
Level one. The first pass, we're gonna call this the preview pass.
This is where you just scan the headings, the subheadings, the intro, the conclusion. If it's an academic article, you're gonna read the abstract. This pass is about getting the lay of the land. You're building a cognitive map, so to speak, so your brain has a place to put the new information when it comes in.
[00:20:00] When you do this step, all you're trying to do is answer the question, what is this about? Because if you do that, you might say, you know what? I got the lay of land here on this article, and I'm realizing that it's not actually gonna be useful for this paper. Alright, so sometimes it's the preview step where you can stop, or after the preview step you can stop because the preview step gave you just enough information to make a judgment call about whether that reading is gonna be useful to you.
Okay, layer two or step two, strategic skimming. now that you know the terrain and let's say [00:20:30] that you have judged the, um, reading to be potentially useful to you or important for whatever you can produce from it, like a paper or something, go back through and read the parts that are most relevant to your course themes or to your assignment goals. You can highlight and annotate.
Of course, I'm gonna recommend that, but with intention, you are not decorating the entire page with neon yellow. You're flagging things that connect to why you're reading in the first place. Are you reading to collect evidence in support of a research paper or a [00:21:00] thesis? Well then annotate just for that.
Are you reading something so that you know what you're talking about when you're gonna present it in class? We'll then annotate and read just for that. I teach a whole bunch of specific annotation skills inside SchoolHabits University. I teach you how to annotate articles, novels, textbooks, and different kinds of readings.
Those strategies can be really helpful here too. I'm gonna leave a link to SchoolHabits University below. I always do.
Okay, layer number three, deep dive. This [00:21:30] is only if needed. This is a judgment call you're gonna have to make based on your preview reading. So like, okay, am I, am I assessing? You've assessed that this text will just say article is important. Okay, so you've determined it's important and then you've read for like the, the key parts that you think you need for the purpose that you're reading it for. And now if you're like, you know what? I read these key parts and I'm realizing I'm going to need the full thing here.
Okay? So this is where the step comes in.
you reserve this pass for readings that are [00:22:00] critical, like key theory texts or something that you know you're gonna need to reference in a paper or discussion. if you are taking a literature class, this is the actual book you're reading, right? Whereas the strategic skimming you would save for the supplementary readings and maybe the literary analysis and the novel adjacent texts that your professor put in the portal.
In this past, you slow down. You might reread, you might summarize sections in your own words, but you don't do this for everything. [00:22:30] Only for the key texts that are gonna be critical to your understanding of the material, to your potential assessments on the material and for anything that you need to produce, like a paper or presentation or something.
And then finally, the fourth pass, connect the reading to your writing so you're not stuck at paper time. I like this strategy a lot. I think this part is so important. You said something like, when I don't do the readings, my papers are impossible to write. Okay. Totally makes sense. That's because grad level writing is synthesis.[00:23:00]
It's not just reporting facts and it's not like opinion based. It's making connections between texts and ideas and your own thinking, and oftentimes like creating something new from that. But if you're reading notes or disorganized or you don't remember what you read, your brain. Has nothing to work with.
And also, if you approach all your readings only ever with the skimming strategy and never with the deeper reading strategy, you also get stuck at this step too. So here's what where I recommend I I, I love [00:23:30] this tip. Okay? As you read, especially in layers two and three, I want you to create a running document where you drop little quick notes tied to your assignments.
This is not a summary of the whole text, it's just something like page 1 43. Okay, love this quote from my paper on X or author's argument. Contrast with reading from week two. Okay. That could, could be good for an intro, something like that. You're basically creating a paper [00:24:00] prep document in real time so that when the time comes to actually write your paper, you already have a whole bunch of raw material sorted by relevance. And this is different from annotating. Okay? I'm still suggesting you annotate, but at the graduate level, as I said, most of your writing is going to be synthesis. So you need to pull something from this reading and pull something from this article and pull something from this book, right?
Your sources are scattered. And when it comes time to write your paper, it can be really hard to remember what you annotated and [00:24:30] where and what you thought about it, and then why you annotated it, right? So creating a running paper prep doc where you consolidate all of your key notes and your thoughts can be super helpful.
This process also helps encode the information like, you know, get it gritty, built into your neurons, which is a fancy way of saying writing about what you read. Actually increases your attention. It activates both the semantic memory, which is what something means, and something [00:25:00] called the episodic memory, which is, you know, where you saw it, when you saw it, what it looked like.
You know, you're like, oh, this one was like online. This was in the top left. Stuff like that. That helps with retrieval later on. You don't have to become a fast reader- that's not the goal here. Okay? You just have to become a strategic reader, and strategic means reducing the threat so that your brain stays,
available and accessible.
Layering your reading to manage time and energy. So layering meaning like first assess whether you're [00:25:30] this article's worth even reading in full. Um, then it's, you know, looking at the headings and the subheadings and maybe the key terms depending on the text, right?
So making a judgment call about what's worth going all in on, um, and what's not focusing on utility and not completeness, and then capturing ideas in a way that supports your future writing.
Also on a more human note, it's okay to fall behind. I know you, you know, wrote in looking for [00:26:00] advice on how not to fall behind, but just, I just wanna put that out there.
It happens, but the solution is not to catch up in the traditional sense. It's just to to pivot, to figure out what's most useful now, what's coming up next, and to make sure that your readings serve you.
I hope this was helpful, and if you want more strategies for reading and study methods that are actually designed for super busy brains, I've got a bunch of related resources at schoolhabits.com, including some specific blog posts on how to annotate and [00:26:30] how to remember what you read. I'm gonna leave those linked in the show notes, um, or in the description box if you're watching this on YouTube. And then everything is at learn and work smarter.com/podcast.
All right, my friends, that wraps up today's show. Remember, you can submit your own questions for me to answer by heading to learnandworksmarter.com, and filling out this super simple form right there on the homepage. I've also linked that form below. Thank you for being with me here today.
Thanks for supporting the show in the form of reviews and shares and comments that means the world to me. [00:27:00] I appreciate you and never stop learning.
