We came across something Dr Noni said on her TikTok Live that has stuck with us, and it’s worth repeating here. Life is not going to wait for you and your PhD, your project, or whatever deadline currently has your full attention. The people you’re planning to catch up with once things calm down are getting on with their lives in the meantime. Relationships move on whether you’re ready or not.
We see this constantly with the people we work with, across all sorts of careers, not just academia. The stuff that gives them energy and purpose and fun gets put to the side while the work takes over. Slowly, without really noticing it happening, they lose motivation and stop enjoying life as much. That’s a big part of why our work at One Life Coaching has always been about helping people build lives that are successful and fulfilling. We work with plenty of people who’ve had genuinely successful careers but get no real sense of joy from them.
What it looks like to protect what matters
Dr Noni’s suggestion was simple: protect the people and things that matter to you as fiercely as you protect your PhD. Most people would never dream of missing a thesis deadline, but they’ll quietly let a friendship or a hobby slide for months without a second thought. If you want to protect what matters, it has to be treated with the same seriousness as the work itself, not left to whatever time happens to be left over.
This connects to something we wrote about recently, on the deadline burnout pattern that keeps academics stuck, where everything else gets dropped the moment a deadline arrives and the exhaustion afterwards makes it even harder to start again. The full conversation with Dr Noni is on her TikTok channel, and it’s well worth a watch.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s the kind of thing we help people work through in coaching.
