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Inviting more ease into your week

By Bonni Stachowiak | February 10, 2015 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

ease

I enjoyed the conversation with Natalie Houston immensely, which aired this past week in episode #034. She reminded us all to find ways to have more of a sense of ease in our lives.

She said:

Productivity, to me, is not about doing more things faster. It is about doing the things that are most important to me and creating the kind of life I want to have…

Here are a couple of opportunities for having more ease in my life that I discovered this week:

Set a timer to better enjoy breaks and conversations with students

Since the conversation with Natalie, I've been setting timers like crazy. While I had used this approach previously, she shed new light on the practice and inspired me to take more regular advantage of the focus on the moment.

I found a Tweet where Natalie coached a colleague who wanted motivation and concentration to:

@rgfeal set timer for one minute; close eyes and breathe. Then ask yourself: what should I do next? Write down whatever comes up. Then act.

— Natalie M. Houston (@nmhouston) September 30, 2012

I met with a few students this week and really felt more connected with the conversations in those times when I remembered to set a timer. There was one time when I neglected to do so, and I both wound up completely throwing off my schedule for the latter part of the afternoon, and wasn't as engaged as in the other “timed” conversations.

Natalie also offers these tips about using a timer while grading.

Install a custom style in Zotero, which enables you to create an annotated bibliography

This one is really more for my doctoral students than for me, though I treasure the opportunities to bring more ease into other people's lives. As a part of their program, they're asked a number of times to develop an annotated bibliography.

We also strongly encourage the use of the citations manager, Zotero. The annotated bibliography assignment hasn't aligned well with using the automated features in Zotero, since until now, I thought it could only “spit out” a list of sources, not something that included annotations.

Thanks to Emory Libraries and Information Technology, I found out I was wrong. Turns out, you can create a custom style in Zotero, or download one from their repository and leave the heavy lifting to others.

[reminder]How are you inviting more ease into your life this week?[/reminder]

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: grading, productivity, timers, zotero

Bonni Stachowiak

Bonni Stachowiak is the producer and host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, which has been airing weekly since June of 2014. Bonni is the Dean of Teaching and Learning at Vanguard University of Southern California. She’s also a full Professor of Business and Management. She’s been teaching in-person, blended, and online courses throughout her entire career in higher education. Bonni and her husband, Dave, are parents to two curious kids, who regularly shape their perspectives on teaching and learning.

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