Teaching in Higher Ed

Productivity

How to be more productive by factoring in context

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context

I have always been a big fan of personal productivity books and tools. When David Allen's first edition of Getting Things Done came out, I liked his methods, with one big exception:

I completely didn't get how considering context was going to be useful to me at all

For those of you who may not be familiar with the idea of using context in your planning, he advises that with each action item on our to do list, we not only consider when this action needs to be taken, but also what (or who) would need to be present in order to do it.

The examples I remember him giving in the first edition were primarily location based. If I were going on an errand to our local CVS, it would also be good to know to stop at the grocery store, which is next door. Also helpful would be to drop by and pick up our dry cleaning.

The problem with his examples was that I can't stand going on errands and it is mostly Dave (my husband) who does the grocery shopping and dry cleaning drop offs in our household. If I'm going to grocery shop, it is likely going to be via the Amazon Fresh delivery service.

While this post links to how to articles on OmniFocus, the set up of contexts is available in many different kind of task managers. Even if your specific tool doesn't have a field for context, you can still type in an @ symbol at the end of each task name and include the context you want to use, such as:

@agenda:FDC or @energy:high or @grocerystore

Why I Changed to Better Appreciate Context

Three factors caused me to make a dramatic shift in my appreciation of context in personal productivity:

  1. I become an OmniFocus user. OmniFocus is one of the task management applications that has features set up for leveraging contexts.
  2. David Allen revised his Getting Things Done book and somehow it stuck better with me on this edition.
  3. I expanded my thinking of how contexts might be set up beyond location-based ones, thanks to experts like Tim Stringer.

There are still ways that other people make use of contexts that don't resonate with me too heavily.

Some people use energy-level contexts and work on the @focus tasks when they are at a time of the day that allows them to target their attention at a given task.

Others set up sophisticated location-based contexts that are better served for people who run lots of errands at once.

If you have set up a system like OmniFocus, but don't think it is working well for you, check out these potential pitfalls and associated solutions.

Contexts that Work Well for Me

By far, these are the contexts that work best for me:

Here are the application-related contexts that I have set up on OmniFocus:

mac-contexts

By far, the biggest time saver on the list is the @Moodle context.

Another one that works well for me is the @Studio context. We have a studio set up at home with professional audio equipment. Whenever I have tasks that can only be accomplished when accessing the audio equipment, I apply that context.

Then, each time I sit down at that computer, I have all the tasks I should take care of in that sitting.

[reminder]How do you use the concept of context in your personal productivity approaches? [/reminder]

Applescript for starting and ending presentations

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apple-script

You know how it is…

It is your first day back after a vacation (or, in our case, a staycation). You're ready to rock and roll.

But, you run into all kinds of road blocks.

Today, I finally figured out the problem with my contact syncing that I've been experiencing. It first required being on the phone with an Apple tech support person for more than 45 minutes, though.

In the middle of the call, I had to ask the guy to hold on, since there was a devious looking spider that I had tried to kill earlier in the call. He was not about to be defeated.

I finally texted Dave and asked him to please come help. Dave was heroic and the Apple tech didn't seem irritated by the slight wait.

When the contacts issue was resolved, I finally got to my tasks on OmniFocus. One stood out to me as not urgent, but a potential time saver during the school year.

Apple Script for Starting and Ending Presentations / Classes

I finally allowed myself to experiment with Helmut Hauser's Apple Scripts for when you're starting and ending a presentation.

When I run it, the script quits various applications that I wouldn't want running when I'm giving a presentation. The script also launches and activates an application called Caffeine that makes sure my laptop doesn't go to sleep or run a screen saver when I'm in the middle of teaching a class.

The end-of-presentation script brings back all the applications that I want to have running when I'm not presenting (such as dropbox and OmniFocus).

It took me quite a while to set it up. This was mostly because I've never used AppleScript before today and I was in unchartered waters.

Helmut has also included on his post a link for an Alfred workflow that runs the scripts off of a keyboard shortcut. I hadn't installed Alfred on my Mac, since upgrading my hardware about a year ago. It is back on and I'm excited to familiarize myself, again, with some of the efficiencies it offers.

It is 5:05 pm… and I'm so pleased to report that when I press option-shift-9 on my computer, it takes care of everything I would normally have tried to remember to do before beginning a class.

Now, if only I could get everything else to the point of “done.” Summer is going to end all too soon.

 

How to support our students’ productivity

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how to help our students be more productive

I still have at least one of my planners from college. It's a comic-themed one. Each double-pages spread contains a Far Side comic on the left side and a week-at-a glance on the right.

Life was simpler then. My weeks looked mostly the same, with the occasional exam or paper thrown into the mix. My to do list was kept in the same place as scheduled events, on the corresponding day in my Far Side comic planner.

Things are so different for our students now.

College students are studying less than prior generations, to the tune of approximately ten hours less per week. More than half of them work while in college.

Then there's the 8-10 hours they're spending on their phones daily, according to one study.

Here's how the BLS's American Time Use Survey shows that college students spend their time.

chart6

 

To my knowledge, no one at my university has surveyed the sleeping habits of our students. It is hard to imagine that our average is higher than 7 hours a night, however. I hope to be proven wrong on that someday.

It is more complicated for today's students to manage their time and their tasks than it was for me in college.

How can we support our students' productivity?

Some students are able to manage their lives in their heads. It depends on the types of classes they are taking and what's going on in the rest of their lives.

However, all students benefit when we structure our teaching to grow students' abilities to manage their time and tasks more effectively. Here are some ways we can support our students' productivity habits.

Leverage an LMS's capability to publish calendars

Most of the LMSs that I've used have some kind of master calendar for students to view all the assignments in their classes and their corresponding due dates/times. Some give the ability to copy/paste a calendar subscription, so that students can add it to whatever calendar they use (Google calendar, a Mac calendar, Outlook, etc.).

Our university uses Moodle, which has this option.

If students subscribe to a calendar with all their assignments in it, likely they'll be able to see it on their smart phone, as well as when they're on their computers.

Break assignments up into multiple parts

When Ken Bain was on the episode 36, he spoke about the importance of giving students feedback along the way toward the completion of a major assignment. Students have told me that my method of separating the research and writing processes causes them to be less tempted to take shortcuts. They also said it helped them learn the skill of researching and writing better by having them separated like that.

By having assignments broken up into pieces, we model for our students to think about larger projects in terms of the action steps that it will take to move it forward to completion.

Choose due dates/times to reduce likelihood of sleep deprivation

On the upcoming episode 45 with Aaron Daniel Annas (link will work after 5:00 am PST on 4/23/15), he asked me how to set better boundaries with students who are in crunch mode with their assignments. I advise having assignments due at 5:00 pm, since that tends to reduce the likelihood that students stay up all night to get them finished.

The bigger picture

Our university has a freshmen class called Cornerstone that introduces them to the university, helps build study skills, and creates a community of learners to improve retention.

One of the assignments most Cornerstone classes require is to submit their planners (or screenshots of their electronic system), with their schedules each week and each classes' assignments in it.

Once the class is over, many students go back to the method of relying on their professors to remind them of assignments.

I wonder if there isn't a better way for me to reinforce the continued discipline around having a planner or other means for tracking tasks and calendar items.

[reminder]What ideas do you have for supporting our students' productivity?[/reminder]

How to support our students' productivity

By | | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

how to help our students be more productive

I still have at least one of my planners from college. It's a comic-themed one. Each double-pages spread contains a Far Side comic on the left side and a week-at-a glance on the right.

Life was simpler then. My weeks looked mostly the same, with the occasional exam or paper thrown into the mix. My to do list was kept in the same place as scheduled events, on the corresponding day in my Far Side comic planner.

Things are so different for our students now.

College students are studying less than prior generations, to the tune of approximately ten hours less per week. More than half of them work while in college.

Then there's the 8-10 hours they're spending on their phones daily, according to one study.

Here's how the BLS's American Time Use Survey shows that college students spend their time.

chart6

 

To my knowledge, no one at my university has surveyed the sleeping habits of our students. It is hard to imagine that our average is higher than 7 hours a night, however. I hope to be proven wrong on that someday.

It is more complicated for today's students to manage their time and their tasks than it was for me in college.

How can we support our students' productivity?

Some students are able to manage their lives in their heads. It depends on the types of classes they are taking and what's going on in the rest of their lives.

However, all students benefit when we structure our teaching to grow students' abilities to manage their time and tasks more effectively. Here are some ways we can support our students' productivity habits.

Leverage an LMS's capability to publish calendars

Most of the LMSs that I've used have some kind of master calendar for students to view all the assignments in their classes and their corresponding due dates/times. Some give the ability to copy/paste a calendar subscription, so that students can add it to whatever calendar they use (Google calendar, a Mac calendar, Outlook, etc.).

Our university uses Moodle, which has this option.

If students subscribe to a calendar with all their assignments in it, likely they'll be able to see it on their smart phone, as well as when they're on their computers.

Break assignments up into multiple parts

When Ken Bain was on the episode 36, he spoke about the importance of giving students feedback along the way toward the completion of a major assignment. Students have told me that my method of separating the research and writing processes causes them to be less tempted to take shortcuts. They also said it helped them learn the skill of researching and writing better by having them separated like that.

By having assignments broken up into pieces, we model for our students to think about larger projects in terms of the action steps that it will take to move it forward to completion.

Choose due dates/times to reduce likelihood of sleep deprivation

On the upcoming episode 45 with Aaron Daniel Annas (link will work after 5:00 am PST on 4/23/15), he asked me how to set better boundaries with students who are in crunch mode with their assignments. I advise having assignments due at 5:00 pm, since that tends to reduce the likelihood that students stay up all night to get them finished.

The bigger picture

Our university has a freshmen class called Cornerstone that introduces them to the university, helps build study skills, and creates a community of learners to improve retention.

One of the assignments most Cornerstone classes require is to submit their planners (or screenshots of their electronic system), with their schedules each week and each classes' assignments in it.

Once the class is over, many students go back to the method of relying on their professors to remind them of assignments.

I wonder if there isn't a better way for me to reinforce the continued discipline around having a planner or other means for tracking tasks and calendar items.

[reminder]What ideas do you have for supporting our students' productivity?[/reminder]

5 tools for when you're sick

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sick_

I had a health issue come up this week that meant I couldn't teach on Monday, as planned. I'll spare everyone the details, but suffice to say once the medicine I needed kicked in, I knew it would only be a day or two of recovery time.

It got me thinking about the tools I'm grateful for, when things don't go quite as I've planned. No one likes being sick, but it sure can be easier to recover when you know that things aren't as likely to fall through the cracks.

5 Tools for When You're Sick

Here are five tools for when you're feeling under the weather, but you don't want your classes to fall apart:

Remind

The first thing I did when I knew I wouldn't be able to teach on Monday was to send a message out via Remind. This free service allows me to keep my cell number confidential, but have all the conveniences of a one-way text messaging service to my students. Sign-up is easy on all sides (for students and faculty). I wrote a more extensive review back in 2014.

They recently enhanced their feature set by adding the ability to chat with individual students back and forth. If you would prefer to keep the communication one-way, as you have been doing, you don't have to activate this setting. However, the ability to set up office hours makes it such that you can control exactly when students can initiate chats with you, or even make it only available to students that you initiate chats with… If you have more questions about how the new chat feature works, check out their FAQ.

FreeConference.com

Over these two weeks, I've been meeting with all the students in my Principles of Marketing classes. I had a few meetings scheduled for the afternoon that I really didn't want to postpone. That would only mean that the students wouldn't receive feedback on their progress on their marketing plans until quite close to when it is actually due.

I wound up scheduling conference calls with them on the FreeConference.com service. The company makes their money by charging for extras like call recording. If all you want to do is have a call, it's free.

TimeTrade

There were some students who preferred to wait until I was back on campus and we could meet in person. My scheduling tool, TimeTrade, made this process simple. I went to my list of appointments and clicked on the one for the group wanting to wait until next week. There's a reschedule option there that automatically sends a link to the student who scheduled the meeting, initially, and gives them a little nudge to remember to find a suitable time to reschedule.

Planbook

The tool I use to schedule all my class sessions is called PlanBook. It is available on Windows and the Mac, in addition to on the iPad. You can review what I wrote about Planbook in the past, as well as check out all the features.

timetrade

Planbook made it easy for me to see what my students would be missing, since we didn't have class on Monday. I could reschedule the remaining class sessions for the semester and easily get handouts and changes to them via the free Planbook Connect website that you publish with the Planbook software.

Netflix

I actually wound up working most of the day, despite not feeling well. The afternoon conference calls went well with the students. I was also able to write the remaining exams for the rest of the semester, using Cengage's exam creation software.

However, in the evening, I did indulge in an attempt to get caught up with Mad Men. I got through two episodes of season 7 and am on my way to being able to join all the chatter on social media about season 8.

[reminder]What tools do you use to keep things from falling apart too much when you're sick?[/reminder]