Friday Mindset #133

Happy Friday you good good people.

Twenty days until Hallowe’en eh. Think of the chocolate you can confiscate by then - trick or treaters will be delighted with the range of goodies you’ve got on offer. Or you could keep it all for yourself. Anyway, let’s not dash off home just yet - there’s some good stuff to share this week, let’s dive in…

Something to try...

We’ve already thought and written about procrastination a lot - and shared stuff with you before. But recently, we’ve discovered a fresh perspective on the topic. We spend next-to-no-time on LinkedIn, dropping in maybe once a year to check everything hasn’t exploded or something, so we’d never have seen this if a colleague hadn’t pointed us in the direction of it: a post by Justin Rosenstein, the CEO of the software company Asana. He’s a guy with a lot of work on his plate, and here, he writes in a fresh way - to us at least - about procrastination.

It’s a five-minute read, and he tells a really powerful story about being rescued from procrastination-hell by Jordan, his super-smart girlfriend:

It struck us as a fresh way of tackling procrastination during one-to-ones, or perhaps exploring it with a whole group of students. Read the article, then use the planning sheet below to work out next steps with a tutor group or a coachee:

Jordan’s an absolute gem, eh?

Something we're reading...

In Martin’s upcoming book, The Backpacker’s Guide to University (co-written with a university teacher and lecturer with fifteen years’ experience,) there are numerous ‘research corner’ sections which explain an interesting experiment and its outcomes. Here’s one about time management and scheduling - including a very readable and engaging paper:

“At West Texas University, 210 undergraduate students were taught about time-management and scheduling in a series of 15 minute sessions. They received some important study advice: a session on being proactive rather than waiting for help, one about setting high standards for yourself, and one about planning delivery stages and taking first steps. 

Each week, every student involved had to list all the projects they were working on, record the deadlines for these projects, and then pre-plan some study time for that week, figuring out where they were up to and what they needed to do next. Of course, like all good pieces of research, there was a second group who weren’t given this advice and guidance, and were left to continue as normal.

After the semester, the researchers compared the two groups, measuring three things. Firstly they studied missing assignment percentage - the number of students who’d missed deadlines during that semester. Next, they looked at satisfaction - how a student was feeling about their studies, and thirdly, at final course grade.

The results were powerful. Effective time-management and scheduling led to a halving in the rate of missing assignments - a really significant improvement. Secondly, those students who’d been taught the additional sessions felt overwhelmingly more optimistic about their studies, and the impact that more effective time-management had had - over 85% reckoned it had been positive. And thirdly, the students taught the sessions even received slightly higher grades - a 3% increase on their peers.” 

Portal Talk…

September’s always a busy month, but as the craziness of the start of term subsides for me and everyone else as well, we may be starting to see the first cracks appear in our students armour of enthusiasm. When this happens it is important to remind them that they will undoubtable face many setbacks over the course of their studies, and to provide them with a framework to help deal with them.

I was reminded of a great video interview of eminent Sports Psychologist, Bill Beswick. His re-telling of an anecdote about how basketball star Kobe Bryant deals with failure, carries a great message to help students who may be dealing with setbacks at this time of year.

We also have some slides, based on Sports Performance Psychology, which ask students to consider how they approach challenges, trying to encourage them to adopt a “Need to Achieve” mentality, rather than a “Need to Avoid Failure”. These are available below for a limited time, and include the video above, which is embedded in the slides.

These and more slides are available on demand from our online portal. If your school or college isn't subscribed yet and would like more information, please use the link below for a free demo!

Our latest offer...

We’ve got a copy of Roger von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head to give away this week. It’s been ours for a long time and we’ve not left it in great condition - there are sections of text we’ve circled for particular books we’re writing, assemblies or presentations we’re giving, and we’ve done that annoying thing of folding down the corners of some pages to remind us where to look. But it’s OK other than that!

First pubbed forty years ago, it’s still such a good book on creative thinking - highly recommended. Anyway, you know the score: just be first to email us at [email protected] and we’ll post it out to you.

And that’s it for this week, folks. Give yourself permission to snaffle a couple of those confiscated Freddos - you can burn off the calories if you run to the car with a heavy bag of marking. All the best to you and yours,

Steve, Tony and Martin

p.s. if you miss out on the free book, but you want more on creative thinking, design thinking and problem solving, this article might be a good place to start. We’ve come up with so many good ideas (for learning, intervention, coaching, developing independence and many more) when we’ve got together and tried some of the following approaches:

p.p.s.

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