The Friday Mindset - Issue #49

April 29, 2022

It's Friday. Boy, this one felt like a long time coming.

But it's been a good week for us - on the road a lot, plenty of trains, staff training sessions in person, sessions on Zoom, student support lectures, new projects beginning, old ones coming to an end.

Many thanks, btw, to those of you that we've seen in-person this week, and who have said such nice things about the newsletter. Much appreciated!

If you recall, these last few weeks we've been obsessing about ensuring exam classes are psychologically ready, productive, and as stress-free as we can keep them. We've covered beating procrastination, getting out of your own head and habit formation so far. Check out previous issues if you want to see the free resources associated.

Today we're on to working in sprints, so let's dive in!

Something to try...

25 Minute Sprints - a simple activity from The GCSE Mindset - has been front and centre for us over the last few weeks. And having spoken to a number of students about working in sprints, and listened to their experiences of planning revision in sprints, we've put together a powerpoint for you.

The aim of our session was to convince kids that they could plan a week of 20 sprints - each of them 25 minutes long - adding up to 8 hours and 20 minutes of revision across the seven days.

Once we'd introduced the challenge, we began asking students to schedule exactly what they were going to cover in each sprint. It's a decent session for planning future revision and beating procrastination.

We've tried to make it seem as do-able as possible, and drawn on the advice of two experts in two short clips as well. This activity will pretty much run itself (we hope!); try it with a whole year group or a class. Oh - and remember to make sure you have some of our weekly planners printed out and ready (they're included.)

OK, here it is. Enjoy!

Two experts explain why working in sprints improves focus

Something we've been reading...

We can't remember how we stumbled across this. It's from spica - a workplace software company - and it's one of the most thorough collections of all the possible time and project management tools out there we've ever seen.

This pdf lists everything from the familiar (time-batching, eat that frog, the 4D system) to stuff we've never heard of (erm... moscow? posec?)

There's no detail here at all - it's just the most bare-bones explanation of each system. But we reckon there's something in this. Possibilities we're mulling over...

  • Having a closer look at the promising ones and turning them into activities (we've done this with one already)

  • Curating the list a little, then giving it out to students to research so they can feedback about how each of the systems work

  • Getting staff to experiment with them early next year and feedback to students about which ones they've enjoyed using as part of a themed 'time management' week

Anyway - check it out. There's lots of interest in this, especially for productivity geeks like us.

A useful list of time management systems

Our latest offer...

We've put Thursday 7th July in our planners for an in-person training day in London. We'll book somewhere central and we'll plan a day which covers the following...

  • An introduction to the system using all-new activities

  • Implementation guidance, with clips from schools and colleges using VESPA

  • How to coach students and encourage behaviour change that sticks

  • Measuring impact and using the psychometric

We'll also cover anything else you want to know about, so if the date looks good and you'd like to come along, feel free to specify what you'd like us to cover! We're going to try and keep the session small - maybe 10-12 delegates, so we can really get detailed about stuff.

If you're interested, put the date in your planner and we'll get some details together in the coming weeks.

And that's it for now. Have a good weekend. We're off to hang around in the park looking threatening until a crew of local toughs challenge us to a breakdancing competition.

Steve and Martin