⛱️ Welcome back to the second part of "The Summer of Tiny Experiments."
Wait ... I don't really get what a "tiny experiment" is?
In case you missed it last week, the article was a self-invitation to try a tiny experiment in your life or work. A tiny experiment is:
- different from a goal in that it is not aspirational, but instead an action you can take in the name of self-investigation
- different from a habit in that it is time-bound, typically a few days or weeks. It could become a habit if we like it.
You can read the full article here:
Week 1 - Setting up a Tiny Experiment
Sounds great, I've got an idea in mind. What's next?
This week, we will review the concept of mindful productivity and the management of our cognitive, emotional, and physical resources as we evaluate our tiny experiment.
Respecting your natural rhythms is crucial for maintaining a healthy relationship with your work and preventing burnout. But this is increasingly difficult as our responsibilities grow, our roles become more complex and nuanced, and the demands on our time and energy feel endless. Reviewing a few simple ways to manage your own resources can help you find a flow that allows for productivity while still honoring the needs of your mind and body.
What's the first resource to look at?
🧠 Managing Cognitive Resources
While our brains are remarkable, a major cognitive bottleneck for us and our students is the limited number of tasks we can focus on at one time. This limit is related to working memory, our ability to make decisions, solve problems, engage in conversations, and generally juggle our sensory inputs. Think of yourself at a clinical site. You have hundreds, if not thousands, of data inputs that you are managing and organizing in your brain. You are making patient decisions, but also evaluating students, administering medications, gathering assessment data, teaching, reviewing, and keeping track of where everyone is in their day. It's no wonder you're exhausted after a clinical day.
The idea that Anne-Laure Le Cunff suggests in her book Tiny Experiments is to use sequential focus. Simply put, this means doing one activity at a time and giving your full focus to that activity. There will always be competing priorities in life and work. Still, rather than trying to find the elusive “balance,” our brains are better suited to use sequential focus to prioritize what is currently important.
For example, if you're writing an article or proofreading your syllabus, focus solely on that project for a set amount of time, without allowing other tasks to distract you.
This week, try to avoid the allure of multitasking in one area of your life (likely not a day on the clinical floor). Dividing your focus is a surefire way to dilute the quality of your work.
I think I could do that! What's next?
🧘🏼 Managing Emotional Resources
I love vocabulary and I just learned that there is a word for good stress. It’s “eustress,” and it has been shown to boost performance.
But what about stress that leads to difficulty falling asleep at night, or being irritable about minor inconveniences? One of the most effective ways to regulate your nervous system is to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. The “rest and digest” that we teach can easily become a tool for managing distractions or nervous energy.
I have written previous articles about how our bodies and minds are interconnected and how involving both in learning is essential to student engagement. But this is also true for us as educators. We cannot ignore our internal world. Roll out your shoulders, do a quick neck stretch as you read this, or rotate your wrists around. Noticing these sensations, you can utilize your parasympathetic system to your advantage and enhance your ability to manage challenging emotions.
Tell me more about how our minds and bodies are interconnected.
💪 Physical Resources
You are more than just a brain on a stick. You are a complex human with a body that responds to hormonal shifts, seasonal changes, and numerous natural rhythms that you may not even be aware of. Accepting that your best effort looks different according to the hour, day, or month can be challenging. Especially when expectations and demands are high, but honoring your body’s signals is essential.
I also like James Clear’s view on a simple time exchange.
I'm usually asleep from 5am to 6am, but when I wake up early I tend to enjoy it. Start the day slow. Watch the sunrise. Get a few things done before everyone else wakes up. Meanwhile, I am often awake from 10pm to 11pm and I find that I tend to use the time poorly. Passively watching TV or scrolling on a screen. Late night snacking. Overthinking things that are unimportant. Trading the last hour of the night for the first hour in the morning would be a pretty high value trade for me. Which hours of your day tend to return the most value, and which ones tend to return the least?
Start to notice what activities, rest, communities, and environments bring your physical energy, and incorporate more of them!
This tiny experiment sounds a lot like the nursing process.
Both are built around the scientific method, so yes! And a part of this tiny experiment process is to evaluate how the action that you chose affects these areas of your life - your cognitive, emotional, and physical resources. These can be excellent monitoring tools to help you decide whether to continue the experiment or turn it into a habit. Don’t get too caught up in “measurement,” just subtle noticing is sufficient.
🎧 Latest Podcast
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05: Notion Semester Planner
Learn how to build a second brain and free up valuable mental bandwidth!
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Did you have success with an interesting or innovative active learning tool?
Submit your idea and I will be in touch about being a guest on the next season of the Learning Lab RN Podcast.
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Next week will be the last article in this series, and we will discuss what to do at the end of the pact that you made with yourself. Next week’s article will also be my last email before the summer content break. ☀️
