My students are asking for extra office hours, so I’ll be learning a new zoom skill today.

And I feel like a proud parent: this assignment’s formal deadline is half a month away and they want help NOW. :-)

We did an in-class writing exercise last week, 1 minute per question: 1. what’s your most important academic work coming up this next week? 2. Why is it important to you? 3. Why is that “importance” important to you (how does it fit with your college goals?) 4. What’s...

4. What’s your most important personal-social goal? 5. Why is that important to you? 6. Why is that “importance” important to you (how does it fit in with your life goals?)

Our discussion after was about urgent vs important: consider what’s missing if you only tend to deadlines

I talked about my own goals this month: read 30 articles; transcribe 30 prayerbook openings. Neither has a deadline, so I had to create my own

I told them ahead of time that their writing on this exercise was private — I did not ask them to share; and won’t be following up. But I did use class time to emphasize that this work is important (ha!) for shaping what they’ll spend their time becoming during their 8 semesters

It felt like one of the more meaningful exercises we’ve done. Learning to handle competing priorities is ALWAY a work in progress!

Oh, and without writing I did ask them what was their time-hog: what was the thing most likely to distract them from their goals. And then talked about my own penchant for doom-scrolling in the middle of the night and the need to move the phone away from the bedside

As humans, we are prone to distraction; drawing back time from trivialities makes time for the larger goals we have set for ourselves. And I believe that intentionality is a teachable skill