Twitter? Challenge not to use it until the end.

I'm Andrew Rogers. I've worked as a Resident Director/Hall Director at 4 different institutions of varying sizes and cultures.

I've seen a lot. I love this field, the work we do gives meaning to our lives. But we have some problems as professionals that we need to address.

Through my time, I've seen a lot of professional burn out. It makes sense, we're a field of over-achieving do-gooders that take on way too much.

I've seen professionals that consistently put in 60 hours a week, take on too much, and feel they don't have a choice. I've seen people who are in a constant state of stress. We preach "work/life balance" but what does that even look like? Especially if our bosses stay later than we do?

I started yoga at a particularly stressful time in my RD career. I learned a lot about mindfulness. Out of mindfulness, other themes emerged. I wanted to find ways to work smarter, not harder. And I started reading about optimal living and producitivty methods.

The focus of this presentation is focus.

We're going to talk a lot about our ability to focus on the task at hand, and how cultivating focus in our life will help us to be more productive, efficient, and effective. The result is better balance balance in your life.

I'm going to discuss some of the challenges to our focus, dispell some myths, and give some salient strategies for regaining and maintaining focus at work.

At the end, we will use our collective brain to come up with examples of how to manage our day to day work life that we can share with the rest of the conference.

I see this as a presentation aimed at new professionals, although a few mid-levels could greatly benefit from these as well. What this presentation isn't for is for professionals that are so overloaded in their work life that all their work is pure reactionary and your working 60 hour weeks. I know there are a few of us at this conference.

I hope that this presentation inspires some professionals to help themselves and then be advocates for their colleagues that are struggling.

Let's talk a little bit about technology.

For starters, I don't consider myself a luddite.
I'm a fan of technology, and am hyper aware of it's ability to help us.

We have so many pieces of technology at our fingertips, it's easy to get overwhelmed with how to streamline our work rather than make it more cluttered and disorganized.

How long does it take you to search through all your devices and tablets and cloud to find the document or email you're looking for? Do you keep your calendars and your to-do lists and your notes and your contacts all together or in separate areas? How many different apps do you use to keep yourself organized?

Isn't it funny that the technology that was built to help make our life more manageable, actually can distract us?
The more powerful the technology, the more it can hurt us.

We have entered a new phase in our history where people are so connected to their devices, that studies have shown that our brains are literally addicted to the stimulation.

Think about it. We fill the lulls in our day with our smart phone. We don't allow ourselves and our minds to sit and be still. Whenever there's a lull, we pull out our smartphones, which stimulates our brain. The problem is, whenever the power goes out or we're without our phone, it causes a sense of anxiety during those lulls. We don't know how to be still. Our attention can't be still.

Let's go further and think about our work day. We have busy schedules and overloaded with work. What is our natural inclination when we want to take our brain away for a minute on our work?

We distract ourselves. And it makes us less efficent, less focused, less motivated, and it doesn't solve the root issue of being overwhelmed.

Where does distractiability show up in your life?

Find a partner. Introduce yourselves.

Ask how distractability shows up in your life and in your work.

When are you the most distracted?

So, how do we keep us selves from distractability? How do we keep our focus? How can we plan to get things done and be productive in our day when we have so much distraction?

Some might say "good time mangagement would help."

Well, here's a little known secret: Time Management is an outdated concept.

"The longer into the 21st century people continue to frame their productivity in terms of "time management" the less effective they'll be. That's because the traditional tools of time management are a calendar and a clock. However, rapid technological advances have made our lives far too complex to manage with these tools. Putting something on your calendar doesn't mean it will occur, and "making time" for something doesn't guarantee that you'll have the experience you intended.

Here's what would happen today: say you set aside time on your schedule at 9am for work on a project. You come into the office and sit down. But first, you have some emails in your inbox that you need to check. You fire off some emails real quick. Then, you get a text from a colleague that you text back. Your phone rings and it's a colleague across campus asking a non-urgent question about a student you've been helping. ETC.

Before you know it, your hour is done and you didn't get your assigned work done.

No, we can't manage time. We can only manage ourselves.

In this picture we see a row of guards standing at attention, except one, who lost all his attention. DO you ever feel like this at work?

Your attention is one of the most valuable commodities you have to offer. How are you going to spend it in your day?

I love this quote by Mark McGuinness

"If you want to create something worthwhile with your life, you need to draw a line between the world's demands and your own ambitions. Yes, we all have bills to pay and obligations to satisfy. But for most of us, there's a wide gray area between the have-to's and the want-tos in our lives. If you not careful, that area will fill up with email, meetings, and the requests of others, leaving no room for the work you consider important."

An example of a routine, would be to make room for creative work first, reactive work second. Creative: writing proposals or curriculuim, developing a community development model, this is the good work, the project work that isn't urgent, but it's important.

Other routines include time outside the office, working out every morning, spending Thursday nights with friends, date night on Friday, etc. Find a routine for things that matter.

p. 103. Haruki Murakami on routine:

When I'm in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4 am and work for 5 to 6 hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10 kilometers or swim for 1500 meters (or do both) then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9pm. I keep to this routine everyday without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing. it's a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

CHARNAS: Mise-en-place translates literally from the French as put in place. It's a way of life that grew out of teh collonary kitchens. The first thing cheifs do when they enter the kitchen is clean their station. Clean work space, clean mind.

How can we translate to our work space?

What's the first thing you do when you arrive at your desk? For many of us, checking email or listening to voice mail is practically automatic. In many ways, these are among the worst ways to start a day. Both activities hijack our focus and put us in a reactive mode, where other people's priorities take center stage. They are the equivalent of entering a kitchen and looking for a spill to clean or a pot to scrub.N

A better approach is to begin your day with a brief planning session. An intellectual mise-en-place.

We are talking about Mindfulness.

Mise-en-place, it really is a way of life. I know people that have it tattooed on them. It's a way of concentrating your mind to only focus on the aspects that you need to be working on at that moment, to kind of rid yourself of distractions. Clear space to work. Clear mind.

There is a movement in optimal living community for early rising. Get used to hearing it. The most successful people wake up early.

Ben Franklin was a huge proponent of waking up early. Wrote "Early Rising: A Natural, Social, and Religious Duty."
"Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

"I do my writing in the early morning before the day sinks its claws into me." - Larry McMurty

Acording to Forbes.com, Benefits of Early Risers:
studies show early risers earn
more proactive
better at anticipating problems
better planners
have time to exercise
get better sleep (your body will be more in tune with the earth's circadian rhythms, which offers more restorative sleep.)
more optimistic
quiet hour at work.
more quality time at night with family/friends

Don't just block off time for meetings and appointments with other people. Be proactive and block off time for other important activities that help your focus.

Like...

Taking time to exercise or even walk around the building gets your blood flowing and increases oxygen to your brain which makes you more alert and productive when you get back. 10 minute walk can boost your energy for up to two hours.

Back to my example earlier about trying to work on a project but getting distracted by other people's demands. If this is a frequent problem in your day-to-day, I encourage you to set some boundaries during the day around solitude. Find an hour that you can shut your door and put a "Do Not Disturb" sign on your door. Or if you're able to, work remotely. Whatever it takes to allow you to work uninterrupted for a small chunk of time.

One amazing way to practice solitude is a simple meditation session once a day. Meditation doesn't have to be mystical or complicated: it's simply sitting and doing nothing else for at least a few minutes. A great place is to do this as soon as you wake up.

Practicing this helps you control your thoughts - instead of the other way around. As you do this, you'll have learned a key skill for focus: how to notice the urge to switch tasks and not act on the urge, but just return your attention to the task at hand.

This is what you learn in solitude and it is everything.

The trick about lion taming. You ever wonder how the lion tamer actually tames the lion? He comes in with a whip and a chair. Many people think it's the whip, but that's just for show. It's actually the chair.

The tamer lifts the chair and points the 4 legs at the lion. The lion sees four different objects coming at it, and he's confused. He's frozen and inable to react.

Sound familiar?

The Second book is "Personal Productivity Secrets" by Maura Nevel Thomas.

It's her outline for a productivity system and her thoughts revolving around focus and technology's ability to help and hinder that.

This session is aimed to give some help at those professionals that have some wiggle room in their schedule and can control parts of their calendar.

Many of these ideas I gathered from reading two books that I recommend everyone read. The first is "Manage You Day to Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen your Creative Mind." Edited by Jocelyn Glei.

It's a collection of strategies and tools that some of the most creative and successful people in our culture have used to stay focused in their work.

Those were just a few ideas. But I bet you probably have a few good ones as well.

Every table has some post-it notes. Take some time to think contribute an idea to the wall. Something that works for you.

IF you think any of these ideas I presented inspired something for you, write it down. Let's post them.

Afterwards, lets take a picture of our wall of idea and tweet the shit out of it for all the conference attendees that didn't make it to our presentation. Take these ideas back with you to your institution.