Tag Archives: focus

Notifications are interruptions

For the past few months I’ve been turning off most notifications on my phone. I tend to keep my phone on silent most of the time. I still get banner notifications for a few things, but most of my notifications only go to my Notifications Center, they don’t pop up and interrupt what I’m doing. What that results in is a phone filled with red notification dots, every time I look at it. I know this would drive some people crazy, but I don’t mind.

I use the dots to remind myself that I’m in control. I don’t need to see what’s on social media, it will still be there when I choose to look. I will see all my email, but I won’t let email determine my schedule. I won’t let email interrupt what I’m doing now. I let my staff know that I will frequently look at Microsoft Teams, and that this is a faster way to connect with me than email.

This shift to MS Teams allows me to prioritize my staff over the last 10 emails that came in after a staff member asked me something on email. It allows me to contextual the conversation rather than letting outsiders determine what distracts me, simply because they were the most recent item in my email inbox. This shift has reduced my total daily emails, and it has also reduced my time on email further because I’m not getting emails I wish I saw hours before from my staff, and my staff know what to, and not to, add to my email.

I’m the first to admit that I probably still spend too much time on my phone, especially at home. It’s where I read my news, listen to audiobooks and podcasts, consume social media, and even create these daily blog posts. But I also know that reducing notification interruptions has helped me stay more focussed on the tasks I’m trying to complete both at work and at home.

Incremental Improvements

For about 5 weeks now, I’ve been recovering from a shoulder injury. It’s nothing too serious, and I think it was brought on by hours of shovelling snow then doing some wide-arm chin ups for my workout the next day… I put together two activities I seldom do, and I overdid it. I recently wrote about how my physiotherapist stopped weeks of pain in one session. I saw him a second time last week and he put me through a regimen of exercises that I’m to do over the next 3 weeks until I see him again. Although he was able to quickly stop the pain I was dealing with, he thinks that it will be another 6 weeks before I’m able to do everything that I could do before the injury.

This is the hard part of injury recovery. Progress is slow and nothing comes easily. But if I don’t put the time and effort in, I delay the recovery time. Day-to-day the results are not visible. Yesterday felt less strong than the day before, today will hopefully be different. When this is the experience, it doesn’t feel like I’m getting better. I have to put that aside, focus, and keep my regular routine up, including pushing myself to work my shoulder, while also not overdoing it.

We are often enamoured by the quick fix, the easy answer, fast and obvious results. But these quick rewards are not always available. Sometimes it’s the slow incremental changes that make us better, stronger, and more resilient. Sometimes we need to work through things slowly and properly in order to see the results we really want.

It doesn’t always seem glamorous, but the day to day grind of doing things well, with positive intention, and dedication can be the key to success. Sometimes it’s not about what we can do to quickly fix a problem, instead it’s about what we can do consistently over time that brings results. Staying positive and keeping the end goal in sight is important. This isn’t always easy to remember when the results we want come from incremental improvements.

Hitting the goal posts

Wayne Gretzky had an amazing talent for scoring goals.  Three records that he holds, that may never be surpassed, are scoring in 51 consecutive games, scoring 50 goals in 39 games, and scoring 92 goals in one season (80 games). To accomplish this he did something very well… He would visually focus on the back of the net, the open space between the goal posts and the goalie, and he would send the hockey puck into those spaces. Yes, that’s what most hockey players want to do, but it’s not what they actually do.

When most people are aiming at a goal, be it in hockey, water polo, soccer, lacrosse, or any other sport with a net and a goalie, they are (almost) always aiming for the edges of the net, near the goal posts or crossbar. However it is challenging to aim at an empty space, so many people end up looking at the posts instead, and that’s what they end up hitting.

When I coached and saw someone hitting the crossbar a few times, sometimes I’d pull them aside and ask them to close their eyes. “Imagine the goalie and the bars of the goal behind her. Do you see them? Ok, now make them all one dark colour, like black. Now brighten the space between the goalie and and the bars. Got that in you head? Ok, aim there.”

Related to this, have you ever noticed the weird odds that a car accident will often include the collision with a telephone pole or a post, when there isn’t any other obstacle for quite some distance? The less interesting reason for this is that accidents that do not involve poles and posts are faster to clean up. The more interesting reason is that when a driver is in a dangerous situation and sees the post, they fixate on it, and while consciously scared and wanting to avoid it, their hands steer where their eyes go.

In school, there are many ways that a student can aim for the goal posts:

What do I need to do to get a ‘A’?

What’s the fastest way to get this done?

What does the teacher want me to do?

There are also many ways that educators can aim for the goal posts:

Teaching facts void of big ideas.

Teaching ‘the how’ without ‘the why’, (such as in Math, teaching that a negative times a negative equals a positive, and not explaining why this works). 

Counting marks rather than marking what really counts. 

None of these questions or examples are about learning. They aren’t on target; they aren’t the goal. But when we aim for the posts, we tend to miss the intended target, or in these examples, the intended outcomes.

What’s a goal post you are aiming at? And what would you be doing differently right now, if you were aiming at the net rather than the posts?

On being present

How much time do we spend ruminating on the past? …Anticipating or anxious about the future? …Thinking about possible scenarios and reenacting different outcomes to decisions or conversations? …Wondering how our lives could be different, if only…

How much time do we spend hiding from the present moment without knowing that is what we are doing? Are we really procrastinating, or are we outright avoiding? Are we creating new possibilities, or are we avoiding inevitable realities? Are we rehearsing alternate options, or creating unachievable fantasies?

What do we do to unintentionally avoid the present?

What can we do to intentionally be present?

Stop. Breathe. Breathe again deeply. Feel the oxygen reach your extremities. Smile. Now decide what you will do right now.

To seize the day, you must first seize the present moment.