Golden rules of a balanced media intake
Today I paid more attention to what I was doing, so I managed to put up the materials for this week’s course almost without further mishap. I’m lucky my students will reach out and ask “erm, there is no PDF linked, was that your intention?” Sorry, it wasn’t; fixed it. I wonder if the reason for yesterday’s mishap was was that I broke one of my golden rules: no news or twitter before 12pm. On weekdays I am at that point already sufficiently snowed under with tasks that I have no time to dwell on things, or follow the links to all the articles that essentially always come to the same conclusions: we’re not teaching online courses but only doing emergency remedial remote learning; we’re pretty much doomed; it’s a good thing to stay inside and here is some funny/interesting thing to do etc. I usually check in to see how bad things are, if there are major changes to the situation in Pennsylvania, and then get back to work.
Yesterday I broke the rule and went online early in the day. And I guess that set the mood for the rest of the day: a mind more fragmented than a hard drive running on [fill out your favourite OS to trash], a sense of pointlessness to everything I do, and a lack of attention to details, which made me waste a pomodoro or thereabouts.
So today I restricted myself to listening to a podcast lecture with some knitting, and then got course materials up and running for two courses. I had the long weekend chat with mum over Facetime (we already had this weekend habit since I moved abroad: first a phone call, then Skype, now this). I went for a run. I also discovered the hashtag #RunVsRona (and I guess I won!). Today was significantly less frantic. Lesson learned: do not give in to the temptation. If I do, it doesn’t help me to be more productive or more enlightened about our current situation, so I end up doing myself and my students a disservice.
