Changing and tracking behaviours - Part 1

Since I'm a firm believer in outing myself, I thought I'd say a couple of things about an online behaviour-modification course I'm in the middle of taking. The name of the course (translated from swedish) is "Stop Procrastinating" (Sluta skjuta upp, henceforth referenced as SSU).

For a long time I've had feelings of impending doom regarding how I handle my myriad mess of work tasks... They tend to vary a lot since I have roles as a teacher, researcher, co-author, reviewer, coach, workshop leader, personnel caretaker (informally, by virtue of having been around for a while ;), administrative dabbler and general volunteer for stuff (like moving furniture). Needless to say I sometimes spend more time changing hats than actually wearing them, meaning that I'll start several work tasks at once but rarely make any good progress on them until time is critically running out (you'd probably always catch me awake the entire night before a lecture, tweaking and adding things...). So I decided that I should get help, which happily coincided with running into a blog post about Psykologifabriken.se, the consultancy offering this app-based course. They specialize in "behavioral economics" - i.e. practicing and training new habits. A lot of the process of the course is about reflecting on what you do when you work, how you mentally and physically structure the work you do, and which behaviours to be wary of in order to maximize concentration and focus. Pretty useful stuff, in other words!

The course is based on the app Viary, which works kind of like a portal for my 'coaches' in the course to share articles, videos and lectures to us course participants. Furthermore, there's a progress tracking element to the course, as we're offered daily assignments or challenges (most of them directly aimed at helping us structure our work tasks or reflect on how we do them or think about them).
You can register assignments as completed and write reflections on how you think it worked out for you. Also, there's a social media element to interacting with the coaches and the rest of the participants - you can comment on each other's reflections, share tips and tricks and generally be encouraging. Like a very, very niched beige version of facebook for scatterbrained multitaskers trying to reform ;)

So to keep this series digestable, this concludes the first part - the following episodes will focus on specific themes of the course and what I've been taking home from it... :)

To be continued!