Tag: mental health

Yerkes–Dodson curve for a difficult task

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Can’t bring yourself to tackle a big project?

That also looks simultaneously deadly boring and nightmarishly terrible?

(ahem, involves SharePoint, obvs)

The Stink Spirit or Polluted River God gets a bath in Spirited Away

If SharePoint was having a bath it would be like this

To recap my previous posts on this, I am starting work on a big project to tidy up the filing system on a big shared network drive that has been used by many different people in different ways over many years. As well as sorting out the files themselves, the filing procedures used by the office staff will also have to be rationalised, standardised and brought in line with data protection regulations, using metadata, SharePoint, possibly PowerApps, and Flows, which are the new version of SharePoint Workflows. And the office staff will hate that.

For those who have managed to avoid it, SharePoint is what happened when Microsoft sent their Trainspotting and Alphabetisation Club to learn bureaucracy from every big organisation in the world. I fully expect someone from Microsoft to land in my comments someday and say that’s true.

Feb 26, 2020

Mindfulness in Education: a Free Back to School Kit for Teachers, Students and Parents

By Annabel Treshansky

On 30th January 2020

In Mindfulness

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Recently, I was lucky enough to take part in a mindfulness meditation session arranged by the University Chaplaincy as part of Mental Health Week. It was a very peaceful break in the day, and definitely one of the nicest ways of raising mental health awareness.

I have always been a fan of mindfulness, or ‘Buddhist Meditation on the Mindfulness of Being’ as it was called when I first tried it at Glastonbury in the 90s. I’m an old hippy, I’ll own that.

But meditation practice has had very beneficial effects in my own life, in improving focus, reducing stress, and generally re-evaluating my perspective on things. For the last couple of years, I have been going to weekly Mindfulness @ Lunchtime meditation practices at St Mark’s Unitarian Church whenever I could get there, and I’ve found these sessions very helpful. So I was very interested to see this offer from Mindful Schools, encouraging the practice of mindfulness in education.

But how is it being used? Here’s an example for teachers:

Pause and Check In

Follow this link to find a 3 minute sample guided mindfulness meditation for teachers at the beginning of the school day from Mindful Schools. I found it through a LinkedIn advert. It’s short, and I really like it:

Pause and Check In: 3 Minute Mindfulness Meditation

Jan 30, 2020