On 9 April 2008, 85 IUCN Staff and visitors welcomed David Allen, author of Getting Things Done (GTD), to IUCN – International Union for Conservation of Nature – at its HQ in Gland, Switzerland. Through a contact of a staff member, David offered to run a full day pro-bono GTD training day event in the Main meeting room of the building. We invited other local GTD enthusiasts to join us and had a full house that day. I was a honored to host in my role as Head of Learning and Leadership at IUCN at the time.

Around that time, my Unit had been working with teams in IUCN to introduce the 43 folders system from Merlin Mann, inspired by David’s approach, as well as developing email etiquette and guidelines for staff. Even back in 2007, email was already taking over people’s work lives and producing friction in work flows. That day in IUCN was my second meeting with David and his team, as I had joined a GTD workshop in London (Walking Around with Nothing in Your Head: Getting Things Done) in October 2007 to experience what our IUCN day would be like – I found it thought-provoking, powerful, practial and highly entertaining!

Two further occasions to connect with David and the GTD team arose after his visit. I was delighted to be a speaker on two panel sessions at the first GTD Summit in San Francisco, CA in March 2009. Already well known in the tech industry and private sector, the system was expanding into non-profit and education applications. My panels were “Good Things Getting Done: GTD Serving Service” and “GTD and Education”,  where we shared experiences from these different contexts. Included were nerdy details on how my team was introducing it into IUCN, and other use cases from academics, teachers and practitioners in training and learning.

I shared this application story further as a guest on an early podcast with David #19 GTD and Global Sustainability (March 2010) exploring how people working in sustainability jobs could use the approach. Listening to that podcast again last week was like opening a time capsule! Recorded 16 years ago, I listened to my younger self with some apprehension. However, overall I think the discussion holds up as I shared tips about how to socialize new processes into old organizations, reflected on the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on the non-profit sector (as we endure another wave of contraction here in 2025/6), and was reminded of the origin story of my social enterprise Bright Green Learning which I had just launched at that time.

It was 25 years ago, this month, that David launched his first book and the GTD system.  That number both surprised me and inspired me to reflect on how I am still using the GTD approach, almost 20 years later, and how I have integrated it into my own unique productivity dashboard. It is amazing to me how much of the system I am still using.

Things that stuck

Lots of folders: I still use paper folders because I purposefully keep quite a lot of my work flow process analogue. I think it helps me slow things down to a more reflective pace and the physical reminders of what is active is helpful for how my brain works. I use my tickler file (days, months, contexts), and I keep my projects organized in dedicated folders that are alphabetized in a stand up file. I regularly use my label maker.

Context lists: I have my context lists (@Work email, @work computer, @home email, @home computer, @Waiting for etc.) organized in an A5 Atoma DIY hand punched notebook. However, the granularity and thus number of contexts proliferated over time, and many of these lists got too long after years of keeping them (and not doing those things). My @someday/maybe lists were pages long, so I retired a few contexts and found some other ways to capture ideas versus tasks.

Weekly Review: I also still do a weekly review at the end of each week, although I have a more narrative approach now and use prompts from my Intelligent Change Productivity Planner to guide me. I picked up some handy annual review questions from GTD that I folded into my end of year reflection and planning (Starting the New Year Gently: Structuring Your Personal Reflection and Planning). David asks great questions!

Things that didn’t

A number of GTD elements have come and gone over the years, some regretfully. I haven’t been using the 2-minute rule (if you can do it in 2-minutes just do it and don’t put it on your list), but need to bring that practice back. I never mapped over my digital space fully into GTD (email and Dropbox folders) but set up my own system for archiving and finding things. I have gone in and out of zero-inbox, but still find it terribly hard to keep up with the digital flow when you are juggling multiple projects and have your personal and professional inboxes synced. I also have boxes and boxes of those physical folders from past projects that I now need to digitize – 16 years later those paper project folders number over 400!  I need to start scanning these artefacts, and get into the practice of doing so right away once a project is finished (one of my 2026 goals).

GTD remains a treasured part of my productivity dashboard, embedded and intertwined with other practices and tools from CaveDay, Relay FM’s Deep Focus podcast, Cal Newport’s Deep Work, MacSparky’s Productivity Field Guide, Intelligent Change’s Productivity Planner, my NeuYear Focused Wall Calendar, and Lett’s Quarto agenda (btw, no sponsorship, just fangirl!) These tools are complemented with other tips and tricks that I have picked up over the years. But GTD was my first system and I see upon reflection that much has had longevity in my practice.  I am proud to have contributed a little to its journey, from the non-profit and sustainability application perspective. Happy 25^th Anniversary GTD!

The post Still Getting Things Done, 25 Years Later!, by Gillian appeared first on Bright Green Learning. Visit Bright Green Learning - Serving the sustainability community - Leveraging impact through learning .

At the end of 2024 and onset of 2025 I was happily traveling around India and didn’t make time for an end-of-year reflection exercise. And I think I felt a little less intentional last year as a result.

This year I spent around 8 hours creating a review schedule, having a mini “kitchen table workshop” with a friend, and putting together a guide for the next 2 months. My goal was to create a more considered framework for 2026 – not too prescriptive, but providing a direction of travel, so that I could make good decisions when confronted with inevitable choices. I also aim to schedule quarterly reviews this year to check in with myself periodically, rather than only at the end of the year. This should help me catch things or bend my plans a little based on observations and learning.

These three parts (preparation, workshop and guide development) looked like this:

Preparing to Reflect

In this first part, I created a schedule, designed and printed my simple templates, and put together the beginnings of a notebook to organize my materials. I reviewed the list of my activities the previous year so I could remember them – this involved looking over my wall calendar (year at a glance), and previous year agenda. I put my materials together (markers, post its, etc.) and prepared for the mini workshop.

Holding the Mini Workshop

I wanted to take this seriously, so I invited a friend, made a schedule, blocked the time (3 hours) on a quiet morning over the holiday break. Tea and healthy snacks and a couple of candles helped brighten the space (literally the kitchen table).

Here is the workshop schedule:

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Annual Review & Reflection (Design for 2 hours and 15 min – Note: It took 3 hours!)

Preparation: Bring your calendar/agenda, notebook and pen. Review projects completed in 2025.

Part I: Presencing & Getting Ready to Reflect

• Coffee and catch up (5 min)
• Agreements: Make the space an oasis. Take a breath. Connect without performance or fixing. Others? (Note: We added positivity and a holding a growth mindset) (2 min)
• Mind Sweep Exercise: Write down everything on your mind right now – what has your attention? The objective is to get everything off your mind and captured before starting. (Template) (5 min)

Part 2: Reflections on the Last Year

• Reflecting on Last Year Exercise: Answer the questions quickly (Template – I used and adapted some questions from the first part of this GTD question list and added some additional ones) (15 min)
• Exchange (what you want to share) (5 min each, listening and no comment – 10 min)

Part 3: Visioning & Planning the Upcoming Year

• Ideal Future: Day in my life on 29 December 2026 – what do I want to say I’ve done this year on this date? How am I feeling? Short narrative writing (5 min)
• Visioning Next Year: Answer the questions quickly (Template – I used and adapted some questions from the second part of this GTD question list and added some additional ones) (15 min)
• Setting Contexts Activity: In which contexts (or for what Roles) do you want to set goals for next year? (5 min) (Note: I ended up with 9: Writing, Research, Teaching, Consulting, Health & Fitness, Business Manager/Colleague, Wellness & Mental Health, Being a Good Human, Volunteer/Board Chair, and Homeowner)
• Context Ratings Activity: On a scale of 1 (not very well) to 10 (very well), how happy are you with how you are currently doing in each of these contexts? (Template: Scales) (5 min)
• Goal Setting for Contexts: What is your end-of-year goal for each context? This can be broken down into projects within each context (as desired). Try for SMART Goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. (15 min)
• Quarterly Milestones per Context: What are the quarterly milestones that you can set that will lead you to the overall goal. Set them for 31 March, 30 June, and 30 September. A3 sheet (10 min)
• Exchange Goals and Milestones: Listen first and then take any feedback (5 min each – 10 min) (Note: This definitely took longer)

Part 4: Strategies

• Ideal Week: Time blocking your ideal/generic week. Write this out on a card. (5 min)
• Exchange (5 min)
• Creating a Weekly Review Checklist: Questions to ask at the end of each week. When and how will this be used?  (10 min)
• Exchange (5 min)
• Reflections and Next Steps: What more does this reflection need to make it actionable?  (5 min)

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The above schedule and prompts were inspired by David Sparks and Mike Schmitz of the Relay FM Focused podcast, David Allen’s GTD – Getting Things Done system, and my own tools. I can honestly say that we spent a good 3 hours in our mini workshop and could have used more time. When you do it with a friend who can challenge you gently on some of your assumptions, you need to build in more time for exchange and perhaps some revisions. Thus, the timings above are definitely indicative.

I also noticed that, as I reflected, I increased the number of areas of focus/contexts during the workshop. I might ultimately regret this context inflation, but it seemed right at the time. It also meant that I needed some additional time to develop the quarterly milestones, which took an additional few hours of quiet time that I usefully gained on a long flight after the workshop.

Making the Guide

I’m ultimately an analogue person, so my guide is an A4 Atoma notebook with section dividers (see lead photo). I find this system very flexible and enjoy the “maker” aspect of creating a notebook (hole punch, covers, tabs, rings and all). Because I wasnt to have an artefact that I can use to guide quarterly reviews, as well as my next end-of-year retreat, I want to be able to add pages to build up and capture those incremental reflections, milestones, and learning.

I was determined this year not to over schedule or over plan. This type of dedicated time and focus can subtly encourage that. However, I went into the activity with the intention of gentleness and calmness. Let’s see if a more meaningful end of year close and visioning forward can help me do that.

The post Starting the New Year Gently: Structuring Your Personal Reflection and Planning, by Gillian appeared first on Bright Green Learning. Visit Bright Green Learning - Serving the sustainability community - Leveraging impact through learning .

(Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash)

“What is a DACUM?” I asked, when I received an email inviting me to join one from an IAF learning webinar co-presenter.

DACUM, which stands for “Developing a Curriculum,”  is an occupational analysis technique developed in the 1960s that employs a panel of master practitioners in a field to “capture the observations of high performing, incumbent workers regarding the major duties and tasks included in an occupation”. This descriptor was included as a part of the brief from the host of our DACUM, the Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) Facilitation Center (Facilitation.eku.edu).

A DACUM analysis can form the foundation for the development or updating of competency-based curricula. The occupational profile and curriculum developed can then be used to inform the design of university, vocational or training courses and programmes. Whatever your occupation – engineer, designer, project manager, trainer – there could very well be a DACUM behind it all that informed your learning journey.

It was a new experience for me, and I thought it might be of interest to others how this behind-the-scenes process works.

How a DACUM works

The DACUM is a highly structured, multi-step facilitated process. It starts with the work of a panel of experts, on which I participated, and this step produces a first draft occupational framework. The framework goes through a number of other steps, including a shorter validation workshop with another group of facilitators, a management review, task analysis, and then this outcome is used to support curriculum development or to update an existing curriculum.

Our DACUM process was virtual and held over two full 8-hour days using Zoom and an online whiteboard. In advance the EKU team kindly sent us each a parcel that included a printout of the slides, a set of worksheets, as well as some fidget toys, a doodle pad and colored pencils, and a bag of lollipops and sweets. The expert panel was composed of 8 senior facilitators located in Canada, the USA, Switzerland, and Jamaica. Collectively we had 199 years of experience as facilitators! An initial occupational background exercise helped us understand the range and diversity of the panel members’ experience and perspectives, which is useful in analyzing and understanding the outcomes from the group. This included identifying the industry or sector with which we each work, as well as the languages we use, and the different specializations we had.

After introductions, we started Day 1 by collectively developing a working occupational definition for a Facilitator, comprising short statements on what they do, how they do it, and why. This exercise sparked an intriguing discussion that exposed some differences in how we approach the role of the facilitator, feeling more or less comfortable using words such as leader, manager, guide, and not always agreeing in these early conversations. Because Day 1 of a DACUM process is a generative/brainstorming day, if any one facilitator had something in their practice or vocabulary, it is captured. On Day 2, however, we worked together to go back to what we generated on Day 1 to dig a little deeper into the meaning, and to refine, reduce, and agree on the core elements.  In all of our discussions, the shared norms on which we agreed included having balanced conversations and not use “killer phrases,” which may work to take ideas or suggestions off the table (“I don’t do it that way!”). Instead, we aimed to listen and dig into the essence of what was being shared. We often helped each other find words to describe concepts.

Facilitating the DACUM

The process was skillfully facilitated and managed by EKU (bravo!) A Miro board was created to support “display thinking” and to capture the outputs of the discussions.  We were all surprised that the facilitator of the process took on the rapporteuring role, writing everything on the Miro board for us while we discussed ( the panelists noted that when we facilitate we normally ask participants to do the capture work). For the first 1.5 days of the DACUM we did everything together collectively in plenary (interspersed with individual thinking work). This was the case until the very end when time constraints made it more efficient to do some of the final analysis in pairs.

The DACUM workflow process is rigorous and methodical. All tasks and terms are clearly defined to reduce differences in interpretation, and conventions established for labelling (e.g. three words – verb, qualifier, noun) to ensure that responses are similarly captured and easily compared.  After developing the working occupational definition, we went through a series of steps to identify and winnow down the major duties of the facilitator, and then within each duty a set of differentiated tasks. As we reviewed each duty and task set, we identified the associated knowledge, skills and traits. At the end of the process, we undertook a series of ranking exercises to share our perspectives on how critical the duties and the tasks were in relation to one another. We also indicated, from our perspectives, which of the duties/tasks would be most useful for new facilitators to learn, and which we felt there were gaps in the current facilitation training on offer.

Identifying the occupational profile of a facilitator

The DACUM was not simply a platform for a set of senior Facilitators to present what we do, to differentiate ourselves from one another, or to judge the merits of the different approaches. We acknowledged the differences in our clients, our tools, and even our language. The overall goal of the DACUM was instead to identify what was at the core of our shared practice. The invitation to diverge on Day 1 in order to generate the most exhaustive possible list of Duties and Tasks that could be identified from across all of our practices, was then in Day 2 reviewed, clustered, discussed, and refined to identify the core Duties and Tasks on which we could all agree.

It was energizing to be led through a structured process to share my practice as a facilitator using the DACUM format. It was also an outstanding peer-learning opportunity for me to spend 16 hours with 7 other highly-experienced facilitators deconstructing their well-formulated practices, which in some cases differed from my own and gave me some good ideas. For example, I was impressed with the steps that some of the facilitators took in the post-workshop/follow-up stage of their work – including how they ran their debriefing sessions, their reporting processes, and how they were using AI tools in different ways at this stage.

In trying to be comprehensive in our identification of the Duties of a facilitator, we identified “Administration” as one of the set, which then was reframed as “Manage Facilitation Resources”. Initially I couldn’t think of many related tasks, but in analyzing that duty we collectively defined a long list of resource-related tasks that facilitators undertake (manage a supplies inventory, manage technology resources, keeping certifications current, setting up folder structures, adhering to GDPR compliance with documentation, etc.). Many of these tasks are mechanical and we may undertake them without much thinking, and they are virtually invisible to others. However, they take time, can be done with varying degrees of effectiveness, and most importantly are not typically included in training for facilitators.

Our DACUM panel’s work now goes out of our hands and into those of other facilitators in subsequent steps. I am eager to see how our initial thinking is further validated and shaped, and how it ultimately informs facilitation curriculum development. As both a trainer and student of facilitation, the experience was valuable and both what I learned from my peers, as well as our output will undoubtedly inform my own work.

The post What is a DACUM? The benefits of contributing to field building, by Gillian appeared first on Bright Green Learning. Visit Bright Green Learning - Serving the sustainability community - Leveraging impact through learning .

(photo credit: Marc-Olivier Jodoin, Unsplash)

Inspired by Oliver Burkeman’s Book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, I reflected over the New Year about how I had spent the last 12 months of my professional life. The concept of “4,000 weeks”, that make up (on average) an entire life,  provided a useful lens for envisioning this upcoming year, which was part of my objective for doing this particular piece of reflection.  The book made me think “time”; my foray into statistics for my PhD work made me think “numbers” instead of “narrative” for this reflection (plus I had the time tracking data).

This was another Covid year of almost entirely virtual work for independent organizational learning professionals, like me, who facilitate, train, write, and undertake MEL activities (monitoring, evaluation and learning).

Amongst the overwhelmingly virtual activities, were two exceptions of face-to-face (F2F) retreats held with local (to me) organizations in the months between Covid waves in Switzerland (September and early November). For both of these, my commute time was less than 15 minutes, one group was 8 people and the other was 20, and they were intact teams where they had complete control over logistics and could cancel, postpone, or flip into virtual format at a moment’s notice.

There were other events that were also planned to be F2F, but that took one of the other options instead of holding their events as planned in 3D. It goes without saying that all kinds of Covid protocols were put into place for those teams who did hold their workshops, but that is another blog post.

Here is what happened, with three qualifiers – 1) This represents the work that I did (and my colleague Lizzie will have a similar list); 2) this includes both paid and pro-bono work; and 3) where hours are given, they do not include preparation time (I estimate that later), only delivery. After these numbers I will include some observations.

• In 2021, I completed 46 activities. An activity is a distinct project or workshop/event. Preparatory meetings don’t count. Many were spread over 2-5 days – however these still counted as one activity. Some five activities did not have a workshop/event attached, but were design, advisory, data collection (interviews) and/or writing. These latter five are considered “virtual activities”, but their time does not feature in the “facilitation delivery” hours accounting below.
• Of the total: 44 activities were virtual and 2 were face-to-face.
• A total of 269.5 hours were spent in “delivery” – facilitating or co-facilitating workshops, webinars, training courses and other events (this is “participant facing” time and does not include preparation).
• Of the total delivery time, 242.5 hours were spent in facilitating or co-facilitating virtual workshops and 27 hours of the total were spent facilitating F2F workshops.
• For the total virtual delivery, 219.5 hours were spent on Zoom, and 23 hours were spent on WebEx.
• 13 virtual workshops used simultaneous interpretation (for 2 to 4 languages).
• 77 days of this year (2021) featured the delivery of a workshop/event, and 7 of these days had two (e.g., one event in the morning and one in the afternoon).
• These 46 activities were undertaken with 23 different organizations.
• Total activities by sector: 8 with foundations; 16 with NGOs; 5 with government and United Nations (UN) collaboration; 3 with UN; 13 with standard-setting organizations; 1 with a university.
• 6 activities were entirely or partially pro-bono.

How these delivery hours (workshops) were spread out over the year:

• The top 3 months for delivery hours were: October (60 hours), November (46 hours), and May (39 hours).
• The bottom 3 months for delivery hours were: January (0 hours), August (0 hours), and July (6 hours). These lower times were in part due to quieter times of the year and part due to my holidays
• The monthly average over the 10 months with delivery activities was 26.9 hours of facilitation delivery.

My observations from this exercise and reflecting on the year:

1. The nature of my work has fundamentally changed. That is a lot of time to be sitting at my computer.

I used to do most of my work in F2F workshops where I was standing up all day in front of a group, and walking around a room, or zipping around a conference venue. I used to travel to and from workshops, local or on other continents through airports, around bus stations, through cities. I have absolutely had to integrate other physical activities into my days (hello online pilates and yoga, walking and cold/warm water swimming).

2. Virtual workshops for facilitators are incredibly intense from an attention and focus perspective, and you are almost entirely immobile for the duration of the event.

When you are facilitating workshops virtually you can not move around, you are on camera, you are deeply listening, you are looking ahead in the agenda for online tools you need to use, slides to share, music or timer to launch for the break, managing participants with low bandwidth, answering questions in private chat.

Large events may have a team to help with the “backstage” work, but that doesn’t reduce the intensity of work for the lead facilitator who is using the WhatsApp back channel for timekeeping or prompting team members, and the platform chat to keep speakers to time and signal changes to those speakers who are to come.

As a result, the facilitator can’t tune out to regroup, zip off to walk around, or decide to take a break. Even the scheduled breaks often have planning discussions or activities you are queuing up, or slides you are revising. You are lucky if you can grab a cup of tea in a 3-4 hour period.

3. The intensity of virtual workshops means they can be exhausting and can take more time to recover energy and focus than expected.

You think you are just spending 2 or 3 hours on Zoom, but the quality of focus needed means that you are not able to muster that kind of mental energy again in that day. As a result, it is not wise to have more than one virtual workshop per day. You can combine F2F with virtual workshops as there is more respite time built into F2F workshops (you can walk around the room as you talk, stand at the back of the room, look away, sit down.)

4. I am very competent at Zoom at this point, ask me anything.

Zoom seems to be winning the platform race. From my facilitator perspective it is by far the easiest and most flexible online workshop platform. Over these last two years, we have used many of them, and are increasingly seeing less diversity. If I can become competent so can others.

5. Virtual events can take much longer than expected to prepare.

Focusing on the number of delivery hours is deceiving. It does not reflect all the preparatory meetings to develop these activities, nor the email correspondence and any reporting (several projects had substantial reporting components).

This amounts to anything from a 3:1 to 10:1 ratio of preparation hours to delivery hours. Online workshops can easily take MORE time than F2F workshops to prepare if you are trying to do more than just hold a webinar with a few speakers that only need light briefing. A 6-hour strategic workshop spread over 2 afternoons for 250 people with simultaneous interpretation can easily take 50 hours to prepare the facilitation component, with interpretation testing, coordinating the delivery team, creating online tools and templates in languages (google forms, slides, etc.).

Another 9-hour symposium spread over three afternoons for 50 people took 72 hours to prepare the facilitation element, including 8 parallel sessions, a complex MURAL to capture outputs, numerous interactive elements, speaker videos, etc. It takes organizations some time to understand the complexity of facilitation preparation, for what seems like a very short workshop.

Based on this learning, I will…(connected to the above observations)

1. Not skip my daily exercise and I will use my standing desk more (I got a varidesk desktop riser that lifts your computer and screen to standing position), I have a balance board (Simply Fit Board), and an under desk stepper.  I forget to use these or are too embarrassed. But I need to get over that. For workshops I can stand, for preparation meetings I can use these other movement tools periodically.
2. Space my virtual workshops out so that they are not every day in a week. (I had a couple of weeks last year when I had a workshop every afternoon of the week.)
3. I will certainly not schedule two workshops in one day.
4. I will help some of the organizations I work with take over the Zoom technical elements and help them learn some of the tricks so that they can run their own events. I can help with design and providing ideas or “makeovers” to add more interactive elements or fun into agendas. But I don’t need to run all these workshops myself when they are relatively straightforward and when my role involves a lot of technical backstopping.
5. Based on a further year of experience and data collection on the ratio of preparation to delivery hours for facilitation, I can be confident in my estimation of the time it takes to add a facilitation component to an online meeting. We still had many workshops where our estimation for preparation was significantly under what it took to prepare and deliver. This should be a thing of the past in 2022.

Overall, 46 different activities was too many for me. I love my work and I am called to support organizations that are committed to positive change. And at the same time, I didn’t always build in enough respite time between these surprisingly intense activities to reenergise, to context shift, and to get away from my desk (for exercise, for enjoyment, for day dreaming, for music, for culture).

Granted this past year we still weren’t able to do all the things we used to do to take care of ourselves, our minds and bodies – travel to see this wonderful world, visit dear friends and family, attend weddings, celebrate anniversaries, go to concerts, festivals and theatre shows…

As facilitators, we love our work helping groups solve wicked problems, generate radical new ideas, support transformational change. Out of my 4,000 weeks I reflected on one year; fifty-two weeks; five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes….there is of course only one answer to the question:  How do you measure a year in a life?  Measure in love! Measure your life in love! (oh gosh, I miss going to musicals!)

Fellow facilitators, how did you spend your year, and what will you do differently in 2022?

The post A Year Reflected in Numbers: What I Learned from Facilitating Over 240 Hours of Virtual Workshops in 2021, by Gillian appeared first on Bright Green Learning. Visit Bright Green Learning - Serving the sustainability community - Leveraging impact through learning .

Virtual workshops need a team to produce them behind the scenes. One person will struggle to do everything quickly and smoothly, and it is nearly impossible to both do the technical hosting and be the participant-facing facilitator if your design is at all complex (interpretation, breakouts, trouble shooting, spotlighting, music, videos, using tools like MURAL, mentimeter, etc.) All this is going on behind the scenes while you are supposed to be listening, watching the time, introducing speakers, taking questions, managing a sensitive conversation, and there’s always that WhatsApp back channel humming away on your phone in the background. The technical hosting becomes even more important with a large group  – 100 to 300 people and you will benefit from a small army of people to help behind the scenes.

We have had very competent teams helping with a number of large workshops recently. Here are the roles we assigned to various organizing team members in addition to the Host. They were designated in-session as “Co-hosts” as they need this designation to be able to do many of these things:

• Participant-facing facilitator: Speaking, on camera, listening, timekeeping, managing the flow of the workshop and briefing and debriefing the different activities – this is the traditional facilitation role in a F2F workshop. (Note: sometimes we have two people in this role)
• Screen sharing: This role focuses on what is being shown. This can include sharing speakers’ presentations (or being erady to do so in a pinch), sharing videos, music (at the breaks or during individual work), countdown timer, etc.
• Recording the session: Hitting the record button at the right times, and pausing it at the breaks and during breakouts.
• Managing participants: Letting people in from the waiting room (and continuing to do this after the session starts), private messaging participants who come in as “Galaxy 421” and renaming them, muting them if need be.
• Spotlighting: Using the spotlight function for speakers, adding people, taking the spotlight away – all at the correct time (timing is everything here).
• Pasting in the chat: Pasting in the chat instructions for group work, questions for reflection, biographical data on speakers, and links to a variety of things – from groupwork templates and feedback forms, to translations of speeches made in other languages (when there isn’t interpretation available)
• Launching polls: Zoom polls or mentimeter, polleverywhere, etc.
• Trouble shooting: The person(s) designated by name to help people through private messages who are having problems of any kind.  You can also provide an email address if they cannot use the chat or communicate in the meeting.
• Managing questions and answers: This can include watching the chat for questions and pasting them into a google doc for the facilitator to use during the Q&A period, or answering questions that are asked in the chat.

The Technical Host may take on some of the above roles, but they should try to delegate as many as possible. Note that there is only one Host for each Zoom meeting, and certain things can only be done by the Host. As the Technical Host in a number of recent meetings, here is my checklist:

Long before the meeting:

• Go incognito (because I have my own Zoom account) into the Organizer’s Zoom account and set up the meeting, checking settings, security, putting in Zoom polls, sending invitations to interpreters.
• Turn off the “ding dong” sound of people entering the meeting.
• Check that “Mute participants on entry” is checked.

Two hours before the meeting: 

• Set up all your tabs on your browser so you can flip through them quickly (as you will be sharing Chrome and not Screen 1 or Screen 2).
• Tab: Upload holding and introductory slides into google slides so that I can share them from my browser (click “Exit full screen” to present).
• Tab: Pre-set the timer for the break (online stopwatch timer).
• Tab: Open the google drive where the presentations are stored (just in case you need to share them to cover for a presenter that cannot).
• Tab: Have any videos lined up and tested (checking the two boxes for sharing sound and video).
• Tab: Have the Rainforest birdsong white noise YouTube video stopped AFTER the advertisements ready to play in a break (or the music video or music from Spotify, or all those).
• Tab: Google translate if you need to quickly send a private message to a participant using interpretation (they will write you in their language, and you need to write back).

One hour before going “Live” – Tech Checks: 

• Open the room an hour early, rename yourself (if you are using the organizer’s account).
• Let in Organizing Team from the Waiting Room for a final briefing; make them all Co-hosts.
• Let in Interpreters from the Waiting Room. Add them to the interpretation and “Start” interpretation. Test all the channels. Trouble shoot if needed. (See post: Tips for Working Successfully with Interpretation in Zoom).
• Rename Interpreters: I rename them as “__Interpreter NAME” – the double dashes make them stand out and so you can ignore them when making breakout groups. You can also see if they are there or disappear (lost connection).
• Let in Speakers from the Waiting Room – do this as soon as they arrive.
• Make Speakers Co-hosts. There are two good reasons for this especially with large groups: 1) Security – If you turn OFF the ability of participants to share their screen (security feature), then only Co-hosts can share their screens. If you need to “Mute everyone” then Co-hosts can still unmute themselves and speak. 2) Finding speakers quickly – Co-host names go to the top of the participant list, so if you are spotlighting people you don’t have to scroll through 200 people to find them.
• Rename speakers if they don’t have full names or correct names, as the Facilitator will be using their name on the screen to find and address them.
• Run a test with speakers: Test their audio and video and make sure they can share their screen. Do this even if they say they know how to do it. Make sure they can find how to go into presentation mode (this is the biggest issue for many).
• Final briefings – agreeing with speakers how the facilitator will give them a time check for their presentations, remind them of timing, etc.
• Check that your polls are in Zoom.
• Send a message periodically to the Waiting Room that the meeting will start in X minutes.

At the start of the meeting: 

• Let participants in from the Waiting Room (Admit All – then the designated other person will continue to monitor the Waiting Room and let people in).
• Share a holding slide and a slide about how to turn on interpretation (in the languages of interpretation).
• Spotlight the opening speaker…
• Create the first breakout groups (rename rooms, decide on how participants will join – automatically, etc.)

During the meeting:

Here is an example of the things I did as the Technical Facilitator at a recent meeting (I held a number of the above roles):

• Admit people after the meeting started (someone else was doing this too).
• Shared opening slides about how to use interpretation and norms etc of the meeting.
• Ran a Zoom poll to see “Who’s in the room?”
• Checked speakers to make sure they were all there.
• Briefed late speakers (who didn’t have the tech check) by private message, and checked they were happy to share slides.
• Made late speakers co-host, and then took this privilege away from all speakers after their respective sessions (to minimize disturbances).
• Messaged people who were incorrectly named, and then renamed them (in some meetings which are sensitive, if people do not respond after a few attempts, they are removed from the meeting).
• Spotlighted all speakers (sometimes tricky as some people were sitting with a colleague, or changed computers just before their presentations due to tech problems).
• Muted people who came off mute accidentally.
• Trouble shooted with people who private messaged me with audio or other problems (in two languages).
• Answered questions by private message (can we get the slides? etc.)
• Transferred questions etc. on Whats App back channel.
• Listened in from time to time on interpretation channels to make sure all ok. Relayed any issues on WhatsApp so facilitators could intervene. Problems included: too far from microphone, unstable connection, two people sharing speaking, speaking too quickly.
• Shared the countdown timer at breaks.
• Looked ahead in the schedule to keep an eye on next speakers (they would drop off and come back in again with tech and connectivity problems).
• Watch timing and let the facilitators know how we are doing on timing.
• Help make decisions on WhatsApp about issues – missing speakers, not enough time for Q&A, last minute changes.

Two fiddly things (for me and the team) to remember:

1. Decide who is letting people in from the Waiting Room after the start. If two or more people are doing that, there is a risk that if you do that simultaneously, missing the person by a split second. Then you might end up muting the next person in line (who could be the speaker) because once they are admitted their name will disappear immediately from the top of the participant list and in that split second, the person you thought you were letting in is gone, and your click does something else (like mute the speaker who is near the top of the list)!
2. Remind speakers and those who are Co-hosts that they have some “superpowers” and they can accidentally mute someone, or stop your poll/share the results prematurely, so ask them to be careful and perhaps not push buttons!

I made this list for myself to use the next time I take the Tech Hosting role, and wanted to share it for anyone who might be newer to this role. Things seem very smooth and easy from the participant perspective, but there’s a lot going on back there!

What did I miss? Please feel free to add additional tasks or roles!

The post New to the Zoom Tech Host Role? What to Expect Behind the Scenes (and where to ask for help), by Gillian appeared first on Bright Green Learning. Visit Bright Green Learning - Serving the sustainability community - Leveraging impact through learning .

This post is generally translating “serious games” (games with learning messages) that we normally play in face-to-face settings into versions that can be played in a Zoom or other online evironment. Here I am writing specifically about games in the Systems Thinking Playbook and the Climate Change Playbook, the latter of which I wrote with two co-authors Dennis Meadows and Linda Booth Sweeney.

Recently I attended an online seminar, hosted by the Systems Dynamics Society and Linda, about how to use Playbook games online. These books are great resources for face-to-face workshops, but in Covid times these are virtually non-exoistent. As we all move online, Linda shared how she is using some of the games in virtual environments. We played Arms Crossed, Circles in the Air, and Paper Tear and they mapped over easily and effectively. It got me thinking about how to translate some of the longer and more complex games into Zoom workshops. I fully believe that every game can somehow have a virtual counterpart, with some creativity! Three of my favorite games are Triangles, Speed Catch, and Thumbwrestling. In this blog post I will write about Triangles. In subsequent posts I will tackle Speed Catch and Thumbwrestling.

A Few General Comments

1) Different Kinds of Games

In the Climate Change Playbook, we divide the 22 games into three categories: Mass games, Demonstration games and Participation games. Mass games are those that can be played by very large groups of participants, for example in conferences or during presentations or lectures. People can be seated in theatre style or around tables and everyone plays.

These Mass games translate rather easily into virtual environments as there is a game leader who provides instructions and people follow these. Examples from the books are Circles in the Air, Arms Crossed and Frames. These games are played by individuals, although there can be some that benefit additionally from group play for deriving lessons, like 1,2,3 Go! or Paper Tear.

With Demonstration games, you can get a lot out of them by simply watching – if you have a small group then everyone can play, but if you have a large group then a subset of the group can play and others can watch and learning can come from either role (player or observer). For many of these kinds of games, you can use videos that are already online to show people parts of the game, stop the video, ask some questions, and then go on. Thumbwrestling is one of these. We call it a Mass game in the book because you can do it in an audience by playing with someone next to you, but because on Zoom you don’t have anyone next to you, I will move it to this category for now.

For Participation games, these can be played by larger groups (up to 30 we say) but learning really comes from participation, and “observation only” provides less value to participants. Triangles and Speed Catch are examples of Participation Games.

The games I want to makeover fall into the Demonstration and Participation game categories.

 2) Time for Debriefing

Virtual workshops and meetings tend to be shorter. People are regularly compressing 1.5 day workshops into a 2-3 hours session. As a result, it might be tempting to reduce the games and skip the debriefing. However, debriefing is the MOST important part of the game. The game mechanics show a dynamic that you then learn from through reflection and discussion. So it is really important to preserve the time after the game for the debriefing discussion. During our Systems Dynamics Society workshop we used Zoom breakouts to debrief the Paper Tear game in smaller groups of 3-4 so that everyone could talk (we were around 115 people). If your group is small to begin with, then this could be done in plenary. The key is that you use your powerful debriefing questions to do some mining of the game experience for the key messages and lessons you are trying to surface.

3) Consider the Environment

If you are doing a Mass game, for example, that depends on your demonstrating something (asking people to draw a circle on the ceiling, or cross their arms, etc.) you need to consider your own environment, camera angle, your distance from your video camera, etc. so that people can effectively see and hear what you are doing. As such, you need to test this, with your camera on, in advance so that you can see what other’s are seeing. You need to make sure you are not crossing your arms too low and out of the camera view (Arms Crossed), or that you are not too close to your camera for people to see your arm making a gesture towards the ceiling, that you want others to make (Circles in the Air).

Consider also that people may be connecting from different devices. Some people might be with you on their mobile phones, or on an ipad, with a smaller screen. As a result, it is important to speak the whole time you are showing people what to do – describe vividly what you are doing, so that even if they cannot see you well, they can still follow you.

Making Over Games to Virtual Environmets

Making “over” games is similar to making them in the first place. You have to think first about the message you want to get across, then think about a dynamic that can do that (with debriefing questions), and then you make the game. It is not always easy to do that, game design is a skill. In translating the following games into a virtual environment, I started by thinking about the games I wanted to redesign in this way.

What follows below is not a complete game description, for that you have the book (hopefully!) but will get you started thinking about how to do this, and maybe give you some ideas of how you can make over some of your own favorite workshop games.

Triangles: Makeover for Virtual Play

The Triangles game shows, among other things, how interconnected players are and how they form a system. It sets up a system in which you (the game administrator) intervene and can show how a change in one part of the system may or may not impact another part of the system (depending on the rules), and it can show delays in that things may change gradually and unexpectedly and not all at once. It helps explore leverage points – places where you can make large changes (if that is your goal), or no changes to a system (if that is your goal) – illustrating high or low leverage.

In the face-to-face (F2F) version of this game, people initially stand in a circle to set up the game. They select two reference points (people) around the circle and, once the game begins, are instructed to stand equidistant between those two people, making a triangle as needed to maintain equal distance. People move and the system starts to move. People laugh and try to maintain equidistance even when others continue to move and shift. Eventually the system settles and the game administrator can make changes to the system (moving selected individuals) to see how it reacts.   In the F2F version, you can add instructions at the start for people to select some characteristic (“pick someone with glasses as one of your reference points”), or NOT to select another characteristic (someone wearing red). So that you know when you move these people there will be a large change or no change.

How on earth could you do this virtually when people are sitting all over the world behind their computers???

Here’s one way:

Using a Google Jamboard or Miro or another white board tool on which people can interact. Set up a page in advance (or if people are used to the tool, they can create their own “avatar” post-it) with one post-it for each person. Start in the circle.

When you set up the Jamboard in advance, you need to change the settings so that everyone with a link can edit. Then you can share the link in the chat window during your workshop, have people click it, and then they are on your Jamboard and can participate, and are still connected with Zoom (for example).  At this point I would ask people to unmute themselves so that you can hear what is going on while people are playing (laughter or frustration) but you need to tell people that they should ideally not talk while playing the game.

Now you can provide the same instructions as in the F2F version, with some modifications. Once the game starts they will move the post-it with their name only when you say “Go”. They first need to pick two reference points (two names on post-its in the circle) and not tell anyone. Once you say “Go” they will need to move the post-it with their name (their “avatar”) so that it is equidistance between their two reference points. You can also add some qualifiers BEFORE people pick – e.g. make sure one of your reference points is orange, and don’t pick one that is yellow. I would say not to “personalise” it too much by using people’s names (same in the 3D version of the game).

When you say “Go” people will start to move their post-it avatars and things will get messy for a while. Then the system will settle probably spread out all over the Jamboard or Miro board. Once it has settled you can reinforce this by saying “STOP” and tell people that you, the game administrator, will intervene and make a change in their system and that they should just let this happen and not move anything. You now make a change (tell the person that you will be moving their post-it) – then move one of the post-its to another part of the Board. Then you ask them to again be equidistance between their two reference points. If you have selected one of the colours that no one has chosen (yellow), then nothing happens. If you choose an orange post-it, then chances are that everyone will have to move again. You can observe delays, where people initially don’t have to move, but eventually their two reference points are affected and they do. The general dynamics of the game should show up as you intervene a couple of times and in different ways. The debriefing can follow the book at this point. What real life behaviours does this exercise remind you of? Where have you seen high or low-influence individuals or policies in your own organization? etc…

Curious? Try it and leave some comments on your experiences.

I have also thought about a way to run Speed Catch and Thumbwrestling which I will write about later, this post is already pretty long!

The post Using Systems Thinking Games in Online Environments: Triangles Virtual Makeover, by Gillian appeared first on Bright Green Learning. Visit Bright Green Learning - Serving the sustainability community - Leveraging impact through learning .

This post isn’t about how to run training in Japan, it’s about how to get your body ready to do training in Japan, if you live 7 time zones away in Switzerland.

Normally, I would be enjoying a Bento box right now in Tokyo, preparing with my Japanese co-trainer, the interpretation team, and colleagues there for 3 full days of facilitation training for a large group of local facilitators and change agents.

I’m still doing that, at least most of it, except I’m eating muesli, it’s 3:30am and I’m still in Geneva.

For the last few years, I’ve had the great pleasure to join Change Agent Inc. to deliver a Foundations of Facilitation training programme in Japan.  This year, as with many other programmes affected by Covid-19, we are taking the training into virtual space. All the preparations are going well, the content is tight, and we are all now seasoned at online delivery from a technical standpoint. But biological? I will be delivering training for 8 hours a day, from 2:30am-10:30am, for 3 days. This is not a one-off 90-minute webinar in JST – this takes more thorough preparation to get body and mind ready for this.

“Have fun in Japan!”

That’s what my husband said to me last night at 7pm as I walked down the stairs to the basement bedroom, arms laden with clothes, pillows, and cables. Not quite the expertly packed samsonite that I would have been taking on a long-haul JAL flight to Narita. At least I can pop back for my forgotten toothbrush in 2 minutes. By 7:30pm I would be asleep.

Now at 3:30am I am up and at my desk. This is Day 4 of my preparation to be on Japan time by Wednesday.  I have 2 more days to get to the point where I am asleep by 5:30pm and up at 1:30am and ready for work by 2am for last minute tech and sound check, with a “go live” at 2:30am.

I have been following this schedule, which I planned weeks in advance, to gradually shift my normal 10pm sleep time up, and retain an 8-hour sleep window each night as much as possible:

• Starting point: 10pm sleep – 6am awake
• Day 1: 9pm sleep – 5am awake
• Day 2: 8pm sleep – 4am awake
• Day 3: 8pm sleep – 4am awake
• Day 4: 7:30pm sleep – 3:30am awake
• Day 5: 6pm sleep – 2am awake
• Day 6: Ending point: 5:30pm sleep – 1:30am awake
• Repeat for Training for 3 days

So far on Day 4 I am on track, and although I am still a big foggy in those early hours, it wasn’t that hard to get to sleep and get up early as the change has been gradual. The house is quiet and a little creepy at this time of night and I have to be careful not to make noise and wake up others. In a reflective moment, just me and the other noctural animals, here are a few observations:

After Day 3, your hours are anti-social. The alarm wakes others up and moving around to get dressed is bothersome. Others will also wake you up when they go to bed later, which can affect your sleep. So, at this point, you will need to move to another room in the house, if you can, if you are co-habitating.

“Jet lag” will present itself in other ways. You will eat breakfast in the middle of the night and have lunch when people are having breakfast, and dinner will be at the time of a mid-afternoon snack. That will be weird, and you won’t be very hungry at those odd times. But you need to eat or else you will be starving at midnight and that will wake you up. You also can’t rely on the sunshine to get your body on track as you would if you were onsite – try to go outdoors when you can as soon as it is light, and have a good dark room with blackout blinds for sleep if needed.

Your periods of overlap with others IRL will reduce dramatically. No evening television, no family meals for a few nights. You’re basically gone if others go off to work or school during the day. Just as though you got on that plane. You need to make arrangements for others to take over things that you might normally do in the evening. Tell friends who call and text you regularly in the evening that you won’t be available as normal.

Protect the rest of your day. It is tempting to take on additional meetings or work during the “regular” workday after your training ends at 10am. You could effectively be working every minute of your waking hours if you are not careful. A meeting from noon to 2pm after your training seems perfectly logical and you have that time free in your calendar, right? But you have to remember that you will have just worked a 10-hour day, and that will be like scheduling every waking moment. I guarantee that this is hard to explain to colleagues who wonder why you can’t join their meeting even though you are done with your training and not yet sleeping, and it’s only 4pm.

Take it seriously. It is pretty easy to let things slide and default to normal in the run up to your workshops, but the result could be a zombie on the training team sitting on the other side of the video camera that makes little sense in English and even less when translated into Japanese. This is part of the preparation stage of facilitation and training processes, so needs to be built into your schedule, recorded in your agenda, with all alarms set and followed.

I’m excited about the training course, it will be enormously fun and full of learning. I am a little more nervous about this biological part as this is the first time I have had to get my European body on to Japan time without physically moving it, and I want to do this in a mindful and structured way. Maybe tomorrow when I get up at 2am, I will start thinking about how to reverse my schedule to get me back on to Central European Time at the end of it all…

The post “Have Fun in Japan!” Getting Yourself Ready to Work for 3 Days in Another Timezone (without actually going there), by Gillian appeared first on Bright Green Learning. Visit Bright Green Learning - Serving the sustainability community - Leveraging impact through learning .

If you can’t run your Open Space session in real life (like this), how can you do it virtually?

This is a very detailed account of how to use Zoom and the Breakout room function to replicate Open Space Technology-like sessions online.

Executive Summary:

• You can run Open Space Technology (OST)-inspired Sessions in Zoom with large groups using the breakout rooms function.
• Pre-assigning people to our 10 groups didn’t work for us, so we assigned them manually once the session opened.
• To do this, participants need to log-in early and you need a specially formatted excel list of names to make manual allocation most efficient.
• Don’t change Zoom Host rights in the middle of preparing the groups, how to prepare and other learning.

If you might be tempted to run something similar in the future, read on…

Recently we ran an online peer learning and good practice exchange for a specialized global biodiversity community whose 350+ members normally meet bi-annually face-to-face. At these conferences, there has traditionally been an Open Space Technology session where community members share their work, learning and big questions on a set of salient topics. We wanted to replicate the dynamic of this virtually in an online event featuring a number of rounds of hosted small group discussions offered in parallel. For each round, participants chose the small group discussion to attend which was of most interest. This blog post shares ‘how to’ information and some learning from our experience doing this.

Using Zoom Breakouts for Parallel Small Group Discussions

We chose Zoom as the platform because of the breakout room function which allows you to designate up to 50 separate breakout sessions that can run in parallel at any one time. We had 10 topical discussions that we wanted to host, and we wanted to run two consecutive rounds (e.g. people picked one topic to attend for Round A, and then, after a break, they attended a different topical discussion for Round B). We ran the whole sequence of two rounds twice to accommodate participants in different time zones.  People could attend one or the other, and a few people attended both.

The schedule looked like this:

Session 1 (09:45 – 12:00)

• Check-in (09:45 – 15 minutes in advance of the opening to set up breakouts for Round A)
• Plenary opening and how the exchange will work (15 minutes)
• Move people into breakout groups
• Round A: 10 topics in parallel (40 minutes)
• Break (15 minutes – people stay connected – create breakouts for Round B)
• Move people into breakout groups
• Round B: 10 topics in parallel (40 minutes)
• Plenary highlights and closing

Session 2 (15:45 – 18:00) (Repeat as above)

Preparation – 7 Steps

To prepare for the Community Exchange, there were a number of steps we needed to follow:

Step 1: Pick the topics. This was done based on feedback from the community, from which the organizer selected the 10 topics.

Step 2: Identify a discussion host for each topic. The organizer identified country representatives and global team members from within the network who had expertise in one of the topics and invited them to host that small group discussion.

Step 3: Schedule the Zoom session(s). The Host does this (in this case it was me, the facilitator). As these were large group sessions (from 60-100 people expected at each session), we enabled the Registration, Password, and the Waiting Room features of Zoom. For Registration we asked for name, country, and organization. In Zoom, the Registration feature enables a two-step process – once people fill in the online registration form, they automatically receive an email with a link and password to the Zoom meeting.

Step 4: Send out an announcement with event information to the network, with: 1) The Zoom link that takes them to the registration page;  2) A link to a google form asking people to select their top 5 topics from a drop-down list of the topics on offer; 3) Information about how it will work – for example, tell people that you will do your best to place them in one of their top 5 choices for each round, and that if they do not specify preferences, they will be put in a group at random on the day.

(Note: This was one of the lessons – while 100% of people registered to attend (you can’t join the Zoom meeting without doing that), only around 50% of people filled in the google form to indicate their preferences. The others just showed up, so they were randomly placed in rooms which takes extra time. We will do this differently next time as we want more people to identify their topics in advance so discussions can be more focused – how, is explained at the end of this post.)

Step 5: Prepare your topic discussion hosts. For this step we organized three 30-minute Zoom sessions where the hosts of the 10 topics, as well as the organizer’s team (who supported the discussion hosts) were invited to attend a preparatory session. During this short session, we talked through the schedule, their role and responsibilities, and then let them experience the breakout room function from both a participant perspective, as well as a Co-host perspective, as we made all these people Co-hosts once the meeting started. They learned how to share their screen, use some of the Zoon security functions, etc.

Step 6: Put together the participant lists by topic. We needed to make 2 Lists for things to work smoothly. This was a particularly important step! Once people filled in the google form with their preferences, we put together an excel worksheet for each session (Session 1 and 2) and round (A and B) within each session (so four worksheets in total.)

Each worksheet had 2 Lists. For List 1, we created a column for each of the 10 topics on offer during that specific round, the host for the topic and the team support person, followed by the list of people who signed up for that topic as their first choice.  This helped us initially place people, as well as see how many people were signed up for each conversation. (click on images to enlarge)

List 1 was useful to see how the groups were shaping up as we had a limit of 12 people per group. Once full, we would put people in their second choice group.  List 2 was more important on the day for putting people into the breakout rooms. This list was a master list of all the people who had signed up for a topic, organized in a column alphabetized by FIRST name (as that is how the Host sees names in Zoom), preceded by another column with their topic number.

Step 7: Prepare the facilitation materials. We wanted to use a Zoom poll at the beginning of our session to map the group and see who was “in the room” (we asked about region, sector, etc.) and we scheduled a short poll at the end to understand people’s experiences – e.g. to see on a Likert scale how well people felt they could share their learning and experience in this format, and if they learned something new. We also created a simple word template for topic hosts to capture take away messages and next steps from their discussions. We sent this template in advance and asked them to fill it in after their sessions and send it back for reporting purposes.

What we learned about assigning breakout rooms – before or on the spot?

One thing that we did NOT do in preparation was set up the breakout rooms in advance in Zoom. It is very tempting to try to “pre-assign” the rooms in Zoom, especially when you have 60-100 people attending. Ostensibly to do this, when scheduling your meeting, you can choose under meeting options “Breakout Room pre-assign,” and Zoom offers you two ways to do this. That seems so easy, but in our tests this didn’t function reliably. I did two tests in advance, one using the option which invites you to “Create Rooms” and the other option with “Import from CSV” – CSV is a simple excel-like spread sheet. I had 5 people for each test meeting.

With the first “Create Rooms” option, you get a pop up that invites you to “Assign participants to breakout rooms by adding their email”. I did this for my 5 people. I changed the names of the meeting rooms in advance which you can do to match the topic names. Tip: Keep the group number in front of the topic name as that will make it easier later to find them. (“1. Green Bonds”) This will sound silly, but it took me AGES to find how to edit the room names – you need to go to the “Add participant” window and then hover over the room name for the little pencil to pop up.

So, the room was set up – now to see if it worked… Unfortunately, when I opened the breakout rooms for this first test meeting, only 1 of my 5 people had been pre-assigned into the designated room. The others were frustratingly unassigned – 20% success.

The second option to pre-assign people to breakouts is to use the CSV format. If you click on that option, it invites you to “Import rooms and participants from CSV File”. It also offers you a simple downloadable CSV file template to fill in.

I downloaded the file and put in the email addresses of my 5 people. In this second test, I got 3 out of the 5 people in the breakout rooms as pre-assigned. Better but still not 100%. And we could not figure out why this variation was happening even among 6 experienced Zoom users. As we had a large group, it felt too risky to wait and see if it would work on the day – who would be assigned and who wouldn’t be, and then try to fill in the gaps.

There are a couple of things to note about the Zoom breakout room function that figure in here:

• People need to be signed into their Zoom account for pre-assignments to be applied.
• You need to enable “join before host” for this feature to work (don’t ask me why)
• (from the Zoom website) If you have Registration enabled and have external participants (those without Zoom accounts), you need to assign them to breakouts during the meeting.

It seems like pre-assignment option might work better if you have a closed system – just a group of colleagues sharing a company zoom account, or a class of students who are taking the same class week after week. This was not our case.

As we could not do a test with a very large group, the pre-assignment feature seemed to have a lot of caveats. We were enabling Registration for security purposes, AND we had two rounds per session, so we would have to manually allocate participants for Round B anyways (you cannot pre-assign two consecutive breakout sessions if you want to change the people in the groups). As a result, we decided to manually allocate participants to their selected breakout rooms, using the two lists described above.

What to Do During the Zoom Community Exchange Meeting

We opened the meeting 30 minutes in advance for organizers, the discussion hosts and the team members who would support them. I had enabled the Waiting Room, creating two-step process to join the meeting – first you enter the Waiting Room and then the host lets you into the main room. I admitted the facilitation team into the main meeting room, and had the other participants stay in the Waiting Room until the official start of our event.

As the Host (and the Co-Hosts can do this too), you can admit people into the main room from the Waiting Room individually, or you can choose to let everyone in all at the same time. When people are in the Waiting Room, you can send them messages. I sent them a message every couple of minutes that said, “You are connected to our meeting. Please stay connected, we’ll start promptly.” (I wrote this text on the Notepad app on my computer and copied it, so I could just paste it in as a waiting room announcement periodically and not have to type it over and over.) Note: We needed all participants to connect early and stay connected so that we could create the breakout rooms, which you can start assigning when people are in the Waiting Room.

We let all the topic hosts and team members into the main room as soon as they showed up so that we could do some last-minute briefing and Q&A and make them all “Co-hosts”. We wanted them to be Co-hosts so they had some powers in the breakout rooms– that is, they could disable screen share for participants, move themselves to another room, etc. if needed.

As soon as participants started to show up in the Waiting Room, we began to use our lists to assign them to the various breakout rooms.

Tip: What it means to be “Host” when using breakout rooms

Only the Host of the meeting can work with the breakout rooms (e.g. name them, make assignments and move people around). And there can only be one Host for any meeting. The Host can give up her Host rights to another person but cannot take them back. The other person must give them back to you. This is important for creating the breakouts; you cannot start this work (renaming the breakout rooms and starting to assign people), and in the middle pass the Host responsibilities to another person without losing all the work you did.

The same Host needs to start and complete the breakout room assignment process. Then once the breakouts are launched, they can hand over hosting rights to another and nothing is disturbed. This means you cannot be smart and get in there early, name all the rooms, and assign the early people, then hand over hosting to another person to carry on while you brief people etc. Everything is lost and the new Host will start from scratch.

As a result, you really need two facilitators to work with Zoom in this way – so Lizzie and I teamed up to make it work smoothly. We asked participants to come in 15 minutes early, as you can only assign them to their breakouts once they are logged into the meeting (they can be in the Waiting Room). But not everyone was there 15 minutes early; many people came in at the last minute, and some people joined 10 minutes late!  So, if you are the main facilitator (this was my role) opening the meeting, welcoming people, giving the first presentation and poll etc. then you need a second, technical facilitator who can take over as Host (this was Lizzie’s role) that can complete the breakout room assignments with the people trickling in after the meeting starts. The alternative is to not finish the breakout assignments and ask people to wait while you do that (time for a musical interlude?) OR keep all those unassigned people in the main room once the groups start and then assign the latecomers after that, which means they will start late. As we did not know how many people might be in this category, we decided to use two facilitators and have one solely dedicated to putting together the breakout groups.

Behind the scenes – assigning people to breakouts

The Host assigning people to breakouts needs to have the two lists described above and needs to work quickly with the long list of names. In our case, part of which had signed up for a specific topical discussion, and part of which had not, thus would be randomly assigned to rooms. One thing that we discovered to dramatically increase efficiency at this stage was to create 1 more breakout room than needed (e.g. we needed 10 topical breakout rooms and we created 11 rooms), the final room was called “UNASSIGNED”.

As people logged into the meeting, the Host located their name on the long alphabetized list, along with their group number, and immediately placed them in the right room. However, if someone came in that had not signed up for a group, they were immediately placed in the UNASSIGNED room. This meant that at the very end, just before launching the breakout groups, you could see exactly how many people were in each group that had signed up in advance, see the total number of those in the unassigned room. You can then quickly move those from the unassigned room to fill in open spaces in the first 10 groups – we aimed to fill all rooms up equally with the same number of participants.

In the end, it worked just fine. We had enough time in the 15 minutes before (and well into the opening) to make Round A assignments manually, and had enough time in the 15-minute break between rounds to make the second set of assignments for Round B. We asked people NOT to disconnect during the break. Of course, a few did, but we manually added them into groups once they logged back in.

Last thoughts

Languages: We had some people for whom translation would have been useful. If you enable Interpretation on Zoom, it only works in the main room – thus in theory you could keep the group needing translation in the main “plenary”. For a large group this would not have been a great option, as there was a small but steady stream of people who lost connection and kept coming back into the main room, to be sent again to their breakouts. This would have been very disruptive for the group trying to work in the main room (with translation no less!) It might be easier to have a “whisper” interpreter (professional or informal) in the same breakout room with the person desiring translation support, and between the two or more of them, they set up a back channel for communication, such as a WhatsApp call or a phone call. Through Zoom they can see what is going on in their breakout room, but the audio is now coming from another source (mobile phone).  The person could still unmute to ask questions, and the interpreter could sequentially translate these for the group, then they could both go back on mute and resume interpretation. This is a work-around, but we thought it might work.

Technical Support: For a large group you really need ongoing technical support throughout the session. In addition to our two Facilitators, we had one person from the organizer team designated for tech support and provided his email address. Occasionally someone without sound or another problem would contact him either through chat or by email and they would work with together to try to get the person properly connected.  Also, while the breakout groups were in session, as the Facilitator, I stayed in the main room and responded to requests for help, or let people in from the Waiting Room who were late, or had gotten disconnected, placing them back in the breakout rooms. At times, I would have up to 4 people briefly in the main room before moving them back into a breakout room.  Our participant group was logging in from all over the world, with almost all of them working from home offices and laptops, so occasionally there were connectivity or other problems.

Also, under this technical support heading, it has to be mentioned that we did find that people using Chrome OS, Chrome Book and Zoom Rooms could not be placed in breakouts, no matter how hard we tried. After some struggles, we found this mentioned on the Zoom website. These people needed to log out and log in again using a different pathway. And finally, for a couple of people, no matter what they did, and what we did, they were either perpetually stuck in the Waiting Room, or in the plenary room and there was simply nothing we could do. This mysterious situation befell only 1 or 2 people with whom I had nice chats as I waited with them for the breakouts to end – interestingly, for the second rounds, they both moved smoothly into the breakout rooms with no problem. You have to just keep trying.

Overall, the sessions were very dynamic and the feedback from participants has been enthusiastic! The breakout rooms worked very well overall, with only some coming and going which was only obvious to me as the Host. To reduce movement in and out of the breakout rooms and to encourage people to settle into their discussions, we did disable the setting allowing people to come back to the main room on their own (now they needed to wait until they were automatically moved back by me). We also reduced the friction for new Zoomers by moving people to the breakouts automatically (this is also a setting when you are creating breakouts), versus requiring them to click on a pop-up asking them if they want to Join Group X.

One thing to try next time – Custom Questions for Registration

One thing to consider next time, to encourage people to register their topic preferences and have less people in the unassigned category to allocate, we will use the Zoom Meeting Registration process to embed the questions about which group people would like to join, instead asking people to separately respond in a google form.

Here is how to do that:

• Enable Registration
• Under “Manage my Meeting”, scroll down to “Registration” at the bottom of the page
• Click “Edit” on the right, that opens a pop-up window
• Go to “Custom Questions” – this adds questions that you want people to answer during the registration process.
• Under “Create Your Own Question” click on “New Question”
• There you can add a question of your choice. For us, we would want to require a “Single Answer” (so people have to pick one, versus “short answer” where people write in responses. You simply type in the question – e.g. “Select your first choice from the following ten themes”. Then add additional questions asking people to select their second and third choices. You can write in the 10 themes as answers to choose from.

This would make sure that everyone who signed up could be placed quickly into a group. Of course, one of the answers could be “Surprise Me!” if people really don’t care, and then you could place that person anywhere.

This was a long post, as we learned a great deal from running our Community Exchange in an Open Space Technology-inspired format. As this group intends to replicate this model at the regional level in their network, and for others who may want to try, I wanted to write down the steps before I forgot them!

The post Running an Open Space Technology (inspired) Session Online Using Zoom Breakouts for a Large-Scale Community Learning and Good Practice Exchange, by Gillian appeared first on Bright Green Learning. Visit Bright Green Learning - Serving the sustainability community - Leveraging impact through learning .

Article by Lizzie Crudgington, Bright Green Learning

When helping clients design online meetings and workshops, we often face all sorts of assumptions about what you can and cannot do online.  Usually we find that you can do MUCH more than you first assume.  What you need is some creativity and thoughtful planning!

Here I share a few examples of some of the more unusual ways in which I’ve used Zoom in the last months for more informal online convenings and gatherings, such as various birthdays and other fun events. These are being shared in the hope that these times push us to challenge our assumptions about what we can and can’t do online, have fun testing new ideas (for example with kids, friends and family- push yourself to try new things in a ‘safe space’), and then find ways to adapt and integrate more lively and creative interactive elements in our professional as well as personal virtual lives going forward.

I’ve included some ‘how to’ steps below with these 20 examples, revealing some of the things to think about when preparing for these online activities.  If you feel so inspired – have a go!  And reach out with questions if you’d like more details. Included below:

1. The Maker Challenge
2. Read Together Online
3. Sewing Workshops with Grandma
4. Playing App-based Games
5. Online Face-painting Game
6. Hum that Tune
7. Charades
8. Mind-meld
9. Pictionary Online
10. Online Quiz with Riddles and Emoji Questions
11. How Well Do You Know…? Game
12. Guess the Song
13. Musical Statues
14. Blow Out The Candles on the Cake
15. Choose a Themed Virtual Background
16. Get Physical with a Speed Hunt
17. Collective Cocktail Making
18. Online Spinning Wheel
19. Celebrity/Who’s in the Bag?
20. Taking Cranium (the Board Game) Online

OK, let’s start!

• The Maker Challenge. The week before Easter, we planned an online family party and asked everyone to get scrap paper ready. We ran the party on Zoom with families in five locations. Each family had 5 minutes to make their Easter Bonnets from scrap paper – ensuring the camera was lined up so we could see one another’s creative process – and of course we wore the bonnets for the remainder of the party.
  (Other versions: Instead of an Easter bonnet, make a space helmet, pair of glasses, diving mask, a dress, a bouquet of flowers, a trophy, a car, the strongest bridge, the tallest tower…. The fun is in the making! And why stick to scrap paper?  Could be modeling clay, twigs found outdoors, LEGO…)

• Read Together Online. Take photos of the pages of illustrated children’s books and upload these to Google Drive. In Zoom, screen-share the book and simply click through the pages.  We’ve had reading sessions with grandparents, as well as 6 and 7-year-old cousins reading their favourite books together.

• Sewing Workshops with Grandma. This was really simple.  We just set up Facetime (could use Zoom or other platforms too) with the cameras carefully positioned, and away we went. Home-sewn face masks – tick.

• Play App-based Games such as Connect 4 and Rummikub – whilst using Zoom or Facetime to interact. We use two devices (a smartphone and tablet or computer) so that we can chat and see and hear one another’s reactions during the game playing – maintaining the social dimension.

• Online face-painting game. How about it? Also during the Easter party, we played a face-painting game using only an eye-liner pencil. We gave a willing volunteer the challenge of giving face-painting ‘instructions’ to everyone else (based on an image provided), without using certain words (i.e. they couldn’t use the words rabbit, bunny, nose or whiskers). We did the drawing part with backs to the cameras and then, once complete, we had ‘the big reveal’. Ours was a Easter-themed bunny, but you could choose any face-painting theme.  An interesting exercise in the power of communication too – usually with entertaining results.

• Hum that tune. To play this one, we combine Zoom with WhatsApp.  The name of the tune is picked from a hat, by the “game master”, photographed and WhatsApp’d to the player who’s turn it is to hum.  Then those ‘guessing’ the name of the tune race to submit the correct answer – either to a WhatsApp group or the Zoom Chat.  (We find that using the Chat for answers works better than shouting out the answer as it can be hard to hear the person humming, especially if the group playing is large.)

• Charades. As we did for for ‘Hum that tune’, we combined Zoom with WhatsApp. The charade is picked from a hat by the game master, photographed and WhatsApp’d to the player who’s turn it is to act out the charade.  Those in the same team call out over Zoom.

• Mind-meld. The idea of this team game is that a word (suggested by the one team) is given to all players on the other team who then have 30 seconds to each write down three words associated with that word.  If there is one word in common in what all players in the team write down, they win a point. To play this, the word is called out, and players simply use simply pen and paper to write down their three associated words.  After the 30 seconds they then hold their papers up to the webcam so everyone can see what they wrote and whether or not they win the point.

• Pictionary online. For this, we’ve done it in various ways. One option is to use the whiteboard in Zoom and have players ‘annotate’ it using the ‘scribble’ tool.  Others can then guess either shouting aloud or submitting their guesses via the Zoom Chat or a WhatsApp group. Another option – which allows for a better touchpad drawing experience – is to invite players to use a drawing app on their smartphone or tablet.  If they connect it to their computer via USB, they can then screenshare what they are drawing.  The downside of this option is that it requires a bit more tech set up (getting people to install drawing apps on their devices), and you need to change who is screen-sharing every time there is a change in who’s turn it is to draw.
  (Another option: use paper and pen in view of the webcam.)

• Online Quiz. There are so many ways to do this.  A few things we’ve done to ensure the quizzes are fun and interesting to all – ask everyone to contribute questions in advance. Include riddles and try some questions with emojis (e.g. Which film is this?).

• How Well Do You Know…? Game. A great variant on the quiz – especially if you are throwing a party for a birthday girl orboy – here Person X. We asked everyone to submit questions about person X in advance (e.g. Where were they born?), and we created a Google Form with questions numbered 1 to however many questions you have.  Note: Don’t actually include the questions themselves in the form – just the question numbers.  During the party, announce the game and send everyone the link to respond to the Google Form.  Read question 1 aloud and invite each player to write their response in the form.  Repeat for question 2, and so forth.  (The fact that the questions aren’t written into the form keeps an element of surprise!). Make sure that person X also responds in the Form!  Once you’ve gone through all the questions, go the summary of responses (in the Google Form) and screen share these, looking at them question by question. Person X reveals the correct answer (and all are amused by the variety of responses).   If you like, you can give points for correct answers but this is totally optional.

• Guess the song. Different to ‘hum that tune’, in this game we play songs from a playlist in Spotify and it’s a race for players to guess the song – using the Zoom Chat or a WhatsApp group.  To ensure a good sound quality, mute everyone and play the music through your computer, clicking on ‘Share Screen’ / ‘Advanced’ / ‘Music or Computer Sound only’. Not only does this help with sound quality – it also means people can’t see the songs you are selecting to play, which would defeat the object of the game.
  (Another version of this game: What’s the next lyric?)

• Musical statues. A classic party game, super for expending some energy and loosening up bodies. As in ‘Guess the Song’, play music for musical statues using ‘Screen Share’ / ‘Advanced’ / ‘Music or Computer Sound only’. Before starting, check everyone has their web cam set up such that you can see them in their ‘dancing space’.  And then play musical statues as normal – when the music starts every begins to dance. When the music is stopped, everyone freezes (stops dancing), and the person who is still moving is out of the game. This continues until there is one person left.  A great and easy party game for small and big kids.

• Blow out the Candles on the Cake. Just for a bit of fun – when it’s a birthday, have a real (or ‘model’) cake with a real candle held up close to the web cam and have the birthday boy or girl blow the candle out from their computer (close up to the web cam).  Tip:  Make it tough for them, and get them really huffing and puffing (with little effect on the flame) before you blow it out once and for all

• Choose a Themed Virtual background – such as bunting or a photo of your favourite bar! In Zoom, go to ‘Choose virtual background’ (next to the video options in the bottom control bar) and you can upload an image of your choice and select it as your virtual background. (Note: This works best when your own background is neutral)

• Get Physical with a Speed Hunt. This is another great way of bringing some movement and energy to online events. Prepare a list of commonplace items and mini challenges and have different household / office teams race to complete them.  g. ‘Find something stripey’, ‘Find something that makes music’, or ‘Take a selfie of all your team in a wardrobe’.  Either have everyone return to the web cam as they tick of each thing on the treasure hunt list, OR have them take a photograph at each step and WhatsApp it to you.
  (Another version of the game: Create mixed teams (across multiple households / offices) and use the Breakout rooms function – putting one mixed team per breakout room to complete the speed hunt.  Note – for this option you can’t ask everyone to take a selfie of themselves together in a wardrobe!)

• Collective Cocktail Making in Various Kitchens. Need a drink? Rather than just take a break, make the drink preparation an online activity. It requires a little prep, deciding on your cocktail and sending out an ingredients list in advance with enough time for everyone to source things (e.g. mint, red berries, soda water, lime, cucumber…) To run it’s really easy.  Just invite everyone to move their devices to somewhere safe in the kitchen and line up webcams so everyone can see one another well, and then walk through the cocktail making steps, and once made – enjoy!  A refreshing and energizing break.

• Screen-share an Online Spinning Wheel – such as the ‘wheel of names’. I love this and use it for all sorts of activities. For example, if playing a team-game online, use it to randomize the teams.  Put all names in the wheel, screen-share it and and spin it to see who goes with who (e.g. the 1st 4 are together, 2^nd 4 are together, etc.) Use it to choose which games you’re going to play next (e.g. will it be Pictionary, charades or treasure hunt?) Use it to see who gets to go next (from all the names).  So many applications.  Get creative!  And keep people on their toes with the element of surprise.  (Note: the default setting in ‘wheel of names’ is that, once selected by the spinner, the name disappears, but you can change the settings if you want to keep all items in the list. You can also change the colours, sounds, spin time, etc.  It’s very versatile.)

• Celebrity / Who’s in the Bag?  For this one, you need to know how to play the game IRL (in real life), then this online version description will make sense. You also need a dedicated games master.  It’s a lot of fun, but the games master doesn’t get to play.  The game works as normal, only the games master has the list of celebrity names and, as people can’t pick the cards or papers from a bag. The games master uses lightning speed fingers to type the names into WhatsApp and send them to the player who’s turn it is to make his/her team mates guess the names.  Every time their team guesses an answer, you send the next name.  As it can go really fast, I try and queue up the names so that I just have to press send.  You can also cut and paste them from a list (make sure you have three copies of the list at the start: one for each round – with the names in a different, random order in each list).  For scoring – count up how many names each player gets in 45 seconds (ask someone else to manage a timer!!) by looking at the number of names sent to them in the WhatsApp thread.  At the end of each turn, write ‘END TURN’ into the WhatsApp thread so you can keep track of how many names they got in each round. 

• Take Cranium (the board game) Online – renamed ‘Corona-ium’ For those who are becoming masters managing Zoom calls, you can put a number of the ideas above together and take the board game Cranium online.  Cranium combines games like Pictionary, charades, hum-that-tune and quiz questions, so see notes above on running those.  Take a photo of the Cranium Board and put this into a Google slide (or make one up of your own design). Make and name a coloured shape per team as the pieces to move around the board (using ‘Insert’ / ‘Shape’). Then designate someone to be the scorer (ideally not you).  Doing it in google slides in this way you can share the link with everyone (view only) so that at all times people can see the state of play.  From time to time you can screenshare it too. If you have the board game, you can take photos of loads of the cards and have these in your photo library ready to send out to people via WhatsApp or pop them into a google slide deck that you screenshare.  If you don’t have the board game (and I prefer this option with an international group), rather than picking cards, before playing ask everyone to send you (privately) 5 quiz questions, 5 famous people, 5 things, 5 songs, etc. Compile these and use them for the game, drawing on them randomly. Caveat: A player can’t give an answer they submitted so you need teams of at least three.Top Tip: As this game has lots of moving parts, I like to give different people the ‘lead’ on different topic types.  e.g. One person reads out the quiz questions.  Another does the Pictionary.  Another the Charades, etc.  This means you can participate and enjoy the game too, rather than just being the games master permanently.

We hope that these 20 examples give you some ideas for how you might adapt the above for your next online gathering, whether it is in a team meeting, a learning activity, or another fun gathering with others online!

The post 20 Creative Ideas for Online Gatherings Using Zoom (or similar), by Lizzie appeared first on Bright Green Learning. Visit Bright Green Learning - Serving the sustainability community - Leveraging impact through learning .

When the days run together without a clear delineation between the work week and the weekend; when you need to work but have other things on your mind (feeding a family of four three meals a day with an increasingly weird set of back cupboard ingredients, supporting your kids to go to school and stop playing online poker, even if it “isn’t for money”; trying to come up with something interesting to say when you call your parents for the 100th time and you really don’t have anything interesting to say – thank goodness for vegetable gardens), not to mention feeling the intensifying gravity of a global pandemic – you need to set up some sturdy scaffolding to structure your days.

Even with your home office in place, as informal or impermanent (you hope) as it might be; even with real work to do; even with the intention and eagerness to do something different today! that takes you out of the Groundhog Day loop that you feel you are in when you wake up every morning – even with all these positive motivations, it can still be hard to get things done and feel truly productive in the currently abnormal situation.

Like you, I have a my lists of things to accomplish for work and home- both the tasks with deadlines, as well as that long list of “sometimes/maybe” things that perhaps this period of no travel might finally afford me the time to accomplish.  But somehow it feels harder to get going every day, especially now after 40+ days and counting of staying at home. Is my current productivity practice up to the task of fighting these new external and internal stressors for my limited attention? As a life-long student of productivity, I try a lot of different things aimed at personal efficiency and effectiveness. For me, it is always a good time to learn something new, and now more than ever. Where to start?

In the present fluidity of hours, days, and weeks, and with the level of uncertainty that is out there in terms of when things will change, I am feeling a greater need for structure even beyond my traditional GTD context lists.  I need this additional structure to help me make decisions about what I need to do and when I should do it (e.g. when I have the appropriate mental bandwidth).

There are a million ways to do this- this blog post is just about what I have put in place during this unique historic moment. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s working for me right now.

Creating Structure

Weekly: I structure my time using a couple of different tools. One is a weekly planning card that I fill in on Sundays for the upcoming week.  This is a useful printed notepad template by BeforeBreakfast which has a place to indicate 3 weekly objectives (things I want to have accomplished by the end of the week), as well as daily blocks where I can note specific daily tasks, affording me an overview to make sure I am blocking enough time throughout the week to accomplish them.  These daily blocks I divide with a line through the middle, above which I write my “Deep Work” (Cal Newport) and below the “Shallow Work”.  I separate these two kinds of work because I want to make sure that I “move the needle” every day, in the words of productivity podcaster David Sparks, if humanly possible. That is, to make some progress on the creative projects I have ongoing (writing, PhD research, developing a new piece of curriculum, etc.) in addition to doing other work that is more incremental and doesn’t necessarily bring something new into the world (meetings, admin, scheduling, email, etc.)

Daily: With my week planned at the 10,000 foot level, I use my daily calendar which is a week-to-view Lett’s quarto (I have used the same calendar for over 15 years now) and includes scheduling from 08:00 – 20:00, to block schedule (sometimes called hyper scheduling) my day. I might do this the night before or in the morning, whenever I feel I have the best overview of my day, to block time for discrete work (usually in 30 minutes to 1 hour blocks) around the hard landscaping of e-meetings and calls.

Within my day, I also block time to walk, cook with those weird ingredients, have lunch with my family, and do an online Pilates class. These are scheduled too. I also want to start to integrate more artistic activities that use a different part of my brain, and let rest the part that is being used at my desk. This week I plan to unmothball my trumpet which is sitting in its case under my desk and see what is left of my high school embouchure (yes, after 40+ days it has gotten to that point.)

Creating Accountability for Completion

When there is no office,  no travel, no long string of F2F meetings, etc. creating your own aspirational schedule is one step, but the best laid plans, as they say. In addition to having none of this office business, you also have no colleagues, no line manager, and no coffee buddies (at least in your home office.) No one may be checking in regularly to see how that document, or proposal or article is going. There are a number of different ways to create accountability if that’s something that helps you not fall into the black holes of procrastination like social media, watching YouTube videos of Stephen Colbert et al., or sparking joy by meticulously tidying up your desk, over and over again. My current favorite is FocusMate or FocusFriends or whatever you want to call it. I am not going to go into too much detail on this as I wrote a whole blog post on how to connect with others while making progress on your own stuff (When You’re Not in the Room Where It Happens: Getting Work Done at Home (Even Temporarily). I have gotten into a nice routine over these past weeks with a couple of friends who are also trying to do more than email during this period. With one of these friends, who works in a completely different field, we work together in parallel almost every day, chatting a few times a day to share what we are doing, accomplishing (or not), and what our perceived barriers are. When we can, we go into structured blocks of working one hour synchronously on Skype, with brief reporting on achievements on the hour. Other times when we have online meetings or other interruptions, we just write on Skype what we will get accomplished during the day, write updates during the day on how we are doing, and diligently read what the other person has written and provide comments and encouragement. Then we might call at the end of the day to debrief on how well we did on reaching our goals.

Another useful accountability mechanism is a monthly habit tracker that I review every night. I created this at the beginning of the Covid-19 stay-at-home period to keep myself focused on 10 things that I want to do every day. This is a simple A4 matrix that has the key words for the 10 things I want to do every day in columns across the top of the page, and the days of the month down the left hand side in rows. There is a line to write in the month at the top, so I can reprint a new sheet each month. At the bottom I have a little more description of the key words with my intentions, be they “Sleep” – sleep 8 hours a night, “Family” – do something with my immediate locked-in family every day; “Friends” – reach out to friends somewhere in the world every day;  “Deep Work” – work on one of my creative projects every day; or “Meditate” – take some time for this daily; etc.  Every night I review this list and make an “X” in the column if I did this. The daily reminder and the visual is useful to keep the habits alive, to confront myself on what’s really important, and challenge myself with the Jerry Seinfeld strategy of “not breaking the chain.”

Creating Habits and Reflection

Inspired by James Clear’s Atomic Habits, a habit tracker helps you set your intentions regarding the good habits you want to create, and then keep them front of mind so you remember to build them in at least a little bit every day. I used to lose my nascent good habits in periods of frequent travel, where my daily routine would be demolished by novelty, other people’s schedules, and intense fatigue. Now that their is no challenge whatsoever to my routine, I want to experiment with this method to entrench some good habits now that will support productivity and overall well being now and in the future.

Daily reflection is another habit I am working on through daily journaling. I write short entries at the end of the day and am using four fields as writing prompts: 1) Highlights of the day; 2) Achievements (however big or small); 3) Gratitude – this has been helpful when things seem to be wobbly around you; and 4) What I got out of the day – this latter sparks more overarching reflections and connections that I spot, such as how on days when I do a longer meditation at night I sleep better, or when I schedule the deep work in the morning it takes me less time to accomplish, etc.

For my journal, I am using a small notebook with removable pages, so that when it gets full I can take pages out and put in new ones.  I also have some “master list” pages at the front where I am tracking some additional items such as, “Achievements” (bigger things – to remind myself that I can finish things, even when life is messy and complicated); “Things I said ‘No’ to (and Why)’ (since this is an area I am working on and trying to actively manage), and “Productivity Tips” (shiny new things or useful hacks I have picked up and want to try).

A final input for daily and weekly reflection for me is time tracking. I have set up a time tracking Excel spreadsheet (although there are lots of apps that do it automatically, I like to do it manually for now), to help me see if my projections for block timing, etc. are realistic or not. Normally they are not – I tend to underestimate how much time it will take me to do something.  (For example, I thought this blog post would take me 1-2 hours, and now 4 hours and some interuptions later I am still agonizing over editing!) Not only do I track how much time I am spending, but when I am spending it during the day, by putting in start and stop times. That has helped me develop an understanding of when in the day I am most productive (Biological Prime Time) so that I can be more effective at scheduling, and know when breaks are needed or a significant change of tune (back to my trumpet).

Time tracking has its practical function, of course, if you are a project-based worker as I am. But it also builds an excellent database, along with the habit tracker, calendar and journal, to support reflection and provide evidence needed to make continuous adaptations to your system.

Too much structure? Maybe, but it actually doesn’t take that long in the aggregate, and in times of fluidity, uncertainty, and what seems like unlimited hours free to sit at my desk, I feel this is helping me focus my attention on the right things and not always on the momentousness of everything else going on right now, just outside my front door.

The post Desperately Seeking Structure: Productivity in the Time of Covid-19, by Gillian appeared first on Bright Green Learning. Visit Bright Green Learning - Serving the sustainability community - Leveraging impact through learning .