Rowan arrived at college with the kind of “she’s got this” record that lets adults relax. She had been a strong student, a reliable friend, and the person her high school theater teacher trusted to run the light board. People described her as organized, and in many ways she was. Her room was neat, her backpack was packed the night before, and she rarely missed a class. This was on the outside.
By the middle of her sophomore year, the work that mattered most was going undone. Readings were skimmed at midnight, papers were started the night before they were due, and problem sets sat half-finished in a folder she had color-coded to capture her attention. She felt busy all the time and struggled to get started, restart, and finish her work. She ought to be able to manage this, her instructors thought. Rowan thought so, too.
A Better System?
So Rowan did what capable people often do when they are stuck. She looked for a better system. A friend showed her a productivity hack: color-code her calendar, and at the end of each day shade the hours where the planned work time slipped away. Within a week Rowan could see exactly where her time had gone unused. On Monday the afternoon was gone until a late dinner. So was Wednesday after lunch. On days when her classes met at night, the hour before every seminar was marked “study,” but to be truthful she was cramming. Saturday she slept in after a well-deserved (wasn’t it?) night out with friends, and most of Sunday seemed to slip away with laundry and catching up on reading.
The calendar was accurate, and it was also hard for Rowan to imagine what would make things better. When she looked at her week, she saw a record of failure. She studied it, felt worse, and resolved to try harder. But the shaded “went dark” blocks didn’t look like opportunities. Instead, they made Rowan feel somehow sad and angry with herself. She signed up for office hours to ask teachers for their best advice on how to make the best use of her study time, but when her watch calendar buzzed a notification, Rowan rolled her eyes.
Rowan’s attention seemed to slide away from everything that mattered. That is, except in the theater. Three nights a week she ran the light board for student productions, and she never missed a cue. She could sit through a four-hour technical rehearsal, track a hundred or more lighting changes, adjust on the spot when an actor skipped a line, and walk out with more energy than she had walking in. Nobody who watched her in the booth would have called her unfocused, apathetic, or disorganized.
What’s Missing?
What did the booth give Rowan that her coursework rarely did? Rehearsal had a start time and an end, and the stage manager called the cues. Every action brought a result she could see immediately. The work of a production was shared, and success was easy to recognize. Papers and exams tended to offer the opposite. They were open-ended and solitary, the first steps were often unclear, and they asked the student to decide when good enough had been reached. For Rowan, academic production also implied a question whose answer was a tender spot: was she as smart as everyone assumed?
Compared to the booth, the shaded hours of “missed opportunity” began to make sense. They gathered next to work with no clear beginning, by the shift from a busy classroom to a quiet desk, and around assignments where her thinking would be judged. The calendar hack from her friend had been showing the shape of her challenge but could not tell her why she struggled.
What Works
We kept color coding and changed what Rowan learned from it. Instead of asking where she had failed, she began to ask what came right before a shaded hour and what the task was asking of her. Then she borrowed from the booth. Each study block got a start time, a link that went directly to the work in the “show book,” and a first cue small enough to be actionable. A friend in the library (places, everyone!) served as her “body double” stage manager. Instead of shading places in the calendar when she was unproductive, Rowan tracked what went well: when she did work, how it affected her schoolwork, and how she could repurpose that feedback for future work.
A productivity hack is a good guess about how attention and executive function work. Often an attempt to diagnose the problem may help, but it may unintentionally feel exposing and result in shame, anxiety, and avoidance. When faced with too many choices, unknowable impacts of them, and no stage manager, what can make the difference is fit: noticing what a tool appears to show you, and shaping it around how your own attention and executive function actually work, including shining a light on the places where they already work well.
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Do you know someone who keeps getting pulled away from what matters in a way that effort or hacks have not improved?
