Friday fragments, Nov 20th
Radical candor and finding uninterrupted time for our most vital work.
What I’m reading…
How to Give Accurate & Critical Feedback, by Ian O’Byrne, focuses on domains of feedback and argues that - in a nutshell - we are wasting our time and energy if we’re operating in any of quadrants below except for radical candor, and suggests that we use the compliment sandwich method to draw attention to what someone has done well and where improvements can be made.
In Professor, Interrupted: The Legacy of Constant Disruptions, professor and associate dean Erin Marie Furtak writes of learning how to separate interruptible from uninterruptable tasks, and finding times in the day for each.
Those of us who are both professors and parents have also faced thousands of tiny little interruptions. Seemingly inconsequential in the moment, those tiny interruptions add up and can interfere in a big way with our writing and research…It turned out that what I had to protect was not my formal meeting time with others but those appointments with myself, in order to minimize the mounting effects of many small interruptions on the overall trajectory of my career.
I so appreciate the author’s clear articulation of the difference between work that can get done with some level of distraction versus work which really is entirely derailed by almost any distraction. Once we determine that distinction for ourselves, I suspect figuring out when to tackle the different types of work becomes a bit easier.
I’ll take a break from sharing readings next week, as it’s Thanksgiving in the United States. Hope you all get to enjoy some turkey!