How to Work (and Live) Well

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In this session, you’ll turn a critical eye on your own routines and be introduced to ways of optimising them. You'll reflect on the multiple roles your life involves and how these give rise to goals and to daily tasks that matter to you. You’ll explore the distinction between urgency and importance, turn your attention to the question of how long things actually take you, and consider what your findings mean for how you spend your time. Then you’ll survey effective methods for improving what actually happens when you sit down to work. Finally, you’ll make a brief an excursion into feelings of academic failure and how to avoid or overcome them, and try out some simple physical stretches to remind you that your brain is part of your body.

The topics covered are:

  • Meaningful planning: roles, goals, and tasks
  • Where your time goes: urgency and importance, how long things really take you
  • What ‘working’ really means: the pragmatics of getting down to stuff
  • Academic failure: why it matters and what to do about it
  • Antidotes to sitting at a desk: stretching and other ways of treating your body well

The workshop is led by Emily Troscianko, a writer and researcher interested in mental health, especially in eating disorders and in the connections between mental health and fiction reading. Emily is a research associate at TORCH, and her academic background is originally in French and German, and more recently in cognitive literary studies. She writes a blog for Psychology Today called 'A Hunger Artist' and offers recovery coaching for people with eating disorders, as well as running the Baillie Gifford Writing Partnerships Programme for the Humanities Division.

If you have any questions please email training@humanities.ox.ac.uk.

Book now.