Tips from Google’s resilience expert on avoiding burnout

Helpful advice for these difficult times.

A college soccer player, Lauren Whitt was sidelined by two knee injuries that took her off the field during her sophomore and junior year. This was incredibly frustrating — she’d played soccer most of her life and had even won a Pan-American gold medal with the U.S. Youth National Soccer team. She realized she was going to need to find a way to cope.

“I began to study the idea of resilience more,” Lauren says. “How it changes your body and your life. It sort of became my personal mission.” A few years later, it became the subject for her doctoral dissertation — today, it’s the focus of her work.

Lauren is the head of global resilience at Google, a job that’s been crucial this last year. Even as vaccines become available, so many stressors remain: Searches for the term “pandemic fatigue” increased more than 300% during the past month in the U.S., and “job burnout quiz” was a breakout search over the past three months. These things are exactly what Lauren hopes to alleviate through her programs that help Googlers build resilience, deal with stress and develop skills to tackle new challenges.

But resilience isn’t only about helping people cope with the negative; it’s also about giving them more room to experience the positive. Lauren wants to help Googlers feel creative and productive so they can thrive at work. “I’m so passionate about this work because I think that while I’m not personally making something that launches us all into the future, I can help the people at Google who are doing that be their best.”

Source: Tips from Google’s resilience expert on avoiding burnout

Top 12 PowerPoint New Features | PowerPoint Updates and Tips for Spring 2021 – #MIEexpert

A step-by-step tutorial on 12 PowerPoint New Features. These include PowerPoint tips on using PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams, presenting directly from PowerPoint into Teams, Convert Word to PowerPoint, Auto Fix, PowerPoint for Mac updates and lots more. This is the modern and AI-infused PowerPoint, so check it out and learn the latest and greatest for Microsoft PowerPoint. This is not your parents’ PowerPoint!

11 Uses for Your Old Smartphone

If you are at all interested in tech you are likely to have some unused phones lurking in a drawer. Why not put them to use?

Every day, we walk around with a supercomputer in our pockets. It checks the weather, searches the internet, plays games, streams media, takes pictures, and analyzes data. Smartphones are great, except for the fact that newer, better versions are always on the horizon.

Most of us can probably use the same phone for years, but the upgrade cycle means it’s always tempting to splurge on a shinier model. You can save a few bucks by trading your old phone in when you buy a new one, but there are times you end up with an extra, aging smartphone hanging around.

Instead of letting that device collect dust, reuse it! If it connects to Wi-Fi, it can still be a handy addition to the household. Here are a few cool things you can do with your old smartphone.

Source: 11 Uses for Your Old Smartphone

The Importance of Scheduling Nothing

This is published on a Friday and that’s a great day to go to your calendar, find some free time, and schedule some reflective time.

If you were to see my calendar, you’d probably notice a host of time slots greyed out but with no indication of what’s going on. There is no problem with my Outlook or printer. The grey sections reflect “buffers,” or time periods I’ve purposely kept clear of meetings.

In aggregate, I schedule between 90 minutes and two hours of these buffers every day broken down into 30- to 90-minute blocks. Its a system I developed over the last several years in response to a schedule that was becoming so jammed with back-to-back meetings that I had little time left to process what was going on around me or just think.

At first, these buffers felt like indulgences. I could have been using the time to catch up on meetings I had pushed out or said “no” to. But over time I realized not only were these breaks important, they were absolutely necessary in order for me to do my job.

Heres why:

via The Importance of Scheduling Nothing | LinkedIn.

10 things academics say students get wrong in exams | #mieexpert

Why yes, it is that time of year again. Why do you ask?

Not many students would admit to enjoying taking exams or writing essays, but if you want to get a degree, they’re an ordeal you have to survive.

So we’ve worked out how to make the whole thing a little less stressful. We’ve persuaded four academics from a range of subject areas to tell us the top 10 things students get wrong in exams and coursework. This is what they’ve told us:

via 10 things academics say students get wrong in exams | Education | guardian.co.uk.

Humble Book Bundle: Head First Programming by O’Reilly (pay what you want and help charity)

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Source: Humble Book Bundle: Head First Programming by O’Reilly (pay what you want and help charity)