Month: June 2025

It seems like a good time, just post ALA 2025, to talk about my approach to learning from conferences (and webinars and e-courses and everything else, really). I’ve been providing handouts at my recent conference sessions (and using them at others’ sessions myself) that give space for attendees to note 1) 3 take-aways from the session 2) 3 people they know in the session that they can contact after for conversation about the session topic and 3) 1 – 3 actions that they will take when they get back to work.

The first item is really just reflecting on the session and deciding what was most important to you, from the information presented. It’s a chance to do a minute of reflection after each session you attend. The second item is all about accountability and is important, but not to this blog post, so we’ll move right on to the third item, which is the action item(s). You can enter one to three things that you will do when you get back to the office that can go directly in your to-do list and that will support the learning you’ve done in the session.

Between the ability to reflect, even if for a moment, on the stuff you’ve learned and to distill the really important *for you* stuff from it and then the decision to make (at least) one action back at home that will make use of what you’ve learned, you have a recipe for not just remembering, but activating the cool stuff you pick up at conferences or in webinars. The handout is attached and is freely available for you to use either at your sessions that you lead or in sessions that you attend as a learner – either way, it’s something that can be useful and can really help get the information being presented into your organization in a useful way!

Having recently read the book The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes, and having recently read similar books (such as Attention Span by Gloria Mark and Shift by Ethan Kross) I’ve been thinking about attention and the currency we use when we “pay” attention and if that should mean that we need to have an attention budget. This sort of ties in with the idea that productivity isn’t really about getting more stuff done, but about getting the right stuff done so that you have time for other things, besides work, in your life. How you “budget” your attention relates directly to how effectively productive you are.

I’m sure we’ve all had days where we have been super busy but at the end of the day, realized we really hadn’t gotten anything of any value done. Those days happen occasionally, and that’s just life, I think, but if they happen *every day*, that becomes a problem. Your goal in becoming more productive can’t be checking off more boxes or producing more mental widgets, it has to be moving your goals forward in a tangible way every day.

Attention, unfortunately, is a finite resource – you can pay attention for only so long before your battery drains and you need to recharge it. This is why having a plan for your day (doing the stuff of productivity gurus everywhere) can be useful – it’s a budget for your attention. It’s also why having recharging times (as my colleague Sharon Morris puts it, refreshes throughout the day) is so important to being able to budget your attention evenly throughout the day. Staring out the window for 20 minutes is part of your work on keeping your attention budget in line! Who knew?

The other issue that comes up in my reading on attention is the connection between your ability to stick to your attention budget and your emotions. Properly regulated emotions help you control where your attention goes. Just as with your monetary budget, going on retail therapy to soothe emotions can wreck your finances; having an emotional meltdown can wreck your attentional budget as well. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you always have to be positive and optimistic to do the best, most attentionally focused work. You just have to be able to manage the emotions you have while you are focusing on your work – and that takes those refreshes and resets and recharging times to properly do that!

So, in all the reading I’ve been doing about attention and how it’s stolen from us, how our emotions can affect how we “pay” attention to things, and how productivity requires recharging and refreshing our brains so that we refill our attentional balances, what I’ve come up with is…

Take your breaks! Take walks in the middle of the day! Stare out the window and contemplate the nature of trees for a few minutes *every day*! In order to do your best work and be the most productive you can be (while you are working, which should leave you with time to be unproductive with your family and friends – don’t forget that!), take time to recharge. If you are a practitioner of mindfulness meditation, spend some time in meditation throughout the day, resetting your brain and getting yourself back into having lots of attention to spend. This will help not only your attentional budgets as you work, but your emotional regulation mechanisms might be improved as well and you might find it easier to deal with the little annoyances that crop up throughout the day without melting down or blowing your top…

David Lee King, a library tech guy I’ve worked with over the years, just put up a great post on AI Policies over at his blog (check it out at https://davidleeking.com/ai-policies-for-libraries-some-observations/). I’m doing a bit of research on the topic myself, for a possible new project, and one of the things that I have done in response to the lack of info out there about how libraries should approach AI policy making is to try to walk the walk, as they say. Right now, the only thing I’ve gotten done is a policy that I’ve put in my Library Juice Academy class syllabi that outlines expectations around AI use in class. The one I am using in my Project Management class, which is currently in session, says:

AI Policy

          This course acknowledges the usefulness, at times, of Generative AI. The only times AI will be used by the instructor is to create case studies or scenarios for projects and assignments to be completed by the class. Gen AI will not be used in any way for grading or providing feedback to students. Students are welcome to use AI as a tool to help brainstorm, identify risks, consider different ways to manage time, money, resources, etc. Students are not welcome to use Gen AI to write, wholesale, project plans or discussion posts or other text based assignments in this class. If there are questions about the suitability of Gen AI use in this class, please contact the instructor at robin.hastings@gmail.com.

I’ve decided to take a middle road here – something that allows use of AI for things it does well (I could see students using a chatbot to brainstorm project risks or to come up with ideas for how to arrange resources in some way, things like that) and does not allow use of AI for actual writing of the homework documents wholesale. It can be useful, but at least for my class, it can’t take on the role of actual person managing a project. The students have to do that! I’m going to put a similar paragraph in my other class syllabi with small changes for the specific class needs, too. I just have to ride that line of being specific enough to be clear about what is and isn’t allowed and being so specific that I give them what amounts to instructions on what to use AI on in their work for my class…

Whichever way you personally lean, some sort of guidance on how staff, administrators, patrons, and other library adjacent folks (vendors? community partners?) are expected to use – or not use – AI will be necessary as more and more of our patrons and vendors and whatnot dip their toes in the waters of Artificial Intelligence!