Do you ever take a minute to pause an activity and question why you do it in a certain way?

I did this week.

I had just spent 8 hours making notes on lecture slides that barely covered 2.5 hours of video content. I was tired, regretting life choices, and mostly just questioning why I was so committed to a note-taking system that clearly wasn’t working effectively for me.

You see, I’m dyslexic, so my brain isn’t the biggest fan of words. Consequently, I’m a slow reader and an even slower writer. To help me out, in my second year of uni, I bought an iPad and started using it for handwritten notes. This was an improvement over paper as it provided me with more flexibility and a better workflow. I was quicker, more organised and killing less trees. The notes were also very neat. However, as the years went on, the amount of content increased, and due to COVID-19, the nature of teaching and examination changed. Thus, the system that had served me so well a few years ago was now slow, inefficient and in desperate need of an update.

The process of updating the system required:

• Reflection on current practices – picking out what currently works and what doesn’t.
• Assessing needs – figuring out what needs to be done to improve areas of weakness.
• Review of resources – identifying the available tools and resources to help make improvements and pinpointing that which needs to be acquired.
• System modifications – selecting little changes that can be made, using the identified resources, to strengthen weak areas.
• Implementation, review and refinement – testing the modifications, analysing their effectiveness and making further changes when necessary. This process tends to occur over a longer time span.

For me, the weak areas were my sluggish writing speed, poor working posture and perfectionist tendencies. I was able to recognise I had the capabilities for typing and dictation as alternatives to handwriting, and over the years had acquired a lot of software tools to allow for the creation of a new fluid flow of work, with an aesthetically pleasing product. Modifying posture was a simple but difficult task, intentionality was needed to prevent me from slipping back into old habits.

Analysing my existing methods and generating the initial modifications took about 2 hours of brainpower. A few things needed to be purchased, but they weren’t urgent, so I was able to implement the new system the following day. To my surprise, I found that work that had previously taken 5 hours was completed in under 3, and more information was retained. The new system was by no means perfect, and in some ways more laborious, but it was a step in the right direction. Given how easy the switch was and its evident benefit, I was left wondering, why had I stayed married to the old method for so long?

Was it the comfort of the familiar, a dislike of change, or simply my busyness blinding me to how bad things had got?

Whatever reasons that had previously stood in my way crumbled as I collapsed onto my bed, tired, aching, and disheartened by my resilient yet futile efforts to make an out-of-date system work for me. Change was needed.

So, to summarise, this week I switched from handwritten notes to typed ones and wrote a short essay to tell you about it. But hopefully, I also highlighted the thought process behind it and the benefits of modifying practices. Like our phones and laptops, we need to intermittently update the systems we have in different areas of our lives. We change and so does the world around us. Too often we are set in our ways and too caught up in the busyness of life to see that the way we were working and operating in the past, is no longer ideal for the present. Most of the time, through small positive changes big gains can be seen, but occasionally you’ll need to scrap the old and create and embrace the new.

Don’t be like me and reach a point of desperation when you spend several hours hunched over a desk, barely covering a single lecture, overanalysing the symmetry of your letter formation, while a backlog of other work that has yet to be touched sits patiently waiting. It’s not fun.