This week a cohort of 16 leaders and managers wraps up the current run of my Healthy Hybrid Habits course. As this is the second time I have run this course in this format, I’d like to take this opportunity to reflect on and celebrate what’s been achieved.
Whilst I regularly facilitate similar workshops or courses on similar topics for institutional cohorts, I designed this course in a coaching format, offering weekly group coaching sessions alongside the asynchronous content. There’s a mix of audio recordings to listen to, resources and tools to try out and further reading and I sent out a course letter by post, too.
The informal design of the course means that individuals can engage in a dialogue and a 1-to-1 coaching session with me, and because of that I cap the cohort size at a maximum of 20. Over the course of the four weeks, we get to know each other a little and share perspectives on leading organisations and teams in different sectors and different size organisations.
Timing is everything
Running a course starting 20 January 2025 had its drawbacks. When I set the dates, back in autumn 2024, I didn’t yet know what the start of the new year would bring with it in terms of global events. However, as I had a full cohort booked onto the course I didn’t want to change the start date at short notice, and thus the start of the course coincided with political and social events that… well, that made it even more urgent (and yet even more difficult) to prioritise a balanced relationship with work, technology and being online.
Digital Productivity Double Speak
One of the things I have noticed in the past couple of years is that very similar language is used to describe things like digital wellbeing and digital productivity even when referring to the opposite. I have blogged about this before, but it’s worth revisiting:
- In the wider context of digital health it can mean using technology, applications, websites or online services to help us manage our health and wellbeing.
- In the workplace, and specifically in an increasingly hybrid workplace, we often use the term digital wellbeing or digital wellness to describe how the use of digital technologies impacts our physical, mental or emotional health and wellbeing, for example screen fatigue or stress caused by digital overwhelm and constantly being connected.
My work, and the course, is very much about the second definition and not the first. But much of the discourse around being “healthy” and “online” is about the first: Use an app to be more mindful, track your sleep, measure how stressed you are and so on. Of course, the skills required to use technology to manage health and wellbeing are important, but they are not in and of themselves sufficient.
Many of the activity in the course are designed to encourage you to step away from digital technology and focus on developing awareness, of noticing and focusing on your embodied self, people and relationships (even if these are mediated by technology).
The AI “solution” to digital overwhelm
I conceived of much of the course content before all major work platforms and tools came with AI functionality baked in, but it doesn’t surprise me that one of the solutions to too much information and digital overwhelm is… summaries. Summaries of emails, summaries of reports, of work meetings, presentations and brainstorming sessions. Summaries of the books you don’t have time to read during lunch or on your commute because you are too busy staring at a screen.
It’ll be interesting to see how the design of the course changes over time, if it does. I am thinking about how to best update its content where needed, but also to retain its core message of how deepening our awareness of and skills for managing people and projects can help create playful, positive interactions for a more meaningful working life.
Congratulations are in order!
I am really grateful for the inspiring conversations and playful interactions we shared over the past month, and congratulations are certainly in order. It takes a lot of energy to step away from a busy workload and focus on what a better work/life balance, a more balanced relationship with technology and digital productivity could look like.
If you’d like to join us for the next run later this year, get in touch or join the waitlist.
