I work in education, and we have events which means people are talking about boring stuff for hours. I find it really challenging to listen to it especially any longer than 30 mins, I feel overwhelmed and over loaded with information and feel burnt out. So I need to take regular breaks inorder to recharge and clear my head. Does anyone else get this
I have many meetings at work, and I find after about 15 to 20 minutes it starts to get hard
Have you considered using AI to take notes for you that you can refer back to later? There is a good list of various services that do that here:
https://clickup.com/blog/ai-tools-for-meeting-notes/
This way you can teach yourself to defocus on the parts that are not direclty relevant to you and skim over these at the time but bring your focus back where it is needed.
I used to be really blunt in meetings that were becoming irrelevant or boring and say "look do you really need me here - I don't feel I am able to contribute and I have a lot to do - can I leave please?" and that tended to be a reminder that they were wasting peoples time.
It didn't blow back on me as I was trying to be productive rather than waffle away self importantly in the meeting.
Where I had to wait for a part where I would be presenting something or answering questions later than I would keep a to-do list in my notepad, phone or laptop and make some updates there to change my focus for a while (let my brain decompress), be productive and I would always keep a track ot the time spent in meetings alongside this so if I was every quizzed on what I'm doing I could say "I'm tracking how many hours of my productivity are lost through these meetings" then be able to tell them how many were lost in the last month.
That would annoy some of the career managers but that was kind of the point I guess. I really disliked the sort of people who have meetings to establish how important they are and waste others time.
I have many meetings at work, and I find after about 15 to 20 minutes it starts to get hard. My eyes start even getting blurry, and I struggle to understand. I frown and look so serious from the concentration it takes me to follow what is being said and end with a headache. That's even with hanging on to fidget toy.
I didn't have that problem at uni, maybe my lectures were more interesting? I was lucky to have good lecturers who were interested and interesting.
Over all I think I have a pretty good attention span, I often find other's attention spans amazingly short, but then mybe I'm the one being boring, lol?
Agreed - previous comments regarding how to stay at least partially focused are good advice. I'd add practicing breathing strategies and forms of sitting yoga can help. Realistically I think it poor form from the persons droning on... At least that is if their goal is to be effective communicators... I would also comment that it is worth watching for those cute enough to realise what is taking place to sneak thro' contentious material once everyone has zoned out... As Leo Tolstoy put it: " The two most powerful warriors are patience and time." Also a Taoist one: "In action, watch the timing".
This is one of my biggest barriers in university. After around 20-30 minutes it stops being understandable and starts being like listening to a foreign language where I can hear the sounds but can't actually make any meaning of them. After getting my hearing checked because I was told to and discovering that it's my brain that's the problem, I got a few key skills to help me, especially as unlike some of the other tricks here, I did actually need to know what they were saying.
Recording and transcription software allowed me to return to it afterwards to cover bits I'd missed. For me these were provided through DSA but honestly the Teams transcription and automatic captions are some of the best I've seen.
Pre reading was really important, creating summarised notes that I could then annotate with specific examples. Knowing the basics of what would be covered allowed me to catch up understanding if I needed to turn off my listening brain for 10 mins in the lecture.
On occasions where I couldn't pre-read, having something to do with my hands was really important. Lack of access to pre-reading made seminars completely inaccessible to me, I just couldn't understand the words, but for things like revision sessions where people knew me better, having things like crochet to do made a massive difference and would increase my understanding from 20 mins to 40 mins.
Understanding my limits was also important. I had one year where I had 3, 1hour lectures back to back. This just wasn't doable for me, so I alternated between going to the 1st and 3rd one day, and then just the 2nd the next, using lecture recordings to catch up. This was sometimes problematic when lecture recordings failed, and there was a period of 4 weeks where I went and sat in the back of the room doing different work while my laptop recorded the lecture for me because the departments systems weren't working.
Overall I've had to get really good at making my needs known, because otherwise I just can't access lectures at all, and I suspect this will continue to be a challenge for the rest of my life, with things like long meetings and research conferences. I'm hoping that I can continue to find ways to work around it, and that by making my needs known early, people won't have time to get cross about it they'll just accept it. I find this attitude works for many things.
I've never heard it put so concisely before, but yes this is something I do
I think I know what you mean. I do often find it quite difficult to listen to one person constantly for more than 10 minutes without becoming fidgety.
When it's personal matters, this can be a problem because I believe I have alexithymia and don't empathize even if I do sympathise. Ultimately my impatience grows and becomes evident and the other person feels not validated.
Not quite the same thing, but I also find it very difficult for example to be in meetings where I am clearly not really needed for most of the agenda being covered but cannot really leave and cannot work while the meetings in place. I then end up having to work extra just to get finished what I was doing when I had to go to the meeting.
This was a regular issue at management and board meetings for me in the past.
The technique I use is to make notes on what is being said so that if I need to dig into any details later it is a lot easier. This approach has a few other advantages:
1 - you can write things like shopping lists etc on the side so you are using the time productively
2 - the people talking think they are being interesting enough to merit note taking so helps them feel valid
3 - moving the focus from keeping all the info in your mind to capturing the headlines on paper can be enough to help you relax enough to take it all in.
I've had some of my most creative ideas when in this semi trance state of capturing the info, making notes and allowing my mind to work on autopilot. It takes practice but I find it works.
Yeah im always thinking of something else, and it always goes in one ear then out the other, its the repetitive noise of there voices going on and.on and.on that burns my head out.
I've developed a way of looking interested without actually hearing what's being said, I just let it pass through one ear and out the other, whilst still being able to repeat the last thing the person said if I'm challenged about my attention, I use the time to think about something else, I bet most of the other people in the room are doing the same.
Whar sort of role do you have?
