OOC DTP Summer Planning Course

About the course

This online two-week course offers you the chance to create and deploy a four-layer life design system: making a weekly plan that honours your intentions for the summer, making daily plans in line with your priorities for this week, and setting session goals aligned with your plan for today. It’s assumed that academic writing will be somewhere in the mix, but the system also works for any other personal or professional goals you may have for summer 2023. Good planning is as crucial for the fun stuff as for the less fun!

The course will help you build systems that work for your life and your ambitions, offering a strong scaffolding enriched with individual guidance and feedback to help you design, perform, and learn from experiments with your everyday routines. By asking questions about these routines rather than taking them for granted, and by systematically giving plausible alternatives a try, you’ll create some quick wins that will drive new habit loops that work better for you—and so you’ll generate the kind of profoundly practical self-knowledge that will serve you well long beyond this summer.

The course is run by Emily Troscianko, a coach, researcher, and writer with particular interests in eating disorders, consciousness, and the psychological effects of reading narrative. She also created a writing programme for humanities graduates and postdocs at Oxford University and runs courses on academic writing, habit change, failure, and other aspects of what it means to work and live well.

Week 1 consists of two half-day meetings, one at the start and one at the end of the week. These will help you treat each session, each day, and the whole week as part of the wider context of your summer. Building on the summer plan and weekly review you'll have prepared in advance, Monday morning starts with guidance for meaningfully and effectively planning your day, followed by two writing sessions and one admin session (each including goal-setting and review and separated by physical movement and screen breaks) to start to put your tiered planning into action. We’ll also have a go at breaking down what’s needed to bring a current writing project to completion, to introduce a whole-project strand into the layered design system. From Tuesday to Friday you'll practise making and following daily plans based on your plan for the week, and on Friday afternoon we return to write together, review the week’s achievements, use a set of key habit-change strategies to support the design of a personal behavioural experiment, and wrap up with some Q&A.

Week 2 is lighter-touch: We meet briefly on the Monday morning to reflect on our morning routines, plan for the day, and prepare for a writing session, before logging off and completing our sessions independently. Then on Friday afternoon we zoom out another level beyond the summer, review our behavioural experiment results, and link everything back to your summer plans.

Event partnerships

To help you cultivate a spirit of curious experimentation, and keep your daily activities aligned with what you’ve decided to do, you’ll be paired with another participant for the two weeks. Together you can try out what forms of contact are useful for keeping life design and personal learning firmly on the agenda for you both: anything from writing/work sessions together to a shared spreadsheet or email, text, or phone check-ins.

Your commitment

You'll be given clear instructions and templates for completing a summer plan and a weekly review before the course begins, as well as an activities overview or "brain dump" during the second week. You are asked to commit to attending all four sessions in full, and to being disconnected from your phone, email, social media etc. throughout (including the breaks), to help us all protect our ability to focus on the work we do together. If you have caring responsibilities or other reasons why you need access to your phone and/or inbox during the group sessions, please let Emily know in advance.

Schedule

• Monday 26 June, 08:30 to 13:30 BST
• Friday 30 June, 13:45 to 17:45
• Monday 3 July, 09:00 to 10:15
• Friday 7 July, 16:15 to 17:30

If you have any questions about the course, please email emily@troscianko.com

To register:

Please register on Inkpath, by 12 noon on Tuesday 14th June 2023.