End-of-Day Chant

To get the Compound Return newsletter in your inbox, subscribe here.

Issue 40 | September 30, 2020 | End-of-Day Chant

The time has come
(The time has come)
To say goodbye
(To say goodbye)
We have learned a lot today!
(We have learned a lot today!)
We will all be here tomorrow
(We will all be here tomorrow)
To work, to have fun, and to be in our first-grade community!
(To work, to have fun and to be in our first-grade community!)

This little chant is the last thing I hear my 6-year-old say on the final Zoom call of her school day.

It’s the End-of-Day Chant. I’m certain that it’s her favorite thing about first grade. And she and the 20 other first graders recite it wildly. After all, they are 6-year-olds on a Zoom call.

Chants are fun, and group-things-with-a-streak-of-wild are fun. But it’s a powerful ritual – a signal to her that she’s met all of her obligations for the day and is now free of instructive videos and finished with maddening math apps. Her mind, body and soul all know: the day is done. It’s time to switch out of digital school mode and back to real life. She slaps the iPad cover shut and scampers off to play horses.

I look on with envy. Why don’t we do this at the end of our collective work day??

In the last two newsletters, I’ve been considering the transition out of digital mode and back into the real world. A survey of friends produced this roundup of six activities that facilitate the transition, and here I propose that the timer-based Pomodoro Technique (a 25-minute window) could be the right amount of time to get your brain across the divide.

In this final installment, I suggest we all take a page from the first grade and get on board with the end-of-day ritual.

Ritual: A Cure for Attention Residue?
Putting aside the toxically ridiculous things about devices (i.e. their design toward compulsive usage), there is a natural phenomenon that’s always present when we are trying to redirect our brains from one task or mode to another: attention residue.

Do you ever spend a bunch of time crafting an important email, triple-check it and confidently hit ‘send’ – and then immediately go into your Sent folder and re-read it? It’s gone. You triple checked it. Why do you need to look at it again?

Because of attention residue. When it comes time to get your brain out of digital mode, it’s the residue you really have to confront.

So how do you get rid of attention residue? The experts suggest that we need rituals. More specifically, we need an end-of-day ritual where we close out our work. We need to review what we did, review where we will start tomorrow, maybe even make a specific list of tomorrow’s top priorities. If we are interrupted mid-task, researchers say we can free our minds of attention residue by pausing to write down where exactly we are in the task and what’s next.

So there you have it: before you start those watercolor turtles for a 25-minute sesh, do your shutdown ritual.

There’s only one problem with this solution – it’s not nearly as fun as wildly shouting your favorite chant with all your first grade friends on Zoom. If you aren’t able to recruit friends or colleagues to recreate the fun part, at least try putting on some Maroon 5 and moonwalking to the kitchen for dinner.

Hoping for Better Bandwidth Ahead
I’m very sorry for all the NOs I’ve been dishing out to great projects lately. Thanks to all for your supportive responses and patience. When things loosen up a bit on this end, I will be in touch. I also know many of you are in the same boat, and I wish you all self-directed children, reasonable teachers and lots of soul-restoring moonwalks.