How to Survive the School Year

Source: Megan Lee/Unsplash

Have you ever started out the school year excited for all the memories you’ll make with your kids, only to find yourself barely hanging on by Christmas?

What starts out feeling manageable somehow morphs into an endless cycle of activities and responsibilities and the never-ending taxi driving. And we find ourselves wondering, How did we get here? How did we end up with So. Many. Things?

It feels like it happens all at once, but that might just be because that’s when we start paying attention. In reality, things often pile up little by little.

We see something that sounds fun or interesting or educational, so we add it to the schedule. And because one thing is manageable, things work out. So, when the next thing comes along that sounds fun or interesting or educational, we add that too. After all, what’s one more thing? And having two things on the schedule is still manageable. So, we do it again. And again.

And everything is fine. Until it’s not.

At some point, we reach a tipping point, and adding one more thing can sink the whole ship.

What to Do Now to Make the School Year Sustainable

One way we can end up at the bottom of the ocean is that we think too much about the individual things we are adding and not enough about the ship that’s keeping everything afloat. We forget to pay attention to the ship until it’s sinking.

How can we keep ourselves from sinking this school year? By paying attention to the ship—the system that keeps everything running.

Keep Your System Up to Date

Have you ever ignored the updates on your computer only to find yourself in the middle of an important document when your computer suddenly crashes, and you lose everything?

When we ignore the updates on our devices, they’re more likely to crash. We need the updates to fix the bugs in the system. And there will be bugs. Our devices don’t start out perfect, nor do they stay perfect. Developers know that if they wait until there are no issues with their devices before they release them, they’ll never be released. If they’re ever going to be useful to people, some of the work has to take place once the devices are out in the world. That’s why we need to do the updates.

Just like our devices, we are a system—a collection of parts that work together. And one thing we can do now to make the school year more sustainable is to make sure we maintain our system.

If we consistently take care of our physical, mental, and emotional health, we’ll have more energy, attention, and patience at our disposal. We’ll run more efficiently and be better prepared to handle the demanding tasks that life will throw at us this year.

Beware Your Bandwidth

No matter how much we maintain our systems, however, we will still have limits.

Have you ever tried to upload important documents at the same time your youngest child is streaming "Paw Patrol," your middle child is playing Minecraft, your teenager is using Khan Academy to help with his geometry, and your spouse is on a Zoom call? It takes forever! That’s because your Internet has limited bandwidth; it can only handle so much activity at a time. When you near the limits, you get a bottleneck, and everything slows down.

As humans, we also have limits to what behavioral scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir refer to as our cognitive bandwidth—the cognitive resources we have available to us that help us pay attention, make good decisions, and resist temptations.

There’s only so much we can think about, worry about, pay attention to, and even care about at a time. Every time we add something to our to-do list or an activity to our schedule, it doesn’t just take up that space on our calendar, it also takes up that space in our minds. It taxes our bandwidth, reducing the cognitive resources we have available for other things.

Have you ever had a hard time focusing on something because you keep thinking about other things? It’s hard to keep other things out of our minds because our mental borders are porous. And the more we have in our heads, the higher the potential for mental creeping, and the harder we have to work to keep everything out. And the greater the stress on the system.

Attention Essential Reads

The Necessity of Multitasking

Your Attention, Please!

Some of this stress can be avoided by not taking on too much. But how do we know what’s too much?

If we want to know how much we will be able to handle this year, we need to consider our future bandwidth. When we’re thinking about what to add to our schedules, we often think about how long something will take us if we’re at peak performance and set aside that much time and energy. But when we actually go to do the thing, we’re not always functioning at peak performance. We’re tired and stressed and have too much on our minds. We’re more like our Internet trying to keep up with a dozen different demanding tasks.

One thing we can do now to make the school year more sustainable is to think about how our future bandwidth will be taxed. How much we can handle in a few months will depend on how our system is running then, not now.

If we’re going to have more on our plates in the future, it’s going to tax our cognitive bandwidth. We might not function at peak capacity. We might be more distracted, forgetful, and impulsive.

What we can do now is acknowledge that if our bandwidth is taxed in the future, things might be harder, take longer, and take more out of us than we think. And if we want to avoid taking on too much, we need to plan on it.

© Jennifer Zamzow, 2022