In an information filled world, it’s helpful to have personal management strategies to make sense of it all. Frameworks are one way to curate and use this information in meaningful ways to improve our work and life.
Episode 6 – Show Notes
- Frameworks can help us make sense of information overload.
- Calendars are an excellent example of frameworks that help us organize our lives into manageable chunks of information.
- Other frameworks help us improve our work performance and can often help us figure out how to solve a problem.
- This episode introduced the idea and importance of frameworks. Other episodes will focus on specific examples.
- PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections) and PANS (Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome) – http://pandasnetwork.org/
- PANDAS Helpful Resource Links – http://pandasnetwork.org/helpful-websites/
Episode 6 Script
This is Rebecca Clark. Episode six Frameworks This’ll Podcast is for anyone that knows they haven’t yet found and offered up their best work but are compelled to seek it out and do it. Are you ready to move your desks? A couple of years ago, my son got sick. It was the fall of 2017 and that is a very normal time of year for little children to get sick because they’re just passing around all that stuff at school. But we realized that along with the sickness, there were a lot of changes going on at school. There were a lot of teachers that turned over into new positions, and it was a new classroom, and we had some changes going on at home that created additional stress, though he didn’t realize at the time. In addition, as you get to that Thanksgiving time period, there special cartoons and start coming on the TV of rot for around the holidays. And so we allowed extra time to see some of these special holiday cartoons, and there was a lot of excitement about it, and there started to be a lot of jumping and hand flapping along with it, which at first we thought was cute and then realized it was going above and beyond how most children would respond. And then it started to occur when the TV was not even on. And so I started paying attention, and the sickness did not seem to improve because it was with the sinuses. You can imagine jumping probably was not a good combination said. It’s really mixing it up. It got to the point where I went to the doctor trying to figure out what was going on, because soon there started to be more behaviors with ease, symptoms of O. C. D. And it appeared a little bit like maybe a Tourette syndrome and autism, and it felt like this very rapid onset of symptoms and behaviors, which was really odd to me, because none of those things seemed to be rapid on sets for most people. So the doctors didn’t know what to do, except they started talking about planning to enroll in certain programs and everything because this could be a long term thing. But I was a little unsettled because I felt like we hadn’t really gotten to the root cause of it. when the doctors don’t have answers and you don’t feel like you’ve gotten answers yet, you know, there’s a lot of choices on how to react, and I decided, OK, I’m taking off a lot of work, even though it was very high intensity work environment at that time as we worked through a system implementation. But I took the time off work and start of observing and started seeing some nuances of the behaviors because he was fine when I was reading with him books and I ended up reading 40 or 50 books a day some of those days because that was the only time I felt like I had the rial person in front of me, if that makes any sense. Otherwise I felt like he was in a different world, and so there’s a lot of learning that it was occurring during this time period and I was able to notice that the part of the brain that was learning was doing well. But the part of the brain that managed motor skills was not then the sickness wasn’t going away. I decided instead of just tracking things daily, I needed to translate this into a format that I could make sense of the information that I was gathering and finding out and what I was monitoring. So I turned this into a chart just on a piece of paper. You draw table in lines and you start scribbling in the boxes information. And as I did that, with the symptoms in the behaviors, it became very clear that he was only a 10 15 20% match. Two. All of those things that I just mentioned, like autism and Tourette’s syndrome and O. C. D. Hughes. He was a few of the things, but he wasn’t all of them. And I like this. Is these air too low of percentages to stop here? I haven’t come across something that I need to discover. And at that point I decided I’m going out to my friends online to see what they know because people know a lot and parents know a lot about kids, and they share this online all the time. I went out there and there were a lot of suggestions, and I checked on those suggestions like, Okay, we’re not doing that. We’re not dealing with that. That’s just a partial issue. And Then a couple of friends said, Have you heard about pandas? Have you heard about pandas? I had never heard of it before. Besides being an animal at the zoo, Panda stands for pediatric autoimmune nero psychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections. So pandas. It is a much easier way to say, but the bottom line is strep infections primarily and children can turn into changes in behavior a rapid onset and this can occur young. And then, is it going to teenage years? Some of these kids it. It’s so difficult for them that some of them end up being home schooled for a while or quitting school for a while because there’s so many emotions and behavior changes and eating. I don’t know disorders, but eating change of eating habits that can occur. I put this into my chart, and it was a 90% match. It’s in those moments where, even though there is a problem that still has to be solved, this is a kn amazing weight off the shoulders to feel like you’ve come closer to finding out what the problem could be, even if you can’t solve it. Yet knowing with the problem is most likely can be a tremendous relief. And for me it propelled me into action. I put that chart on the computer I wrote an executive summary showed all of the tracking. I’ve been doing a behaviors and presented it to the doctor, which, you know, some of you may already do this. But I walk into the doctor with my little paper and they’re kind of forced to look at it. And of course I brought copies. So no, they didn’t have to say, Make it copy of them like No, no, I’ve got more copies for you. You put it in every possible folder every doctor’s thing that you need to now. A couple years ago, Pandas was something that doctors kind of heard about. They heard it was a thing, but it had not been mainstream, and you kind of would still get some weird looks. Now it’s starting to become mainstream very fast as more and more parents deal with this, which which is really pointing the fact that there’s a lot of environmental factors involved. If it’s a combination of strip stress and changes and and just environmental factors, they were willing to run some more tests. But primarily the work went back on us to spend more time on the diet, to get the right medicine for that moment and to ensure that this little person’s body was getting healthier. Since that time, we have had many more infections, and we have seen the signs and seeing those behaviors occur. And since that time actually the world of autism and some of these other areas have found that there’s some connections, even with Lyme disease and that kind of thing. I won’t get into all of that here because this is a story to introduce an idea. But it it is going on right now in the United States. And if you are dealing with anything like this, please look up some of the links that I share because there is a way to work through some of these things and I was able to start working through this problem and helping my son and our family as a result of taking all this information and putting it into a chart. Now, this experience was so important in my life because first of all, it taught me that I was going to have to do my part and not rely on doctors for everything and guide them through the process. In some cases, it helped me realize health is very important to our well being. And if we’re not healthy, we’re not going to get a whole lot done in life. And so it’s worth spending the time on health to get it right. But underneath all that, I started noticing how often I use these frameworks and charts to organize my life, to solve problems, to plan projects two. Create family re union approaches and to organize the bombardment of information that is now in our lives. And so I wanted to share this with you as an introductory podcast because I’m going to be doing more where Ally will use one podcast to share one particular framework. Now the framework that most of us are probably familiar with is a calendar, because I would be very surprised if anyone listening gets out a big, huge sheet of paper at the beginning of the year and puts 365 lines on it and operates for the year from that sheet or sheets of paper most of us use in some way a calendar, whether it’s online on our phone, on our wall, whatever. The counter is a beautiful example of a framework because they take 365 days and turn it into 12 months that each have a name. And each of those months there’s a week that’s broken down in each of those weeks has seven days and each day has 24 hours and then we’ve got minutes and seconds, and most of us don’t have to measure those with Some of us do. And this is a way to take a heck of a lot of information about time and organ eights in it in a way that our mind can handle it. And when we talk to each other and say, Oh, can you do this on February 25th? Mentally, each of us have something going on where we either count how many months it is until that point. Or maybe it’s a week away or whatever, and we can go. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that’s coming up soon. Oh, I think I have some things surrounding it or not and can make some decisions from that point, and that’s an example of everyday framework. We used to take a complex set of information and simplify it for our use. As I’ve shared the concept of frameworks and charts with people I know every single time, they say, Oh yeah, I use a framework for this or I’ve created a chart for this And I’m hopeful that when you have that thought, you tell me, Go to the website, move your desk dot com and submit your idea or what you do to the pushback on your desk form, because it would be great to share all of these ideas with each other. We live in a world where there’s so much information out there. There are some people that choose not to look at it all there. Some choose to look at it all the time, and there’s a lot of thoughts and feelings that happen when we hear information and we consume it. We can choose to do something with it, or it becomes overload or some react to it in very negative ways. But if we make frameworks part of how we deal with information, it becomes a way to help us actually use that and meaningful ways in our lives. And that’s one of the insights I’ve had for myself over the last 10 or 15 years is that with all of the amazing advances in technology and information sharing, there becomes an even greater importance for the individual toe. Learn how to personally manage that information, to use it wisely, to be able to know how to organize it, to use it to solve problems, know howto assess and analyze, and that responsibility is no one else’s. That is our own. And if we don’t take that responsibility, we let the world and the newsfeed dictate what we think and do, and that’s that’s not how we roll. It’s our job to take that and do something with it and be better for it, whether it’s in our work or becoming our best self. I’m excited to share these frameworks. I’m excited for you to share with me yours, and we can build together this resource of charts. I call it, start with a chart because whenever you approach anything, you can start with the chart and use thes to get the best out of us. Have a great week. Thanks for listening and saying thank you for listening to another episode of the move Your desk show. If you enjoyed listening, I would love if you would take the time to give a five star review and share the podcast with friends that are seeking to find and do there.
