Digital Wellbeing and Productivity (edX)

Chances are, we are spending more time online and on screens than we ever have before. Our digital lives have transformed a great deal in a short amount of time, and we can sometimes struggle to make sense of what it all means for us.

Individuals and organisations now face the challenge of finding a healthy balance between productivity and downtime. How can we adapt to changes in our digital lives, while remaining healthy and happy? What habits can help us get the most out of our time and energy online? How can we best manage digital wellbeing while maintaining productive digital habits? And how can individuals, teams, businesses, and institutions learn from research-based knowledge to create digital habits and skills to help us flourish together?

This course draws on insights from business, psychology, philosophy, and the tech industry to help you develop digital habits and routines that work for your lifestyle. It will also help teachers and leaders to think about how to build good habits in others in their organisations and teams.

In this course, you will get many opportunities to learn by doing. You’ll get to experiment with numerous tools designed to help better understand and shape your habits in your digital work and life. You will be equipped with skills around developing a digital life plan to cultivate lasting habits of productivity and wellbeing.

The course instructor, Tyler Shores, manages the innovative ThinkLab research program at the University of Cambridge, and is a Senior Research Associate at the Intellectual Forum, Jesus College. His research focuses on digital habits, social media, and how digital environments shape how we work and think. Prior to Cambridge, Tyler worked in online education at Stanford University, served as a director at an international education nonprofit organisation, and worked at the Google world headquarters in Mountain View, California while running the Authors@Google program.

What you'll learn

In this short introductory course, you will undertake a process of reflection and strategic development, constructing a digital wellbeing plan for you and/or your team based on:

- An understanding of available tools that can help optimise the time spent online at work and in our wider lives.

- An existing habits analysis that will help craft a productivity and wellbeing routine for yourself and others.

- A more in-depth understanding of some of the values and habits that drive our behaviour online, as well as a greater sense of autonomy about what we can control and change while online.

- Top tips from world-leading experts who have discovered and created strategies for themselves and with organisations, exploring what they have found drives surviving and thriving in the online world.

Syllabus

Week 1: Digital Wellbeing

How much is too much time online? That question is harder than ever for us to gauge when so much of our work and leisure time is absorbed in apps and various online platforms. In this section, we will talk about research-based approaches to wellbeing that can help us to understand digital habits and how to take care of wellbeing in an online – and offline – context. Learners will develop a wellbeing strategy and think about different options to thrive, not just survive.

Week 2: Digital Productivity

How do we work when we are online? This section explores how we use our time, how we can manage our attention and focus, and more. During this week, learners will gather data and information about their work and how their time is spent, with an aim towards employing tips and strategies to get the most out of their workday and from those in their teams. Learners will do a digital audit throughout the week, looking at their screen time and productivity. Different tools will be discussed, and learners will explore how they can understand more about their digital lives.

Week 3: The Future of Work and Learning

There is a very good chance that many of us today are working and learning more online than ever before. In this section, we will explore the nature of digital work and learning. This section will draw upon insights from business, psychology, and other fields to help understand current trends about how we work and learn, and what the near future might look like - and how we can all keep ourselves constantly learning and growing in a world of constant change.

Week 4: Social Media

What makes us click? In this section, we will examine some of the principles that tech companies employ upon us on an everyday basis to entice us to engage in their platforms. We will explore both the good and the bad, the well-known and lesser-known questions that surround big tech companies and social media to help you make informed decisions about how much of a role social media might play in your everyday life. And just as importantly, to help you to gain a better understanding of how we can use this knowledge to reshape our digital habits. This week will ask learners to conduct an audit of their online social behaviour and help them understand the tools available to them to understand their social media use.

Week 5: Digital Psychology

Sometimes our values can be shaped by our habits and behaviours. In this session, we discuss principles of neuroscience and behavioural psychology from leading experts on how you can apply your understanding of all this course’s topics to shape the kind of online and offline life that you want to be leading and that will help you flourish in an ever-changing digital world. We will cover topics that will prompt you to think about how being online shapes how we think about ourselves, how we relate to others, and the rest of the world.

Week 6: Digital Philosophy

This section brings learners into the fascinating, bigger picture discussion of why we might want to examine our online and offline habits. Much of our habits and behaviours are defined by our values, and this lecture will examine philosophical insights from throughout history that have a direct relevance for how we think about ourselves, our work, other people, and our world in a digital context.