112. Office Transition Strategies and the Power of Color in Study Methods (Q&A)
Episode 112
In this monthly Q&A episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I answer two questions submitted by listeners of the show.
Question 1: A working professional asks for tips as he transitions back to in-person office work after years of working from home.
Question 2: A student asks about the benefits of using color (specifically colored index cards) in his study methods.
What You Learn:
The reality of returning to office work, and why trying to recreate your home setup is setting yourself up for frustration
How to train your colleagues to respect your focus time without you having to explain yourself or seem difficult
Why you should bring a desk lamp to the office (yes, really)... plus other unexpected items that can transform a sterile workspace
The truth about colored flashcards: when color theory helps memory and when you're just adding cognitive load for no reason
Why your study method isn't working (hint: the structure isn't the strategy, and most students confuse the two)
🔗 Resources + Episodes Mentioned:
⭐SchoolHabits University: (SchoolHabitsUniversity.com)
⭐The College Note-Taking Power System (CollegeNoteTakingSystem.com)
⭐Assignment Management Power System (AssignmentManagementSystem.com)
Episode 94 - Simplifying Task Management and Staying Focused despite Distractions
Episode 03 - How to Use an Admin Block for Increased Productivity
Never stop learning.
❤️Connect:
-
The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I choose not to spend my time fixing them 😉
Office Transition Strategy and the Power of Color in Study Methods (Q&A)
===
[00:00:00] Hello there. Welcome to another episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. This is episode 112 and it's one of our monthly q and a episodes where I answer questions submitted by listeners of this show. As usual, I try to cover two questions, and I'm gonna do that today as well. One is from a working professional and one is from a student.
I love when it shakes out like that. If you are wondering where to submit questions, it is really quite simple. Just head to learn and work smarter.com. Scroll down just a bit on that homepage and you're gonna see a really simple form. And then also, if you are watching this on YouTube, I've left that direct link in the description box.
I don't read any names on the show, so feel free to submit whatever question you have without worry of me calling out any identifying details like your name or your school, or your boss. I am Katie.
And I hope you enjoy today's show. If these aren't your questions, I still encourage you to listen or watch all the way through, because as I'm always saying, sometimes other people ask questions that [00:01:00] we didn't even know we had ourselves, and I think that's one of the most powerful things about q and as.
Like this. Alright, let's get started.
All right. Our first question today is from a working professional, and I'm gonna read it right here. They write. Hi Katie, thanks for answering this question. I've been listening to the show for a few months. Very helpful, thank you. You're welcome. Um, here's my question. Me and my team have been allowed to work nearly a hundred percent remote for the past.
Few years recently, our company made the announcement about 50% of employees will be required to come into the office four days a week. I'm one of that [00:02:00] 50%. Any tips for this transition? I worked hard to perfect my at-home working conditions, and my concern is I won't be able to recreate these conditions in the office.
Thanks so much. Looking forward to your advice.
All right, so you spent some time working from home and now you need to shift everything back in the office. What are some tips for working in the office when you are so used to working from home? Alright, well first thank you for your really lovely words about the show. It really makes me happy to hear that you are a return listener, that you've been enjoying the content.
I've said this before, but sometimes it feels like I'm talking to a vacuum. So that really means a lot and your situation is tough, but I've been hearing more and more from others that it's happening for them too. And you know, I just think with the pandemic shift to at home work, we kind of just got comfortable with that setup and I think for many jobs that still makes perfect sense and there's really no need to return to the office, but I am seeing companies now starting to make that shift back into the office, either full-time or part-time or [00:03:00] hybrid, and that's just kind of what we're facing now. You said four days a week you have to be in the office, so I'm assuming that there is one day that is still remote.
I don't know that for sure, but I'm going to answer this question as if that is the case that you have four in-office days and one at home day. Um, and I think that's important because that's gonna influence my answer. You said your concern is that you won't be able to recreate the at-home working conditions that you worked really hard to establish that you won't be able to recreate those in the office.
And I think the reality is that you won't. Home is not the office. There are luxuries and comforts and advantages to working at home that we just cannot recreate in a public space. I mean, there are disadvantages to working at home as well, but I think going into your new working set up with reasonable expectations that you're not gonna be able to just recreate what you had at home is important.
So first things first. If I'm assuming correctly that you're gonna have one day still remote, then I think you [00:04:00] need to be very, very strategic and intentional about how you use that remote office day. Like I would guard every single minute of that day like it's a mountain of gold, because time-wise it essentially is.
Now, I don't know what you do for work, but obviously it's something that you're able to do from home so you're not like construction or you know, boots on the ground kind of labor. So I'm assuming that there is some kind of knowledge work, maybe computer work, maybe something like that. And if there's any part of this knowledge work that you need total focus for, and you have perfected your way of doing it in your home setup, like you have a routine and a method and you've timed it so that you know no one interrupts you, maybe the kids are at school, roommates are a spouse or outta the house or whatever your situation is, then that's the kind of work I would say for that one day at home.
I have a previous q and a episode number 94 called Simplifying Task Management and Staying Focused despite Distractions at, like I said, that's another q and a. I'm gonna leave [00:05:00] that link below. I talk really deeply about some focus strategies in that one. Again, I'll leave that link below.
Now, I know it sounds like I'm saying well take, you know, five days of focus work that you would normally complete in five days at home and get it all done in one day. And obviously that's not possible, but you're gonna have to be ruthless with what you consider focus work, and you're gonna have to be ruthless with guarding your attention and minimizing your distractions, and truly maximizing your time at home.
No checking laundry. No, you know, extended lunch breaks, no email. You know, management, whenever you feel like it. That's the reality. So if your gut response, well, there's no way I can take, you know, five everything I did in those five days and make it happen on my one remote day. I know that's true. That is impossible.
But there's still probably some dialing in that you could do. I say do a task management or a time management in inventory to figure out like, okay, this is how I [00:06:00] typically spend Monday through Friday. And identify what are the tasks that non-negotiable you feel like you need to get done at home, that you need your perfectly created conditions to execute on.
And those are the tasks that you do on that one remote workday, and you design your remote workday in such a way that you can bang out those tasks the way that you need to get them done. And then for your in-office days, to be honest, there is gonna be a transition period here. It might not be ultra smooth, you know, from the get go.
You've been home for a few years, you said you've gotten accustomed to operating a certain way. It might take you a few weeks to figure out how that translates into your new office space. So I wouldn't necessarily go into this transition with a full written in stone plan. Because you might get to the office and say like, whoa, you know my plan actually makes no sense for how things operate at the office these days. Like my office is in the middle of some bullpen [00:07:00] space, or maybe there's open walls and you don't have the quiet that you were expecting behind a closed door. Maybe your company has some new meeting schedule that disrupts how you expected to spend your days.
Maybe you're gonna have an ultra chatty colleague who's just so happy to see you in real life after all these years, but they're obviously taxing some of your focus battery throughout the day. So there's things about returning to the office that are gonna be a bit more unpredictable that you can't plan for.
But with that said, let's zoom out a little bit and talk about what you can control. Okay. I think you have a great opportunity here to establish your personal operating system and communicate that to others freshly as you return to this office space. So maybe right out of the gate you have some kind of implied or directly stated, either way, focused time, or office hours. I'm using air quote around office hours if you're watching this on YouTube. But, um, that your colleagues will eventually [00:08:00] come to learn about you and they'll come to understand that this is how you operate. Obviously this won't apply to your bosses 'cause if they need to talk to you, they need to talk to you, right? Drop everything.
But maybe from the beginning, anytime a colleague wants to just stop by and chat, you say something like, Hey, I tend to lock in from nine to 11, but let's grab coffee at 11 or like, let's touch base at 11. And over time, this will become understood as the way that you operate. And you don't have to like explain yourself.
You don't even have to say, Hey, I, I tend, I'm trying this new strategy, I'm trying to focus. Just say, Hey, I tend to work on things. Um, I tend to need some focus from nine to 11, but let's touch base after. And they're gonna be like, okay, sounds good. Like, no, no one's gonna push back.
And if that exact scenario doesn't apply to your situation, okay, like maybe your hours aren't nine to five. So when I say walk in from nine to 11 and that doesn't apply, just adjust to whatever situation yours is. Whatever your particulars are. And same goes for anyone else listening. And then the last point I'm gonna make [00:09:00] here, before you transition back. I want you to observe yourself and your current at home conditions and do a little data collection.
I want you to start thinking about what it is about your perfectly created perfect working conditions that you've created at home that are gonna be non-negotiable for you. Because I said at the top of this, episode or top of my answer here, not everything is gonna translate to in-office time a hundred percent.
But if there's maybe one, maybe two non-negotiable components of your at-home setup that you can identify and then think about, well, what would this look like in the office? You might realize that just carrying those one or two components with you into the office might have a bigger payoff than you imagine.
So for example, let's say that over the next week or so you're in this data collection mode and you realize, you know what? Like it is the silence that's non-negotiable for me, and you're worried that going back to the office, you won't have [00:10:00] that silence. First things first. You are right. Offices are loud, but what can you do to bring some of that at home silence into your new place. Can you bring noise canceling headphones? Can you bring earplugs? They make some really discreet ones. I use a brand called Loop. I just get the cheapest tier. I think they have some expensive ones, but I get like the cheapest ones. I get 'em on Amazon. They work fantastic. When I need to focus at home and my family has different plans. Is it something maybe about the way that you've set up your desk or workspace at home?
Alright, well there, are there any elements of that workspace that you can bring to the office? Maybe your own keyboard, your own mouse, your desk pad accessories. I'm gonna like go on a limb here and be like, can you bring your own chair if that's what you really like. I've told this story before, I can't remember if it was on this show, but in my first corporate job outta college, I worked at a big tech company.
It was very cubicle style. I was in editorial for this tech company, but you know, very classic, [00:11:00] very open plan layout, very sterile, very glaring overhead lights kind of thing. And I actually brought in a desk. Lamp with a warmer bulb, like a light bulb to put on my desk. And at first, some of my colleagues were like, what the heck?
Like who is this girl on her second day of the job? Just like sauntering with a desk lamp under her arm. Right? And my colleagues were like, what is this? And this massive company, nobody had a desk lamp. And here I was just be like, do you like my light bulb? Right? But you know what, it was so calming.
I loved it. It made my workspace better, and honestly, it didn't take long at all before a couple of my colleagues in my row and then a couple rows over. Also brought in desk lamps. Hey, I never said I wasn't a trend setter. And then my final piece of advice, although I think I already said that the last one was my final piece of advice, but one more thing.
Routines and systems are so important. Whether [00:12:00] you're working from home or in the office or some hybrid situation, routines are essential. So I know I opened my answer with the reminder that you won't be able to translate your home conditions perfectly to your work conditions at the office. But you know, you might find that you're able to create some kind of routine at the office that really does work for you.
Change isn't always a bad thing, and sometimes we are far more adaptable than we think we are. But in order for you to have the opportunity to benefit from some change that works in your favor, you are gonna probably have to put in a little bit of thought around your new routines. And maybe it's not a fully structured, you know, nine to five routine for every minute of your day, but maybe you create like a morning routine before you leave the office, that excites you and motivates you for the day before you even leave the house. Maybe it's a routine for right when you arrive at the office and like that first 45 minutes of your day and how you're spending time in that, in that pocket.
Maybe you develop a lunchtime routine where you get out and you walk [00:13:00] outside for a bit. Maybe it's routine where like I kind of suggested you have some sort of obvious focus time every day. I don't know, again, from nine to 11 or from one to three, whatever it is. And you either formally or informally open yourself up to some kind of office hours after that where you can connect with your colleagues and have these conversations that they want to have earlier.
Maybe that's from 11 to 1145 each day. Maybe that's in the afternoon after lunch. Maybe you're building in an admin block. I have a podcast episode all about how to build an admin block into your, into your day. I can't remember the episode number off the top of my head, but I'll leave that link below.
But I think if you can create some kind of routine around your office workday, either before work, in the morning when you arrive, maybe around lunchtime, maybe a shutdown routine where you feel really good about inventorying your remaining tasks for the day, writing down the status of things so you feel good leaving the office and like you can finally shut down when you get home. I think that'll make your transition back to the office, feel more, [00:14:00] more controlled, and that can lead to some kind of peace that you likely felt when you were at home.
All right. I hope that gave you some food for thought as you transition to this new phase of your work. It might be tough in the beginning, but who knows? Something really cool could come out of this transition for you. Okay.
We are going to move to our second question. It sounds like it was submitted by a student who is a learning thing, which is exactly what I am always encouraging on this show.
Let me read their question. They write.
Katie. I'm working on a study method for myself that involves colored note cards, not color coding. I use randomly colored note cards because I believe that the color of the card serves as a cue for recall. Do you see any advantage to using colored note cards for studying?
Super great question. And the part that excites me the most about this question is that the listener opened it by saying, I'm working on creating a study method for myself. And that right there is just like everything. And to anyone who's listening to this show, if there's something you're gonna take away from today's episode, please [00:15:00] let it be that I'm encouraging every single one of you to do some kind of experimenting with yourself.
I am always saying that you have to be the scientist and the experiment, because I can give you all of the tips and the strategies and the methods and the world. But if you don't ever put them into practice and assess whether they're working and where you might be able to tweak them. You're just gonna stay stuck where you are.
So I just wanted to say that I think it is so incredible that this listener is working on creating a study method for themselves. That is awesome. Onto your specific question about colored note cards, I think that is an absolutely awesome thing to experiment with. There is definitely research behind color associations and color theory.
That is not woo woo stuff. And if you're working on creating a study system where you're using certain colored note cards for certain kinds of material, maybe I'm making this up because like it wasn't stated in your question, but maybe you're using green note cards for some kind of material or yellow for vocab or maybe blue note cards for processes.
You know what I mean? But you're indicating in some way that this [00:16:00] color is for this kind of material. Then I think that could have a cognitive benefit for you. Now, you just have to be careful in your question. You said randomly colored note cards. I'm assuming that you're. Initially assigning the color to a type of content randomly, that's fine.
Like you don't have to use, you know, green for anything that's like biologically related. You know what I mean? But, so you can assign. Random colors to random kinds of content, but then you're gonna wanna stick to that color for that kind of content going forward. And I'll, I'll touch on that in a bit. But one thing I also wanna flag here though is a potential pitfall and that is overcomplicating this.
'Cause I do see this happen sometimes, especially with students who are motivated and really trying to do things the right way. I'm air quoting if you're not watching on YouTube. If you end up with so many different colors and you need some kind of legend to remember what each color means, or you're constantly stopping to think, wait, like what category is pink, then the system may start working against you. So I would say fewer colors tend to work better than [00:17:00] more. You want the colors to feel intuitive and obvious, not like some other thing that you have to remember or manage. The goal is for the color to support the learning, not add an additional cognitive load to it.
And that brings me to another important clarification that I wanna make, because this comes up a lot too with study strategies like this. The color coding, well, I know you're not calling it color coding, but using colored note cards. Okay. That in itself is not the strategy. It is a structure that supports a strategy.
So if you're just writing things on different colored note cards, and just rereading them, the colors alone aren't gonna help you learn. The learning is coming from what you are doing with those cards. Testing yourself, trying to actively recall the information that is on those cards, making decisions about what you know versus what you don't know.
The colors are there to help you organize and cue your brain and to tap into some of that sort of color theory. But they're not a study method in themselves. They're not replacing [00:18:00] active recall study methods. And I think that this is a really important distinction to make because sometimes students will say, well, I tried flashcards, or I tried color coding and it didn't work.
And then when we unpack that, it turns out that the issue, it wasn't the structure, it wasn't the color coding. It wasn't that. It's just there wasn't really a strategy, an active recall strategy layered on top of that. So as long as you're using these color coded cards in a way that's actually requiring effortful active recall and thinking and testing yourself, then the colors absolutely can be a helpful support, but they're not magic on their own.
Okay. Another thing, I want you to consider this as an experiment. Let's have you try the multicolored index card method for a while before you make a judgment call about whether or not it works. Now, typically when I'm recommending people experiment with systems and strategies, I say a good two to three weeks.
But in your case, I think it would be more a matter of how many tests you're preparing for or something like that. Assuming [00:19:00] that you're studying material on these flashcard to be tested on it at some point. And if you're a student taking assessments, then that data would come in the form of a test grade.
Remember, this is an experiment, so there has to be some kind of way for you to collect data to assess whether or not it's working, and if so, you would keep going, and if not, you would tweak it. Okay. Does that make sense? So like give it two to three weeks of trying it and see how you do on the tests. And if you're like, well, it made it more enjoyable and I did better, well then that's your data.
But the reason why I'm actually really enthusiastic about this approach is, first of all, of course there's some science behind color theory and associations. And not even just colors, but any kind of sensory input. Certain smells can evoke memories from our past. Songs can trigger a memory, you know, at the drop of a hat.
And colors have the potential power to do that as well, as long as you're consistent with the colors that you use. This was my little caveat in the beginning where I was like, I know you used the word [00:20:00] random in your question, and you can pick the colors randomly, but then you need to be consistent. You have to have that consistency so that you strengthen the association between that color, even if you randomly picked it and the material connected with it.
But the other reason why I'm enthusiastic about this approach is that it can be fun and it sounds novel. And whenever we're doing something that has the potential to be tedious or challenging, like learning new material, if we can add an element of novelty or excitement excitement to the strategies we're using, we increase our chances of sticking with the strategy and it is sticking with the strategy that's going to yield you the most success.
Now, if at some point the novelty of the strategy wears off, you can still change it up and insert novelty in another way, but don't change the colors because that is something that, again, you need to keep steady for a significant period of time in order to increase or strengthen the association between the color and the kind of material you're learning.
So there's other [00:21:00] ways that you can add novelty, maybe where you're doing your study sessions, how you test yourself using the note cards, what kind of pen you're using to write on the note cards, things like that. I teach something called the Tthree Pile Method Inside SchoolHabits University, as well as a few other study methods in there about how to use note cards. All of those can be really good options as long as you keep the colors steady. But I think it's great. And again, I wanna extract a key idea from this question that I want all my listeners to hear, and it's that you are experimenting with creating a study method for yourself.
And that is what I want everybody listening or watching to take away today, that that's what it often takes. Even for students inside my programs, I'm teaching very specific study methods that are based in cognitive science and that do work. But I am always saying in there, but you could try this, you could tweak it this way. Maybe experiment with this. Maybe, you know, make that adjustment there, right? That's what it takes to be a lifelong learner and I love that you're open to that.
[00:22:00] Alright, my friends, I know this is a shorter episode than usual, but I'm trying to be concise with my answers here. I do have a tendency to ramble 'cause I just wanna download everything I know.
But anyways. That wraps up today's episode. Remember, all of the links that I mentioned today can be found in the description box if you're watching this on YouTube. If you're over there, definitely give it a subscribe or you can head to learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/112. All of the links and a transcript will be there as well.
Thank you for your time. Keep showing up. Keep doing the hard work, keep asking the hard questions, and never stop learning.
