FINANCIAL: Scott Prath, M.A., CCC-SLP is an employee of Bilinguistics and receives a salary. Bilinguistics receives royalty payments for online courses.
NON-FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE: Scott Prath does not have any non-financial relationships to disclose.

The majority of continuing education hours that speech language pathologists receive relate to job specifics such as treatment and evaluation. This makes complete sense from a professional point of view. As a percentage of time however, there are a large number of hours that are applied to non-speech pathology tasks. These include paperwork, report writing, professional interactions, and collaborations. Not only that, but the administrative portion has been increasing over time. This course discusses the factors that have been changing our scope of work and then shares research and strategies to structure our paperwork, report writing, and collaboration time.

Suggestions won’t be unfamiliar to speech language pathologists because the same strategies used to help children with executive function deficits can be modified to improve professional experiences. Executive functions are a collection of higher-cognitive skills that emerge from the interaction between prefrontal regions of the frontal lobe of the brain.

This executive system in the brain handles new and unfamiliar tasks. Unfamiliar tasks require many areas and abilities of the brain to all fire simultaneously.
These tasks can include: planning or decision making, error correction or troubleshooting, situations where responses are not well-rehearsed, unfamiliar sequences of actions, and assessing dangerous or difficult situations. Once the tasks become automatic, the process is moved to other parts of the brain that handle familiar routines and less brain energy is needed to complete the task.

The course concludes with research from high-stakes professions where productivity without overwhelm has been achieved successfully. We explore three models:

Getting Things Done (GTD) – David Allen
GTD is a method for organizing your to-dos, priorities, and your schedule in a way that makes them all manageable. One of GTD’s biggest benefits is that it makes it easy to identify what is most pressing and determine what to focus on next. It also has a strong emphasis on clearing our minds of any mental distractions that keep us from working efficiently.

Essentialism – Greg McKeown
Essentialism provides strategies for dealing with the stress of overwhelm and identifying how to use our extremely limited free time. A strength of Essentialism is the 90-10 model for making decisions that provides a criterion for identifying what is truly important.

The One Thing – Gary Keller

The core concept of The One Thing is identifying what a professional should be focusing on so that other things become easier or no longer need to be completed. In a time when greater demands are being made of our time, eliminating activities that are not required becomes critical.

Participants will:

Discuss methods to organize and schedule multistep repeated processes such as conducting evaluations
Summarize how cognitive load can negatively impact memory, self-regulation, and academic performance
List six strategies to improve student attention, recall, memory recall, emotional self-regulation, time management, and focus
Contrast motivation and self-determination to explain how they influence outcomes in an academic setting
Summarize how environmental factors such as inadequate nutrients, toxins, and deprived sensory, social, and emotional stimulation negatively impact the use of executive functions
Time-Ordered Agenda
05 minutes: Introduction to the topic
05 minutes: Identifying Executive Function Difficulties
15 minutes: Considering the Importance of Motivation and Personal Interest on Executive Function
10 minutes: The Relationship between Executive Function and Internal Command Pathway
15 minutes: Addressing executive function deficits with difficulties of motivation
10 minutes: Strategies to Increase Motivation and Determination
15 minutes: Profile of research on productivity from three business professionals.
15 minutes: Moderated Question and Answer session
05 minutes: Concluding remarks and summary