How to help university students to manage their interruptions and improve their attention and time management

TL;DR

This paper presents a workshop designed to help university students, especially in computer science, manage interruptions and improve attention and time management, with positive evaluation results encouraging wider adoption.

Contribution

It introduces a novel workshop approach for teaching interruption management and evaluates its effectiveness among students.

Findings

Participants showed improved attention and time management skills.

The workshop had a positive impact on students' ability to handle interruptions.

Results suggest the approach is effective and can be adopted by other universities.

Abstract

Technology has changed both our way of life and the way in which we learn. Students now attend lectures with laptops and mobile phones, and this situation is accentuated in the case of students on Computer Science degrees, since they require their computers in order to participate in both theoretical and practical lessons. Problems, however, arise when the students' social networks are opened on their computers and they receive notifications that interrupt their work. We set up a workshop regarding time, thoughts and attention management with the objective of teaching our students techniques that would allow them to manage interruptions, concentrate better and definitively make better use of their time. Those who took part in the workshop were then evaluated to discover its effects. The results obtained are quite optimistic and are described in this paper with the objective of encouraging other universities to perform similar initiatives.