Transcript: Kai Kelley, Jr.: In conversation with an academic advisor from the Academic Resource Center, we'll discuss the importance of establishing balance through time management and goal setting to essentially ensure that your break remains of time to decompress, relax, and unwind. This is Making The Most Of Break. Thank you listeners for joining us. My name is Kai Kelly Jr. and I'm a career advisor in the Duke University Career Center, for the Discovery & Exploration Career Community and I'm super excited to be speaking with Dr. Darla Swann, who's a staff psychologist and learning consultant in the Academic Resource Center. Thank you for joining us, Darla. Darla Swann, Ph.D.: Thank you so much for having me, Kai. Kai Kelley, Jr.: Awesome. So in our conversation before, we talked about the purpose of us actually doing this podcast episode and partnering with the Academic Resource Center was to foster some sort of conversation about how students can create the most impact during an academic break, essentially in exploring their major and also a potential industry or career field of interest. So, we also wanted to hear from you to get your take on a couple of concepts, like professional goal setting, time management and prioritization and balance as well, too, and how that plays a role in essentially thinking through those types of tasks and doing them successfully over break. So, with your insight, would you mind sharing your experience with advising Duke students, whether they be first years, all the way up to seniors, about what the benefits of learning how to effectively set goals is and how that's really beneficial for them? Darla Swann, Ph.D.: Yes, absolutely. There are a lot of benefits to goal setting and many of us do set goals naturally in our minds' eye. We don't necessarily think that we're setting goals, but very often we have long term and intermediate term goals that we're working on, for example, graduating with a Duke degree. But one of the things that typically human beings overlook is the more immediate and short-term goal setting. The reason why that's so important is because when we set specific goals for ourselves on a daily and weekly and monthly basis, it helps us clarify what is meaningful to us, what our priorities are. It helps us to get some clarity around our decision making in terms of how we want to use our time and structure our time, both productive time, as well as free time or relaxation and down time. It can help us stay motivated with something that we're moving towards. I also think that when we set goals and then we achieve them, there's a lot of personal satisfaction that goes in with that and that that cycle of getting satisfaction from a goal that's been achieved can keep us motivated. So, there's a lot of research just in general in the human productivity literature, as well as mental health and psychological literature that talks about the importance of goal setting specifically for productivity, both personally as well as professionally for people. So, it is something that works really well in terms of keeping people focused and clear on what's important to them. Kai Kelley, Jr.: Exactly. I agree, especially with what you said about setting goals makes us feel like we've accomplished something. It makes us feel good about ourselves. So when thinking about prioritizing those things and how to do that, what does an essentially achievable or substantial goal look like for a student when they're thinking through that process? Darla Swann, Ph.D.: Well, one of the ways that we can help ourselves to meet goals is actually to make them what we call SMART goals and SMART is actually an acronym and it's nice and easy to remember. So, what you want to think about is these letters. So the S in SMART stands for specific. So our goals need to be specific, we need to think through the who, what, when, where, and how of those goals and how those are going to be accomplished. One of the p
