Ready to carve out intentional space for deep, focused work?
Try out a Virtual Research Cave (ViRC)!
ViRCs are dedicated work sessions, held approximately once a month on Zoom for Pratt faculty and staff. At the start of each three-hour deep-work block, participants briefly share their goals and name the distractions they plan to set aside. Then cameras go off, focus sharpens, and meaningful progress happens. Midway through the session, the CTL facilitators invite everyone back for a short stretch or playful reset before returning to another concentrated work sprint.
Analogue Studio VIRC – September 3rd from 9am-12pm, RVSP here
Step into an Analogue Studio for this semester’s first CTL Virtual Research Cave. This three-hour, lightly structured work session is designed to help you focus, make progress on your writing or research project, and reconnect with slower, more tactile modes of thinking. This Cave session is inspired by pre-digital creative practices: we invite you to work as if the internet didn’t exist: drafting, sketching, revising, and building momentum without such distractions. As always, we’ll begin with a brief check-in and intention setting, followed by three timed work sprints, with short, playful analogue-inspired activities in between to reset your attention. Whether you’re writing, reading, designing, or preparing a course, this is a space to get something meaningful done, one focused interval at a time.
Pomodoro + Peer Review – October 7th, 9am-12pm RSVP here
Join us for a VIRC that’s made up of smaller sprints to get some task, like drafting or peer review, off your plate! This will depart from our usual long-to shorter dwindling sprints, and instead will focus on more but shorter sprints of work that have a small goal to be accomplished. Especially geared toward anyone participating in this semester’s Supportive Peer Review Groups or iteratio issue 7, we’ll aim to structure the sprints to the giving or digesting of feedback and creating (maybe even executing?!) a small list of second-draft objectives.
We’ll spend some time at the top of our session, as always, with a brief check-in and intention setting for each of the sprints, and the factor in some playful activities and bio-breaks in between to reset your attention.
Return of the Living Draft -November 4, 2pm–5pm—RSVP here
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the CTL….
This event is a sequel to Dread Reckoning: Fall Forum Reanimated (October 26–October 30). What’s more emblematic of the horror genre than a rapidly produced sequel?
Join us for a Virtual Research Cave in which we will focus on the work that we are dreading: the idea we are stuck on, the work we’ve been avoiding, the tab/document that we keep closing. Bring a project that haunts you (an abandoned article or creative project, a course or assignment redesign you keep circling, a draft you’re afraid to review). We will exhume our projects, confront our ghosts/monsters, and, ultimately, decide whether to resurrect them or to lay them to rest.
Frequent attendees of ViRCs say…
As a regular attendee of the ViRCs I can attest to their value as focused work opportunities. The format, brief introductions and short breaks interwoven with intense work sessions is ideal. I always get more done in a ViRC than I ever manage when left to my own devices of time management. Highly recommend them!
The Virtual research Cave allows for focused commitment to projects that are otherwise easily derailed by distractions. Its strength lies in its collective intent to fully focus during three work sprints and to regenerate during two short breaks.
The virtual caves are a gift; they are both freeing and disciplining in all the right ways. They offer an opportunity to focus on the projects or work that often fall to the bottom of the list as they either seem less “urgent” or demand more focus and to do this work with a deep breath and with the support – and joy – of community.
The sessions worked for me, here’s why. The online environment created by CTL is above all inclusive, all voices are welcomed into the cave’s virtual space. A scheduled time helps build a healthy routine practice. Individual ideas and projects benefit from such a proposition. Opportunities present themselves when participants take their time to focus on one aspect over multiple aspects of a proposition, and particularly in the breakaway room’s challenging, sometimes provocative discourse that punctuates the solitary periods. The cave offers a unique opportunity to gain clarification eg in a premise’s intentionality or re which direction to take etc.
