July 2026: Physician, Heal Thyself

Organizing, Focusing, and Removing Distractions at Work

For the eLearning Designer's Academy July 2026 Challenge the prompt was to build an experience using Mighty, the Rise add-on from the eLearning innovators at Maestro, and in particular its Studio feature, which lets designers use LLM chatbots to create and share custom interactive components to use in Rise.

As it happened, I had an Articulate 360 trial ending on the 12th of the month, so I had to get cracking. And, well, that was easier said than done. A couple of false starts I wasn't happy with, various life things, and three and a half days of power loss (after a storm knocked down half a tree in the backyard, taking out the power lines with it) all conspired to make me no closer on the 10th than I was on the 1st.

So naturally, I applied my frustration with my own procrastination and indecisiveness and made a course about organizing your to-dos, maintaining focus, and removing distractions. I used Mighty Studio to build interactive components to demonstrate various sticky-note techniques, the Pomodoro focus method, and simulating removing the distracting apps and notifications from your desktop. I also used the regular pre-built Mighty transitions to make course more colorful without the typical Rise blockiness.

Working with Mighty Studio was a lot of fun, and while I don't entirely follow the ins and outs of MCP (Model Context Protocol), they do seem to have done a good job of helping your favorite LLM understand how to build an interactive widget that fits nicely into Rise. I'd already been working with Claude Code and Design so it was a familiar process. (It does eat a lot of tokens though — I'm not sure whether that's the MCP or me.)

Try it out!