Organizing My Time

October 9, 2013

This week I started these things called coaching sessions with Ingrid. These sessions are meant to improve my organizing skills and to help me balance my MPC tasks and activities with those outside of the MPC. At the beginning I was a bit reluctant to do this with Ingrid and I honestly thought it was a waste of time, but now I really learned so much from this.

The reason why I thought that I didn’t need this is because I consider that I organize my time quite well, and even though I use most of my time to do MPC work, I always have a little bit of time to do other things. But after the meeting I realized that in that free time I have I rarely do other projects that I want to do, I really just waste my time.

Every Thursday I wouldn’t leave the MPC without making my schedule for the week. I use Thursday as my starting day instead of Monday because over the weekend I read all the things that are due for the next week. So, every Thursday I divide up my readings and other homework over the weekend and the next week, that way I don’t have to read too much on one day, always leaving Sunday without any homework (because its football SundayJ).

 Well this hasn’t changed after my meeting with Ingrid, she thought it was a great way of spreading out my work and getting things done on time. What changed was that into my weekly schedule I added all of my extra activities, that way I can make sure that I get it done. Ingrid taught me that even those small little things like watching a movie with my mom, watching games or going to the gym should also go into my schedule. She also told me that I should try to prioritize all of my projects and activities. With her we make a list of all of the things that I wanted to take up in my extra time, and this is what the list looks like:

• ·        I want to learn how to cook. I’m going to do this once a week.
• ·        I am going to do at least one arts and crafts project every week.
• ·        Watch 2 football games on Sunday and one on Thursday with my dad.
• ·        Go to the gym 3 times a week and do crossfit twice a week.
• ·        Retake painting, and make an estimate for when the painting should be done.
• ·        Practice my French.
• ·        Retake archery.
• ·        Have time for metacognition.

In order to make sure that I do all of these things and to check my improvement, I created a sort of checklist, which I have to show to Ingrid on Thursdays. Depending on the day, I wrote down the activities that I had (for example reading 12 pages of human action) and next to it a space in which I could check off the ones I did.

This is the first week that I am going to try to work out this way of organizing my schedule, so it is still a work in process. But I really think that this will help me make all of those things that it seems I don’t have time for. And the best thing that about these meetings with Ingrid is that they are in French, so I guess I can already check off one of those things on my list.