Bricolage

A classmate posted to our internal Ning asking where did April go?

We have been engaged in an on-line distance learning class and she has had difficulty finding the time to do all of the things that such a class demands.

It raised for me one of the three keys to successful blogging - time, ideas and enthusiasm.

It is easy for enthusiasm to wane, but I suspect that if we start out with a genuine interest in our subject area it is often time and ideas that contribute to the loss of enthusiasm.

I intend to do a follow up post on sources for ideas, but the issue of time is one I have been looking at for a number of years.

My Time Management philosophy is based on five habits:

• Work out what matters
• Decide to decide
• Get Organised
• Share the load
• Then deal with disruptions.

1. Work out what matters.

I spent yesterday morning at my nine year old son’s soccer game and went to the park with him and two of his mates for a couple of hours in the afternoon.

This morning I went to my 14 year old daughter’s T-ball game.

Last night I watched Doc Martin on TV with my wife and the two kids. (I haven’t managed to see any of Neighbours, the Biggest Loser or Big Brother - not just this week, but ever.)

Nothing takes precedence over those.

I am working on a project for a client as my full-time (though at home) job. I spend about 50 hours a week on it.  I do have the advantage of being able to access the ning and edublogs while I am working, but that time is not counted in the fifty hours per week.

To reduce distractions I have turned off any indicators of e-mail arriving. I check my email and at the same time the ning about once an hour. When I reach an end point on my work writing tasks.

2. Decide to Decide 

If I see something that I can react to, like the classmate’s question, I make a decision on whether to respond or not. when I make the decision I act on it there and then.

That action may consist of writing the reply, as happened in this case, or making a note on my tasks list in Outlook.

A decision not to act means not doing either of the above.

3. Get Organised.

When the lecturer posted details of an article to be read as part of the course we are doing, I ran the article through an OCR program so that it was in Word format. I use the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer. It is automatically installed as a printer if you have Office on your machine. I did that immediately and added the article to my Outlook tasks.

When I decided it was uni time (priority number 3 for me) I started to read it in Word and pasted some extracts into a new Word document. When I struck “reification” I looked it up in an on-line dictionary and pasted that there too.

That one word led to a blog post, a response to someone else’s blog post and a paragraph in my assignment. All three differ, but contain the same basic thought.

When we received advice of the location of our wiki, I logged in, posted the assignment question, extracted the three or four key statements and set up a page for each.

I ran through the Ning and cut and pasted the discussion that led to the formation of our group. It probably looks like a lot of work, but as far as the wiki is concerned, it took about 20 minutes of my daily allocation of 1 hour to uni.

The one hour a day incidentally is made up of a calculation of the amount of time I would spend in a  face to face class plus travel to and from, doubled as I would still need to read and write, then rounded down.

I am about to paste this response into a database, which I go to when I want to write an article (I write about five a year for various publications) or give a speech (Toastmasters membership is my number 4 priority) or use it in a training session.

So this response will probably get at least three outings with minimal editing. This is the second, with only minor changes from the original response on the ning.

4. Share the load

The next habit in my time management philosophy is share the load - I have picked up ideas from class-mates Prue, Lorraine, Debra, Nicole and Michelle for blog posts and quoted Mal and Concetta in an assignment.  

They found interesting articles or made interesting blog posts and I built off them.

5. Then deal with disruptions

If you can get into the first four habits the number of disruptions will be much less. What to do about a disruption is a decision, based on “Does It Matter?” How can I use my organised activities and tools to deal with it?  Who else is involved? What are they doing about it? No point in two of us doing the same thing!

I still run out of time to do things that I might find attractive, but none that really matter!