Category: Productivity

  • What if I’m not organized enough for the Organize Your Language Teacher Life course?

    What if I’m not organized enough for the Organize Your Language Teacher Life course?

    For today’s blog post, as the end of the Fall enrollment for my Organize Your Language Teacher Life course approaches, I thought I’d address a response I hear over and over from language teachers about this course: “It seems like exactly what I need, but I don’t know how I will get organized enough to…

  • Systems for setting up a Language Learning Center

    Systems for setting up a Language Learning Center

    As most of my energy the last two months has been consumed in taking over as Interim Director of our Language Learning Center, I thought I’d take this blog post to describe what that experience has been like, and the systems I’ve been using to stay on top of a lot of new information.

  • Summer Blog and Podcast Recommendations

    Summer Blog and Podcast Recommendations

    I traditionally take the summer off of blogging, so this is my last post until August! So, I thought I’d provide a roundup of some of my favorite blogs and podcasts for you to consume, as if you enjoy my blog you will probably enjoy some of these as well.

  • Systems versus Tools

    Systems versus Tools

    Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between systems and tools. This is partially because of the Organize Your Language Teacher Life course I’ve been working on, as well as my own recent decision to make a major switch to the digital tools that support my own planning system. With digital tools in…

  • Experiments with Notion

    Experiments with Notion

    As blog readers know, I have been using the program Trello to organize projects in all of the various areas of my life, including my home, my work, travel, events, teaching, and more! However, I recently switched over to using another program, Notion, for a similar purpose, and so I thought I’d share here why…

  • Organize Your Language Teacher Life!

    Organize Your Language Teacher Life!

    I’ve been having a lot of fun over the past month or so designing an online course called Organize Your Language Teacher Life that brings together two of my favorite things, language teaching and organizing! The course is set to launch on May 24, and so in this post I thought I’d give a preview…

  • Weekend Planning

    Weekend Planning

    While I’ve discussed weekly planning several times on this blog, it occurred to me recently that I’ve never discussed weekend planning, even though this is a fairly large component of my planning system! So, I thought I’d delve more into this process in this post.

  • Strategies to make mundane tasks more interesting and less painful

    Strategies to make mundane tasks more interesting and less painful

    I’ve had a few conversations recently about the annoyance of mundane tasks and chores, such as laundry and email. While none of these activities would make a list of things I’d do for fun, I realized that I’m less annoyed by them than the people was I was talking to, or even my past self!…

  • 2021 Planning Setup

    2021 Planning Setup

    Happy New Year! While 2021 has certainly started eventfully in the US with successful Senate runoffs, a White supremacist coup attempt, and ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, little has changed in my day to day life (well, except increased news consumption). In this post, I thought I’d give an overview of my current planning setup for 2021.…

  • Using Trello for Future Plans and Project Limits

    Using Trello for Future Plans and Project Limits

    In my post on using Trello for Home Management, I mentioned I had a future section of my Trello board that was likely deserving of its own post. Since 2020 is drawing to a close, and December is when I start thinking about plans for the upcoming year, I thought I would dedicate this last…