Category: Productivity
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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 find the time to take it!”
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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.
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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.
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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 particular, I’ve noticed there’s a tendency to see the app itself as the system. I’ve even contributed to this myself in my posts about digital tools, with post titles like Using Trello for Home Management, or Trello for Travel. These titles make it sound like Trello is the key to managing these areas, but in fact Trello (or any digital app) is just a tool for making a particular system work in this area.
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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 I decided to switch and how it’s been going.
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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 of the course, and why I decided to develop it.
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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.
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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! So, I thought I’d reflect on strategies I use to make this mundane tasks interesting, or at the very least less painful.
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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. I have three basic types of planning: projects, action, and future. Each type has its own set of tools and review timeline.
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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 post of 2020 to this future planning section! Although I mentioned it in my home management post, I use the same system in the Trello boards for other areas of my life, such as work or dance, so it should be widely applicable.