Tag: Notion
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Using Notion to Organize Travel
Two years ago, I wrote a post about organizing travel with Trello, and shortly thereafter, the world shut down. As I traveled the last two weekends for dance competitions, and am headed two my first in person conferences since 2020 the next two weekends, I thought this was an appropriate time to revisit travel planning! After switching to Notion I’ve been using that to organize travel, but the process is essentially the same.
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Organizing Teaching with Notion
A few years ago I wrote a post on Using Trello to Organize Teaching. Since then, I’ve moved on to using Notion as my digital organization system, and so I thought it was time for an update on how I’m using that to organize my class teaching. Notably, you’ll see that while the app has changed, the system has remained the same.
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2022 Planning Setup
2022 has started off on a challenging note for me in terms of pandemic childcare issues. As I pulled up to drop off my daughter the first day of school, we learned the school had to unexpectedly close for the day due to a staff shortage. She got to go back the next day, but the one after that my son’s daycare class closed for COVID exposure, and he is home for two weeks, not-so-nicely overlapping with the start of my semester. All of this, and we’re still a couple weeks out from the Omicron surge in my state.
Despite these challenges, I am enjoying one of my favorite parts of the New Year, setting up my new planners! While my basic system remains the same as last year, I’ve changed several of my tools, so I thought I’d give an update on that.
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Taking the stressful edge off of November
After 22 years as a student or professor on semester systems where fall semester runs mid August to mid December, I feel pretty confident saying that November is the most stressful month in this semester, and possibly the entire academic year (April, the spring parallel month, is also a contender). Early in my career as a professor, I remember fantasizing about November/April overnight camps for academic children, where I could send my children just for these months, to make them a little less overwhelming. While the reality is that I would probably miss my kids too much to actually do this even if it existed, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to make these months more manageable, and I wanted to share these thoughts in this post. Some of these items are easy to implement on an individual level, whereas others require long-term structural change. For me, it’s important to take this whole range into consideration, so I can get some immediate relief while also advocating for structural changes.
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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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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.