Tag: organizing

  • 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…

  • Using Trello for Home Management

    Using Trello for Home Management

    Although I’ve written before about how I use Trello to manage my academic work, travel, large events and projects, and teaching, I realized I’ve never written about using Trello for home management, even though this is arguably the most complex area of my life in terms of managing projects and tasks. So, in this post…

  • Trello Templates for Repetitive or Recurring Tasks

    Trello Templates for Repetitive or Recurring Tasks

    I am a longtime fan of checklists, especially for repetitive types of things like packing, teaching prep, weekly planning, etc. Recently, Trello added template cards, which as the name suggests allow you to create new cards from a template, rather than a blank card. Trello cards also allow you to add checklists, which means that…

  • Spring 2020 Semester Plan

    Spring 2020 Semester Plan

    Every semester, I make a plan using my semester planning sheet. In previous posts I’ve discussed my semester planning routine, and you can also read about my Fall 2019 plan. In this post, I’m sharing my 2020 semester plan, which looks a little different than most because I am on sabbatical this semester, which means…

  • Fall 2019 Review

    Fall 2019 Review

    Happy 2020! Given the number of decade in review posts I’ve seen around, perhaps I should be doing that instead. As it happens, however, this was quite an eventful decade for me, and every time I think about reviewing it, I just want to go to sleep instead. So, I’ll stick with Fall 2019, which…

  • Unexpected Benefits of Planning: Knowing when NOT to do things

    Unexpected Benefits of Planning: Knowing when NOT to do things

    While attending the recent conference of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, I had the opportunity to catch up with a friend I used to work with at the Middlebury Arabic Summer School. In the intervening ten or so years since we worked together, we’ve both had two kids, completed grad school,…

  • Trello for Travel

    Trello for Travel

    As a general rule, I enjoy traveling, and obviously I chose to make the majority of these trips. However, I’m less thrilled about the logistics of traveling, such as packing, purchasing flights/hotels, arranging entertainment, etc. These have gotten even less thrilling as I have to pack and make arrangements for more people and spend time…

  • Weekly Planning Routine

    Weekly Planning Routine

    If I had to choose one piece of productivity advice, it would probably be weekly planning! I talked about weekly planning and daily adjustments almost a year ago, but I’ve had some questions recently from friends about how I actually do my weekly planning process, so I thought I’d share it here. 

  • Back to School Preparations

    Back to School Preparations

    So, back to school . . . This has always been one of my favorite times of year, so probably not that surprising that I ended up as an academic :-).  Since the public schools in Albuquerque start August 12, and my university classes start August 19, I basically consider the beginning of August the…