Tag: planning
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Summer Planning: Yes, really, even this summer
Needless to say, this summer looks very different than other summers. Our STARTALK program is postponed to 2021. One conference was canceled, and another has gone virtual. All the dancing events are canceled. I was on the planning committee for the U.S. Championships that were going to be in Denver this Summer, so this is…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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Spring 2019 by the numbers
For several years now, I have tracked how much time I spend on particular work tasks, as part of an attempt to make sure I’m properly balancing the various components of my job (research, teaching, service/admin). I track this in a google spreadsheet by month (pictured below for May), and update it each week (from…
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End of Semester Review
As I’ve mentioned before, my larger scale unit of planning is the semester, and I’ve discussed how I make my semester plan for Fall and Spring. At the end of each semester, before making the plan, I also conduct an end of semester review, looking at what went well and what didn’t, and what I…