Image by flickr user kowitz.
(CC-licensed)
I think a fair number of people have a calendar similar to mine: the academic year starts next Monday, and classes start the following Monday. That means your schedule is starting to fill with requests for meetings and appointments of various kinds, some missable, some not. (I’m not even the only person in charge of my calendar, which amazes me to no end.)
It’s important to defend your calendar to at least some extent, by blocking off time to write, to be in the lab, to grade–all the various things you need to do that aren’t captured by class time and office hours. Another thing that you should think about doing is going to your calendar RIGHT NOW and scheduling in time for your weekly review. In the Getting Things Done mythology methodology, the weekly review is the time you set aside during the week to make sure you’re not just getting anything done, you’re getting the right things done. It’s the time when you think about what’s bothering you, where your time’s going, what priorities need to change to reflect new facts, and so forth. Last week, the Getting Things Done team did a special event on Twitter in which they walked through a weekly review session. You can see the tweets here, and the webpage looking back at the event here.
Marking time off each week to check what you are doing against what you should be doing is a minor change in your schedule that can reap significant results during the semester, when things start to get a little out of control. And if it’s already on your calendar, then you’ll be less tempted to skip the review later on!
Bonus: I always link to the photo page when I use creative commons-licensed material from Flickr, but this time you really should click the link: kowitz’s point about “defragging” his calendar–grouping similar tasks–is v. helpful. Merlin Mann has talked about this as “ganging” (example 1, example 2) and it’s a powerful way of thinking about incoming tasks.
One Comment
I’ve been a big using of Google Calendar for a long time. All through graduate school I blocked off my time to some extremes in order to stay on task and actually get what I need to do done. Now that I am teaching I have begun to block off my teaching times, what I will do between classes, and what I will do when I get home. I highly recommend using GCal to do this.
3 Trackbacks
[...] responsibilities that aren’t work-related. Fortunately, the same technique Jason describes in an earlier post can be used to protect the time you need for writing, lab work, grading and other work tasks can [...]
[...] need to do to to keep up with your regularly repeating tasks. It’s also a good idea to do a weekly review of all of your tasks and survey the weeks ahead in your schedule to make sure you’re doing [...]
[...] format of calendar + post-it note requires her to review her calendar. Late Sunday or early Monday, she sweeps through her calendar and e-mail for [...]