All entries for Thursday 17 March 2005

My Time Management

Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/cll/skills/personalacaddevelopment/timemanagement/

How I spend my time:

I presently spend:

9 hours, 0 minutes sleeping
2 hours, 0 minutes eating or cooking
0 hours, 30 minutes on your personal life
0 hours, 30 minutes travelling
5 hours, 0 minutes in lectures or seminars
3 hours, 0 minutes studying
2 hours, 0 minutes doing paid work
1 hours, 30 minutes using the internet and blogging
0 hours, 30 minutes exercising and relaxing
0 hours, 0 minutes null

I ideally would like to spend:

8 hours, 0 minutes sleeping
1 hours, 30 minutes eating or cooking
0 hours, 30 minutes on your personal life
0 hours, 30 minutes travelling
5 hours, 0 minutes in lectures or seminars
5 hours, 0 minutes studying
2 hours, 0 minutes doing paid work
0 hours, 30 minutes using the internet and blogging
1 hours, 0 minutes exercising and relaxing
0 hours, 0 minutes null

How I could improve my time management:

• Use a defined list of objectives to prioritise my tasks
• Plan and schedule my time on a weekly basis
• Find large blocks of uninterrupted time when I want to
• Use travel and waiting time productively
• Control interruptions and drop-in visitors effectively
• Stay up to date with my most important reading

I am not the greatest fan of time management. It has never been my strength and I only use it when it is absolutely necessary such as in a case where i have assignment deadlines clashing where I have no choice but to stick to time management strategies. I am certainly not the weekly planning guy. Most of the time I engage myself ad-hoc without much planning. But i know one thing for sure. Before i start a job things need to change a great deal.

So how am i going to change? From the suggested strategies in the Time management activity, I believe four strategies are crucial in effective time management.

Firstly, I would need to sit down and think on the questions such as, What do i want to be in 5–6 years time?, What is required for me to get there? etc. I understand the importance of having clear objectives to guide me through. I also realise the long term strategic direction should essentially form my time management strategy. I would need to schedule my time on a weekly basis. This is especially the case if I have to study for a professional qualification while working as it demands a lot of organisation which i have not done in the past. I would need to continuously review my long term goals and schedule my weekly activities. If necessary I may need to alter my long term goals after sometime in order to aim at a realistically possible target.

Additionally, I would need to prioritise my activities for the week. I would not be surprised especially during the early days where i would end up being unable to achieve all objectives set out for the week. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that i prioritise activities so that I get the most important things done in order to realise my long term goals.

The next strategies i would need to implement are working on the move and saying 'no'. It is quite possible that in the early days i would require to allocate a significant time for travelling. If i could use this time productively, i would not need to stress myself too much in crunch situations. Furthermore, I would need to get out of the 'nice guy' image I have developed since coming to university. I find it extremely difficult to say 'no' and I believe if i dont rectify this, I am going to waste a lot of time helping others.

Therefore, to sum it up my time management strategy would evolve around formulating clear long term goals, weekly plans which highlights my priorities, productivity while on the move and saying 'no'. It is going to be a challenge, but i am not the person to shy away from such matters.

: 17 Mar 2005 23:47 |  Tags: PDP |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Commentary on my blog entry titled 'My learning style'

Two months after my blog entry I am reviewing how well it identified reflective practice and issues such as learning from experience. Another so called 'self-assessment' exercise which hopefully will help me to gain productive results from my learning. This exercise is mainly based on the commentary produced at the end of 'the presentation' class activity conducted in the WSC CM1 workshop.

When i look back on this entry I feel there are some features of reflective practice that emerge quite strongly. I believe that the entry recognises how prior experiences and thought processes resulted in a miserable and below par first year experience in university. Additionally, there is some evidence to suggest that the author has learnt from others experience and developed an own framework in internalising these experiences. Additionally, the writer has stood back from the experience and made this reflective entry.

However, looking back in retrospect I feel the entry has been very weak in some features of reflective practice. The entry does not take others opinions into account and is written from my own perspective. Additionally, the entry fails to mention how the transition happened and what was done to make the second year experience much better than the first. The absence of this clearly affects how future learning through experience coud be achieved as as no reference is made. Furthermore, the absence of an internal dialogue where different views of my own experience are explored is a major flaw in this entry.

Based on this evaluation i feel that the reflective entry on my learning style was not very good. Specifically, i would classify it in the lines of how the reflective account B was written which shows some reflection. Based on this self-assessment I believe I would need to work on the major flaws mentioned above in order to gain a better learning experience and also effective reflective practice.

: 17 Mar 2005 17:52 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem