Tuesday, June 27, 2006

A day of (metaphorical) housecleaning

One of the things I always do to kick off the summer is to sit down and figure out what my goals are. This serves a few purposes. First, it forces me to sit down and prioritize what I *really* want to accomplish, because otherwise I'll start thinking too big and then get frustrated when I only get a fraction of the work done. Second, it keeps me from getting overwhelmed and bogged down in the details. And last (and most importantly), it prevents me from frittering away the summer in an unfocused haze. Not that there's anything wrong with that....

It's kind of telling that I only got around to doing this task *today*. Sigh. The ideas have been swirling around in my head for a while, so it was mostly a matter of putting everything down in writing. Something new that I'm trying this year is writing a weekly to-do list to make sure that I'm on track. I worked really hard to make sure the to-do lists were manageable, building in time for slack/crises/playing hooky. I wrote weekly lists through the beginning of August. We'll see how that goes.

In the spirit of accountability, I've posted my goals on the sidebar--along w/ some "fun" projects I'm currently working on. Those are mostly a reminder to myself that I should take some time for my own interests this summer, too!

And in the further spirit of organizing/housecleaning, I've updated my blogroll, which was way overdue. If you're not familiar with some of the names on the list, do go and check them out--there's a lot of great writing and thinking going on out there!

1 comment:

ScienceWoman said...

You may just be getting around to writing down the list, but you are already making lots of progress. And that's the most important thing. I'm glad your list includes some fun things too.