Time Management and Dreams of the Future

Based on many requests, both from the community and from faculty, a colleague and I have put together a "Readiness Series."  My colleague first conceived of it as getting high school students ready for college, but we quickly realized it would be valuable to many populations.

Last night was our first workshop.  My colleague did a great presentation on time management.  Many of her ideas came from Steven Covey, and they're fairly straight forward.  Still, it's good to be reminded of them.

She had us do an exercise where we thought about the year 2023, 5 years from now.  What did we hope to have accomplished by then?  One of her points was that as we plan, we should start at the end and work our way backward.  For most of us, if we start by thinking about today and what all needs to be done to reach our goal, we won't be able to do much because we're overwhelmed by it all.

Ah, the idea of chunking!  Divide your time into manageable chunks, and you'll be amazed at what you can do.  Plan out your week, but don't cram too much into that planner so that you have space for the unexpected--do that each week, and see how much more you accomplish.

I thought about how far away I've gotten from that, although truth be told, I never had that kind of planner.  But I knew where I wanted to be in 5, 10, 20 years, and I had a plan to get there.  Each day, I'd do something, no matter how tiny, to get further along.  Usually my goals were along the lines of creating new writing, getting writing published, and eventually, I wanted a job in a creative writing department.

While my life hasn't worked out exactly how I was planning for it to, back in the period of 1995-2002, I have taught as many creative writing classes as I would have with a different job, and I have been widely published.

Last night, we had a brief time to write down what we saw for ourselves in 2023.  I love these kinds of exercises.  The first vision that came to my head was one of having the house repaired.  Then we have the decision of when to sell, to get ahead of all the ones who will be selling as we realize how relentless the sea will be in this century.

Then I wrote about transforming the cottage into a workshop for Carl, where he creates wood sculptures that sell to bring us $500-$1000 a month.

I wrote about my surprise success in publishing that had happened by 2023.  Based on the article I had been writing earlier in the day, about what we can learn about prayer practices through the lives of medieval monastic women (I had a fantastic writing session), I had gone on to write a whole book on various spiritual practices and monastic women and female saints, and it had been a surprise success.

As I was writing that paragraph, I felt that happy surprise that often comes when I do uncensored free writing.  Could I really do that?  Is it a good idea?  I record it here, in case it does have some value.

And then, the evening was over.  Because we decided to serve beverages and cookies, the clean up was easy.  I do feel like I've hardly been away from the office, and now the day begins again.  But that's O.K.--it's a joy to have a colleague who has the same capacity for planning and dreaming as I do, a colleague who believes in transformation.

Today we move onto another project.  We unveil our project about growing the campus to 350 students.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:  I've been part of a campus, several of them now, that's expanding, and I've been part of a campus that's contracting--it's much more fun to be part of a campus that's expanding.