Friday, June 20, 2008

summer/time management

Well, all of my school-year students have wrapped up their lessons, and I only have a couple of students coming here and there over the summer... so I have tons of unstructured time ahead of me! This is definitely the first in a long time this has been the case for me (I was working as a part-time reference librarian the past couple of summers). I think though, that it's a lot harder for me to accomplish things when I don't have specific deadlines and goals. I'm trying to avoid the trap of wondering where all the time went... spending my time walking, gardening, and cooking with all the yummy fresh veggies of the summer. I have a few trips planned to visit family. I also have a handful of big piano projects I want to work on, but for the past couple of weeks at least I've been tending to garden and walk rather than go into the studio. My life-long pursuit, it seems is to find the ever-better way of organizing my time and tasks. Yes, this is the girl who turned in her Cornell application at 10 minutes to midnight the date it had to be postmarked... and friends who know me know that this has been a pervasive trait in my life... okay okay, I admit it, I finished a major grant application at the end of May, and drove it to the airport post office at 10 pm on a Saturday night so that it could be received on the deadline on Monday. The cool thing is that I wasn't taking the train into the city on Monday to hand-deliver it... I'm making progress! :-) Actually, I've made tremendous progress in the past I don't know how many years. Right now my office is completely clean, all my paper has places to go and I'm actually putting it in those places, and this past week I revamped my "Remember the Milk" task lists in a way that I think will really really work for me... I've been working towards this over the past year or so, getting better and better with each revamp... (check out the book "Getting Things Done" by David Allen) ...did I mention my e-mail inbox is empty right now!!?? AND I have a method all set up for very easily recording follow-ups in my e-mail and transferring them over to my task list as needed? My goal is to keep this this way over the whole summer, so that I get into the piano studio more. Well, if it works, I'll write another blog post in 10 days, as it will show up on my task list then...

have a great week! go find a farmer's market!!

cm