So as many of you know, I am now teaching at Canadore College as a professor for the Appreciation of Media Design course. I never thought way back when I was in the Graphic Design program that I would ever be up at the front doing the actual teaching. But alas, here I am.
It has been taking a lot of my time as I have to lesson plan for each week and my books are feeling lonely (at least I think they are). On top of this, I still have my full-time job as a web developer and decided to do indoor volleyball for the autumn and winter season.
I am still doing my best to read as much as possible so have faith book bloggers, I will be adding more reviews soon. I am currently reading Fat Girl on a Plane by Kelly deVos and am about half way through.
How do you get through week by week with so much to do? Comment below what helps you stay organized? Maybe I could pick up some tips or stargies from you!
Talk soon bookworms!
That’s great Erik 😎
congratulations
Thanks 🙂 means a lot!
My tips (your mileage may vary). In general, people fritter away bits of time, a few minutes here, a few minutes there. Over the course of a day it is surprising just how much time you lose to frittering.
1. Live a minimalist lifestyle. Cleaning, sorting, organizing. laundry is quick. That frees up quite a bit of time.
2. When you’re busy don’t even bother with tv or videos. Instead binge watch them next time things slow down.
3. Put aside a time slot in the evening for things you need to do. e.g. I read for an hour at bedtime. I can’t afford to read during the day because I’ll get sucked into the book and not get work items done. Or write for a specific period of time at a certain time every day.
4. Make a week’s worth of meals. Then you don’t need to interrupt work flow to make something to eat. Just pop a premade meal in the microwave and you’re set. I should follow this advice…I tend to snack on cashews and bananas so I can keep working.
5. Be okay with taking time off. Walk, bike at lunch hours and/or breaks. It’ll re-energize you for the next bit of work.
6. Have a setting just for the work you do aside from the full-time job. Mine is sitting outside under a canopy in the evening with my laptop and a good-sized laptop desk on my lap (my laptop desk is two feet wide, lots of room for a mouse and a holder for pens, external hard drives). I seem to get more done in one hour outside than two hours inside.
7. Regular exercise. In a time crunch you can skip exercise for a day or three, but don’t get into that habit. You’ll notice the lack of energy after a week.
Basically, just observe how you lose time and then see if you can use that time for the extra work that isn’t part of your full-time job. Make it a game to see how you can go through the day with no wasted motion or retracing your steps to get things you forgot, or things you could have grabbed the first time you were there, etc.
Biggest tip is 8. Don’t over-extend yourself on a continual basis. Two to three months at a time seems fine for me. After that, the stress begins to build and I lose time to stressing about things I can’t do much about.
Now see if I can take my own advice as I have 1 full-time job, a 20 hr a week computer job, a few hours a week overseeing a plant growth experiment at the university, about an hour or two doing computer filing for a physiotherapist and also video-editing for a police detective for his presentations (which I was just told are getting national attention now so I try to do a professional looking job). Also, am taking a three-hour night course at the university, am in the process of buying a house, getting financing, etc, and in a month my usual “2-3 month 10-12 hrs a day every day” contract comes in–I have no idea how I’ll be able to do that even if I just had a full-time job and nothing else. Then there’ll be the house and garden renovations…..sighhh.
Congratulations Erik!
Thanks Jay! It is a lot of work but I am enjoying it!
Congratulations on your new career!
Thanks Mark!