20 for 2020: week 36
Week of 31 August
My 20 for 2020 list.
What did I want to do better this week?
Go to bed on time.
Have a proper lunch break
So, how did that go then?
I mean, it’s not like I’m going to bed near midnight or anything. Except on Saturday night. And the four days this week I wasn’t in bed by 10.30 I’d been working on my uni assignment, so it’s not like I was spending the night vagueing out on Facebook or anything like that.
However, I went back to my list of “rules” I made for myself at the start of the course, and right up at the top is “protect your sleep”. I had made a promise to myself I wasn’t going to stay up late to get this work done. Sleep has to a priority for me and it currently really isn’t. Ideally, I’d like to go to bed with enough time to do my reading before 10.30—otherwise what would be the difference between reading in bed until 10.45 or staying up reading and going to bed at 10.45?
So next week, I’m going to start packing up at 10.00 instead of 10.25. Or 10.30.
And I didn’t do the lunch break thing.
On to 20 for 2020
My sole aim this week was to finalise my workplace project proposal (thing 8) and submit it on Sunday. It’s worth 40 per cent of the mark for the unit, so I wanted to make sure I did a reasonable job of it.
I met with my project sponsor (we have to have one of those) this week to go through my draft and I got some very encouraging feedback about how well I had refined it after our initial discussion a couple of weeks ago.
The main thing I was struggling with was identifying which of the plethora of tools we had been learning about would be most relevant to my project, as part of the assignment was to outline how I was going to use the tools in my analysis and recommendations. My sponsor wisely pointed out that what I think I might use might not actually be that useful when I get the information I need to analyse. She suggested it might be better to identify just a couple of tools now that I’m fairly sure will be useful and reserve the right to use others as it becomes apparent that I need them, rather than include a whole bunch of things that I don’t end up using. This makes sense to me, though I don’t know if it will satisfy the unit facilitator when she’s marking it.
On the other hand, the assignment is limited to 1500 words, and there’s only so much I can include in that limit!
After a solid weekend of work (punctuated by a small shopping trip and a Father’s Day lunch), I got it done and I submitted it on Sunday night. I’m not going to tell you that after I had shut my computer down (at 10.15) and was getting ready for bed, I thought of something I should have done differently . . . and turned everything back on (a tedious process that takes ages) to make a small change, which, once I’d done, I realised was going to need more work than I had time to do, and I turned everything off again and went to bed.
What’s done is done.
What did I achieve this week?
I submitted the assignment and so far I’m keeping up to date with my weekly photo journal and my street corners project.
I attended a training course called Priority Samurai, which was, as you might imagine, about setting priorities. There wasn’t a lot of material in the course that I wasn’t familiar with, but the course presented it in a different way that helped me to understand how I could actually use it in my weekly and daily planning. I think it will be really helpful, especially in the very intense period I’m in right now with the assignment.
What didn’t go so well?
Bumping a random key combination on my computer that closed my project plan after three hours of work that I hadn’t saved. On the positive side, I learned how to recover a document that you haven’t saved . . . .
What do I want to do better next week?
Following the training course, I want to use some of the things I learned to streamline my weekly and daily planning and review processes. And I want to make having a proper lunch break away from my work a habit.
Summary for the week
Things completed this week: 0
Things completed to date: 12 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20)
Things I progressed: 1 (8)
Things in progress I didn’t progress: 5 (7, 11, 13, 17, 22)
Things not started: 4 (9, 12, 19, 21)
Days I worked on my art: 2
Days I read a book: 7
Days I did yoga stretches: 0
Days I was in bed by 10.30: 3
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