Habits

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about routines. Partly because it's my last day of summer school, and the giant list of giant projects I'd intended to get done is still pretty much not done, partly because I know my time will be much more constrained when school gets started and I want to keep this blog and my professional growth going, and partly because my son will be leaving for college and now I am faced with having to do unpleasant but necessary household chores myself instead of having him do them.

A post over at Vicki Davis's blog not too long ago posed the following questions when thinking about routines:

• What are the most important things if I do them every day, that will make the biggest difference in my life?
• What are the things I need to make sure that I do every week in my job that will make the biggest difference?
• What are the things I need to make sure that I do every week at home that will make the biggest difference?
• What are the 20% of my problems that cause 80% of my headaches?
• What is the one habit that is most important to start in my life right now? (Set an appointment with yourself every day this week to do that one thing.)

I was especially curious about the 80/20 split she mentioned, so I spent some time reading up on the Pareto Efficiency, including some neat mathematical equations. The gist was this: in general, 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of the factors involved. To put it more specifically, 80 percent of my time is sucked up by only 20 percent of the things I do or need to do.  Or 20 percent of the housework is pretty much guaranteed to take up 80 percent of the time I spend doing it. Doesn't this ring true for you in the classroom? Think of those six kids in that one aggravating just-after-lunch class and how my attention you have to devote to managing them so you can do your actual job and teach the other thirty.

I don't think this one blog post is going to clear everything up for me just yet, but I do all my best thinking out loud, so here goes.

Things I need to do every day to make the biggest difference, at work and at home. Exercise. Eat right. Pick up after myself. Prioritize tasks, especially at work.

Things to do every week at work. Check in with student aides and provide feedback on their work. Personal PD time, a couple of times a week, to catch up on stuff like this. Program planning and development, once or twice a week.

Things I need to do every week at home. Make time for family. Clean. Plan groceries and check financials.

Most important things to start right now.  On the home front, I have roller derby tryouts at the end of September. That makes gym and food especially important, followed closely by being sure to make up the practices I'm going to miss for work and vacation during the next few weeks. For work, I think probably taking some time to think about ways to get student aides proficient at their jobs and what to do about my unfunded plans for a computer lab in the library.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it's nice to see the relative shortness of each one. I guess the lesson is this: focus on the most important 20 percent, and let that consume the majority of my time.