Students are constantly asking me, “why don’t you just teach us how to write?” My response is canned at this point. Writing is a form of communication with a nuance and set of rules, but writing is really just communication and in order to do that you need to have something worth saying. It is for that reason that I teach my classes through any number of critical thinking lenses. Lately I’ve been my own guinea pig, testing classroom concepts on myself. The one that I find to be extremely important is where I sit down at the end of the day and assess everything I’ve done that day. I write it down in a list and work to make sense out of it.
What are my habits, who do I talk to, where is the best work taking place, where does the time go? As a result I find my productivity has risen, because I cannot justify to myself an entire day of sitting around and watching Gilmore Girls. Today, for example, I finished off my son’s present (a homemade loot crate) just in time for it to be given to him. I got a quote for some backyard work–two, actually. I cleaned up my dog a bit. I cleaned up the garage a very little bit. I made dinner. I put away most of my laundry…
Things get pretty sketchy after that.
The point is that writing down the things I do have helped me to identify the things I don’t do and compare that to the reality I am trying to create for myself. I find the exercise to be very useful, especially to cluttered people like myself who is prone to slipping into dangerous fits of wasting time…
Some Thoughts:
- Did you know that Greece became independent in 1832. Now they’re defaulting on debts. That was fast…