Time Strategies

One of the new time articles I added to the Diigo library is the one about eating the frog first. That is personally one of my very favorite strategies, and I saw already that several people had chosen that article to read, so I am glad that I put that on the list. I even found this Keep Calm poster for eating frogs, ha ha.

Eat the Frog First Thing in the Morning by Thomas Oppong

(image from Hello Stripes)

Last semester, I remember reading Why Time Management is Ruining Our Lives by Oliver Burkeman, which had made a big impression on me. That really resonates with the article that has been making the round about millennials, but which is really not just about millennials: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen. I've bookmarked that one to add to the Diigo Library (when I get time, ha ha, I will set up a new routine for keeping up with Diigo this semester; I did a terrible job with that last semester). For a lot of reasons, I am very very very lucky, and I don't think I am experiencing burnout right now, even though time is tight and my life is more stressful than usual because of my dad. But this is a really insightful article, and burnout is always a danger in a profession like teaching, not just for millennials but also for baby-boomers like me. :-)

In their writing on homelessness, social psychologist Devon Price has said that “laziness,” at least in the way most of us generally conceive of it, simply does not exist. “If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you,” they write, “it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple.” My behavior didn’t make sense to me because I was missing part of my context: burnout. I was too ashamed to admit I was experiencing it. I fancied myself too strong to succumb to it. I had narrowed my definition of burnout to exclude my own behaviors and symptoms. But I was wrong.