This week, my role as director of my graduate program ended (potentially temporarily or permanently, depending on how department stuff shakes out). So I'm starting to slide into my new existence as a tenured faculty who is on sabbatical. In the past, a year of unstructured time would have made me anxious or even terrified me...but, well, I've learned some things over the past six years, and the past year of working from home taught me A LOT about productivity and work time and focus.
This week's tasks have been focused on clarifying my goals, outlining my timeline/deliverables, and beginning to organize myself. One thing I just did was clear out all my open tabs of things I want to read, adding them to my Notion workspace. While similar to Trello, Notion offers the ability to create databases and some share features--and it's free for educators (and has a downloadable desktop app that syncs across devices), so I've been using it to help me organize the articles, links, and books I want to read.
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| A screenshot of my Notion application on the Citations + Notes page |
As you can see, you can create a bunch of subpages (with various configurations), and you can actually include a Trello-like section with boards and things to create workflows. So it really has a lot of potential, though I'm mostly using it as my writing log, citation database, and faculty reporting log.
The other tool I've been using heavily this summer has been Trello. Before reading Cal Newport's books, I didn't fully grasp how to use Trello most effectively--but then he described how he used it for administrative work, and it clicked, and it's been helping me keep my information organized and track due dates.
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| A screenshot of my Trello research board with the columns to do, doing, and Elon Seminar |
Essentially, here I have columns for to do/doing/done (a pretty common way to track workflows), but I've added a few columns for specific projects, such as a research seminar I'm participating in (with lots of projects/tasks to organize), a column for presentations/publications, and a column for a grant I'm applying for (also with many components). Each card has information, weblinks, tasks, and deadlines, so I can consult them as needed to see what I need to do--without going on my email or looking in a bunch of different places. And because I have a Rocketbook, I can upload a PDF of handwritten notes to the appropriate card. So far, it's working pretty well for me!
Right now, I'm excited and confident that I can manage my time and have an invigorating and productive sabbatical year. I'll share my goals and what I hope to accomplish both professionally and personally in my next post!
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