New Year New Me
A Project and a Pre-Pol Post combined?
Hello welcome to and back to my blog! In this post, I will be talking about the start of my grade 10 year! Haha just kidding, this post will be about two big topics, my Pre-Pol and a project we did in PGP (New Year New Me). From what I’ve been told a Pre-Pol is a marking point to see where you are at before you do your mPol. These two topics combined nicely because they both focus on your progress. We learned about personal growth in our project New Year New Me so putting them together will make it easier to get my thoughts across.
The driving question for this blog post is: What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my well-being? I will be connecting as well as answering this question throughout my whole post.
In the project New Year New Me we learned a lot about self-management and personal growth, especially in using positivity to your advantage! There are many topics that we focused on but this segment of the post is going to be about management skills. We were reminded of how organization skills can improve your productivity and did an assignment on it. We looked closely at the physical, digital, and mental backlog and how to clean everything up to create an easier work space. I tracked my progress in a crafted document, which shows all of my many screen recordings and screenshots of evidence, mostly just before and after shots.
Here is a link to my craft document of all of my evidence of my cleared backlog:
https://turkeys-push-u9o.craft.me/uLm9i6D8Xvpkqx
In summary, we also learned how to use the Things app and Calendar app more efficiently. We learned how to make sections in Things so our checklists are more organized. We also learned how to connect the two apps so you can be more efficient with your time. You can see evidence of this in my craft document I have linked above.
I got reminded that I also had to update my blog, I haven’t changed it that much over the years. I updated my About Me page as well as my widgets so it doesn’t look as cluttered. I also added a spot for my social media, this can be useful for users who want to see more of my work!
On top of all of this, we learned about how if you apply positivity to your working habits it can ultimately make your work better. We watched many videos and a TED talk on if you do meditation, journaling, exercise, random acts of kindness, etc. for a whole month you will see improvements in your mood and work, it is shown to be very beneficial. So we all had to do daily notes in craft, Monday was Meditation, Tuesday was Conscious act of Kindness, Wednesday was Exercising, Thursday was Journalling (my favourite), and Friday was when we would do Gratitudes.
We also had to pitch an idea of how we are going to track our happiness, I did mine in Pages and asked myself two questions every day. “What did someone do for me that I thought was kind?” And “What did I do today that was kind?” These questions made me look for positivity throughout my day because I knew I would have to answer these questions. It honestly made me look through my day through a different lens, one with a silver lining to everything. I would add in my evidence but some of it is too personal to put on the internet. 🤲
Looking back on this project looking for the good in your day really worked for me, I still do it now, if I think of a kind thought about someone I always share it with them, I know for sure that this is something I will keep doing. I love spreading kind words because when they’re shared with me I think about frequently.
Something I probably won’t keep doing is tracking my happiness and daily notes, I feel like I wouldn’t get much out of it if I thought of it as a chore. This project also helped me realize that I need more time for my academic classes, I decided to drop the Senior Chamber Choir because of this. It took up time after school on Mondays (I also have Rangers at 6-7) and before school on Wednesdays. I also have Student Council, only once a week, on Thursdays before school so that would have been two days in a row of no tutorial and I greatly value this time.
I’ve gone around two weeks without Senior Chamber Choir and I miss it but I think it’s been beneficial for my productivity as well as being balanced between my social life and school.
As I bring this post to an end, the weeks I did the New Year New Me Project have been very helpful for my productivity level. Of course, I will always need to work on it but the strategies I’ve learned will be very useful in my future schooling years.
Remember, self-improvement takes time and doesn’t happen overnight. I will continue this journey for the rest of my life and hopefully over the next 2 years you will see improvement in my posts. I know that I’ve noticed it already! Anyway, see you next time and remember to stay positive!