Hello wonderful readers, welcome back to my blog. This blog post is going to be all about a project we recently wrapped up in PGP, called New Year, New Me. I know what you’re thinking. It’s not a new year! Well, when we started this project, it was a new school year. So that basically counts. Anyways, the driving question for this project was “what strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own well-being?” So, let’s break this down.

As suggested in the driving question, in this project, we focused a lot on productivity and balance, and further in we touched on our emotional wellbeing and how the two relate. One of the first things we did for productivity was learn about how we can use the tools we have to organize what we have to do and when we have to do it. Then I began blocking off time on my calendar. Though I was already using a calendar to block my time, I still had a few things to add for the project. Here is what my calendar looked like before I put all the places I have to go into it:

In order to fully organize my time, I needed to add all of my classes. So, here is my calendar after I did that:

Along with my calendar, I needed a task manager. The task manager we used was Things! Things is an app perfect for writing down what you need to do, and checking it off once you’ve done it. In this project, I learned all about how to utilize Things to best cater to the way that I operate. Here was my Things before I started using it as an effective task manager:

As you can see, there isn’t really much there. Since then, I’ve started to use it more. Here is my Things currently:

You can see that I am now using it as a tool to keep track of everything I have to do, and I have it all specifically organized so that I know exactly what I have to do for it and can be more aware of upcoming deadlines and what I have to do. When I pair it with my calendar, I can block out the times that I need to work on specific projects. This helps me be more productive and get things done.

Another main aspect of this project was our positive brain training exercises! Every day, we had a different exercise to help us be more positive. On Mondays, we did meditation, on Tuesdays, we did a conscious act of kindness, on Wednesdays, we exercised, on Thursdays, we journaled, and on Fridays, we did a gratitude journal. The overall goal of these exercises was to improve our mood. Here is one of my favourite ones that we did:

That’s a screenshot of my love letter that I sent to my friend Gwen for a conscious act of kindness. All in all, I think all of these exercises really did improve my mood. During this project, I was looking forward to going to class to go do a little happiness exercise. I especially enjoyed the Wednesday exercises and the Monday meditations. They added some fun to the classroom and just made this whole project more enjoyable.

All in all, this project helped to improve my productivity, stay on top of my work, and be in a better mood all the time. I have kept using all of these strategies to try to keep up and even get ahead of the class work.

Thanks for reading,

Susan