Each summer a teacher friend of mine makes a poster-sized To-Do list with her kids, writing down all of the fun and adventures they hope to have while on vacation. Any summer lists I've made in the past have been little more than documents on my computer desktop, and instead of fun and adventures I've usually just listed jobs that really should be taken care of that I've managed to procrastinate into near oblivion during the school year.
This year I decided to go a different route and make my summer To-Do list more engaging. Since I don't have any poster paper, I did the next best thing and covered the refrigerator door in colorful Post-It notes, each with a different job or adventure or experience written on it. After the task is finished, I pull it down from the fridge and throw it away, which has been a lot more viscerally satisfying than just crossing things off a list. The fridge has been both a constant reminder of things I need to accomplish before school starts and a source of ideas for slow and empty afternoons. It's worked so well that it's likely I'll do the same thing next year. I'm even putting together plans of how I can use this same kind of format in my classroom this fall.
However.
I'm a little over halfway through my summer break as I write this, and I feel myself losing momentum. Granted, I've gone from having the whole fridge covered at the start to only most of the freezer door left at this point, but there's a lot of purple on that freezer door. See, when I started, I color-coded each of the things I wrote down. Blue Post-Its were for entertainment ("binge this series, read this book, etc.") yellow ones were for things that somehow involved shopping ("get a new bookshelf for the home office"), red were for thing related to writing ("prepare a Middle Grade Minded post for August"), and green were for new experiences or special events ("take a day trip up to St. Cloud"). The purple ones were my least favorite, since purple was the color for summer jobs -- clean the garage, get the furnace tuned up, go to the dentist...the kinds of things that need to be done at some point but are easy to keep putting off. I think that's the nature of To-Do lists, to pounce on the things that are fun and interesting and easy first, and let the boring, stupid ones sit there until you don't have any choice left but to take care of them.
August starts in a couple of days, and because of an amazing schedule this year, I'm not due back to school until just about the very end! So even though the few weeks of break we had in June zipped by and now the entire month of July is almost done, there is still essentially an entire month of summer vacation left! A couple of years ago I blogged about a New Year's resolution I had, setting a different goal to work on each month instead of trying to sustain one thing for a whole year. It worked out pretty well, but my biggest takeaway from it was just how much can be accomplished in a month when you set your mind to it.
Anyway. Because of the collaborative efforts between the writer and the teacher parts of my brain, I've developed a strong tendency to look at almost anything I'm doing in life and try to find ways to do it better. So why not do the same thing with the fridge, and remake my collection of Post-Its into something that will make August more fun than an ever-present reminder of how the school year is closing in while I still have so many things I need to do?
Some things on the current list are coming off, and a lot more will be going up. I'm going to try to stick to a few rules to learn from previous mistakes:
1 - Be specific about the things I include.
2 - Only have one item on each note. None of this "do this thing this many times," because it's so much better to rip the note off the fridge right away.
3 - Make sure some things are challenging, but not so far out of my comfort zone that they'll just be this source of stress staring me down every time I walk into the kitchen.
4 - Only include jobs that absolutely have to be done.
5 - Make sure a lot of things up there will help me to make the most out of the month of summer that still remains.
Making the list longer will keep me busy, but that isn't such a bad thing. After all, you can get a lot done in a month if you set your mind to it.
Any suggestions?
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