10.Timetable / Lesson Plan
I miss the structure of SCHOOL. The bell announcing the lesson’s start; the grid showing 1hr of history, of PE, double science (2hrs) etc. The break would come and I always fully utilised it! Mooching in the school field; playing piano in a practice room. I struggle to implement such structure in my own life now, and there are many other tasks competing for my attention.
Writing these posts! Marketing KNITSONIK books and courses! Doing accounts! Managing health stuff + medication side effects!
There’s also the unexpected LIFE STUFF like (this week) having a cat that’s suddenly started pooping indoors (so fun). I know you know what I’m talking about. You might not be running your own business, be disabled, or have an elderly cat with extra needs. But I know your life is busy and the demands on your time are MANY. I think about this for us all when putting together a KNITSONIK course, and when trying to uplift my learning goals.
In KNITSONIK Bullet Journaling, I include a task where you map out your everyday life stuff and schedule course tasks, allocating pockets of time and phone reminders to do the work: the 2020s equivalent of the school bell.
For Colour at Play there’s a colour-as-you-go progress tracker for encouraging visual evidence of progress.
In The KNITSONIK System, the curriculum is outlined in The Welcome Pack, saying how long each bit will likely take.
I include those links, in case any of those resources can be adapted to your own studies – or as reminders that they are there, if you’ve started any of those courses and have lost your way with the content.
For me the key lies in finding ways to get studying to fit in with my real life. Knowing WHAT and HOW LONG for each bit of learning make them easier to fit in around life – at least for me.
This month in my KNITSONIK Bullet Journal I’m making bigger weekly spreads that let me see my whole week in one go and plan learning stuff in detail for each day. There’s quite a bit of post-it-note redaction in this image, but hopefully you can see the week laid our in detail with a third of the page given to each working day and to the weekend; I’ve been trying to schedule study across these spreads in more detail, rather than working with my usual (more improvised) day-to-day lists. And I am working through How to Break Up with your Phone and The Artist’s Way like this: it’s the timetabling I need to make it happen.
My DSLR course and music-making have been bumped to October but it’s OK. Sometimes it’s writing out a list + realising you can never finish it that teaches you to adjust your timetable so that your lesson plan fits with your life.
#knitsonikbacktoschool
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Dear Felix,
Will these THOROUGHLY MARVELOUS posts be staying on your website? Some family responsibilities are making it hard for me to keep up with valued projects these days, so I’m hoping I can reread them when my horizons open up. I love how detailed, personal, inventive, cheerful, simple, and concrete your GENIUS posts are.
Thank you for your lovely kind words – it really made my day to hear you are enjoying this post series and I’m going to put what you wrote in my KNITSONIK Bullet Journal to cheer me on; I’m so happy the posts are resonating for you. Re: how long they’ll stay up, the honest answer is that as long as I can afford the £300+ a year it costs to own knitsonik.com these posts will remain up here.
Hi! My brain has never managed to do well with acronyms. I didn’t see this as an issue until I moved to Washington DC where so many things are expressed that way, especially if they have anything to do with government. I suspect that these shortcuts are stored in a different place in the brain from words. Just as math and language are in different places which helps, I think, to understand why some brains are more linguistically oriented and others more analytical. I have a great linguistic brain!
So, having said all that, what is DSLR? Thanks!
Oh apologies – DSLR stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex; it’s the type of camera used by professional photographers and the one my brother Ferg has lent to me to improve my photography. I’m earmarking October for my quest to improve my usage of it! I’m not great with acronyms either and like your theory about them being stored somewhere else in the brain, other than where we keep the words.