Back to Class, Kinda

In reviewing my lessons thus far, I came across one that really stood out to me. “Life is learning; you have to create the lesson plan.” On the surface, it seems to line up with the overall thesis of this blog, but there’s a piece I often leave off the table, the plan.

There’s Something About Freedom

Many of my trials come to me just a few days before starting, if not while I’m writing the very post announcing it. There have been some I’ve had planned prior, but for the most part I pursue what interests me at a given time.

This degree of freedom has been nice at times but stressful more often than not. There have been a number of final posts for a trial which have led to me pacing about trying to determine what I should do next.

This tendency leaks into a number of areas in my life, including my intellectual pursuits. I tend to find a new idea through a podcast, book, or video, and am ready to dive in. I research various resources for a bit, but with no requirements to follow through on anything, I tend to learn a couple things and then move on.

Lesson Planning

I, like many, have probably only had a clear education during my years of school. It’s difficult to get students in a class without an idea of what is going to be taught. This goes for classrooms in schools everywhere to online courses.

Currently, my interests bounce from topic to topic in a moment’s notice. My whiteboards are covered top to bottom with notes and ideas from just a couple of days. A consistent problem I have is poor follow through on those ideas. Even in projects where I get to some level of competence, I often don’t have a plan for developing further.

While perhaps not a trial in itself, I want to create quarterly “courses” that I’m going to take, almost like a semester in school. With that, I can focus on these ideas and develop them further. Each would have an associated syllabus, an outline of what would be required to be completed in the time.

Creating these courses would get the idea out of the “maybe I should do this” part of my mind and provide me a jumping off point for when I find the time is right to do so. In other words, I stop feeling guilty for not making the time for it.

Something I’ve added for myself with these is to have a list of the minimal requirements of what the course will teach me and the purpose, the why. If I can’t list these elements down, the course is removed. It ties to a lesson from the very day which inspired this one, “When deciding to do something, the critical point is WHY.”

This post might not have been directly related to this specific trial, but it was through this documentation of ideas that the idea came to me. I do hope to share the results of this process later in the year, be it success or failure.