How do you find the time ?

This post is a response to a blog post by David Rogers which you can read HERE.

David is the author of Citizenship through Geography (see earlier post)

I often get asked the same question that David was: "Where do you find the time (to do all that you do) ?" (in fact, someone asked me at the end of my seminar at SAGT...)

Here are a few thoughts on that:

1. I don't tend to watch a lot of TV in the evening, or do other things. I like reading and find time for that but over the last decade, once my kids are in bed, and my wife is engaged in her hobbies, I have had time for geography - when I was teaching I made the most of every minute of the school day: always worked through break and lunchtime, and got to school early but didn't worry about leaving fairly promptly either...
2. Over that decade, I built up a large electronic bank of resources which can then be edited and repurposed : this is mainly based around my website GEOGRAPHY PAGES, which is still available (and still getting thousands of visits each day) - this was where I used to file documents, or thoughts, and the pages grew organically over time...
3. My blogs are my filing system: when something occurs to me, I tend to have BLOGGER open, and will start a blog post to finish at some later date (as I write this, I have 10 draft posts already waiting to be finished at some future date)
4. When teaching, I always had my laptop switched on and, latterly, connected to the internet. This meant that I was able to keep up with the inputs from my Personal Learning Network (PLN) and also respond quickly.
5. RSS feeds allow me to have new content from the blogs I read sent to me, and I read this once a day, along with the 'online papers'...

Sorry that there's nothing more 'deep' to this post than that... I suppose I just get on with things, and put them out in the open where others may make use of them, and spend time online that others might spend doing other things.

Don't worry, I do get outside sometimes...

Comments

David Rogers said…
Interesting reading Alan. Looks like it all comes down to working in a smart way - using all the time and being efficient.

Talking of which - I'm enjoying a malt while I write this one handed! ;-)
Alan Parkinson said…
Yes, I suppose I just try not to waste time - that used to be one of my bugbears when teaching: when time in a lesson was wasted for whatever reason...