the week's end.

Something happens on Friday afternoons, as I prepare my desk at school for the next week and lock my office door before heading home.

I feel a sense of accomplishment at tasks I've been able to complete through the week and a sense of relief at the idea of a few days "off".  

The week's end is a time of reflection and a time of looking forward to the future.

I've developed a routine for Friday afternoons that has helped me to leave the school with a sense of peace and contentment.

It hasn't always been this way though.

I used to stay at school late into the evenings playing catch up from the previous week and organizing my post-it notes of tasks that I needed to accomplish the following Monday.

Thanks to Google Calendar and a few books, like The 12-Week Year, I have figured out a better system.

The book The 12-Week Year that I read last year really shifted my mindset from making year-long goals.  Now I focus on a vision of where I want to end up later in life and I take twelve weeks at a time to make some small changes that will help me to get me there.

I started integrating this mindset into our home and family life last year and noticed immediate success!  We asked ourselves, "What can we accomplish in twelve weeks?" and we marked some projects off of our ongoing to-do list that we had been putting off for quite some time.

I began to wonder if the same concept could work at school.

First semester of the next school year, I decided to try it out.

When I got back to work in August, I made a 12-week plan for first quarter.

I made a list of all the things that needed to be accomplished between the beginning of August & the end of October.

I started to divide them out based on what dates I needed to meet certain deadlines and then I took it a step deeper and divided the tasks by days during that week.

This was working fine, but I found myself writing and re-writing my lists for each day and it started to become a disorganized paper mess.  Yes, the tasks were getting finished, but it was exhausting to keep up with my paper system and I hated the "cluttered feeling" that my desk had at the end of each work day.

That is...until I found Reminders.

​One of the things that Google has added over the last year is the integration of "Reminders" into the Google Calendar platform.  

​Essentially, ​I can make my "to do" list using Reminders.

The difference in using this platform is that I can give my "Reminders" a date and time!

When I have blocked off an hour to work on an evaluation report at my desk or editing a photography session at home, a notification pops up on my phone and my watch.

When I complete the task, I click "mark as done" on my calendar, my phone, or my watch and I move on to whatever else is going on for me.

Now, there are times every week that a task takes longer than I expected or that something else comes up during the time I had planned to work on my to do list.

The magic of Google Reminders is that the tasks AUTOMATICALLY MIGRATE when you don't mark them complete!

Each morning, I open my calendar when I get to work and look at any tasks that have migrated over to the current date.  I check for a few things.  First, I love to see if I completed the tasks and just forgot to mark them complete.  Next, I see if the tasks are still relevant.  If not, I delete them.  If they are, I assign a time later the same day or later in the week to work on these tasks.

On Friday afternoon, when I start to prepare my office and desk for the next week, I now open up my Google calendar and look at the tasks I was unable to complete during the week. 

I look at my upcoming weekend and the next week's calendar and I fill in any tasks that I need to complete. 

I collect any resources or materials I might need to complete these tasks and I put them in folders I have labeled with the days of the week.  

Then I clean off my desk, turn off my lamps, and head out the door.

Feeling good at this week's end,
Hannah

​❤️?❤️