I treat every Fall Equinox as my New Year. I do not resonate with the concept that it has to happen in the middle of winter, and I detest summer. As Autumn is my favorite season, it only seemed natural that I would use it as the beginning of life changes. I’m also a really huge planner person, and always like to have planners and lists of what to do. This served me better before I graduated, but I have since lost the ability to focus on timing for things. I’ve spent the last month or so attempting to get myself organized enough to meet some goals that I wanted to do before the end of the year. Like moving. And renovating an RV.
This is when I found the concept of the 12 week year. I’m still only part of the way through the book, but I find it is very similar to what I had already planned on doing: quarterly goals that get finished and then move on to the next set of goals. However, I just don’t think that 12 weeks is enough for me. I am an over-planner. My lists are always … ambitious, to say the least. So, I really do need more than 12 weeks to accomplish everything. Then, I remembered that, as a life-long learner, I’m incredibly good at fitting my projects into semester time frames. 16 weeks is really the sweet spot of time, if you ask me.
THAT’s when I found the concept of personal curriculum. It’s always nice when people do the setup work for you. Now, I already have a self-study habit. I own a lot of books, almost none of which are fiction. That’s because I am an annotator. I write lengthy takes in my books while I study them. I don’t find this as satisfying in a digital book, although I also do it in those. There’s just something about a book with a large number of annotation tabs that just makes my heart happy – especially if they’re in rainbow colors.
Since I am trying the personal curriculum trend, on top of the 12-week year concept, today just seemed like a good day to start. With more thought, I’ve managed to break my year into 3 16-week semesters for this experiment. This gives me more time to work on projects, and also time off between them to get in the right head-space for the next one. These semesters may not work for you, Dear Reader, but the breaks in between also coincide with weeks that I personally need a bit more time, for personal life things.
The tentative semesters are currently as follows:
Sept 8 – Dec 28
Jan 5 – April 26
May 4 – Aug 23
Why yes, I am a little late for the first one. However, that’s kind of irrelevant since I already started working on things related to it. Not the educational parts (shipping has been so slow!), but the “Home Economics” (aka cleaning my entire house so we can move) part at least. Oh, and I started working on a Bible read-through September 1st. It was originally supposed to be a 365, but I’ve ramped it up to finish in my first semester. I am working on a personal project to compare all of the translations of the Bible to see how the messaging compares dependent on the intended readership. This is entirely a project that should take less than a year to read through each translation, after I stopped to think about it.
So, I have decided I am going to mutate these two ideas into one and attempt UltimateProductivity^TM. A year, split into 3 semesters, that also includes my goals for the environment around me, and some breaks. I hope that if I give myself an end date for every project, that maybe I will manage everything at the same time. I could also be biting off a lot more than I can chew. We will see!
HAPPY HOBBIT DAY!