Tag Archives: online classes

Time and Project Management Class Starts Monday

j0227558Hello my friends! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s. I sure did. I’d planned since last Christmas to take two full weeks off and relax. Right up to the last minute, I was sure I wouldn’t “be able to” do it. But in the end, I did!

My workload piled up during the two weeks off, but I feel so much more relaxed and rested and ready for work! How did I manage to take so much vacation time when life has been battering me for the last couple of years? The primary reason is because last January I laid out a written plan for my year.

Granted, a LOT of things went wrong with the plan. I couldn’t have anticipated six months of unemployment for John. I made more money than I did in 2012, but it wasn’t enough to offset the costs of a few book-selling risks I took that didn’t pay off. Near the end of the year, I had to put my writing business on the back burner and work full-time at a temp job.

Calendar 2013But for the whole year, I could look at my writing plan and my calendar and I could figure out how each of my plans would be affected by the new turn life took. I could move the sticky notes on the calendar to change deadlines. I could cancel things that just couldn’t be accomplished now that the course of life had changed.

And I could do it all with more peace than usual because I had a written, changeable plan.

If you’d like to work with me over the next four weeks to get a plan in place for you this year, please sign up for my online class Going the Distance: Goal Setting and Time Management for the Writer. Due to popular demand, this is the fourth year I’ve taught this class, and there’s always something new to learn and share. I hope you’ll join us!

What do you want to accomplish this year?

Portrait of a Learning Addict

I have a learning addiction.

I’m taking an online class right now on branding and, at the same time, I’m teaching an online class on goal setting and time management. I bought two of my teacher’s books and have already started reading both. (Kristen Lamb’s Are You There Blog? It’s Me, Writer and We Are Not Alone: The Writer’s Guide to Social Media.) I also took an online class in November about training your brain and helping it work better for you. The teachers, Susan and Harry Squires, also suggested a book (One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer), a sample of which I downloaded to my Kindle. If I can convince myself to pay $10 for it, I want to read the rest of that one, too.

I often find myself with a bigger To Do list than I can possibly accomplish. If I just stopped taking classes and reading books, I’d have skads of time!

And yet you know what I did last week? I looked up seminaries that offer online classes on faith and culture. I even found a class on faith and popular fiction – perfect! – and actually considered trying to enroll even though I really don’t have time or money to take another class right now. My student loans from my master’s degree in creative writing go into repayment next month, for Pete’s sake!

I think I need counseling.

What would a 12-step program for a learning addiction look like, anyway? Well, I’d have to stop taking any kind of class because you know how one just leads to another. The teacher of my branding class is going to teach a blogging class later. I don’t need to take it – and I could stop myself from signing up if I wanted to – but I’m probably going to take that one, too. Couldn’t hurt, right? Really.

Worse than not taking any more classes would be limiting my exposure to friends who are taking classes. They’d be talking about the cool stuff they’re learning and my eye would begin to twitch and my fingers would accidentally type out a Google search for classes and I’d soon be enrolled in “The Symbolism of Butterflies in the Romantic Comedy.” Or worse yet, I’d design and teach that course!

No, I think I should forego counseling and 12-step programs and just let nature take its course. What’s the worst that can happen? I already drool over new books and get heart palpitations when I see ads for the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute or ITT. I could totally be a motorcycle mechanic or a cash register programmer!

Please, friends, tell me what some of your addictions are so I don’t feel like the oddball. Or just let me know about an online class that would help.