Getting ready for the new semester

For those of us in academic life, New Year’s Day occurs somewhere around September 1. By January 1 our new beginnings are behind us and we are mid-stream.

But September – ah, lovely weather, fresh pages and screens, a new garment or two, and hopefully, a rested mind ready to tackle the work that awaits us.

A recent ProfHacker blog recognizes this phenomenon and suggests that we start now to organize ourselves for the autumnal New Year.

In his post of August 13/14, George Williams discusses a number of things we can do now to prepare for the new semester. (Pre-thinking transportation was a new one for me – but what good advice. I never think of tuning up in August – but the idea makes perfect sense.)

In “5 Things You Can Do to Prepare for the New Semester,” he makes his five points crisply.

• We should use our calendars to rough in all of our expected/recurring deadlines.
• We should pre-think handling stress, because there will be lots of it.
• We should stock our pantries in anticipation of being too busy to think, making sure that the basics are on hand.
• We should think about and prepare for the way we will need to commute.
• And we should also rough into our calendars the “life events” we don’t want to lose track of or lose out on doing: there is more to life than work, and we might as well pre-remember the things we really want to remember to do as the term goes on.

One of my favourite things about blogs are the links they provide and in this case George has linked to previous posts that address each of these points. In other words, lots of good foraging is available here.

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