{"id":221,"date":"2008-07-29T18:56:47","date_gmt":"2008-07-29T18:56:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ivyrun.com\/wordpress\/2008\/07\/29\/vacationing-with-a-to-do-list\/"},"modified":"2008-07-29T18:56:47","modified_gmt":"2008-07-29T18:56:47","slug":"vacationing-with-a-to-do-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/?p=221","title":{"rendered":"Vacationing With A To Do List"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a long month of travel and training, I am home for the whole week.\u00a0 It is a bit of a vacation..or, actually, a staycation<\/a>, since I’m not leaving home except to go berry and peach picking and meet with the church secretary to help her with a website.\u00a0 But, despite telling everyone I was going on vacation, the first thing I did on Monday morning was write a to do list.\u00a0 Hmm…certainly doesn’t look like a traditional vacation, does it?\u00a0 And, I probably could afford to take the whole week off.\u00a0 Turn off the computer, crumple up the list, and just vegetate.\u00a0 But the fact is, I don’t want to.\u00a0 For one thing, I would be absolutely bored by Wednesday.\u00a0 For another, I would have trouble relaxing completely knowing that I have two presentations on August 14th and a course to teach come August 27th.\u00a0 Instead, it’s easier and less stressful for me to find a spot along the work\/play continuum that falls closer to play with still a bit of work.\u00a0 (As opposed to where I’ve been sitting…very close to the work end…for the past month.)<\/p>\n

The problem with the continuum idea, though, is that it still gets at a division between work and play.\u00a0 But, a lot of what I do for work blends pretty seamlessy into what I do for play.\u00a0 Even as I surf the web locating materials to share with my pre-service teachers, I am earning points for PMOG<\/a>, the online game I play.\u00a0 And, frankly, I find it a lot of fun crafting presentations about teaching and learning in the 21st century.\u00a0 It is a rare day that I don’t do something that someone would classify as “work,” yet I don’t feel like a workaholic who needs some counseling.\u00a0 Instead, I feel blessed to have found something I love to do enough to want to do it all the time.<\/p>\n

Before you shake your head at my blindness to my own situation, I should point out that I do plenty of stuff offline as well.\u00a0 Today is “squash bread” day at my house; I’m filling up the freezer with loaves of homemade bread.\u00a0 Loaves 6 and 7 just came out of the oven, and I’m planning for at least two more but maybe four before the end of the day.\u00a0 I’ll also be curling up with my current book–Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry–and if yesterday is any indication, I’ll probably end up taking a nap as well. \u00a0 Then, there’s the bathroom painting project:\u00a0 we’ve stripped all the wallpaper and are now waiting for primer to dry before we put on the first coat.\u00a0 Finally, I’ll be freezing and drying blueberries and canning peaches on Thursday and Friday.<\/p>\n

So, what’s the point of this little window on my world?\u00a0 If the World Congress on the Future of Work<\/a> is to be believed, I represent the future of work<\/a>.\u00a0 Unlike my father, who worked 46 years for the same company before retiring, or even my older sister, who has been with her firm for nearly 30 years, I’m a freelancer who has had 6 or 7 different jobs and now run my own business.\u00a0 In their summary<\/a> (pdf) of the 2005 World Congress, these are the relevant paragraphs:<\/p>\n

In the \u201cold world\u201d of work we went to a corporate office because that\u2019s where our file were, that\u2019s where the company resources (including support staff) were, and that\u2019s where we would meet with colleagues, bosses, suppliers, and even customers. Now, of course, we can do that work anywhere, anytime, and we meet all those fellow workers wherever it\u2019s most convenient. And all too often we blur the boundaries between our professional and our personal lives. We have a tendency to take our laptops, cell phones, PDA\u2019s, and other \u201ctools of the trade\u201d with us just about everywhere we go (including the beach, the golf course, the living room, and the car) because we can \u2013 not always because we \u201chave to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many knowledge workers also mix and match their \u201cwork day\u201d and their personal time, to the extent that they run personal errands mid-day and make up for it by working late at night. That\u2019s a real benefit of the information economy, but a major complication as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That describes me perfectly.\u00a0 And, learning how to navigate that world is going to be an important skill for us and for our students:<\/p>\n

We believe that learning how to choose, and how to set limits on when and where they \u201cwork,\u201d will be one of the biggest tasks facing knowledge workers over next few years as they finally begin to take charge of their work, and their lives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These are not skills I got at school, where someone else usually determined the timetable for completing work, and there was a clear distinction between work time and play time.\u00a0 I had to learn the hard way that there is a limit to how much work I can do after I spent one really long summer doing workshops every day and prepping for them at night.\u00a0 By the end of August, I was exhausted, and it certainly wasn’t fun any more.\u00a0 Now, I know how to block out preparation time on my calendar, and I have a much better sense of how long it takes me to do different tasks.\u00a0 As we consider the skills that our students will need in the future, perhaps we need to concentrate on the literacy of work, giving students the opportunity to take charge of their own work and, thus, their own lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a long month of travel and training, I am home for the whole week.\u00a0 It is a bit of a vacation..or, actually, a staycation, since I’m not leaving home except to go berry and peach picking and meet with the church secretary to help her with a website.\u00a0 But, despite telling everyone I was … Continue reading Vacationing With A To Do List<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[48,2,44],"tags":[354,103,104],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-21st-century-skills","category-education","category-technology","tag-education","tag-freelancing","tag-future-of-work"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4X3L0-3z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ivyrun.com\/inanotherplace\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}