Time Management...
on Tara's Ethiopian Adventure (Ethiopia), 11/Nov/2009 14:26, 34 days ago
I have finished teaching my second session on time management. The first was to the majority of the HDP group (about 18 people) and the second was a catch up session for those who missed it (only 4). I felt very hypocritical leading this session as my time management skills haven’t been very good recently (I spent much of the morning playing spider solitaire). I have not been very busy this last week and I find that when I slow down I find it hard to get back into the swing of working hard again. I do have plenty that I could be doing (sorting out my flea problem in my house, finding a language teacher and dedicating a couple of hours a day to language learning, sorting out my landline and internet connection, planning my extracurricular English Language lessons etc) but as none of these‘need’ to be done urgently I find myself idling the days away with pointless tasks. Whenever I feel like I am getting back in gear I find some new thing comes along to change my well made plans. For example yesterday I was quite content after teaching a HDP session and was planning to start doing one-to-one interviews with each of the candidates which would keep me busy... but then was informed that our next session (Thursday) would have to be cancelled due to a fieldtrip to a nearby university that most of my candidates were expected to attend. So no session and no one around for interviews. So back to‘spider solitaire’ for me then! I have rewritten the overall year plan several times already as I keep needing to make adjustments for unexpected events.   My first session on time management I felt went quite well. The candidates could all see ways in which they could improve their time management and were happy make plans to implement these changes. However, in retrospect I worry that they were just telling what I wanted to hear. The second group was much smaller and with some colleagues I know very well so I think they were happier to be honest and speak their mind. Whereas the first group suggested that they should not get up and go for coffee whenever they are invited but should learn to say no and prioritise their work, the second group felt this would be totally culturally inappropriate. It seems if a friend asks you to coffee you are expected to join them (whether you are in the middle of something important or not). Whereas the first group was happy enough to plan their activities fairly rigidly into a day the second group claimed it was impossible. They say that most of their time is spent‘stamping out fires’ i.e. responding to urgent issues, that most meetings are organised ad hoc and they rarely get much warning about changes to their schedule. Although they agreed it wasn’t ideal they didn’t see any way they could change it as it is a countrywide issue and as much as they may try to plan ahead it wouldn’t work if those working above them didn’t also plan ahead.     I could certainly sympathise as my attempts to try and have a long term plan for HDP are constantly being thwarted by university events or even by the Ministry of Education. After carefully planning the year so that I could fit in some important sessions just before the students go on semester break I was told that I am to attend a weeklong HDP Conference in Addis Ababa instead. I was going to spend tomorrow planning and organising HDP and scheduling the one-to-one interviews, but about 1 hour before the end of the day the Vice President invited me to join them on the‘fieldtrip’ leaving at 6am tomorrow.   Even simple things like the dates for the start and end of term cannot be put in stone. Although the second and third year students have been here for about a month the first year students only just arrived (which means they will probably finish later). The reason...the government has requested that they take on a larger number of students this year. They had the staff in place but many other things like accommodation, canteen and even classrooms had not been completed to accommodate the increased numbers. So until enough of this was in place they had to tell the first year students to wait.    Time management is often a difficult issue but I think here it is particularly challenging. I really sympathise with my colleagues who all work very hard but struggle to accomplish as much as might be expected. Everything seems to take so much longer here naturally (often due to bureaucracy requiring purple stamps for just about anything to happen) but even more difficult if you are regularly expected to drop everything for unexpected emergencies or simply to have coffee with a friend.