Goals and Time |
|
By the end of this lesson, you should be able to do each of the following without consulting notes or other resources:
Before
coming to class on Wednesday, you should complete the following assignments: Read: “24 Time Management Tips” in Making Your Mark. Write: a draft of your motto, long-term goals, mission statement, and daily schedule. Our class activities this week include the following: Think Fast: A
distant relative from a foreign country has left you a huge inheritance of 1
million vidas. Decide how
you will spend it on the following items: career, family, health, enrichment,
material items. Presentation:
Spending Your Treasure (Professor Canada) Cooperative Learning:
Compare your budget with your groupmates’ budgets. Discuss your various rationales for spending your
treasures. Presentation:
Managing Time (Professor Canada) Discussion: During
this time, we will discuss the insights and questions that have emerged
during our reading, “Think Fast” exercise, presentations, and cooperative
learning. Think Again: Using
what you have learned or reviewed in this lesson, revise your motto,
long-term goals, mission statement, and daily schedule. Conferences: While
the rest of you are working on the “Think Again” exercise, I will meet with
two of you in one-on-one conferences.
During this time, I will review some of your writing, orally quiz you
on lesson objectives, and field your questions. Announcements: We
will wrap up this lesson with announcements regarding upcoming lessons, as
well as other relevant subjects. Make sure you know the meaning and significance of each of the following names and terms:
You can pursue
the objectives in this lesson further by consulting the resources listed
below: Rocky, a film Sylvester Stallone wrote and
starred in back in the 1970s, is surely one of the most inspirational movies
ever made. Watching it and
listening the famous theme song—“Gonna Fly Now”—may be just what you need to keep
you focused on your goals. Give It Some Thought: Quotes to Remember and Questions to
Ponder
contains quotations that may help to inspire you. Updated August 16, 2002
|
IntroductionWelcome to Freshman Seminar! I look forward to our time together this semester as we explore the various resources and strategies that you can use to get the most out of your college experience and your life. Each week, I will post one of these lessons, which will contain lists of objectives, assignments, activities, and resources, along with announcements and discussion of course material. You will want to read each lesson before you come to class on Monday. DiscussionGoalsWhat do you want to do with your life? The question undoubtedly has occurred you sometime in the last 17 or more years, probably many times, and you have done your share of wondering and dreaming about it. The dreaming is important, and you will want to keep it up, but it is also time to begin setting some realistic goals. If you do not dream and only plan, you may not go far, but if you do not plan and only dream, you may go nowhere at all. So what are your goals? As you begin working on your “life plan,” the major project for this course, you will set two kinds. Long-term goals are ones you set out to achieve sometime in your life. They are the big ones, the ones that take a long time to reach, but have big payoffs: happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction meaning. As you set these long-term goals, keep a couple of things in mind. First, be realistic. If you struggled in your high school math classes, then aiming to become a doctor is merely setting yourself up for disappointment. Don’t like to read and write? Forget about being a lawyer. Dreaming is great—and important—but it will serve you best once you know where your real strengths and interests lie. Exploring those aspects of your personality is part of this course. If you discover that you have a propensity for biology and love the outdoors, then go ahead and dream of doing cutting-edge research in the Amazonian rainforest. Indeed, plan to succeed. Second, remember that there is much more to life than your career. When setting goals, consider what you want in the areas of family, service, and personal enrichment, as well. If you decide that you want to have children and spend a lot of time with them, then pursuing a career that involves long hours and a lot of travel doesn’t make much sense. None of us knows how much time he or she has on this earth, but we all know that it is not infinite. Being happy in life is largely a matter of balancing many demands on your time, energy, and money. Once you decide what you are willing to invest those resources in, you stand a better chance of being contented. Remember, too, that service and enrichment can come outside a career. That is, you don’t have to be a politician to serve your community, and you don’t have to be a professional poet to write poetry. You might think of these long-term goals as constituting your mission in life. Indeed, as part of your life plan, you will come up with a mission for your life. The best way to achieve long-term goals is to set many short-term goals, the manageable achievements that you can reach in a few years. To become that rainforest biologist, for example, you will first need to learn a lot about botany, earn a bachelor’s degree in biology or some related field, perhaps attend graduate school, and land a job in the field. Along the way, you may also need to obtain internships and additional training. You may need to learn another language. With help from experts in career planning, as well as experts in the field itself, you can make a list of manageable goals that will gradually move you toward your long-term goal. You should set these short-term goals for each of your long-term goals. Write them down, along with your long-term goals, and put specific years on them. Finally, don’t neglect the value of motivation. Meeting all of those short-term goals will require a lot of time and hard work, and achieving the long-term goal will require a lot of patience. Finding role models and heroes, reading inspirational books and quotations, and watching movies about your subject or about achieving goals in general all can help you keep your dream alive. TimeAside from energy, the most important resource you will need to achieve both your long-term and short-term goals is time. Until now, you may have felt that you had plenty of time, but college will put new demands on you. To achieve all of your short-term goals, you will need to manage the finite time you have in an effective manner. Each day is resource you can apply toward meeting those goals. Take, for example, the 16 waking hours you will have on a typical day this semester. You may spend three of those hours in class, two hours working in a part-time job, and two hours eating, showering, dressing, and so on. If you spend eight of the remaining hours watching television, hanging out with friends, and napping and only one hour studying, you have made little progress toward your short-term goals of learning a lot, earning high grades, and graduating with honors. On the other hand, if you spend five hours studying, an hour participating in a club related to your major, and only two hours relaxing through exercise or conversation, you are closer to your short-term and long-term goals than you were when the day started. A surefire method for using your time effectively is to maintain a daily schedule. That is, decide in advance how you will spend your time on a given day and write down your commitments—classes, study, work, exercise, relaxation, and so on—next to or under the hours of the day. When making a schedule, keep a few things in mind. First, as when setting goals, be realistic. Chances are, you will not be able to complete all of your statistics homework in 30 minutes, so don’t set yourself up for defeat. Second, experiment with doing things in different places and at different times so that you can figure out what works best for you. If you do your best writing in a library and in the evening, then schedule a time to write when the library is open. Finally, leave some time for errands, phone calls, and other pesky tasks that need to be done each day, along with some time for exercise, meditation, or another form of effective relaxation. In this course, you will create a daily schedule, which you can fine-tune until you are using your time as effectively as possible to meet your long-term and short-term goals. ConclusionIn this lesson, we have discussed setting goals and setting up a daily schedule that can help you achieve them. We will continue exploring goals next week as we look at careers and courses. In the meantime, work on your life plan and let me know if you have questions or concerns. |