I mentioned a while back that I was reconsidering my contexts. I’ve done that - after a few days away on a work retreat. My old contexts were these:
Experience
Wife
Home
Professional
Writing
LGBT Activism
Relationships
Spirituality
In each of my contexts, I have one year, three year, five year, and ten year goals. I review them each year and I build all of my daily activities around these different contexts. Now, as I am looking at the next four years as a graduate student, with the ultimate goal of changing my professional life, I’ve realized that I need to update and change my contexts. So here are my new eight contexts:
Experience
Wife
Home
Poetry
Creative Work
Scholarly Work
Relationships/Spirituality
Work for Hire
As you can see, I’ve left the first three the same. The experience context is where I put activities that I like to do (travel, visiting museums, seeing plays) that fuel both my growth as a human being but also my enjoyment of life. This is also a generative space for my writing - poetry, creative, and scholarly. I split my professional/writing contexts into four contexts that I can consider and monitor separately. Poetry is one in and of itself because I am a poet and it is an area that needs devoted time and attention. I have some concrete short and long-term goals in that area and so a focused way to think about them is important. I also want to keep a context of creative work. This is both creative non-fiction work, reviewing work, and also things like embroidery, sewing, and other creative endeavors. Scholarly work will be things associated with my PhD program. I combined Relationships and Spirituality. This may just be for the next few years while in graduate school. We shall see. I actually really like having them separate, but didn’t want to exceed eight contexts. The final one is the work that I do for money.
Next I’ll be updating these in my calendar and on my master planning documents. We’ll see how they work. The goal of the contexts is to have a way to build great attention, mindfulness, and productivity in the various areas of my life. I’ll check in later on how it is going.
Experience
Wife
Home
Professional
Writing
LGBT Activism
Relationships
Spirituality
In each of my contexts, I have one year, three year, five year, and ten year goals. I review them each year and I build all of my daily activities around these different contexts. Now, as I am looking at the next four years as a graduate student, with the ultimate goal of changing my professional life, I’ve realized that I need to update and change my contexts. So here are my new eight contexts:
Experience
Wife
Home
Poetry
Creative Work
Scholarly Work
Relationships/Spirituality
Work for Hire
As you can see, I’ve left the first three the same. The experience context is where I put activities that I like to do (travel, visiting museums, seeing plays) that fuel both my growth as a human being but also my enjoyment of life. This is also a generative space for my writing - poetry, creative, and scholarly. I split my professional/writing contexts into four contexts that I can consider and monitor separately. Poetry is one in and of itself because I am a poet and it is an area that needs devoted time and attention. I have some concrete short and long-term goals in that area and so a focused way to think about them is important. I also want to keep a context of creative work. This is both creative non-fiction work, reviewing work, and also things like embroidery, sewing, and other creative endeavors. Scholarly work will be things associated with my PhD program. I combined Relationships and Spirituality. This may just be for the next few years while in graduate school. We shall see. I actually really like having them separate, but didn’t want to exceed eight contexts. The final one is the work that I do for money.
Next I’ll be updating these in my calendar and on my master planning documents. We’ll see how they work. The goal of the contexts is to have a way to build great attention, mindfulness, and productivity in the various areas of my life. I’ll check in later on how it is going.
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