Alberta field school reflection

It’s been a while since our Alberta field school happened, but we’re not done with it yet! If you’ve been following my blog, you may remember some of my posts about PGP, which is all about self improvement, you can check out those older posts if you want to know more about PGP. You can also check out my post I did on the Alberta field school as a whole if you want to know more about that. Anyways, our first PGP post of this is a reflection on the Alberta field school, more specifically on what strategies I used to manage my time and impulsivity to make sure that I could complete my project and enjoy myself at the same time. Well, the first thing I’m going to do is outline what our days looked like in Alberta. We would usually wake up early, have a quick breakfast, and be off to our first location, do our research/activities, go to the next location, do our research/activities, eat lunch, next location, research/activities, then dinner, and then we would go to wherever we were staying for the night and go to bed. So yeah, most of the extra time we had was on the bus, and if you didn’t get everything you needed from a location, well, tough luck. So, needless to say you really had to make sure you were on task and getting things done in the time you had to do them, or might not get them done at all. So, let’s get on to some of the strategies I employed. Well, the first strategy I used was planning ahead of time. I would usually check the itinerary in the morning so that I would know what to expect from the day, and put tasks that required time outside of our activities to complete in Things, an app handy for putting down to-dos and such. With this advance planning I knew what to expect from the day, and could easily keep track of what I had to do. However, this tactic couldn’t help me if I was distracted during our stops at different locations, and lots of the information we needed was usually just at one location, so if we were distracted at the location we wouldn’t get our things done, so how did I manage myself at the locations? Honestly, it kind of just came down to common sense and knowing that if I don’t do it now I won’t get it done at all, an example of this was our Ghost town video. Basically, we had to make a random story in the ghost town at Three Valley gap and shoot a film of it. We only had an hour or so to shoot it, so we really had to be on task for the whole time. We were kind of goofing off at first, but then we realized we needed to get going, so we got focused and finished the film on time. In fact, we actually had a little bit of time left afterwards because we finished filming so quickly, and were able to explore the ghost town some more. This also happened with a few of the other locations, where I would finish the assignment quickly enough to have enough free time to enjoy myself more. Another example of my first strategy in action was our daily note. For our daily note, we had a question assigned each day, and we were given a bit of time to finish it, but I usually wasn’t able to get all of my thoughts down in the time we were given. So if fell to me to make sure that I completed the notes I planned when I was going to finish them, and instead of wasting time on the bus I actually used the time to finish the notes, and got them all done on time. Although I still think that if I was more on task during the time we had specifically for them, I wouldn’t have had to do as much on my own time. So in conclusion, while I did have some good strategies to finish things on time and increase my enjoyment of the experience overall, I feel like I could improve on working my best for the entire duration of the work period and not get sidetracked, so that way I don’t have to rush at the end, which greatly takes away from the the experience since you have no time to do anything but desperately try to finish on time.