Hi everybody, now I know that most of the the time I speak about units I’ve just finished but the time it’s a little different. As I’m finally nearing the end of grade 9 my PGP courses coming to an end. Now for those of you who don’t know what PGP, I spoke little bit about it in my mPOL but I’ll give you a mini description here. This year in PLP the teachers decided to give us a course to help with our goal setting, time management, and basically everything to keep us from exploding with stress. In this course we went over many different ideas and worked on many different things. A few of them were time blocking, reading a goal setting book, starting weekly reviews, learning the 7 habits and so much more. As I said in my mPOL post I was definitely skeptical at first as I thought I was already on top of everything and it felt a little unnecessary. However, I’ve reached the end of the year and learned a lot from it. Our final project for this unit was to make something that we would send back to our previous selves in a time machine. This thing we sent back would tell our past selves something we wish we knew before.

One thing I instantly thought of was using the app Things. When grade 9 first started and the teachers kept forcing us to use things I thought it wasn’t needed and that I could just look in Showbie for what I needed to do. But Things has turned out to be probably my favourite thing I’ve gotten from PGP. I use it everyday and it really helps think about what I need to do and when I need to do it. I now use Things for stuff outside of school as well, and I always set a date and time in Things for when to complete it. This ties into time blocking, another big part of our productivity unit. With time blocking I can make sure that within all the chaos of homework, baseball, umpiring, and everything else in my life, that I have time for me. In the productivity unit I really realized how much I like to procrastinate. So if I could time block when I had me time that meant I had no excuse to not dome work in the time I scheduled for it. Below is my time Machine, a PGP-ified To Be or Not To Be.

Now you’re probably wondering why I care so much about me time, well that’s simple. On one hand everyone loves to just watch Netflix and eat food, but also it’s one of the 7 habits. Having me time is Sharpening the Saw. Everyone has a lot going on in their life and so it’s important to keep your mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional health in good shape. For each the there are different things you have todo but keeping yourself happy is a real big one. Now Sharpen the Saw was just one of 7 really cool and useful habits but it was my favourite. Another habit I really liked was beginning with the end in mind, which connects to goal setting.

Throughout this course we read two different books, What Do you Really Want and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens. In What Do you Really Want there was a lot of focus on goal setting. I learned about goal ladders and lots of other techniques I can use to set goals. Whether my goal is to get 15,000 steps in a day or to become a lawyer when I grow up, these methods will really help. I also made a dream board which helped me realize some of what I want in life.

I realize that I spoke about a lot of different Things (haha get it) but to try and summarize all of my learning from this course in a blog post is difficult. I hope you got to see some of what really helped me and appealed to me this year as well as maybe intriguing you to do something similar. Maybe read one of the books we did, start a weekly review, or even buy the app Things. This course although seemed unnecessary to me at first made a major difference in my life and I am very happy with what I’ve made throughout the year surrounding it.