One of the classes that I’ve had the most interesting time with this year is PGP. Working on the personal growth plan has required me to spend a lot of time outside of school focusing on self improvement. 

While we originally started with “what do you really want” while reading the book and filling out all of the forms that came with it. I don’t think that I learned much from this as the forms didn’t feel like they were encouraging self improvement, rather they were just chores that I was doing to get them handed in on time.

I did spend a lot of time on time blocking and things as that was one of the main early focuses of PGP.

The time machine was a concept that really interested me as I always have regrets of not being able to do the work to the level that I wanted to do after finishing a project. I have countless thoughts about telling my past self something that could vastly improve my life.

But the time machine comes later in the post and I want to talk about the “PGP experience” first. Honestly at the start the class I really didn’t like what we were doing. The lack of class time made me forget that the class even existed and I was always lagging behind on work.

I had a pretty hard time getting everything in on time

I definitely saw how I could learn from the seven habits and all that but in the end I never really absorbed the ideas until it came back to what if I could send my past self something to improve my work. 

So the time machine project that I built to send back to myself is one related to habit one: being proactive. It’s a calendar with a thin plastic sheet over the dates so when I write down the due dates of my work for the week I can flip over the sheet and then see that the work is due in a day or two earlier than it should be. I have accepted that I am the kind of person to procrastinate and so by making this I’m telling myself to finish it before the final due date so I have the time to revise and make it as good as possible as well as getting started on the work sooner. 

I also made a shortcut to go with it that sets a due date a day before when I say it’s due in. 

I’m not going to say that I was really invested in PGP because I wasn’t. But I did learn a bit about how to get on a better footing with my work.