Hello loyal readers, I’m Jason Guan and this is my official PGP post. Before I start, this may be my biggest post ever, so prepare for some reading.

So PGP (personal growth plan) is something new that the PLP team introduced this year. It’s an X-Block class that involves all of the goal-setting things from regular class and compresses them all into one, once-a-month class.

In this post, I’ll be showing off my “Time Machine” project (blast from the past), and also walking through everything we’re learned this year in PGP.

But first, backstory. In the beginning, I was a small child who didn’t know any better. I had the occasional late assignment in showbie, and got flooded with work. However, from the beginning of Grade 9 until now, I have learned so much information I wish I could have told my past self. That’s what Time Machine is for.

My Time Machine Project

The first section of this post will also be the best. Time Machine. For time machine, I chose to create a good ol’ self help video. You know what I’m talking about. These videos are notorious for being mystical and using fancy words like “revitalize” and “heal”. I found this to be the best way to show off this information, as many aspects of self help videos and PGP line up together.

I chose to focus on my three favourite habits, AKA the topics I wish past Jason had known. Putting first things first, Think Win-Win, and putting first things first. These all associate to some part of my life, whether it be education, music, or health. Here’s the final product.

Here’s the second part of my post, the explanation of everything we learned. This is the long, reading part that I warned you about. So buckle up, grab a drink, and prepare for a mild ride through the streets of productivity.

Goal Setting

I’m sure you all know what goal-setting is, and we thought we did too, until we read the book “What Do You Really Want?”. This book was focused on goal-setting and how to set effective goals.

One of my biggest take-aways from this was SMART goals. Smart is an acronym to consider when setting goals. It stands for:

Savvy

Measurable

Active

Reasonable

Timed

If you remember this acronym, then your goals will be bound for success. One of our main assignments for this unit was the use of forms. Forms (Think it and Ink it) were great ways to get thinking about our goals, and we wrote them down in a journal.

Productivity

Our Productivity (Time Management) unit was mainly centred around two main aspects. Time management tools and time blocking. Time management tools are like evolved to-do lists. The one we used was called “Things” and allowed us to set deadlines, set repeating to-do’s, and even organize them by area and project. It was incredibly useful for managing your time well, which was one of my goals from last year.

Time blocking was another focus of this unit. Time blocking is the use of a calendar app (we just used the Apple calendar) to plot out every 1-2 hour block of your life. This can be incredibly useful for people who play sports and practice often, or for people like me, who are terrible at sports but take a ton of extracurriculars.

The 7 Habits

Oh boy. This is the big fish. This is one of our biggest units this year. The 7 Habits. The 7 Habits are a set of… well…. 7 habits designed to help you achieve your goals and many other things. The 7 Habits (in order) were:

Be Proactive

Begin With The End In Mind

Put First Things First

Think Win-Win

Seek First To Understand, then to Be Understood

Synergize

Sharpen The Saw

I could sit here and type out a long, detailed explanation of the 7 Habits, but I highly doubt you want to read that, so I’m going to make good use of this unit’s main project, the 4 creative reflections. For each section of the book, we were asked to fill in a workbook to show our learning, as well as make a creative reflection for each section. I think you’ll enjoy looking at my doodles/sketch notes a lot more than reading big, fat blocks of text.

Reflection

Wow. That was actually a lot less than I expected. But, I still have a Reflection to write.

PGP was a big help for all of my classes. The time blocking and use of things was incredibly useful for planning out my valuable time and helping my stay on track and helping my assignments stay on time. The 7 Habits were an even bigger help. They stayed in the back of my mind, and helped me in every situation where they could be used. I think I’ve used every single habit at least once after I learned about them, and I feel I utilized them well.

The first ever unit, goal setting, was just as big of a help as anything. The forms allowed me to concentrate on all of my goals, and the SMART acronym is something that I don’t think I’ll ever forget, whether that be good or bad. The Time Machine was a great manifestation of everything we learned in PGP, and was a great refresher on everything I might have forgotten.

Overall, PGP may have been frustrating at times with the workload, but in the end, I think it paid off.

This is a very tired Jason, signing off.