I sat down before tonight's Skype call to think about my action learning pathway, which I've not updated since June last year. It's dreadfully out of date, of course, but I was more thinking about how I felt about my progress than what I'd actually done. I just spent ten minutes going through Looby's design web points (you can see them here on my old action learning pathway post), and jotting down a few things that leapt out at me.
The main thing I realised (and I'm not entirely sure how I hadn't realised this before) was that I was feeling slightly overwhelmed, and like I had a lot of unfinished things looming over me, and yet I didn't know what they were. This is most unlike me - at work I am a rigorous list-keeper, and always know every single thing I could potentially be doing at any moment so I can make informed choices. But for some reason with the diploma I'd been avoiding making a list.
Jo helped me to think about my other commitments throughout the week, and we concluded that I could regularly allocate two hours a week on a Thursday evening. My partner is always out at this time so I'm not tempted to get involved in anything else going on in the house. We talked about how I organise the rest of my time, and concluded this was realistic.
Then we looked at each ongoing project in turn, and I listed the things that were my responsibility, and, as some of my projects are collaborative, the points at which I would be reliant on someone else to do something. As we went along, we allocated two hour time slots to each bit of work.
Theoretically, if all goes according to plan, these three projects should be off my hands (not finished in all cases, but my initial work finished and sent to someone else) in ten weeks, which (allowing for two weeks when I'm not at home), takes us to the end of June. We'll see... but the whole thing feels more manageable now.
I'm part of an email peer group, and we have a plan to email each other with an update each Thursday evening. So far we've all been quite sporadic, but this fits nicely with my new Thursday evening diploma commitment, so I plan to spend the last ten minutes of each Thursday evening session emailing the group with my progress, and reading theirs. A nice bit of built in accountability.