Planning for the next two weeks

After a relatively quiet weekend, it’s 6.30 am Monday morning and I’m facing a very big next two weeks. This will include:

• 4 days solo travel interstate in Sydney at a conference (this Tuesday- Friday)

• Presenting at this conference

• E’s 8th birthday

• E’s school friend’s birthday party

• Marking, moderating and finalising grades for the postgraduate course I teach (next week)

• Possibly getting a new car - yay! (depends on availability though)

• E’s end of term and start of school holidays

• Progressing two research manuscripts

  
  

My strategies to have this all run smoothly:

1. I already bought all of E’s presents on Friday when I had a few hours free

2. E and I bought her friend’s presents yesterday

3. I will take certain sessions off during the conference to work on/practice my presentation

4. I will have 2/3 quiet nights in Sydney to recharge (it’s nice to socialise too but have to get the balance right).

5. I will walk every day (hopefully the weather is nice so a couple of these can be beach walks).

6. I will take a couple of hours while away to do some Q3 planning (this runs from July to Sept for me in line with the school term).

7. Next week, I will only have two focused- marking and writing. I will reschedule anything non-urgent during that week.

8. Al and I will make easy dinners, and not feel bad if we get takeaway a couple of nights.

I’m looking forward to a lot of this- yes even some of the marking! But I have to be realistic on what can be achieved, and I think writing this all out BEFORE I hit the busy time helps with this. Otherwise, it’s too easy to think, oh yes I can just do my usual schedule and just fit extra things on top of it, Ummm, no.

For E’s birthday, we are going to take her to Aussie World, which is an amusement park 20 minutes up the road. It’s nice in the milder weather - the only other time we’ve gone it was summer and too HOT! So this should work out better. E loves a book about an 8 year old who goes to an amusement park on her birthday, and we’ve been reading her this book since she was 2. So we thought it would be fun to take her on her 8th birthday. (The book is called Sicky Vicky because she gets sick and vomits on the rollercoaster but we’ll ignore that part of the story haha). So Saturday should be a fun, but busy day!

How’s everyone else’s next week or two looking? Any additional strategies you think helps during a busy time?