Dan Learns Time Management

I consider myself to be an organized person. I keep my living spaces neat, I arrange my possessions into categories, I wash my clothes with like colors. However all of these are spacial organizations; when it comes to organizing and managing my time I'm a mess, and as luck would have it I'm rapidly learning that farming draws heavily upon that very skill. So I'm presented with a choice: give up on being a farmer and take on a job where my time is organized for me or learn better time management. So far, I've opted for the latter.

This weekend presents an interesting time management challenge. If all goes well, I'll be up at the farm for two days, working on all the various things that need to get done, by myself. Terra, who has enough on her plate with school work, won't be around to help this time. Compounding the challenge is the fact that several things need to happen in a specific order. If all goes well, the end result will be our first round of plants in the ground, but between now and then is a juggling act of testing, improving and conditioning the soil. In order to make sense of this process, and accomplish everything in the time that I have, I did something I rarely do; I made a schedule.

It's a little strange to me: all throughout my years in school, I never made schedules. For large assignments I'd let deadlines be my motivator, and had I been inclined I could have plotted a very nice logarithmic function relating the closeness of the due date to the amount of work I did. I'm not proud of this method, and I've handed in some truly dreadful work because of it, but It served me well enough to earn a college degree. So trying to suddenly develop better time management skills is exercising a part of my brain that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention in the past. And it's actually a pretty good feeling.

-Dan