Time management is about being efficient with our time by planning and organizing our activities so we can complete tasks quicker and have time for other things. There are several steps to managing time:
These time management steps are also cognitive skills called Executive Functions, when damaged by a brain injury they are termed Executive Dysfunction.
While regaining my memory in the hospital, I was told I had a brain injury. I didn’t know what a brain injury was, what it meant and I wondered what it would look like. The purpose of making the Healing Images was to learn about brain injuries, how it would affect me and what happened when the three weeks I lost my memory.
Setting Goals
I didn’t use any guidance to make the goals of my Healing Images realistic. There was no need to have a finish date and I was unaware of how much time it took planning and organizing the content on the images.
There is an acronym called SMART that helps maintain our goals. It says that our goals should be:
Specific – My project wasn’t well defined.
Measurable – I made no limit of images or text to work with.
Achievable – It took longer than I thought to solve my problems.
Relevant – The project was relevant to my life.
Time-related – I didn’t have any time limits.
If I tried to applied the SMART acronym to the Healing Images, it would have reduced my time to complete the project and limited the content to tell my story, I wouldn’t have tried to make the project. Instead, What happened was that I benefited from years doing art therapy without knowing it.
My incentive for making the Healing Images was the same as my goal. I wanted to understand how the brain injury would affect my life, why the injury happened and what was my health when I lost my memory. I lost many things I enjoyed with the injury, I was motivated not to loose the ability to make graphic design. I’m often motivated by the excitement of thinking what I could do, only to realize I don’t have the ability to achieve it. It’s good to ask other people if your goal is practicable.
Perceiving ourselves as other people do and understanding our limitations is personal insight. My self awareness is poor. I still believe I capable of doing what I did before my injury, even after repeated failure. I’m not always aware of how much activity that could make me sore and yet improve my health. the consequence of becoming sore is that I need to rest longer and miss other activities.
I’m learning that since I process information slowly, I’m taking longer to think and understand, therefore, it will take me longer to complete my goals.
If my personal insight was accurate and I understood that the healing images would take 4 years to finish, I’m sure I wouldn’t have started. If I knew my limitations, I wouldn’t have done half the things that improved my health.
I have difficulty starting activities, especially if the activity is new, like when I’m writing this article. I have notes, printed information and I know the subject to write about, but there is no clear idea regarding what I should write, even after pondering for several minutes and reading the notes and printed information a few times.
When projects become too large too grasp, I need to stop, go back and re-due / start over from where I last could understood. That happened often when making this website. I also have problems stopping and moving on to another activity when I’m making progress. My troubles with starting and stopping are one reason it took three years to finish my website.
Now that I’ve changed subjects I don’t have any difficulty writing my thoughts, maybe since I’m writing about the past, I don’t know.
I don’t recall having any problems starting the healing Images, but I had lots of time to think about it, and it took I me time to gather the content (images and notes) to place on the images.
having a consistent technique or procedure of doing things will make activities become easier and quicker with repetition. It has worked for me when I have scheduled appointments like volunteering exercising class. It becomes difficult when I try to exercise by myself. Routine is difficult to establish if a person has problems initiating new tasks.
The process of deciding what, how and why to carry out the design of the Healing Images is what slowed me down. I needed to re-learn the design elements and principles and how to apply them, things I forgot or was unsure of since my brain injury. I was uncertain of everything right after my brain injury.
again my goal was to understand what happened, what a brain injury is and how it will affect me. after wondering how best to tell my story I decided to tell it chronologically, the complications, rehabilitation and personal struggles.
I meant to explain and show how all parts of my life were affected by the brain injury. The doctor and therapist notes showed improvement, The exercise images represented rehabilitation, background images represented the road of recovery, the block letters represented starting over and the road signs represented personal losses.
Arranging our thoughts, activities and possessions with similar ideas, events and items will save time. Organizing keeps track of things so we know where they are and can return to them when needed.
When I planned and organized the Healing Images, events were arranged by week, I placed the MRI scans with the related diagnostic reports and My journal notes were placed the week I wrote them.