Welcome to the CPS Coffee Break!
This involuntary shift to unstructured time may be challenging for many of us. And while we settle into home working routines, maintaining appropriate barriers between working life and home life, while remaining both necessarily yet satisfyingly productive can present new challenges.
The purpose of this community is to provide a supportive environment to support members of CPS in working towards goals that are important to them. It is about accountability in a completely non-managerial sense and if you're worried that this is about checking up on you, post under a nickname and enjoy the comparative anonymity!
We will set goals for the whole session and then for each week. Our first session will be until the end of the Easter Vacation. It's really easy to get carried away setting goals so I encourage you all to be optimistically realistic without creating a new source of pressure to perform!
Goals can be in any aspect of life although it might be useful to think of tasks that are personally (and professionally) important but that never quite tip over into important AND urgent. Each week we will report back on the previous week, reflect on the progress we made, and set goals for the week ahead.
The moderator for the week will post a list of everyone's goals once a week (typically Monday morning) and you are invited to comment with your progress, and your new list of goals for the forthcoming week. This is called a checkin and there are no rules about when you have to check in.
Each week there will be a discussion topic, generally prompted by checkins the previous week. Feel free to suggest topics to throw open to the group. We'll recap the session goals for updating and refining about halfway through. Feel free to comment on everyone's goals as much or as little as you like.
So to get started:
1. Tell us a bit about yourself. What's your main focus at the moment? You are welcome to be vague and mysterious in the interest of maintaining anonymity if you wish while still introducing yourself to the group.
2. Goals for the session. Common themes include research, home stuff, family, self-care, crafts, exercise, writing, and gardening. Be as detailed or brief as is helpful to you. It may be useful to give specific projects nicknames that help to keep track of things, and if you want to anonymise things, you can do. If you anticipate any challenges for the weeks ahead, you can note them too.
3. Goals for the coming week. What do you want to get done in the next week? Specific small tasks and “microdeadlines” are typically more achievable than 'tackle big task'. And don't forget, a lot of this is about the satisfaction of ticking things off the to-do list. So you can be as detailed as you want to in breaking goals down.
You are welcome to join at any point in the session, and similarly to leave if this isn't useful for you. And finally, don't worry if you miss a few checkins. Life happens.
