It’s perfectly understandable, it’s hard to complete REx course with the ongoing juggle in our lives. We don’t have luxury of time. In fact, we don’t even remember when we had it last! But learning cannot be stopped. It’s the 7th habit of Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Effective People – Sharpen the Saw! And we already chose to learn to “Stand Out”, didn’t we?. So, let’s find a way!
- Make the content omnipresent– The first action must be to organize the course content to make it handy. This would mean few things. Add Bookmark to the course web page in your PC/Mac browser – preferably in the bookmarks bar. Also, let your browser “Remember me”. If you have set your browser to share bookmarks across all your devices, you will have to do nothing to get the bookmarks in your Smartphone/Tab browser, but otherwise do it explicitly.
You may also want to create a label/folder in your email App where you keep precisely those 14/15 weekly course emails. A couple more ideas will follow.
- Eat the elephant– The only way to eat an elephant is by taking one bite at a time! Do not wait for a shiny day, that you will spare to just do this one thing! The day will never come! It’s like trying to swallow the entire elephant. Be content with what you can achieve in smaller pockets of time. Thankfully the course is already divided into small units, as small as 7 minutes.
- Grab those little unused pockets of time– Now that we have decided to consume the content in smaller, bits, the next question is, when? Thankfully, almost all the material is in the form of videos and quite conversational! I mean it doesn’t require you to stare at the content all the time. We can take advantage of it.
Identify all those physical activities where you leave your mind to wander. Here are my top favorites – evening walk, chopping vegetables (my wife likes this part) and my morning yoga sessions. Connect your headphone, start a video and get on with the physical activity that requires no specific mental focus. You might find the trick to play the video with smartphone in your pocket with screen locked, handy. The course starts moving inch by inch, each day!
In short, get the course work included in one or more of your existing rituals in addition to the regular study hour slots.
- Track the course completion – There is a recommended order to cover the course from Week 1 to Week 14. Prepare a tracking table (see the picture) where you could keep marking the completed parts, say by changing the font color and pick the next ones in the queue.
This mode of tracking helps in a way to even pat your own back, on your progress and get motivated to push forward the work.
- Keep an eye on takeaways– We will have to ponder over the key takeaways, after each of those sections. And here comes the best part of the course that is in the form of Summary of Key Points PDFs. Each word in those PDFs is worth its weight in gold.
You may want to download those 5 PDFs and keep them handy on your PC/Mac, for revisiting anytime you want to. As usual keep a link to that folder in your favorites/Quick Access of the Files Manager.
- Get The big Picture – You will need to get a big picture of the all the lessons together. It can come in many forms, but the one that I like is Mind Map. We could create a couple of mind maps that slice and dice the whole information and help forming your mind with respect to this knowledge!
- Let the Rubber meet the road – It’s one thing to gain the knowledge and it is quite another to apply it. The course has excellent homework exercise PDFs meant to assist for the same. Again, download those five PDFs and keep in the earlier mentioned folder to keep them handy.
The course provides guidance on the methods of picking up the goals and planning for them. We will have to extract several “goals” for ourselves based on the learning (Now, a train of elephants walking towards your dining table !).
Get all those goals and the steps required to attain them in your work management system and track towards their completion.
