It’s almost the end of the quarter and one of the projects that we needed to complete for our Digital Literacies for the Speech Language Pathologist class had us created a PKM Strategy Report. PKM stands for Personal Knowledge Management (sometimes, Mastery), and it is a system we can create to makes sense of and manage information that the world throws at us constantly. In this class, we were commissioned to think about our professional, and really, our personal mission statements, productivity, our relationship with the digital world, and a workflow or rhythm by which we interact with the world around us. Before I post my final PKM project, I want to share with you some of the processes that we had to articulate before discovering our own systems. The following was about productivity:

I never knew how productive I could be until I became a mom. Laundry? Check! Meals? Check! Hockey practice, Jujitsu, PLAAFP, evaluation report, field trip money? Check, check, check, check, check! I have always considered myself to generally be a productive person, but I don’t think I could say that all, or even most of what I do, encompasses meaningful personal productivity. The fallacy of “productivity” as we generally tend to define it can make you feel noble and validated by society, pinning you with an imaginary badge of success; however, most of the time, it can also leave you feeling a bit off-kilter and perhaps even unfulfilled. Meaningful personal productivity, in contrast, is intentional inner work, sometimes invisible, but always life-giving.

If I am being completely honest, I have not been living with this intentionality in my life. I did carve out some moments of my harried life to put down on paper my whirlwind of thoughts in the form of our SLPD application. Previous to starting this program, I would often have thoughts and ideas but no system or tool to capture them. Ideas would spark in my brain, spin around in the circulation of, “I need to revise those goals,” “Hockey is at 5:45 today, not 5:30,” and inefficiently get stored in the overstuffed “Miscellaneous” folder in my mind. In addition to that folder, I have my overflowing “Just in Case” folder on my desktop and my disorganized “Research” folder in my email inbox. These folders are not much different than the junk drawer in my kitchen with everything from Gorilla Glue to the extra screw for those Ikea toddler chairs that my boys stopped using 6 years ago. I have an underdeveloped personal mission, an incomplete PKM system, and a stifled workflow resulting in too many incomplete loops and an overabundance of residue in my mind.

While I often refer to myself as a “systems person”, I realize now that most of the systems and workflows I have created are for my household or my workplace, without the inclusion of myself. While my distractions are often positive ones (my family is important!) and my lack of time in this season is mostly due to my responsibilities as a mother, I have essentially omitted my own personal life mission and vision from the larger equation of my family and workplace. This has been a challenging realization, and I am rediscovering my hunger for deep work. Honestly, I initially felt that starting this SLPD program was overly self-indulgent. However, this program (even the application itself) has allowed me to start carving out some time for myself, to structure the process of (re)discovering my personal mission and vision, to talk and work with people who have similar interests and motivations, and to reactivate the parts within me that had gone dormant.

This class was more emotional for me than I ever imagined it would be. I’m not sure about all of you out there, but when I started to lose myself in the chaos of everyday life, I became my own miscellaneous folder. I was stuck my own junk drawer. I hate to associate this with age or with family status, but I do wonder how I got to the place where my being a 40-something mom just became bigger than it ever should’ve been. Don’t get me wrong. I love being a mom. But I wonder if, after awhile, it was just easier to become myself once removed and become “the boys’ mom”. AND I wonder how much I was hiding behind that status because I wasn’t sure how to make my re-entrance into the world as just myself. These are the kinds of questions I processed while taking a digital literacy class!! That was unexpected!

Well, more to come about how I’ve been processing my identity issues while working on my PKM!