Zuhura has been an Intern for 7 months. Over the 7 months, she’s become very busy.

She facilitates the Reach Up! curriculum to two sets of participants, which includes facilitation as well as all the record keeping, like sending the participant register

for each class.

She’s coaching three groups of participants, once a week on their livelihood projects

She’s working with two local community partners.

That’s in addition to

keeping her ISM, Giselle,

up to date with how the

program is going, which

means

•completing the Intern

Barometer

•completing her monthly

time sheet and

•submitting her weekly

expense claim for bus and

Internet café fees.

Plus, she volunteers at a tutoring center twice a week.

On Friday of last

week, Giselle said

she’d like to see more

ideas and stories

posted to the

intranet. There didn’t

seem to be enough

activity or

information sharing.

Zuhura volunteered

to look at it and see if

she had any ideas.

Very soon, she

will begin

thinking about

her life after DOT

so she needs to

develop her

professional

ePortfolio to

showcase her

skills to potential

employers.

How does she juggle all of these things? Let’s look.

It’s 7 am on Monday morning and Zuhurais ready to begin her week. The first thing she does every day is look at her calendar to double check her schedule for the day.

Whenever she has to-do items that repeat she puts

each instance on the calendar.

A daily to-do is to schedule time to record her

reflections on the day. She added submitting her

weekly expense claim to the end of the day each

Friday.

Her timecard is due at the end of each month, so she has a to-do the last working day of every month to make sure.

She notices she has time this morning to schedule some of the items on her To-Do list,

Plus, she needs to add a few To-Do items based on her latest conversation with her ISM.

She leaves items on her To-Do list until they are scheduled on her calendar.

She adds a new To-Do item to her list

Next, she schedules the following To-Do items in her calendar and checks them off on the list as she goes.

To do check box

Here’s her

calendar for

the week

She see’s that she has time on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning to review the DOT site and think about ways to generate more postingsfrom Interns in the field.

On Wednesday, she has three potential hours to use for this task, if she can find someone to help her make sure that the classroom is set up for the participants.

She recalls that Sentwali, one of her participants, is good with computers. He has caught on quickly. She decides she will talk to him about helping her if he can. It might take more time now but free up some time later.

She adds that to her To-Do list

The meeting with Giselle, her ISM, is next week and she wants to be prepared to share her ideas. She creates a task list for preparing. Here’s the first draft of her list.

Then she begins to work on the agenda for her meeting with Giselle. She knows that she’ll work on her task list for the meeting and the agenda at the same time. As she comes up with new agenda items, she’ll have to figure out what tasks are needed to prepare.

She thinks about the

items that she would like

to discuss with Giselle

and begins to build a

meeting agenda that she

will propose.

Zuhura and Giselle have an hour and a half together and

she knows from experience that Giselle will need about

30 minutes to talk about items on her agenda.

As Zuhura works on the agenda, she quickly realizes that they will run out of time. She will need to send some of her thoughts to Giselle ahead of time so that they can save their time together to discuss anything that is unclear or needs immediate attention.

She checks the time. It’s time for her first appointment but she feels in control of her day and is beginning to see how her week will shape up.

Whew!