So far, I have been in Dublin for 2 full weeks now, and to say the least, it has been fun. Being able to immerse myself in the culture and explore the city as well as the surrounding places has truly been a blessing. So far on this trip, I have been able to explore some of the history of Dublin, find a new church to call home for the time being, go to the Isle of Man to watch the TT race, and explore Manchester’s city center. Saying all of this out loud now makes me super excited to see where my journeys will take me throughout the rest of this trip. But the main thing that I have noticed is the importance of managing my time while I’m in Dublin.

Effective time management influences almost every aspect of your life, from personal fulfillment to professional success, and being an active, honest participant in your life can either make or break your dreams. Now that sounds overwhelming at first, but large issues, often, can be solved or understood using the basic things in life. A large part of time management comes from understanding what your goals are in the first place. Whether you are looking to start a business or just introduce more consistency into your day-to-day life, understanding what your goals are drives the rest of the process for time management. Once you have established the thing you want to achieve, the next step is to decide how you want to go about achieving your goals. This step is what defines how you will manage your time, allocate your effort, and overall get to your future goals. Sounds simple enough… but we all know it’s a lot easier said than done, and this is something I have come to learn since I started my internship this summer at St John of God ID Services in Dublin, Ireland.

At St John of God ID Services, it is essential to have effective time management. Although it’s never going to be perfect, understanding what you are doing and why you are doing it in the field of Intellectual disabilities is key. A lot of times in ID support, especially for the users I work with, can become triggered from one change or one mishap in a day. This can be as simple as a change in an event’s location due to weather, or even changing the contents of a meal because you ran out of the ingredients earlier in the week. The little things that most people would overlook could change the entire course of the day for a user. So, a large part of my role working in ID services is to manage not only my own time but the time of the users diligently. This mainly comes from utilizing schedules and timetables from each of the users. These schedules are tricky to write at times, but they play a major role in how effective the day can be. Each user has his or her own unique timetable that takes into account all the things they like to do, but more importantly, their unique triggers. But the schedules are a lot more than just activities that users like and ways to manage things that could and would go wrong. As I mentioned before, time management starts with assessing what you want to accomplish, because without a goal, all the work you put into managing your time has no purpose. This goes for the users as well. At St. John of God ID services, the goal isn’t to run a daycare for the users but to help rehabilitate them into living a normal life and allow them to become as independent as possible. So, when setting up the timetables, keeping that as the goal for each user is key; it allows us to not only get the users to have fun but to get closer and closer to becoming independent each day while they are with us.

To become a master at time management, something I am not, it takes time… lots of it. Often it takes people years to master time management and gain control over their day. But while I’m in Dublin, I don’t have years, I only have a summer. So practicing time management is going to play a huge role in my ability to be successful throughout the duration of my internship. To practice this, one of the things I have started implementing in my daily life is a fully planned-out calendar. Taking the time at the beginning of the week allows me to set my goals and orient my life in a direction that I want to go. This is exactly what is asked of me as St. John of God, orienting the user’s life so they can obtain their goals of becoming more independent in various aspects of their lives. Practicing this for myself will allow me to understand what it takes to reach my goals, whether it’s just for the week or for the entire year, and see through firsthand experience the effort it takes to improve.