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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The Training Schedule

On one of my Yahoo Berner groups, we were discussing training our dogs in muliple dog sports at the same time.  One trainer, who has several dogs involved in different events, makes a training chart to help plan her time.  I thought this was a great idea, so I made a 4 week schedule (it is even color coded) to help me stay organized.  So far, I have been following it very closely (for over 2 weeks now) and it has helped a lot with my procrastination.  It also helps me a lot to see my goals for the week laid out in front of me so that I can stay focused and motivated.  I will vary the schedule depending on what events we have coming up in the near future.  Right now, I am concentrating on Draft with Bosley, so I make sure I schedule him for 3 or 4 sessions a week.  Once the Draft test is over, I will start to put more emphasis on obedience work.  Here is what this weeks schedule looks like:

Notice that Maggie has "Walks" scheduled in her chart? This does not mean that Bosley does not get any walks (both dogs always get their usual runs and hikes), but Maggie is not as involved in as many things as Bosley is, so I try to schedule time with her where we can just go out for a nice walk (without Bosley) and enjoy ourselves.  It is nice to have that fun, alone time with her and she really enjoys it.

So far I am really liking having the schedule to follow.  I am starting to think that maybe I should make a "housework and laundry schedule" too.  Then maybe I would be more motivated to scrub the toilets. 

6 comments:

  1. Very good idea Kim!!

    When I was doing bird work, 3 or 4 times a week, i did up a similar schedule for my guys, so i could keep it all straight!

    I should get back to that!!

    LOL I love the you coloured coded it, wow and I thought I was anal!!!!!!!!!

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  2. oh i meant to add, all that had work will pay off, and you can see it already in your dogs!!!!!!!!!!

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  3. lol i totally laughed at the "color coded" part. you've been hanging out with sarah too much!

    but really, it is a great idea and it will totally help with motivation, and sticking to a plan.

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  4. ooooo I love it...I want to make one, with colours too!!....tell me how!!
    I also need one to tell me when to scrub the toliet! LOL!!

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  5. Jolene - I just used Word to make my schedule and made a simple Word document. It was easy. Excel probably would have been better, but I am so bad at using Excel by the time I figured all the cells and formatting, I would have given up and had no chart at all.

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