Strategic analysis of beer money income efficiency.

High school Economics, those were the days :)

One import ant lesson I have learnt over the last semester is that efficiency is king.

Let me explain: September came and I jumped upon every job opportunity. Leaving me with teaching hours at two language schools, a contract at university and several private students.  I was only vaguely thinking about ‘teacher burnout’ as I thought the money could motivate me through anything and I’m still not over the work hard, play hard part of my youth.

During this semester, I was earning on average 400Pln per day, not a bad amount considering I live in a village with negligible payments in terms of a rent. But all the hard work, and super big invoices never quite translated to big bucks in my pocket. Why? Because nothing was efficient. For example,  I was eating three meals a day in the city and because eating constituted part of my free time, I wanted to eat good, and ‘eating good’ costs money.  Often because I was so short of time I was taking taxis between the school and university. Put all this together and I was blowing 100/200pln of my wad daily just on living. I never burnt out, I just became frustrated that despite working like a muvva, I still didn’t have the disposable income I, or my wife (joke), wanted.

So today marks the start of a new strategy. I’ve dropped my hours at private language schools to one day, I have two teaching days at university. I’m going to max out these three days and hopefully cut my overall outgoings substantially. Theoretically, I’ll have the same disposable income and a four day weekend. Theoretically of course, because one day will be solely dedicated to lesson planning and anyways, things never turn out like you plan but hopefully I ‘ll have more time to write and generally laze about.

This ‘efficiency’ mistake can be observed in other areas of my life last semester. I was learning three languages at once. Although I was progressing in all languages, the effort put in didn’t correlate to the total learning I achieved. So this semester, I’m focusing on one language and only trying to occasional train the mental muscles of Ukrainian and German, to prevent them withering away completely. 

It also means the type of lessons I’m teaching will change. My background prior to teaching was Economics and business, so why the hell am I teaching law or medical English? Bez sensu. I takes forever to prepare lessons but business English is a piece of cake. I probably only accepted legal English classes because I thought it sounded good. But now, time to start playing to my strengths.

So, new semester resolution

Bm = P/T

Bm = Beer money

I guess my message to other Teflers would be to do the same, evaluate the least effective parts of your teaching schedule and drop them, don’t harbor any sentiment – just do it or better yet don’t ever accept a teaching proposition without truly assessing it’s level of efficiency when integrated into your life. Probably, your thinking to yourself that that’s such a basic concept and I must be slow for writing a whole blog post about it but I’ll stake a whole beer on the fact that we all can make efficiency changes to our lifestyle, we just need to be arsed to do it.