Thanks for sharing, this is great! I found it particularly useful to read how many hours you spend on each activity and the objectives and key results you’ve planned for 2020.
I was a bit surprised that you’ve used a quarter (250/932 hours) of your time on personally learning directly related to EA. How much do you think the hours you spent on learning have contributed to the positive outcomes of EA Toronto? You wrote “Finally, without independent learning, another wild guess seems to say that the other two thirds of EATO’s strategy updates and insights would not exist”. Does this mean that you partly focused on learning about strategy and evaluation?
Also super cool that you directed around 42,000 CAD to MF!!
Hi Eirin! I appreciate your comment. Yes, I naturally spend quite a bit of time reading newsletter articles, EA forum posts, books, and other resources that I find interesting and that relate to EA community building (plus, one gets enough reading recommendations at one EA global or EA retreat to last a year, it seems). If I had to give a better account of this relationship between my learning and EA Toronto’s outcomes, I’d still be quite anchored to saying that somewhere between one third and half of new suggestions and action-updates that I have for the group result from the learning that I do, e.g. an 80k article prompts me to talk about policy careers in a new way in a one-on-one or reading part of “Managing to Change the World” prompts me to think about accountability different in terms of following up with EATO group member action items. I think that more reflection brings out more direct connections between the learning, my actions, and the community outcomes. In the report, when I say “strategy updates and insights”, I am referring to what I think is a moving, shifting, dynamic, iterative process that goes into how I prioritize what I work on. A lot of the year was about experimentation with more focus on project meetings or one-on-ones and then presenting those experiments back to the community at group planning meetings. The learning itself was not normally planned out in advance to involve much strategy and evaluation, as those were two of the many interests I was more heavily drawn to. Much of the learning is me trying to embrace my curiosity and channel it towards EA where it can hopefully do good instead of just fizzling out in all directions. Indeed, re AMF, I echo that excitement. I’m very happy about the more concrete good done through donations, though I didn’t have too much to do with that besides a bit of maintenance. (We have some wonderful members who have been living EA values for many years).
And now, you have gotten me to be a little more excited about the learning and development that other EA community builders are doing. I see that you folks have read some books that had an influence on your group (and I imagine, a lot more time reading articles on and off of the Forum). David Nash still seems to be “crushing it” in terms of learning more about EA ideas, opportunities, and resources and then feeding them into the powerful EAL newsletter. I suspect different people have different tendencies to spend lots and lots of time learning, thinking, and reading (and that aspiring EAs have the tendencies and privileges to do so more than most people).
Thanks for sharing, this is great! I found it particularly useful to read how many hours you spend on each activity and the objectives and key results you’ve planned for 2020.
I was a bit surprised that you’ve used a quarter (250/932 hours) of your time on personally learning directly related to EA. How much do you think the hours you spent on learning have contributed to the positive outcomes of EA Toronto? You wrote “Finally, without independent learning, another wild guess seems to say that the other two thirds of EATO’s strategy updates and insights would not exist”. Does this mean that you partly focused on learning about strategy and evaluation?
Also super cool that you directed around 42,000 CAD to MF!!
Hi Eirin! I appreciate your comment.
Yes, I naturally spend quite a bit of time reading newsletter articles, EA forum posts, books, and other resources that I find interesting and that relate to EA community building (plus, one gets enough reading recommendations at one EA global or EA retreat to last a year, it seems).
If I had to give a better account of this relationship between my learning and EA Toronto’s outcomes, I’d still be quite anchored to saying that somewhere between one third and half of new suggestions and action-updates that I have for the group result from the learning that I do, e.g. an 80k article prompts me to talk about policy careers in a new way in a one-on-one or reading part of “Managing to Change the World” prompts me to think about accountability different in terms of following up with EATO group member action items. I think that more reflection brings out more direct connections between the learning, my actions, and the community outcomes.
In the report, when I say “strategy updates and insights”, I am referring to what I think is a moving, shifting, dynamic, iterative process that goes into how I prioritize what I work on. A lot of the year was about experimentation with more focus on project meetings or one-on-ones and then presenting those experiments back to the community at group planning meetings. The learning itself was not normally planned out in advance to involve much strategy and evaluation, as those were two of the many interests I was more heavily drawn to. Much of the learning is me trying to embrace my curiosity and channel it towards EA where it can hopefully do good instead of just fizzling out in all directions.
Indeed, re AMF, I echo that excitement. I’m very happy about the more concrete good done through donations, though I didn’t have too much to do with that besides a bit of maintenance. (We have some wonderful members who have been living EA values for many years).
And now, you have gotten me to be a little more excited about the learning and development that other EA community builders are doing. I see that you folks have read some books that had an influence on your group (and I imagine, a lot more time reading articles on and off of the Forum). David Nash still seems to be “crushing it” in terms of learning more about EA ideas, opportunities, and resources and then feeding them into the powerful EAL newsletter. I suspect different people have different tendencies to spend lots and lots of time learning, thinking, and reading (and that aspiring EAs have the tendencies and privileges to do so more than most people).