Trends and Issues in Extension

Not so good news from today’s NY Times article by David Leonhardt. It’s never encouraging when an article starts with these four lead sentences:

If history is a reliable guide, the recession of 2008 is now unavoidable.

The dismal jobs report released Friday showed overall employment to be lower than it was three months ago. Every time such a slump has occurred since the early 1970s, a recession has followed — or already been under way.

And if the good times have really ended, they were never that good to begin with. Most American households are still not earning as much annually as they did in 1999, once inflation is taken into account. Since theCensus Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s, a prolonged expansion has never ended without household income having set a new record.

Implications for Extension include more programming to meet increased economic stresses, community economic development strategies. And once again we need consider the impacts on Extension funding and budgets. It also forces us to consider more uses of technology and new organizational systems like Extension 2.0.

It feels like a matter of weeks since I last posted and it’s really been months. Kind of the way life feels like these days.  I’m forever committing to multiple projects. A great (and quick read) on the need to focus and on getting more done by doing  less busywork is Graham Alexander’s Tales from the top.  Some more good advice comes from a post from Dwayne Melacon’s Genuine Curiosity  blog. Dwayne recommends a simple system. Taking the top few items that are critical to get done each day and putting them on an index card. Dwayne calls it his “Daily Watch” list and creates it from the multiple project lists he maintains (this follow’s David Allen’s Getting Things Done).

Good advice for Extension professionals caught in daily white water. If you can’t at least focus on your key commitments for at least some of each day they will slip away.