When a team is working together successfully, everyone has a specific role and sticks to it without fail. Another key characteristic is accountability, and I think we ironed that out by designating our roles. When a team is not working together successfully, there is typically a lack of communication. This can lead to one group member carrying the weight of the rest and can cause a lot of stress and thus a lower grade. This week was mostly about working out our schedules among ourselves in the group and figuring out what days work out best to work on the project. Since we all have such hectic schedules with classes, work, and other groups we are involved in, it is imperative that we make a schedule that we can follow for the most part every week. It appears that while most of our days are fairly busy, most evenings and weekends are ripe for working on our project. A challenge was working out little details, for example I had a busy Thursday night and no one else did, so I may have to look to get that day off of work so we’re all clear. I wouldn’t say that I’d change anything we did this week, it went fairly smoothly and we all seem to be getting along really well so that is going to make this go so much better.

In my opinion, the biggest key for 5 Guys being successful this semester is communication. It sounds like a no-brainer, but the more effectively our team is able to identify deadlines, plan our meetings/due dates, coordinate responsibilities, etc., the more successful we will be. Because of this, I think effective communication is a characteristic that every team, group, organization, staff, etc. must have in order to be successful. If people don’t know when a meeting is, what they’re responsibility is, who they are supposed to contact, or when they’re supposed to have something done, it makes them far less efficient at working together, as certain members of the group who have the needed information are constantly picking up the slack for those that don’t. As long as every member in our group makes a good effort to communicate, inform others when they have information, and get informed when they don’t, I think we will be very successful as a group this semester. All five of us are excited about our project ideas and getting the ball rolling.

This week in class, we worked on and finished our team contract, all contributing ideas, potential rules, information, etc. in order to create and submit a useful and effective contract. I’m excited to move forward with our group and our project.

This week we did a little more than just getting the website together. Making the contract was very helpful and I think will be a good aid when we run into problems. It also ensures that everyone promises to do their part and not lag behind. It went pretty smooth and nothing was too difficult.

We had actually started talking about ideas for a project the week before, and because of the connections our group has we were able to decide on something pretty fast. But we’ll still brainstorm a couple of other ideas and seriously consider those before we make our final decision just so that we have some variety. It was really cool to see how connected everyone is, and I’m looking forward to figuring out what all of our strengths and weaknesses are to make a quality final product.

The idea we all initially agreed on was teaching everyone how to golf. I myself have never gone before so it will be interesting learning the ropes of that. The other guys have done it before I think so it will go smooth in that sense. The main reason is because Zach is in a golf club so he can guide us through it. It’ll be cool to learn something new.

We all do have things that we like/don’t like to do, but everyone in the group agreed that if they needed to help with something else they would. It gave me some more confidence to know that everyone is being flexible, and I think that will make for a better project in the end. I personally like doing things on the design/editing side of things, and I’ll be going over any footage, video and photo editing for the project. I also thought it would be cool to design a logo for our group just so that we have something to brand out work. I look forward to when we start working on the project

This week was much like last week in terms of we didn’t have a whole lot of individual stuff to do for our project. We just continued to throw around and finalize our final project ideas and narrowed it down to a few options. I think the one that we really would like to do is over learning to golf but once we pitch the ideas to the class we will have some different feedback to make trhe final decision.

We also as a team came up with our contract and what we expectations we wanted to meet as a team, as well as some basic rules for the group to follow. We also went through and decided what parts of the project each member of the team was going to complete. For me I am doing photography as well as working on the website.

I think overall we are not going to have any problems as each team member knows what they have to do and what is expected of them. I think with our team our main issue will just be staying focused when we meet up because we do get along well so some side conversations might get us side tracked but as long as it’s not too bad I don’t think we will have any issues.

My group this week ended up settling on the golf project. We decided to do this because this is something that all of us are excited to try and something that I personally have a big connection with. Some challenges that we could possibly encounter throughout the project is availability and possibly having to pay for multiple rounds if we aren’t satisfied with our end “product.”

A schedule is very important because it gives everyone a time table for when they need to have certain parts of the project done. Obviously, the schedule can not be met if the person does not work the project, but it will let everyone hold everyone else accountable on if someone does there job or not.

This week I took the job of making our powerpoint for the presentation that we had on Tuesday. I was also one of the main contibuitors of picking our final project between the three that we had chosen. I made the powerpoint because all of us were busy or out of town over the weekend so I set time aside to be able to prioritize that so it did not hurt all of us. Even though I do not have a problem of taking the bulk of work, I believe that we should work on a new thing that we need to present earlier on in the process so we can review it and so that everyone can work on it.

I’m really excited to be writing my first blog for JOMC 134, and to be in the very early stages of our semester long project. The thing I’m most excited for is the amount of freedom we have as a team to explore and try something new – whether that be a new sport, club, organization, hobby, etc., it’s all up to us. Myself and my group (5 Guys) have been throwing around project ideas since we met each other on Tuesday, and there’s a few that I’m really excited about.

I’m really excited to work with this group, as it seems we are all hard-working, like-minded individuals. We all especially expressed an interest in sports, and came up with the idea to try and learn a new sport. The question then became, which one? One unique thing about our group is that Zach is on the club golf team here at UNL. The rest of the members of our group had pretty minimal golf experience, so for our project, Zach is going to (attempt to) teach the rest of us to play golf.

This week, as there wasn’t a whole lot do by way of the project, my contribution was simply productive conversation with my group about what we wanted to do for our project. I look forward to progressing in this class and getting to the point where we can really start to make progress on our project.

So far we have had a very successful start to our group project, as I can tell we all have a chemistry and rapport that will help us to be as effective as possible. We started a group chat on the GroupMe app and we have been shooting ideas off of each other to determine what we should do and how we should go about it. We decided, since one of our group-mates Zach is on the club golf team, we will experiment with learning the sport more in depth for our project.

We didn’t really encounter any challenges, we were not for sure that we would be able to do this specific project since Zach is more experienced but we got the green light to do so. Like mentioned in a previous post, it may be challenging to find a day where there is optimum weather, but it should get easier as time goes on. Overall, I’m very happy with the way everything has shaken out so far and I am genuinely excited to get started with this project. Since golf isn’t incredibly fast moving, I think we can get some really great angles for photo and video shoots. Since we have a group of great and hard-working guys that I can tell, I know we should not have any issues getting our work done as effectively and swiftly as possible. I look forward to seeing how all of this unfolds.

Our group all worked together and we really had no trouble coming up with a topic for our project. We all just threw ideas in the group me and found a common one we all liked. We are going to do a project centered around golf. I think our main challenge for this topic is going to be the weather. We are going to have to wait until the end of the semester to do a lot of the outside stuff. 

There wasn’t much individually for us to do this week, we mainly just decided as a group about what topic we were going to cover and also we all sent in the GroupMe which times of the week works best for us to meet up. I think that this semester should go pretty smooth and I really don’t see many issues coming up.

We still need to go over the team contract and what everyone is going to do for the project exactly but we have until week 3 for the contract so I don’t think there will be any issues.

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.