This cartoon highlights a problem many of us have with planning for the future. It illustrates how we often believe that defining the finishing point, the goal, is sufficient. We anticipate a small, but gentle, gradient of effort. We tell ourselves that ‘nothing is easy’, but don’t not want to believe that it will demand serious commitment. In reality, ‘The Universe’s plans for you’ depicts how obstacles, shortcuts, and risky alternatives lie ahead, possibly in the form of unanticipated activities, deadline clashes with other scheduled activities, and other personal and professional commitments. So how can we plan better?

If, like me, you are not only a serial offender, but occasionally juggling multiple hobbies, interests, and courses, with professional development, it can all get rather messy. Many of us use paper journals to plan out our day or week. These serve as useful tools to prevent ourselves from being steered off course, but result in numerous booklets which are rarely referred to again. Online tools, such as Evernote, Trello, and a million other apps, now serve a similar purpose, with the added benefit of personal reminders, searchability and 24-7 availability. However, very few online tools can offer these benefits, whilst also providing self-assessment, peer review, flexible design tools, integration with cloud storage, and offline capture

PebblePad offer both institutional and personal accounts. Institutional accounts are available to education- and healthcare-providers, public bodies and businesses to support the recording, evidencing and collation of skills, reflections and competencies amongst learners and employees. However, Personal accounts are available to anybody to purchase and are available for life to all higher education alumni. They offer similar tools for creating personal portfolios, designing self-assessment forms, and managing one’s own professional development.