This semester, there weren’t a ton of rules surrounding our writing. We could write pretty much whatever we wanted as long as it related to class in some way shape or form. I think for a lot of people in my class this was exciting but for me personally it was anxiety inducing.
I think personally this is because throughout the larger part of my education most of writing was very structured. We were provided with specific topics and outlines and given a solid deadline. Even then, I occasionally struggled with my time management. It’s one of the trickiest things for me.
Dr. McCoy talked a lot about the importance of time management not only with set deadlines but also with floating ones, such as these blog posts. Well, I really screwed that up. I had great intentions, I even had a schedule planned out and everything. But when things aren’t due on set dates, it’s hard to not let them slide, especially in the face of other assignments that do have set deadlines.
So, as I know I struggle with time management and always have, and I very often watch ted talks while procrastinating, because well, it feels a little less like procrastinating if I’m educating myself, I watched one about time management. The talk was done by a time management specialist named Laura Vanderkam, I didn’t even know that was a job honestly, she talked about how our time is a choice.
Every minute of time you spend, is a choice. She recalled an account of when she was studying a very busy woman and having her fill out a time diary, in order to analyze how her time was spent. One night the woman came home and she discovered her water heater had broken. She logged the entire incident and the time it took to resolve it, and it ended up taking around 7 hours of this woman’s time. Did the woman necessarily have time to handle this? No. But she found the time, because she simply just had to.
Vanderkam then said something that honestly resonated with me. She said “I don’t have time for X,Y,Z because it’s not a priority. I don’t have time often means it’s not a priority”. I thought this was really interesting because well, she’s right. If I truly want to do something, I will find the time to do it, always. Like if my mom asks me to do laundry, I often say I don’t have time. But really, I’ve got more important things to do than to spend 2 hours washing clothes.
This helped me to analyze my time management because I realized that a lot of times, when I’m putting off assignments, it’s because I have a lot more to do and I’ll find a way to reason with myself by saying “Oh well, I’ve got to get this other paper done first” or something of that nature.
This semester, I’ve made several mistakes regarding overestimating my time and underestimating my assignments. This made me realize that in high school when I’d have to stay up until 3AM writing AP Lit papers even though I didn’t read the book because I had practice and drama club and work, it was because, practice and drama club and work were the things I prioritized. Having this realization, I’m hoping will aid me in making changes to the way I manage both my time and my priorities in the future.