Time Past and Time Present

It's an unfortunate fact of life that things don't always (see: ever) go the way we plan for them to go. This semester, for me, has been an excellent example of this importune law. I thought, going in, that I had this all down pat: I was going to start all of my work for all of my classes early and keep going until I was ahead, thereby dodging the extreme sporting event of patting my head, rubbing my stomach and hopping on one foot that the second half of the semester often becomes.

What I didn't plan on, however, was the fact that one of my classes would, quite literally, take over my life for the first seven weeks of the semester. That there would be about four hundred pages of reading a week for three of those weeks, and I would spend eighteen hours in class on the weekends (okay, I was planning on that, but I really underestimated how much I depend on my weekends as catch-up time otherwise). That I would then spend the next four weeks furiously working on the various projects that were due. Or that what I learned in this class would simultaneously affect everything else I was learning in my other classes.

It's been a wild ride, and an incredible lesson in time management. I've failed a lot, because I'm pretty sure that succeeding at all those things, when I was already taking eighteen hours, was an impossible expectation for myself. I've developed some strategies for coping, though: one of the things that I really had to focus on was cutting out the "planning time" that I used to need for all of my writing assignments. Now, for the most part, I just sit down at my computer and start typing, and don't worry overly much about what comes out. Likewise, editing is a beautiful thing, but sometimes there's not time for a lot of it--and that's okay. If I do find that I need to plan out what I'm going to say a bit, I use in-between times: during meals, or when I'm walking to class, or riding the bus to class, or cooking, or cleaning. I also, surprisingly, sleep a lot more, because Kathryn-with-sleep is a person who is more willing to put her time to good use than Kathryn-without-sleep. I do my work early in the morning, when I have motivation, because I become a procrastinating grouch in the evening, after I woke up early and have been in class all day.

For the rest of the semester, I'll only be pulling fifteen credits, but they're fifteen credits that I'm pretty behind in. I'll need all of these strategies and more to get back to where I need to be. But for now, it's getting late and I need to go to bed so I can study for my midterms tomorrow. So have a cartoon that keeps it very, very real:

(Cartoon by Dave Regan, via Flickr)