Week 13 Learning Challenges: Time Management Advice from Maggie Stiefvater

(Stiefvater herself, via Wikimedia Commons)

This week I thought I would sort of add on to the time management stuff I posted a couple of weeks ago and give you some other awesome time management stuff that I've collected over the years. All of it is by--you guessed it!--Maggie Stiefvater, who is a huge believer in setting (manageable; more on that later) goals and then putting your butt in a chair and achieving those goals (or I guess you don't have to put it in a chair if you don't have goals to achieve that require sitting down, but all of my struggles with time management tend to center around my inability to sit still for more than 20 minutes at a time, so that's a helpful saying for me).

Anyway, from her early stuff there's this article that describes some of the things that keep her from achieving her goals in a timely manner, and there's this sequel explaining what exactly she does to combat these things.

From her later stuff, there's this one, but basically it says a lot of the same things, it's just an updated version and not nearly as comprehensive. And this one, which is somewhat about timers but mostly just about Space Penguin.

And I think that's all? I hope it's helpful for someone, because it's sure been helpful for me...as of now Maggie Stiefvater has almost 15 books published (her next one is due to come out in seven days, and I can't wait), and is a serious artist and musician as well as everything else she does, so it's advice coming from a good source!

Learning Challenge: Learning About Time Management, Writing 10 Minutes a Day

Link to the article I am referencing

Ooooooooh boy, do I ever have a problem with putting off writing. Just like the article says, I tend to push it off until I have big time blocks--but who ever has big time blocks? Not me. So instead it just gets pushed further and further out...and the deadline looms...and I start worrying that what I write won't be good enough, or that I won't be able to write about what I've been planning on writing about, or...or...

But you know what I've learned (especially this semester)? Writing isn't a big deal. You don't need large chunks of time to do it--you just need 15 minutes and a focused brain. And also some kind of writing implement, because without that it's hard to write.

(The focused brain is also a hard part. But I think that goes in Health? Anyway...)

This article really articulated some of my recent thoughts about writing, especially when you really don't feel like you have enough time to write in your schedule. Just writing for 10 minutes at a stretch can be extremely productive, and the more you start to write in these short bursts the more you get used to them. It also, like the article says, makes writing much less daunting: I'm going to do this thing for 10 minutes, Kathryn, I tell myself. No pressure. No strings attached. No opus magnum required. Just 10 minutes...

(I also find that when I only have a short amount of time to write I have much more luck getting myself to focus. Partly because I do well with short-term intensity, and partly because 10 minutes is well below the amount of time it takes me to get bored with things. I can sit down, stare at the computer, and type constantly for 10 minutes. It's harder to do it for 2 hours. Or *ahem* twenty-two, as was the case this past weekend) (not in a row. That's superhuman. There were breaks--just not as many as there should have been...)

But anyway. I'll be attempting to utilize this method for the incredible (!) amount of final papers that are due this semester. It'll be good. Or, you know, as good as things can be when you've got 12 books and 7.5 billion tabs open in the same window and outlines scattered as far as the eye can see. But whatever, right? It's only 10 minutes...

(My aforementioned role model Maggie Stiefvater showing off her teapot timer. Photo credit to Maggie Stiefvater)

Learning Challenges and Failing Less

In my opinion, it's really hard to separate out one kind of learning from another, when it comes down to it. Life is horribly messy, and all of its parts are invariably intertwined--each affects the others. It's become more and more clear to me, as I move forward through college (and life outside of college, as mythical as that sounds sometimes), that the reason I feel like I've had a lobotomy at the end of every semester is because I've not only learned the subject material provided to me to the best of my ability--I've also readjusted all the knowledge I had before the semester. I've filled in gaps, or (hopefully) corrected inconsistencies, or even smashed a couple paradoxes together into a dubious-looking lump. But knowledge isn't limited to what you learn in school; it's the sum of everything you've ever experienced. So the headache I have is really the result of me revamping my entire perspective on life, the universe, and everything--all in the space of sixteen weeks. It's like an extreme renovation project, where at the end I have a house that may be vaguely familiar but may also look nothing like when I started. It may have the same layout and foundation, or it may not. It may have more doors and windows, or it may have less. It really depended on what that semester was like.

This is a really roundabout way of me explaining that I don't really think about--or conduct--learning in the categorized terms of the HEART model. But I'll try to parse things out a bit.

Firstly, we'll talk about the things I'm bad at. It would come as no surprise to anyone who knows me on a more than hey-I-know-your-face basis if I said that time management is not one of my strongest skills. In fact, I will come right out and say that I suck at it. But I'm slightly less awful, this semester, than I have been in past semesters--and I hope to get even better by the end.

When I procrastinate, I've discovered, I'm really just listening to the fears in my head, telling me that things will go wrong, or that I'll suck at something, or that doing the thing I want to do really won't be as good as it sounded in my head. Now, I know these fears aren't logical--and there are actually very logical statements that I can repeat to myself that help me dismantle these doubts completely. In fact, I've been repeating them to myself nonstop for the past week, to great effect. My favorite of these statements (or questions, really) is So what if things go wrong? You can fix wrong, followed closely by Will you ever know if you don't try?No, of course not, and What could you be doing right now if you'd allotted more time to work instead of worry, and finished earlier?

I try not to ask that last question too often, though, because the answer is usually Well, dishes, or More schoolwork--or, my favorite, Calling so-and-so about *insert boring, routine reason for phone call here*. Because I've usually been procrastinating about the phone call, too!

Of course, I've also put quite a lot of work into others of these categories. For instance, I'm great at reading. I read when I'm happy, when I'm sad, and whenever and wherever there is reading material available. No written text is safe: watch out, ingredients lists! Beware, doctor's office pamphlets! Run, poem I stumbled across online!

Ahem. It's good to have variety.

But I can't talk about reading without also talking about empathy. Because the best kind of reading happens when the words get absorbed into your blood and bones and you carry them around with you for the rest of your life. It happens when you come across new ideas, and new people, and new places. Because once you've read something, you can't un-read it. It's with you forever. And you can take those new ideas and people and places that you didn't have before and use them to interpret the world around you. When you empathize with a person, you are, in a way, deciphering their own personal language (spoken and unspoken). How can you do that if you have no experience grasping ideas you've never seen before? Or putting yourself into another person's head, full of their failures and triumphs; their hopes and dreams? Reading is an amazing way to teach yourself these things, and I try to indulge in the meaty, question-raising kind of reading at least once a day, to keep myself sharp. To keep myself thinking about what people besides myself might be feeling. I'm not saying that empathy doesn't seem like an impossible task, sometimes, because still fail--often. But reading helps me fail less.

And I still fail less at empathy than I do at time management. So I'm working on that.

We'll leave this post on a Gandalf note, shall we?

(Learning Challenges as explained by Gandalf. Quote: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." By Eugenio Hansen, via Wikipedia Commons)