Hope Road

Back in the day, when I was a young and naive seventeen-year-old college freshman, I used to be great at time management. In fact, you might even say I was a little obsessed with time management. I did all my homework. I mean that I read every single page. The first time I skipped one reading assignment was in the second semester of my freshman year, and it was really hard for me to convince myself to do that. I did everything ahead of time, and I considered myself stressed if I had a five-page paper due in two weeks.

Fast forward just over three years. I’m an old and seasoned twenty-one-year-old senior in college, and I have become quite bad at managing my time! Me! The organized one, the non-procrastinator! I still try to manage my time, I really do. I write lists when I can and I make plans, and my room is still clean and organized. But now, I skip reading assignments when they’re not necessary. I do projects the night before. I write ten-page papers in one afternoon.

Now, I am willing to admit that not all of this change has been negative. It has been good for me to loosen up a little, to make people a priority once in awhile, and to stop trying to control everything.

But sometime at the end of last semester, I really just burned out on school. And suddenly, it felt like I couldn’t enjoy anything anymore. I had no motivation to do my assignments. I could barely get things done on time. Gone was that feeling of motivation, of ambition, of satisfaction over a job well done. Even when school ended and summer began, I felt constantly tired. All I wanted to do was rest and read and watch movies. Going to work was a drag. In Peru, I had trouble getting up in the morning and being excited, even though I loved what I was doing. When this semester started, I was still feeling the same way. And though I have lost that feeling of not being interested in anything, the procrastination and lack of motivation is still lingering.

There are a lot of factors that have played into this, including my insomnia and my constant busyness and hard work over the past three years - as well as the adjustment from being a home-schooler with lots of free time, to being a college student with almost no free time.

But the point of this entry… because believe it or not, there is a point… is that sometimes, the secret to time management is this:

Apply yourself, and
just do it.

I know! Revolutionary! That’s what happened to me last night. I had procrastinated all afternoon on writing a five-page paper that I really had no other time to write. It’s due tomorrow. After my night class, I realized how urgently I really did have to write the paper. So I sat down at the table in our living room with my books, and I didn’t open my e-mail or the Internet, and I didn’t try to “pace myself” by taking little breaks that turn into huge chunks of time. I just did it. And it got done, in a little over an hour, and edited tonight after I got back from babysitting.

The lesson I’m learning is that this whole college experience has been showing me how much I need balance. I do not need to be this uptight person who controls and lists out every minute of my time. But I also can’t be lazy, and I shouldn’t procrastinate without a purpose. Instead, I need to be productive and ambitious and hardworking, and to purposefully set aside times of rest so I can really enjoy them instead of feeling guilty.

So I hope this post has been sufficiently motivational for me to endure these last three or four weeks of the semester. I don’t know what good it’s done you, but I feel better having written it!

Filed under: Time Management on November 14th, 2007