I Still need to do Better
I’m reporting back as promised in my post from last week. This week went okay, but it could have gone a lot better. I started off the week well, doing work well before it was due and this helped me a lot later in the week. But then as I feared might happen, I started slacking. I had plenty of time to do work, but I just didn’t feel like it. Maybe I should change my blog to “The Lazy Cornellian.”
I have a lot of extra time and I don’t have a huge amount of work, but my work is very hard. Sometimes I even enjoy doing it, but sadly I tire of it easily and by the end of the week comes, the thought of doing work disgusts me.
Overall I think that I’m on the right track. I know what I want to learn and how to learn it. What’s missing is the self-motivation to do my work even when I’m not up to the challenge.
I kept track of my time last week and graphed it using a spreadsheet in Google Docs. I split up my time into my most important activities, sleeping, eating, going to class, and doing work for my classes. Notice the general decline in work throughout the week and how on Saturday I celebrated my birthday by not doing any work. I split days at midnight so the amount of sleep each night isn’t necessarily all from that night. Also, “Other” is not entirely time wasted fooling around (although a lot of it is), it is the time spent not doing any of the other four activities.
September 18th, 2007 at 7:25 am
Hahaha, Joe… you are suffering from a very common affliction. The most widely accepted cure is caffeine, especially in the form of Jolt soda. =P
(I’d like to see a spreadsheet of Jonah’s week, I think some of the food slots would be blank some days >
September 18th, 2007 at 9:39 am
Happy belated, Joe. All the best people were born in September!
September 27th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
You might try building up your work schedule slowly. In other words, using that google docs spreadsheet, plan out how you’ll do at least as much work each day next week as you did last week. If you try to increase your workload too fast it’s easy to lose motivation.
Of course, prelims will throw off even the most carefully designed schedule.
Also, why split the sleep record at midnight? Seems like that will make it harder to correlate your sleep pattern to how much work you do…
September 29th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
That sounds like a good idea, maybe I’ll try it.
I split times at midnight so that things would be evenly spaced out. Yes, it does mess up any correlation on sleep length.
April 13th, 2009 at 12:04 am
[...] the begging of my sophomore year I kept track of my time for a week. I wanted to see how things have change in my work habits since then so I did it again. This [...]