Post 8: Struggling to (Time) Manage
My connection with time is a bit of a love-hate relationship. The elusive social construct has only managed to become harder to mentally keep a hold of over the past year, where weeks after weeks were spent staying-at-home. When jumping into an online university experience after quite a long summer break, the days seem to zip by, making it difficult to keep up with the various deadlines and requirements for each class. Personally, this rushed feeling has been doubled this semester. Whether this is due to the difficulty of my classes this semester or the lack of an actual break from schoolwork (as “wellness days” merely serve as an opportunity to complete all of the work teachers assign due to said wellness day), I’ve tried to keep my head above the waves of assignments and deadlines. With the vision of the end of the semester in the near distance, I’ve managed to convince myself that pulling consecutive all-nighters and destroying my sleep schedule in order to finish assignments is an acceptable practice for the time being.
Despite my best efforts, with each large writing project for this course, I always felt like I was racing the clock in order to get everything submitted on time. This feeling is obviously not the fault of the course or its structure, but rather my struggle to identify the best way to manage time in order to complete the tasks for my various classes. Even though I acknowledged that this was an issue of mine when submitting my first version of my WP1, it was something that I continued to struggle with more with each writing project afterwards. While I attempted to start things earlier in order to pace myself out leading up to the deadline, my amount of time outlining and gathering sources always ended up being larger than the time I spent actually writing. However, these organizational tools MAJORLY helped when it came time to actually write the piece and provide a form for my ideas on the page.
Although I was having a very difficult time at first attempting to “flesh out” my ideas for my WP3, the process of being specific with my outlining and my organization of sources to “match the bullet points” within the outline aided in multiple fronts. It not only served as a blueprint when I managed to break out of my writer’s block, but it allowed me to further understand the purpose of what I was writing and the key ideas to bring with each point in my piece. While I wish that I would have been able to break out of this writer’s block sooner in order to have more time to review drafts before submitting, I’m still very proud of the work I was able to present regarding my unique intellectual identity along with the experience for fellow female technical theatre artists.
Moving forward, I’m not sure what the best methods to “pacing myself out” would be. After attempting to allot certain times in my schedule specifically to write, the content I was creating felt forced and unnatural. But, waiting until I was “in a mood to write” also wouldn’t prove to be a viable option. While I attempted to put other distractions aside when being struck with a solid idea that I could build upon, this proved to be difficult when running errands or in other classes, forcing me to scrawl down everything within my current train of thought before it disappeared (hoping it would make sense when I went back to read the notes later). Until I discover a better solution, I believe that the best course of action is to continue responding to writing prompts in a “less formal” environment without the pressures to write to an audience outside of myself, simply building upon ideas in a way to better develop my writing style and approaches. This way, I can attempt to work the muscle so that I can flex my writing capabilities when the need arises.
