Thursday, 19 January 2017

Michaelmas term: workload management



I thought I’d do a post reflecting on Michaelmas term now that it is over and all of my essays are handed in. Just to clarify, I’m a 1+3 funded student so I’m currently doing a Masters in preparation for my PhD in October. However, I finished my BA degree in 2015 so I ended up taking a year out and, thankfully, got the funding that I needed to continue with higher education. To cut a long story short, I was quite nervous getting back into the swing of things academically as I hadn’t written an essay for a bit over a year, so I was scared that my writing would be horrendously rusty (perhaps that’s a blog post for another day!). But here I am on the other side, deadlines over.

Overall, I’m quite happy with how I handled first term. I feel like I organised (for the most part) my deadline work well in terms of getting the essays finished in good time. But, don’t get me wrong, I 100% could have organised my workload better as you will see, and there are certainly a couple of things that I want to do differently this term – which is what this blog post is going to be about. I want to try and highlight how I managed my workload, and list a couple of things that I’m going to alter this term in order to (hopefully) handle it much better this time around. Also, perhaps some of my own recommendations for myself might help others too!

1.    I’m not going to burn myself out at the start of term
I kind of started first term in a really intense way, partly because I was so determined to get fully back into the swing of things after taking a year out. Looking back, I think I definitely put a lot of pressure on myself to get ahead of time, start deadline work super early, and to just be REALLY organised and productive. For some reason, I built up having a year off from essays in a really negative way in my mind, and thought I needed the extra time to write off my rustiness and “catch up” with myself. So, I think I started my first essay on the second week of term in the hope that I’d eventually be happy with the work that I would produce (not that I’d ever be fully happy with my work anyway!). I kept this momentum going for 2 and a bit months and had two essays fully finished before the term ended for Christmas break. I then planned to get my third, and final essay, completely drafted in the week before Christmas, so that I could enjoy the Christmas holiday whilst still leaving myself plenty of time to edit the final version of the essay.

Surprise, surprise, as soon as I came home for Christmas I stalled…in the BIGGEST way possible! My god, I don’t think I’ve ever been so unproductive than how I was over the Christmas break in my whole life. I woke up at the start of the week with such good intentions. I sat at my desk every morning and opened up my word document, but I just could not start. I’d just sit there staring at my laptop screen with the hope that I could be productive, but I just couldn’t – no matter how hard I tried. Before I knew it, it was Christmas Eve and I hadn’t completed the task I set out to do. I still pretty much had a month to draft and edit it, so I thought it was fine in the end to just have the week off. After Christmas, however, there still wasn’t a productive bone in my body. It made writing my final essay so unenjoyable because I had to force myself to do it; it was such a struggle and, I’m not going to lie, the most stressful three weeks ever!! I realised then that I had burnt the candle out at both ends, and was writing my final essay with no energy and, therefore, no enthusiasm or motivation whatsoever.

I learnt that it was probably the worst possible state to be in when writing an important piece of work. Honestly, it was just dreadful to the point where even when I handed in my essays on deadline day, I just had zero feeling or emotion about it! Never. Ever. Again.

So, this leads on to my next point:

2.    I’m going to be more kind to myself this term
I think this is so key if you want to remain productive throughout term. It sounds so basic, but I find that it can often be one of the easiest things to forget or neglect. Once I’m in work mode, pretty much everything else goes out of the window! I forget to have regular breaks, and when I do have a break I can often think about work. This just isn’t good and, more importantly, working like this just isn’t worth it. What’s the point when you’re just going to burn yourself out and then end up being so unproductive for days on end?! Because I’ve experienced how dreadful I felt writing that last essay with absolutely no energy, it’s definitely put a lot of things in perspective re. how I should work and approach things.

I’m going to make sure I have more regular breaks and when I do go on a break, I’m going to move away from my laptop. Often I will have a “break” by still being on my laptop, but that’s definitely going to change this term. I’m also going to feel less guilty when I take a couple of days off: it’s NORMAL to take a couple of days off!! The problem with academic work is there’s no set hours. It’s not like I go to an office at 9am until 5pm Monday to Friday, and then work ends there, I can switch off, done. Rather, there’s no set structure – I am in charge of ending a work day, and sometimes that can be at midnight on a Saturday! But, I’m 100% going to be more conscientious about when I stop working and, more importantly, when to switch off.

However, I feel like I’m portraying myself as 99.9% productive most of the time, but that’s not completely true. This term, I found I worked really hard at the start up until the Christmas break, but after that I really struggled with my motivation levels. I think a lot of the problem was that, whilst I did get my essays done in good time, I didn’t quite manage my workload appropriately. For my final essay, I really started to lag behind, and quite frankly, I just couldn’t keep up with the momentum that I managed to maintain throughout a lot of first term – because, simply, that momentum was too intense! The last month of term was definitely the hardest because I physically and mentally couldn’t be as productive as I wanted/needed to be. I worked hard, but I could have worked even harder on my final essay if I felt rested and refreshed, instead of exhausted and stressed.


The moral of this reflection is it’s SO important to manage workload effectively. Although everyone has different work ethics and everyone works differently, I think it’s important that we should all take regular breaks and to try to maintain a healthy work/life balance to avoid this (horrid) burnout phase! Maybe I’ll do a reflective post like this at the end of this term to see if I’ve managed my workload better? Fingers crossed I will… 


Here is a blog post I also wrote when I was in the process of feeling majorly burnt out and unmotivated over the Christmas period, just in case anyone is struggling with motivation currently: 

https://letstalkacademia.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/keeping-momentum-with-motivation.html 


PS. Apologies if this post seems badly put together/written, my deadline day was on Monday so I'm still feeling the burnout and can't tell what makes sense anymore! But, I really wanted to get a post up, as a couple of people have messaged me wanting to know more about my own work structures :) 

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