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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