#this is the inspo I had in my brain but I need a solid 8-hour slot to try and map it out to gpose

[rynpost]

Side note - it's during the beginning of ShB that Rynianger starts ramping up. When Urianger goes down shortly after Thancred, Rynia is distraught, more so than she was expecting, but she has to put it aside to help Alisaie.

When Thancred tells her they're heading to Urianger's house she starts rushing forward, desperate to see him again even if she won't admit it to herself. Thancred knows, though. She bursts into tears on seeing Urianger and flings herself at him, and he is so caught off guard by it that he actually picks her up and holds her close just for a moment.

Thancred stands there smirking while MinfiliRyne is just like ?????

[foreverdaystudies]

{5/40 DoP} ~ 5/11/2017 ~ Cambridge, UK ~ Work-Life Balance at Cambridge (aka living in the procrastiNATION and how I hope to move to productiCITY)

Do you know what the most common, most stereotypical prayer request is at Cambridge? Balance. And believe me, as a rep this year I’ve been to enough prayer meetings to attest to this. Everyone is busy. Everyone is trying to figure out how to work dawn to dusk. 

For example, this week, I had a supervision (teaching session) scheduled from 8-9pm, and that was only an hour later than “normal” teaching hours. So I could start my contact hours at 9am and finish them after 9pm. There simply isn’t a line between work and free time. This year I will regularly have supervisions on a Saturday and  I’m likely to have a few on a Sunday as well. There is no such thing as a holiday or vacation, their technical term is “non-teaching periods”. The learning is expected to go on, day in, day out.

But did I work 12.5 hours on that day? In the words of the Village Voice, No Way, José. There were several gaps in the schedule, an hour between lectures, a few between the practical finishing and the start of supervisions. Unlike Byron’s Beauty of the Night my day was not all in goodness spent. I actually deleted the app from my phone which tells me how much time I waste on the internet. It made me feel too bad. Instead I’ve taken to timing when I’m actually working. I get up to make a cup of tea/coffee/juice/mocha/smoothie/etc/etc (There have been a few times I’ve been worried I was giving myself water poisoning, but that’s another story) and stop the clock, start it again when I sit down and concentrate. Stop for Facebook/Twitter/Tetris break. I don’t count contact hours, and on a really good day I get 3 hours of solid extra work in. Often it’s a lot less. 2 hours is pretty average, but 1 is not uncommon. 

So where does the rest of the time go? Some days it is more in goodness spent than others. Thursdays I am in sessions from 10-4pm solidly, then with 2 hours of supervisions that evening. That is 8 hours of other people directing my attention and when I get back to my room I am t i r e d. I was interested to read how some cultures view concentration not as something that can be depleted, but something that as you use it, it increases. The study found that for those people their concentration was better after a tricky maths problem, while those in the Western world who view it as a pot that dries up, it was worse. Although I want to change my perspective to that of it increasing (and the concept of flow has been shown to be so. true. in my study) I’m not quite there. I really don’t feel like I can force my brain to focus indefinitely. Some days it’s hard to get it to focus at all, for any length of time.

A significant proportion of time it has to be said goes on procrastination. Worse when I’m tired, but sometimes I’m feeling fresh, ready to work, and the siren call of the internet is too loud to resist. It also is a l o t worse if I view the task as too difficult for me. 

My neuro essays are a prime example of this. I don’t understand the material and now you want me to explain, expand, re-utilise the information for 4 pages??? How about I just put that off until it can’t be put off and then put it off a bit longer??? (I have yet to email one neuro essay in on time and this is mostly due to the childish “I really don’t wanna do ittttt, it’s too haaaard :( :( :(” feeling that paralyses me a bit)

The 2 main ways I’m trying to combat procrastination that are new this year (i.e. I feel like every site tells you similar things so I’m excluding them, like I’ve been breaking up the task into chunks for yonks gimme some new inspo) are both based around fighting my night-owl-ness. I.e.:

Giving myself the sleep schedule of a toddler. 

REGULAR & CONSISTENT bedtimes and wake up times. 

NAPS if my brain is fuzzy and can only work on low-function & I’m needing high-function learning/working to take place.

getting up before lectures to do some work before I’m tired 

One term in, and there have been a few problems with this so far:

it can be hard to maintain if you want to go out and socialise during the evening (i.e. when everyone is socialising) bcuz a) you’re going to be out later than 10pm so byebye schedule, and b) you’re going to get tired and yawny and sleepy way earlier than everyone else (I just feel like a real party pooper if I’m saying no to everything bcuz it’s “too late”. FOMO is real man)(Also, I like people, I like seeing them and socialising, I just don’t love clubbing or how I feel the morning after going to bed after 2am)

not waiting until you’re UTTERLY EXHAUSTED to go to bed means that you spend a fair amount of time waiting to fall asleep. I really can’t stand this. You can’t think anything that’s going to keep you awake (i.e. absolutely no replaying conversations with your supervisors and thinking of new ways to defend yourself against their un/fair criticisms, no thinking about how to kindly reject that well meaning boy, no planning outfit/meals for tomorrow) and so I just end up counting. Sometimes I count breaths, sometimes I just count. It. is. boring. Every night having to count and the more impatient you are about falling asleep the harder it is to do it. And then it’s an hour or two after you went to bed and you’re thinking “what a waste of time, and I’m going to be really tired tomorrow” which is again not conducive to sleep. Sigh. This does get a bit better if I’m really militant about consistent timings, but I have always hated going to bed. I am a night owl through and through and this feels a bit like it’s going against the core of my being (I mean, obviously an exaggeration, but my natural state is stay up late and get up late. From birth, and even before that (if you count my being my most active late at night in utero according to my mother) I find it easy to keep going late into the night, and hard to start up in the morning)

Things I’m going to try implement to help with this:

Tracking my working hours on a graph, as well as comments as to why I thought that day went well or not, so I can then do a proper evaluation and see what my personal pitfalls are (although I have my suspicions *coughlackofsleepcough*) (now I just have to find a good website to use for this).

Take. More. Naps. Like I said, I have a tendency to view sleep as a waste of time when I’m awake, and so will limp on with a fuzzy brain that is good for nothing except playing copious amounts of Tetris and not even that well because “If I sleep for an hour that’s an hour I’m not working.” But if I actually took that nap I could then work for the hour after that, rather than spending 3 hours doing nada. Also: more sleep in general

Pimp my phone. And by that I mean:

Have a playlist of educational YouTube videos to click on during the week instead of instantly going for the low-engagement vlogs etc. That way the legwork is done for me (and I want to make it as easy as possible for me to make the right choice).

Anki cards. I kind of went off Anki (after 4 years of being their top cheerleeder -.-) because they just took Too. Long. to make for such a content heavy course and I couldn’t get through all the lectures and I ended up panic-reading through lectures for the VERY FIRST TIME SINCE THE LECTURE the night before the exam and it was very stressful and unhappy-making and I told myself never again, and I will have to by hook or by crook find a way of being faster this year which I thought meant giving up flashcards. HOWEVER, I do feel that for learning drugs and anatomy they would be pretty useful- and since I spend too much time procrastinating on YouTube on my phone if I have some flashcards on there I can at least do a little bit of work while watching something pointless (the ability to have a mini internet screen on top of other apps is one of my fave features of the LG phone it has to be said) and even if my attention isn’t 100% it’s better than 0%.

Less multitasking. Despite the last bullet point I want to do less, but better. Sometimes (esp with neuro essays) I feel like there’s no way to actually get through it than to write a sentence, flick onto Facebook, write a sentence. Mini-rewards for getting through a hard thing, however slowly. But for a lot it just slows me down a lot. And it would be nice to not do it.

So here’s hoping. I don’t know whether I’m actually getting any more productive as I get older or not (another reason for the tracking) but it would be really nice to be more efficient (which would then let me have better designated “off” times, and just be happier/less stressed generally.)

PRAYING FOR A MINI-MIRACLE.