Thursday 19 March 2015

Procrastigreat: Living The Uni Life!

Y'know what's great about uni? Aside from the discounts, breadth of knowledge acquired and total bludgefest it can be at times? You become exceptionally skilled at procrastinating!

Okay, so maybe that's not really a great thing especially if you have a hectic life schedule to start with and just need to get stuff done. But still, maybe one day it will become an employable skill...maybe.

With my new timetable this semester I've been left to listen to 2 of my lectures online due to work or other study commitments. The first time I did this was last semester and found it much harder to do since I was so accustomed to being in a theatre of some variety surrounded by laptops and writing implements.

Listening to lectures online is convenient yes, but it's also time-consuming especially when everyone can find something they'd rather be doing. I only ended up listening to a few of the lectures, mainly because I found it hard to keep track of what slide they were on half the time, and the other half the lecturer's voice wasn't the easiest to listen to for 2hrs.

One of the lectures I've actually found interesting content-wise which eases the pain of having to commit to 2hrs worth when I could be watching a movie or whatever else. The other one I've found is easier just to copy the slide notes from since that's pretty much what they're working from anyway. That narrows down the audio side of things and definitely something I can do at my own pace instead of the frustrated groan I hold back in sit-in lectures when I'm written half of the slide down and they skip ahead.

You might be thinking, if there's slides, why bother writing them down? The same reason I don't type up notes on my tablet which I've just bought a bluetooth keyboard to accompany, because I don't retain nearly as much. My boss has even said to me that it's been scientifically proven that writing notes is more effective than typing them. Makes sense.

So last week I had a midterm to study for, an essay for which I needed an interview subject for, at least 3 readings to catch up on and 2 other lectures to listen to. I told my cousin/flatmate in an attempt to hold me accountable for my uni work that I would dedicate my weekend to catching up on it since I had no other immediate plans and no immense desire to communicate with the outside world so it seemed a perfect occasion to do so. Instead, I spent both days watching season 1 of Supernatural. Niceee.

To be fair, between a fulltime study load, working part-time, attempting to have a social life and take care of myself, there's really not that much time left in the week for me to just chill out. So I took that opportunity and ran with it.

Thanks to my incredibly lenient boss, I was able to get everything sorted in the first few days of this week. He agreed to let me interview him on my own time, I got the rest of the essay done the following day, had a crash study session with some group-mates in my midterm class which was enough for me to pass it, yay! The following day I had enough spare time to dedicate to catching up on one of the lectures and copied down notes from the second one so now it's just a matter of finding the motivation to finish off the readings for the remaining subjects of the week even though there are definitely things I'd rather be doing, like blogging!

Procrastination is kinda great when you use it wisely. Sometimes you just need to unwind with some me-time.

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