Tuesday, May 14, 2002

Well, the work of the paper has been grueling. It is near completion and I am convinced that it is the most worthless pile of cow manure that I have ever produced.
It had the potential to be a really good paper. I had the information I needed, I knew how to organize it, and I have the necessary writing skills to put it down. The problem is that I didn't have the time. A good paper takes many hours. And, yes, I had those hours this week. The problem is that they cannot be consecutive hours. I don't have the stamina to create good work hour after hour. Or even day after day. It needs to be stretched out. The other problem is that I have put my self under so much pressure that the quality of my work is affected. At this point it doesn't really matter though.
I am hoping for a C-. I don't know if this will happen though. I don't think the paper deserves anything more than a laugh and match. But that is from my perspective and I have been staring at this thing for days now. I also know how good it could have been and it is nowhere near that good.
From this experience I have learned some things:
1. Staying up late to work on something is a bad idea and should only be done in extreme circumstances and then only when the next two days do not require and quality work. Since nearly every day requires quality work, this should almost never be done. I stayed up way late working on this paper and then the next day I was fried. I wasn't so much physically tired as mentally tired. I am still not recovered. Life is much better on sleep.

2. Do not drink coffee. I have learned this lesson too many times to learn it again. I drank the coffee to stay up late. This was good at that time, but like #1, it affected me later. When I did try to sleep I couldn't and then not well. It also fried my brain that I am now just getting over.

3. Do not do too many things. This one seems obvious, but I have realized that I am not able to live a life with as busy a calender as other people. They can go 100mph for days on end. I cannot. I can be productive but not constantly. There is no reason to try to do everything anyway. I will follow this rule next year.

Now these rules are not universal. They are simple rules that I need for me. I know many people who can try to do nine hundred things, and stay up late drinking coffee to accomplish them and be successful.(They probably spell things right too.) Good for them. It just doesn't work for me.

This will all work out well in the future. Unfortunately the past is gone and so I still have this crappy paper to hand in.
It is academic suicide.

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