too busy to be productive?
So, it’s been ten days again since I last blogged and while I do have a few things I want to discuss, I thought I’d get this one out:
It’s once again the last week of a term, midterms are coming up (well, one anyway) and our current project is due to be presented in a few days, too. We’ll see how that goes … I’m hoping good, but I’m prepared for bad too.
So, currently when you switch on the TV or read any newspaper, you’re guaranteed to come across someone talking about how little time we have and how precious it is and all …
If you ask me, we don’t have little time, we just choose to spend it the wrong way. As a student, I know that I “waste” loads of sparetime during the last week of a project because I choose to procrastinate quite a long time; granted, it works out every single time, but I’m certain that I’d have more free time and less stress if I’d start finishing stuff earlier.
Then again, it seems that when I create stuff last-minute, I always come up with stuff I’m happy with. I’ve talked to other students and I know they feel the same way. My guess is that this is just the way creative people choose to work and to be honest, this way of working has advantages too.
If you prepare stuff weeks up front, you’ll not be able to incorporate up-to-the-minute information into your article, presentation, discussion, simply because you don’t know up front what’s gonna happen.
Moreover, if you start out too early, your creation might lack “depth”. I’d like to take an essay I wrote a year ago as an example. The task was to discuss a media landscape, I choose the SciFi Channel, finished my text three (!) weeks up front and ended up rewriting the whole piece from scratch the night before it was due, turns out the text I wrote during the second pass was something I’m really proud of, while the text I wrote up front was sub-par.
So, while in general it might seem like a bad idea, it seems to be a very acceptable (and already accepted) way for creative people to create stuff. Granted, you sacrifice loads of sparetime in the last days prior to the deadline, but then again, you already used that sparetime up front anyway.
[UPDATE]:
Jack seems to be experiencing a similar problem, having too little time to do stuff he likes.