Winter (term) is Coming

With winter term approaching, I thought I’d write out some thoughts on the previous term and my plan going forward.

Reflecting on Fall Term

Fall term was my first term in university, and after completing it I feel like I have a much better idea of what I need to do to optimize my university experience.

For the first couple of weeks or so of fall I burned myself out trying to constantly do school work, because that’s what I thought I had to do. Following that, when I noticed that I had quite a bit of free time, I over-corrected a little and started spending too much time doing personal work. As a consequence of this, my grades dropped and my lack of solid study material created unneeded stress for me when finals came around.

Another thing that I noticed was that I was overconfident (sometimes even cocky) about exams. I didn’t appreciate the difference between doing a complicated problem in the comfort of my room with plenty of time and doing one in a timed exam worth a significant portion of my grade. Given my attitude towards tests, I feel like I was lucky to get away with the grades I did this semester.

Plan for Winter Term

Given my experience in the fall term, my overall goals for the winter term are to:

1. Allocate time towards personal and school activities in a more balanced manner.
   • Ideally, this means doing enough school work to achieve the grades I want while still allowing myself enough time to enjoy myself.
   • In order to achieve this goal, I plan to maintain a fairly strict routine (wish me luck) where I spend a minimum of 25 minutes on each subject each day, in addition to classes. 25 minutes because that is what I have found to work best for me when using the Pomodoro method, and I plan to use this method for this work. Minimum of 25 because I expect I will need to spend more time on some courses than others on different days. This minimum may change depending on how I feel about my workload and performance, but I think if I can maintain a routine such as this I will be able to achieve my desired grades.
   • I think my biggest enemy in achieving this goal will be my habit of distracting myself with minor optimizations. For example, I might notice while I’m working that a snippet I’m using isn’t indenting properly then spend the next 15 to 30 minutes figuring out how to fix that. This is a bad habit because context switching is very harmful to productivity, and switching contexts for something that I could easily live with is just silly. So, to avoid this I plan to use org-capture (a system to quickly take notes with minimal context switching) to satiate my impulse to fix everything while I’m working, then come back to it once I’m finished. So in the previous example, I would org-capture the problem of the incorrectly indented snippet, then forget about it until a time that I have set specifically to work on those minor things.
   • An important aspect of the above mentioned routine is that if I meet the minimum time I have set for myself in each of the courses, and there is no pressing school work to do, I will then allocate personal time. I’m not as worried about over-working as under-working, but this condition should prevent it.
2. Maintain a healthy respect for the difficulty of the examinations I will take.
   • This doesn’t mean fear them and worry about them, just that I aim to make a greater effort to understand what they will contain and adjust my studying accordingly.