Full speed, slow down, or do less?

 Still a week behind, but that shouldn't be too surprising given it was the last two weeks before spring break (woo!) which kind of just started a few minutes ago.

That's right, I finally have an honest to goodness break, where my time is my own. Nothing clarifies how precious that is like an overwhelming amount of work to put it into perspective.

I'm really thinking hard about how I want to go about the rest of my degree. Full speed, or slow down a bit and take an extra 9 months or so. This semester, especially the last month, has shown that I can make full speed work. However, it entails a number of sacrifices, things that I need to let drop... or doing a significantly worse job at school. Honestly, that might be the best option. There are a lot of elements of school that are low reward to the amount of time put into them. My goal is to be a good counselor, not a good student. The 'good student' part of me unnecessarily wants to do a bang-up job on papers and reading every last bit of textbook. It is hard to stop it, but it may be useful to do so.

The fact is, I appear to be overwriting all my papers. I know this because even when I ease up a bit on time input and thus quality, I still get really good grades. And, as I've experienced with my teaching degree, taking longer and going more in-depth with classes would have prepared me approximately 0% better for actually being a teacher. So likely the best option is focusing on getting better at "doing less." and maintain my current class load.

However, if I do that, I need to somehow ensure that I am actually doing less school work, and more of the other, really important things in my life. I think my best friend for that is time blocking. That is, deciding "OK, I'm going to get this first draft done in the next 3 hours." and then try and hold myself to that. And then, just maintaining a steady work pace, putting in a few hours every day towards those time-blocked goals, so it doesn't bunch up at the end of the semester.

However, I can't do that much ahead of things, because professors have an ultimately benevolent tendency to cancel, change, or reduce papers/projects a week before they are due, because that's when they realize the syllabus is way too much work. In any case, I will continue to try reducing how much time I spend on low-value assignments, and then carving out more time for important things, like rest, love, family, and spirituality, along with learning that is relevant to what I want to be doing.

I guess we'll see how the summer semester goes and then I'll decide if I'm staying at 3 classes for fall or going down to 2.

Tomorrow I get to sit down and figure out what I want to do with my break! 

With love,

I out!