Busy Life How You Struggled to Complete

¶ … Busy Life How you struggled to complete the segments of the assignment in the context of your busy life Multitasking is a constant challenge. Like most people today, I am constantly balancing the obligations of work, school, family, and friends. First and foremost, I always try to make use of the small windows of time I do have, to maximize the value of my downtime.

When waiting before class or during short breaks of free time at work, I always open up my laptop or a book to work on assignments. Before I sit down to relax, I try to page through some of my work to keep the ideas for a paper 'bubbling' in my brain. When other people are listening to their iPods, I have my nose in my books. Starting early is another important part of doing high-quality work. I have learned this the hard way.

When an assignment is due in several weeks, it is easy to put it out of my mind. However, invariably, new obligations and challenges arise, and unless I began work early, it is easy to become overwhelmed as the workload gradually mounts. In my planner, I make lists of long-term and short-term projects I am working on. However, I do not merely include the due date of the projects. I also schedule in critical milestones I need to reach on the way to the final deadline.

For example, if I am working on a research paper, I might schedule 'library research time' several weeks before the due date, and then schedule 'have a rough draft completed' after weeks of research. If I do not impose these artificial deadlines upon myself, then I will find myself on the night before the assignment is due, desperately typing at my computer, only to discover I do not have the critical books needed to complete the assignment.

Planning is important to ensure that one has a sense of how long the assignment will actually take to be completed, as opposed to wishful thinking. The fact that this particular assignment was segmented made this methodological approach very helpful. Because the larger assignment itself was broken down into components, I had a further incentive to set reasonable deadlines when creating a timetable for completion. I was not tempted to put the assignment aside because the due date seemed far away.

I knew I had to be mindful of the short-term deadlines as well. Of course, having a busy life often means sacrifices, and sleep is often one of them. Getting up early and going to bed late has become the norm for me, as I try to squeeze everything into my life that I need and want to do. I often find that I am less distracted and have more mental clarity early in the morning, when most of my friends are asleep.

Understanding the difference between a need and a want is very important when managing time. I might want to sleep late on Sunday or to go out with friends on Friday night. But I need.