20 for 2020: week 19
Week of 4 May
This was week 2 of the third unit of my uni course (thing 8). Our lecturer said this means we are more than half way through, unless you are counting assignments, in which case we’ll be half way through when we submit the one we’re working on now. It will be number five out of nine. The assignment is due on Sunday and I am quietly freaking out about it.
I really can’t relate my work to the material in the course and I had to contact the lecturer to clarify what I have to do in this assignment. I’m a little clearer now after chatting with her and sitting in on the online workshop on Wednesday night but I still have a long way to go and less than a week to get there. This is the least prepared I have been for any of my assignments. Normally I’d have a fairly robust (and very long) first draft by now and I’d be giving myself a week and a half to refine it and make it fit the the word limit. Right now, all I have is a vague outline and a few references, and it’s making me very edgy and unsettled. I really need some very large blocks of uninterrupted time to focus and I don’t seem to be able to carve them out. My plan to spend all of Sunday on it got upended, and the closer the deadline gets, the more I’m doing to avoid the work. But feeling overwhelmed isn’t helping and I need to sit down and just do it. Just focus on one step at a time but I can’t even work out what the first step needs to be. This is the most frustrating part of the course for me so far and it’s not pretty.
Since I did the 21-day creativity kickstart program (thing 6), I’m dedicating the small pocket of time that I have after my morning walk to my creative work, because I need to do something creative to stay sane. I’ve started using the time to watch the Photoshop course videos (thing 7B) and I am really excited about this work. It’s what I really want to be doing right now, which makes it all the harder to do the uni work. Right now, I’m questioning why I even signed up for that. I think I’m in way over my head and I don’t know how I’m going to get the work done.
For the assignment, they recommend drawing a “rich picture” to demonstrate the relationship you are analysing. I thought this would be a good opportunity to practise using my graphics tablet (thing 17). In hindsight, this was a bad idea because I have no idea how to draw stuff and I made a complete mess and nothing worked and I went back to pen and paper (after a mammoth effort on the whiteboard). I’ll chalk that up as a learning experience and leave the tablet for something that isn’t time pressured.
One of the tasks for the wellbeing work (thing 3) is to keep a track of everything you do for a couple of days. I did that a while back for Indistractable (thing 13) but I figured things have changed a bit since then so it might be worth doing this again with my new schedule and seeing where the windows of wasted time are popping up. I can probably guess. Any time I try to sit down and do my uni work would be the main one! I’ll try and track my time for a few days over the next week to see if this is correct. I did some more journalling work for that class as well.
I’m happy with my continuing reading habit (thing 14). This week I finished Rob Lowe’s second book, Love Life. Rob was one of my first teen idols (after the cricket players and footballers I used to adorn my bedroom walls with) and I have found both of his books (I read Stories I Only Tell My Friends several years ago) interesting and insightful. According to my trusty habit tracker I have done some reading every day since 8 March. It means I am slowly working my way through my unread books piles. (Yes, piles.)
Now, enough complaining. Back to the assignment.
Summary for the week
- Things completed this week: 0
- Things completed to date: 8 (1, 4, 5, 6, 10, 15, 16, 18)
- Things I progressed: 5 (3, 7, 8, 14, 17)
- Things in progress I didn’t progress: 3 (11, 13, 22)
- Things not started: 6 (2, 9, 12, 19, 20, 21)
- Days I stuck to my 15 minutes creative habit: 7
- Days I read a book: 7
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