Skip to main content

Where Did My Time Go? Assessing Your Time & Finding Your Patterns:

March 3, 2022

Where does my time go? Have you ever thought that? After a busy week and the hustle and bustle, feeling like you have lost time? I know I do all the time. As a busy graduate student who also works, most weeks end with me feeling exhausted and unsure of what I actually got done. I know that I had been busy – sometimes far too busy – and I did at least most of the work I needed to, but I honestly feel like time escapes me. I get that constant feeling that I am overwhelmed but not productive. The words effective and efficient use of time continually evade me.

Rocking a Paper with Scissors

October 5, 2020

It was late one night in December, and, with what seemed like hundreds of other people, I was in the library. I had been working on a paper about the U.S. intelligence community for weeks—reading articles, finding book chapters, and typing page after page of notes—and my head was spinning.

Papers as Puzzles

July 14, 2020

By applying these strategies to my writing process, I now think of my own writing as a puzzle. The techniques that I’d use during my puzzle night are also useful for making progress on writing, especially when the project’s structure won’t become clear until closer to the end. To illustrate how this works for me, let’s look at an example of a lecture series about Marx that I recently wrote.

How I Use Calendars

April 13, 2020

I wholeheartedly believe that the perfect calendar doesn’t exist. It took me a few years of trial and error to learn that a combination of paper and electronic calendars works best for me. This system doesn’t need to be complicated. In my case, I use Google Calendar to figure out where I need to be (as well as any recurring reminders) and a paper calendar for what I need to do.