6 score and days ago (clever huh? ) I was preparing for a new semester at the University at Buffalo.  Little did I know what I would be getting myself into.  I was enrolled in 17 credit hours (8 undergrad, 9 grad) with a really split schedule.  This and an unexpected Teaching Assistant position pretty much took all of my energy away for most of the semester.  Included I’d like to provide some tips after looking back that might help others facing similar schedules.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make my schedule in such a way that I could have classes in a long solid chunk like I have had in past semesters.  I wasn’t expecting this to be hard to handle, but I was expecting a bit of lost time throughout the semester.  This is because most of my work is project based and I’m not very efficient with doing work when I have an hour here and there to do the work.

The reason why is because it takes me a good half hour to an hour to get into an efficient working rhythm.  I prefer having a large chunk of contiguous time to handle any chunk of work that I need to get done because I enter a mood and I work very quickly and efficiently.  Programming is one of the huge tasks that I do that requires large chunks of contiguous time.

During the semester I couldn’t find large chunks of time to get work done and this probably hurt me a little bit, but I did get through it.  I managed to get by through losing the concept of a “life”.  Most of my weekends were spent working on projects that were due, and I was limiting my sleep to 6 hours a night.  During the last 2 weeks, I had so much work left to do and so little time that I finally gave up on the concept of getting it all done in time.  I switched over to a “best effort” approach and started getting my 8 hours of sleep every night again.  This probably saved me the most because I quit worrying as much and I started being more productive.

After adjusting, I did start a paper todo list.  I found this to be very helpful compared to my computer based todo list because I could cross stuff off and it would still appear on the paper.  My computerized todo list removes my items from the list so I can’t see what I’ve accomplished.  This was a huge set back for me until I realized it was happening.  I will hopefully have a solution to this problem in the next few weeks to prepare for next semester.

Here are my tips: If you are in a situation where you don’t have enough time to do all the work, I recommend taking the stress out of the picture and start sleeping again.  I found that losing sleep wasn’t helping the problem at all.  I just couldn’t focus.  I also admit that I didn’t get everything done, but the tiny details were the things that I left out.  In my best effort approach, I quit doing the stuff that wasn’t worth a lot of points for my time and that was a huge help.  Another huge thing that helped was a todo list on paper.  This managed to keep me organized until I could finish and proved to me that I was moving forward.

All in all, I did enjoy the last semester.  I learned a lot from it in many aspects that I can hopefully take away into future tasks that I need to handle.  I would like to thank everyone who had to put up with me last semester, I probably wasn’t in the best of moods most of the time