As I’ve gotten towards the end of my third year at Bath Spa University, I’ve noticed a lot of people become increasingly stressed about looming deadlines. But I have to say that I’ve never worried about deadlines because I have my own system for handling them that has always worked perfectly for me. So for today’s entry I am going to talk a little about how I manage my deadlines in the hope that it will be a useful strategy to others.
The reason I never get concerned about my deadlines is that, as soon as I know my deadlines I write them all out and then pick a day (at least a week before each one) and just do the entire piece then. I know a lot of people like to get a big piece of work done by breaking it up into tiny pieces and working very slowly over a long period of time, but for me there’s too much uncertainty in that. If I know the exact days that I’ll do all of my pieces of work, I don’t worry about deadlines because I know I’ll do them on their allocated days.
I often hear it advised that you shouldn’t work on a single piece for more than an hour at a time, because then you’re forcing yourself to go too far and you probably won’t be producing work of the highest quality. But I don’t look at that as a universal truth. Some people may not be able to work on one thing for hours, and some people (like myself) may be able to do so quite happily. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I don’t produce bad work with this method either, I actually usually get fairly high grades. As with most things, different people work in different ways. I just wanted to share this in case it might be of use to anybody!
The reason I never get concerned about my deadlines is that, as soon as I know my deadlines I write them all out and then pick a day (at least a week before each one) and just do the entire piece then. I know a lot of people like to get a big piece of work done by breaking it up into tiny pieces and working very slowly over a long period of time, but for me there’s too much uncertainty in that. If I know the exact days that I’ll do all of my pieces of work, I don’t worry about deadlines because I know I’ll do them on their allocated days.
I often hear it advised that you shouldn’t work on a single piece for more than an hour at a time, because then you’re forcing yourself to go too far and you probably won’t be producing work of the highest quality. But I don’t look at that as a universal truth. Some people may not be able to work on one thing for hours, and some people (like myself) may be able to do so quite happily. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I don’t produce bad work with this method either, I actually usually get fairly high grades. As with most things, different people work in different ways. I just wanted to share this in case it might be of use to anybody!
(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)
