free time and the lack thereof
May. 27th, 2008 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kareinaSometime not too long ago ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
katerit commented to me "I don't know many people who don't do insane amounts of stuff" and this got me thinking about how little free time I have these days, and how it never used to be like this.
I was one of those kids who found school easy--very little effort on my part was required to get grades ranging from decent to excellent. I don't recall having "homework" to do for most of my school years, because the "in class" time available to work on stuff was more than sufficent to get it all done. I never needed to "study" for exams (reading over notes or text books again after the creation of the one, or the first reading of the other), but just remembered enough of what had been said during lectures so as to be able to pass. Indeed, I felt that studying would be akin to cheating--that the exam was meant to be a measure of how much we learned during class itself!
When I moved on to University I found it a bit harder, and I actually had assignments to do outside of class time, but still I found ample free time to go for long walks, spend hours reading fiction, attend SCA events nearly every weekend, attend SCA gatherings/practices at least a couple of evenings a week, and spend hours just hanging out with my friends--possibly working on projects, possibly curled up in a lap visiting.
Moving on to my Master's degree--again, more work required during my "free" time, but still plenty of time available to continue being "active" in the SCA, enjoy time with friends/loved ones, reading, walks/x-country skiing. I am pretty certain that I still spent more of my time on things that count as "leisure" than I did on my Uni work.
In the decade that slipped past between finishing up my Master's and starting my PhD I was careful to arrange my life so that I could continue to put the primary emphasis on what I considered "quality of life"--lots of free time to indulge in what I do for fun. I didn't have much money, but it doesn't take much money to hang out with friends, re-read old favourite books, go for walks, and I managed to arrange thing to make it to oodles of SCA events with very little outlay of cash as well.
Needless to say, when I first enrolled in the PhD program here in Tassie, I started off continuing as I'd done before--taking time to do things I enjoy in addition to the Uni work. But having enrolled to work on a project for which I had zero background, it was necessary to do an awful lot of self-teaching to get to the point where I could understand the journal articles I needed to read for the project, so I started cutting back on some of my leisure activities to make time for the extra uni work. Time progressed, the project progressed, deadlines loomed, other "fun" activities were dropped from my schedule to free up more time for uni work. A couple of years slipped by, progress was made on the project, but not enough. Deadlines loomed. Cut back on more fun stuff.
Suddenly, I find myself in a place I never, ever, thought I would be--I've actually chosen *not* to attend an SCA event on a weekend so that I could stay home and get more work done. I'm considering staying home from other, upcoming events to get more work done. For the first time in my life, I am one of those insanely busy people with too much that needs to be done *now* and not enough time to do it. For the first time ever, I'm one of the people saying "sorry, I can't, I have to work".
I can remember feeling smug when people said that to me because I *could* go play, and I remember feeling sorry for them that they couldn't. Now that I'm the one saying it, I must confess, that I'm actually enjoying the work that I'm doing (most days), and that I don't mind missing out on the other stuff because I'm learning interesting stuff, and making progress on a fun project.
Speaking of which, I'd best get to it--it is nearly 10:40 this morning, and I haven't started working yet!
(ok, I'm giving up on fun stuff, but I'm still averaging 8 hours of sleep a day!)
katerit commented to me "I don't know many people who don't do insane amounts of stuff" and this got me thinking about how little free time I have these days, and how it never used to be like this.I was one of those kids who found school easy--very little effort on my part was required to get grades ranging from decent to excellent. I don't recall having "homework" to do for most of my school years, because the "in class" time available to work on stuff was more than sufficent to get it all done. I never needed to "study" for exams (reading over notes or text books again after the creation of the one, or the first reading of the other), but just remembered enough of what had been said during lectures so as to be able to pass. Indeed, I felt that studying would be akin to cheating--that the exam was meant to be a measure of how much we learned during class itself!
When I moved on to University I found it a bit harder, and I actually had assignments to do outside of class time, but still I found ample free time to go for long walks, spend hours reading fiction, attend SCA events nearly every weekend, attend SCA gatherings/practices at least a couple of evenings a week, and spend hours just hanging out with my friends--possibly working on projects, possibly curled up in a lap visiting.
Moving on to my Master's degree--again, more work required during my "free" time, but still plenty of time available to continue being "active" in the SCA, enjoy time with friends/loved ones, reading, walks/x-country skiing. I am pretty certain that I still spent more of my time on things that count as "leisure" than I did on my Uni work.
In the decade that slipped past between finishing up my Master's and starting my PhD I was careful to arrange my life so that I could continue to put the primary emphasis on what I considered "quality of life"--lots of free time to indulge in what I do for fun. I didn't have much money, but it doesn't take much money to hang out with friends, re-read old favourite books, go for walks, and I managed to arrange thing to make it to oodles of SCA events with very little outlay of cash as well.
Needless to say, when I first enrolled in the PhD program here in Tassie, I started off continuing as I'd done before--taking time to do things I enjoy in addition to the Uni work. But having enrolled to work on a project for which I had zero background, it was necessary to do an awful lot of self-teaching to get to the point where I could understand the journal articles I needed to read for the project, so I started cutting back on some of my leisure activities to make time for the extra uni work. Time progressed, the project progressed, deadlines loomed, other "fun" activities were dropped from my schedule to free up more time for uni work. A couple of years slipped by, progress was made on the project, but not enough. Deadlines loomed. Cut back on more fun stuff.
Suddenly, I find myself in a place I never, ever, thought I would be--I've actually chosen *not* to attend an SCA event on a weekend so that I could stay home and get more work done. I'm considering staying home from other, upcoming events to get more work done. For the first time in my life, I am one of those insanely busy people with too much that needs to be done *now* and not enough time to do it. For the first time ever, I'm one of the people saying "sorry, I can't, I have to work".
I can remember feeling smug when people said that to me because I *could* go play, and I remember feeling sorry for them that they couldn't. Now that I'm the one saying it, I must confess, that I'm actually enjoying the work that I'm doing (most days), and that I don't mind missing out on the other stuff because I'm learning interesting stuff, and making progress on a fun project.
Speaking of which, I'd best get to it--it is nearly 10:40 this morning, and I haven't started working yet!
(ok, I'm giving up on fun stuff, but I'm still averaging 8 hours of sleep a day!)
