In a recent interview, I was asked about my time management skills: How have they changed over the past four years? What tricks do I use to stay on top of everything that I need to get done? A generic question, yes, but an important one nonetheless.
While senioritis has put quite the damper on my motivation to do anything at all, it did prompt a bit of reflection on my part. Like the majority of other Hopkins students, I have fairly strong time management skills when it comes to school-related obligations (…I think). At the very least, when I’m inevitably scrambling to write a paper at 3 a.m. that’s due the same day, I feel like I have a realistic enough grasp on my schedule to admit that I probably brought this upon myself.
So to answer the question, the way I manage my time hasn’t changed much – obsessively making lists (Post-Its, you da real MVP), color coordinating my calendar, and whining loudly to my roommate. But what I allot my time to has changed rather dramatically.
(T)werk station
Freshman and sophomore year, I put school before everything else, including my general health and well-being. I reasoned that losing a few hours of sleep or skipping a meal or a workout here and there was simply the cost of succeeding academically. As a freshman, I remember someone jokingly saying that at Hopkins, you can sleep, get good grades, or have a social life. “Now pick two,” they told me. I scoffed at the time, thinking in my naive pomposity that I knew better than them. Why pick two when you could do it all?
I thought nothing of my all-night caffeine binges in the library, spending every waking moment either studying or zipping from one extracurricular to the next. My eating schedule revolved around this constant cycle of productivity, and my main criteria for meals was convenience rather than nutritional value. I’d scarf a scone down in the cafe upstairs or order something greasy to-go on the premise that I simply didn’t have the time to cook. My sleep schedule was a slave to this mentality, as well. I stayed out late with friends on the weekends instead of taking the time to recharge, clocking only four or five hours of sleep on any given night. I took pride in the exhaustive extremes of my life, and how I “managed” my time by cheating the clock: skimping on sleep and working or partying until days blurred into nights into days.
Wandering out of our snow-day hibernation
These days, I’m a humbled (or perhaps a more strategically apathetic) grandma. I’ve traded in the “work hard, play hard” motto for a more balanced approach. Productivity doesn’t cleave neatly into two categories of work and play, nor does incorporating other elements necessarily mean you aren’t working hard. As I’ve gotten older, I think my time management skills have allowed me to structure my days more productively.
Sidenote: I wish this list were longer, but unfortunately (or fortunately) there are only so many hours in the day. Besides, this is a fairly simple yet accurate breakdown of how I spend my time as a senior. On a typical day, you can find me doing one of five things:
1. I try to leave the library by midnight. Honestly, my body just can’t pull all-nighters like it used to. I can’t hang. Besides, the intensely gratifying feeling of sinking into my memory foam mattress pad is infinitely better than the feeling (or not feeling, I suppose) of my butt going numb in one of the sad excuse for chairs in the Brody Cafe.
2. I cook. There’s a serious lack of good food in Charles Village. And by “good” I don’t mean “dripping with so much grease it could be a wet dream” good, I mean “local, organic, non-processed, and fresher than the Fresh Prince of Bel Air” good. It didn’t use to bother me as much, but the options for students seeking convenient and healthy places to eat are severely lacking. I try to carve out time to make my own meals, and I love going to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings to get cheap and local ingredients.
Brunch in the apartment
Brown rice bowl with grilled chicken
Kale, quinoa, avo & blueberries
3. I be up in the gym just workin’ on my fitness. He’s my witness (woooEEE). In all seriousness though, I’ve been frequenting the Rec Center a lot more this semester. Thanks to my roommates in Sydney (Hi guys), I had a shockingly good workout routine while abroad and I want to try to make it a habit, though the walk from my apartment to the gym is in and of itself a workout some days.
As it turns out, there are a number of different ways to stay active besides dying slowly on the treadmill. CHEW at JHU, a group on campus dedicated to fostering student health, hosted a free yoga class a couple of weeks ago, which I attended and loved. I’m in the middle of nagging JHU_Caleb about teaching me to rock climb on the wall in the AC, something I want to try before I graduate.
The Rec Center also hosts free body-fat testing every year, which I never knew about until my friend Allison dragged me along with her. Funny story, actually – the first time they measured my BMI, the worker accidentally input my height as 5’11” instead of 5’1″. I was pretty happy with my results until I noticed that my BMI was 5, so I went back through a second time: “Um, excuse me, sorry, but according to this, I’m dead.”
4. I get creative. I recently stumbled across a quote that resonated with me:
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time. (Mary Oliver)
I’m taking an art studio class this semester called Works on Paper with Professor Barbara Gruber, whose sheer enthusiasm for art, or as she calls it, “mark-making,” makes me love going to class every week. We work in a variety of different mediums, and she does live demos in class to help us understand the logistics of light, shadow, line, and color. The combination of studio time and individual homework assignments is structured enough so that I feel like I’m constantly learning and improving, but informal enough to give students the creative freedom to do what they want. She once told me that learning to look at the world, “the practice and teaching of art,” helps people learn how to live. During critiques, when we line up our work for the week, it’s always amazing to me that a single subject can be rendered and seen in so many different ways.
This semester, we’ve taken a trip to the Archaeological Museum in Gilman to sketch ancient artifacts and the Baltimore Museum of Art to do sculpture studies in graphite. Last class, we had a live model sit for three hours while we worked on portraits in pastel. She sat in twenty-minute increments, with five-minute breaks in between. Working from life under such time constraints really forces you to make strategic decisions about what to include and what not to include. For someone who tends to get overly mired in the itty bitty details, these types of exercises have been their own form of therapy.
Auguste Rodin, “The Kiss” – two hour sketch at the BMA
I drew a model with red hair. Her name was Alice.
Self-portrait in pastel
Does this look like me? Nod if yes, recite the entire Bible backwards in Romanian if no.
5. I sleep. Self-explanatory. I’d say sleeping/laying in bed is in the top five (at least) of my favorite things to do. My roommate Joy constantly comments on the number of times she comes home to find me laying peacefully under my covers at a ridiculously early hour. They should have marathons for sleeping. I’d win.