And Another Thing

Every college class that occurs during dinner time should have a prerequisite course teaching how to eat healthily despite a crazy schedule. A lot of my peers are working on their PhD in health areas, yet many regularly come with fast food or get junk from the vending machine at the break. I’ve been there and I know it’s hard, but school isn’t worth your health.

I made it through another statistics class. I made it through by ordering a coffee grinder on amazon, looking up the schedule for NW Arkansas’ minor league baseball team and figuring out a game that will fit with my schedule (May 1), and organizing my next week before leaving for the Badlands. I made my running schedule, which was supposed to include an early morning run tomorrow. But then I got home and realized my running clothes are still in my car and that’s just too much response effort required because I’m already in my pajamas. So I realized if I switch my Bible study to the morning I can sleep in a little and still run tomorrow afternoon. But that means I have to shower tonight. And I had just started watching The West Wing, which means – more multi-tasking – laptop on the toilet (with a special “laptop on the toilet” protective towel). (I discovered that during the Olympics, because I was watching more stuff than usual and couldn’t justify the time – lol.)

On another note, do you ever wonder if dogs think we’re rude when we pry toys out of their mouths and throw them across the room? A few minutes ago I did that, trying to get Dempster to expend a little energy before bed. He looked at me like I’d stolen his best friend. And now I have to go see why he just took off running into my room. He’s undoubtedly got some puppy contraband.

Extreme Time Management

Grad school requires it. And I’m decent at it. I firmly believe people do what they want to do, so I refuse to allow “I don’t have time” to be an excuse (even if it’s somewhat valid) for things like: not exercising, not studying my Bible, not spending time with loved ones, etc. I just don’t allow myself that “out.” Even so, sometimes it’s a struggle.

How’s this for time management? I chose to do nothing last weekend. Well, that’s not true – I did enter some data for studies we’re doing in the clinic. But other than that, I just hung out with my mother and my nephews (the little one turned 3), and put school on the back burner. I’ve been trying to not do school on the weekends. It doesn’t always work, because there’s just too much to do. But as much as possible, I’d rather work hard during the week and have the weekend off. Like a normal person.

But I took it a little too far this weekend. I really should’ve at least looked at my statistics homework and done some article reviews. Statistics varies widely in how much time it will take. And I knew I would basically just have a couple of hours yesterday, because I’d already decided I needed to hang out with Sarah last night. (I have to force myself to make time for socialization sometimes, and going to Stuart and Sarah’s is perfect because Dempster loves it too. We even got our walk in going down their mile-long gravel driveway, instead of having her meet me at the top [they don’t want my poor little car driving on it because it’s so rough].) And today my friend and her little boy came for lunch, and I had a conference call right after. So yesterday afternoon was about all allotted for statistics.

I didn’t finish the homework though, so I woke up an hour early today and did some then. It turned out to be a good thing, because I had a question I wouldn’t have had time to have answered if I’d waited. I was able to take care of a [school-related] phone call during clinic hours, that I normally would’ve had to spend time on afterward. Then, I was able to fit in 27 minutes of our 35-minute walk before my friend got there.

I realized I didn’t have to run today, which I thought was on my schedule but I suddenly realized in the middle of the night that it’s actually tomorrow. So that meant I didn’t have to shower. Lol. Then, my conference call only lasted 15 minutes instead of the hour I had allotted for it, which meant I had gained some time in my schedule. (This conference call was funny because Dempster kept following me around with the loudest squeaky toy ever; and there was another weird sound that my advisor finally confessed was her breast pump.)

I usually work 15 minutes and take a 5-minute break, although if I only have a limited amount of time I don’t always stick to that. Today I knew I would need those breaks because I despise statistics. But I did two 15-minute work intervals back-to-back so that I could take a 10-minute break for our walk. Perfect! That way I didn’t technically take time out of what I needed to be doing. (Although keeping the walking habit strong is more important than this one statistics homework anyway.)

It turns out I finished statistics during that 30 minutes, so I was totally done before our walk. I voice transcribed this as we walked, so all I have to do is edit and post. I feel super productive today. And I have a tired puppy!

Two awesome things happened at clinic today. The first one is that this kid who’s been in the intervention phase of a study for two semesters finally reached 80% on independently requesting using a whole sentence on his iPad during snack. Which is awesome because I’m presenting these data at a conference in May!

And then this other kid randomly started imitating my song actions at circle time. We’ve been working on that for two semesters too. We can rarely get any motor imitation from him; much less spontaneous imitation for a variety of actions. It was amazing. When I say amazing, I mean that his one-on-one and I both almost teared up a little. I sent a video to my advisor, who I try not to text much these days in case she’s sleeping when her baby sleeps.

What a great day this turned out to be. I have 8 minutes before I have to eat dinner and get ready for class. 3 1/2 more weeks!