Day in the Life #11

Hey there! Happy Wednesday! I thought that today I could fill you in a little on what current life looks like. The thing is, I’m not sure I know what it really looks like. It’s still the beginning of the quarter, and my schedule is a little up in the air. I have no idea what my workload will be in a week or so, though I am about certain it will be much larger than it is right now. So… today I want to talk about how to create a structure for yourself when you don’t actually have a structure. Make sense? Let’s do it. Here’s a glimpse at yesterday!

The schedule

5:41 am – I wake up. Even though it’s a little later than I often wake, it feels too early. I was exhausted last night, I went to bed in good time, and I could not fall asleep. I was feeling pretty anxious, even though I couldn’t point to any specific cause. 

5:46 am – I’m just awake enough that going back to sleep isn’t happening. Also, I really like starting my morning with some time for myself, and getting up this early allows me to do just that. I hop out of bed, change into workout clothes, plug in my phone (I’m sharing a charger with one of my roommates for now, since I left mine at home), and head downstairs to do a cardio circuit.

6:03 am – Start workout.

6:43 am – Cool down and stretch before heading back upstairs.

7:06 am – I get back to my room and pull out some chicken to thaw for dinner. I see some extra house subsidy money my RA must have left me last night. (I’m the treasurer.) I put it in a, uh, secret, very-secure location before I leave to go take a shower.

7:26 am – I do my hair and makeup, and check my email and Facebook messages. I intentionally leave one from one of my Spoon writers unread so I remember to edit her article this morning.

8:10 am – After procrastinating a little, I get dressed.

I start making breakfast. I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but I’m making a different breakfast than usual.

8:22 am – I take pictures of breakfast for way too long.

My morning photo-taking setup is extremely embarrassing and involves me carrying food and a camera and any props I’m using into the hall outside my room because there’s a huge window and more light by the stairs. I’ll be sure to take a picture of the whole crazy thing sometime.

8:40 am – Eat breakfast, read blogs.

9:10 am – Clean up dishes from breakfast. Dry off and put away all the dishes my roommates have washed recently. I catch up with the roommate I haven’t seen since sometime last week about her classes and the like.

9:22 am – I pour a bowl of cereal and make a mug of tea before doing a little more blog-reading.

9:40 am – I make edits for a Spoon article about the best Chicago restaurants to eat at to celebrate April food holidays and Facebook chat with the writer a little.

9:51 am – Attempt to grab a tissue from one of those little cube tissue boxes. I just opened it, so the tissues are all stuffed in there and the tissue rips. Casually complain about the design of said tissue boxes to my roommate.

10:13 am – Leave for sosc. 

10:25 am – Get to sosc, talk to some classmates briefly, and confirm the date we’re supposed to lead the discussion with my assigned partner. Class starts at 10:30 and we talk a lot about Freud, war, good and evil, and neuroses. There’s a lot of frustration about his methods and the fact that while it’s hard to confirm anything he claims, it’s also hard to completely refute his argument. 

10:50 am – Sosc ends and I head to econometrics.

11:03 am – Econometrics starts.

We talk a lot about some important distributions, parameters, and what makes a good estimator. 

1:20 pm – Class ends and my friend and I walk out, talking about our favorite TAs and what our workload will look like this week. We expect an econ problem set after class tomorrow, and we expect an econometrics one sometime after class on Thursday. Until then, I just have a lot of reading (Freud), so I can’t really plan ahead. I can, however, stay on top of my known work, and that’s what I’m determined to do.

1:27 pm – I split off from my friend and head to my adviser meeting. I’m pretty sure this is technically the meeting where I would declare my major, but my adviser has known I’m an economics major for a while. So, it’s a required-but-unnecessary meeting.

1:30 pm – Adviser meeting. My adviser is the sweetest. She knows my schedule is crazy and laughs when I tell her I did it intentionally because I thought the feeling of being done with the core of my major would be worth a tough quarter. She asks if I’m planning a second major, or to write a thesis, or what, and I tell her I just intend to graduate 2 or 3 (probably 2) quarters early. I’m grateful that she doesn’t try to talk me out of it. We catch up on some other life stuff, I confirm the classes I’ll need to take in my remaining time here, and we’re done.

2:15 pm – I come back to the dorm, clean up the kitchen (which has somehow become a mess in the last four hours…), and start cooking the chicken I thawed this morning.

3:15 pm – Eat and check emails. 

{Honey mustard chicken tenders with roasted apples and asparagus}

4:00 pm – Grab some pistachios and dark chocolate as some sort of snack/lunch dessert before sitting down to power through some Freud.

4:35 pm – Actually read Freud.

5:20 pm – Take a break. Get some grapes. Breathe. Continue.

6:32 – Finish my reading. Call my dad to return to the real world. Chat with him about my day while stir-frying shrimp and veggies.

6:56 – Eat dinner. Watch The West Wing. Chill.

7:14 pm – Get a Greek yogurt and start this post. Watch/participate in group chats with the UChicago Spoon team and my high school friends.

8:35 pm – I pull together a pretty standard collection of nighttime snacks… which I demolish before taking a picture. Plain Greek yogurt, an apple, a banana, Justin’s honey peanut butter and a microwavable cup of Private Selection oatmeal. 

9:22 pm – Look at my to-do list for tomorrow and don’t stress about the fact that I didn’t do it all today.

9:45 pm – Bedtime. Hoping for a better night of sleep tonight!

The strategy

I’m only in class four days a week, for a maximum of about three hours a day. Right now, I don’t have that much work, and I need structure to prevent myself from going crazy. If I’ve learned anything in college, it’s that. How do I give myself that structure? I figure out what I want to do and I set times to do it. Simple. I used my morning to work out, edit, and blog. I wanted (needed?) to clean, so I did that while I cooked a nice lunch that would provide leftover meat for busier days. I wanted to get ahead a little on my reading, so I set aside a couple hours for that. Frankly, today I had around 9 hours of unscheduled time, but scheduling it myself made it a lot less ambiguous – and consequently, a lot less terrifying. I got stuff done and it was great. I hope I can continue that trend for, oh, 10 more weeks. 🙂

How @EllenSlater gets stuff done without a real schedule - by creating one herself Share on X

When are you most productive?

Do you schedule your time or just go with the flow?