When classes were online, it was relatively easy to stay on top of your responsibilities. I would wake up and plan out my day, and work through all of the things I had to get done. But now that we’re in person again, small things keep seeming to pop up and get in the way of things. I’ve had to learn (again) how to manage my time, and how to handle all the random problems that come out of nowhere.
I’ve noticed that with all the different varieties of work, it’s easy to get bogged down in the details. Each task might only take a few minutes, but if you don’t deal with them as they come, it’s easy for them to pile up and bog you down. The only way that I’ve found to solve these problems is to take care of them immediately. The less work each task is, the faster it should be to get it done. Why not just do it now?
The smaller tasks are what I personally have the most difficulty with, but a similar logic applies to other activities. For big tasks, it’s better to focus on the work and avoid distractions. When resting, it’s better to relax and forget about your responsibilities and problems – for the moment – because otherwise, your time off won’t be restful.
In some ways, that makes dealing with those kinds of problems even harder. To handle the little things, we need to turn our attention from a bigger, more interesting, more important problem. I can assure you that there is no engineer that would prefer writing technical documentation to designing something new. Anytime that engineer is working on that documentation, or anytime that I’m working on the business side of my Senior Design project, it’s hard to focus on the task at hand when it’s only a tangent off of much cooler work.
There’s also the inverse scenario where, in order to avoid some work that I don’t want to do, I get sidetracked into doing some other more menial task. This usually isn’t very responsible, but sometimes works out in my favor. For example, when I was Business Manager of The Stute, I needed to reach out to a variety of businesses in Hoboken, but I didn’t want to email the entire contact list individually. So instead, I wrote a Python script to send out customized emails for me. Sure, it probably would’ve taken about the same amount of time to do it manually, but the way I did it felt a lot more fun. But even then, I was still working to solve the same problem; the emails had to get sent out, I just went about it in an unusual way.
Regardless of what I’m doing, I’ve found that living in the present moment gets me the most out of whatever I’m doing. Whether it’s work, rest, or hanging out with friends, I gain very little from splitting my focus. The phrase ‘my full attention’ is something of a misnomer; attention is a singular, unitary thing. There is no more or less than all of your attention at any given moment.
Senioritis is an Opinion column written by one or two Stevens student(s) in their last year of study to discuss life experiences during their final year at Stevens, and other related subject matter.
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