Isn't it about Time?

What do Charles Lindbergh, William Wallace and pre-Victorian aristocratic women have in common? Absolutely nothing, apart from the fact that they have dominated my life over the past few days. Let me explain.

I took an incomplete in my History on Film class, which I took my last semester of BYU. I more or less forgot about this class and only recently did I realize that I need to get it taken care of so that I don’t have to explain to law schools why I have an uncompleted class on my transcript. So this week I emailed my professor to see if it was still possible to finish the class, fully expecting him to say no, which I deserved for blowing the class off in the first place. Much to my delight, he said he would be more than willing to let me complete the class, but I would need to take care of the paperwork to get an extension on the previously agreed upon completion date. Well, friends, turns out there is a maximum time period of a year and a half from the time the incomplete is started to when it must be finished, including the extension. Yikes. This meant that I would need everything turned into the records office by 5pm next Friday.

The tricky part about all of this is that in addition to working full time, I have been taking an LSAT prep class 3 days a week, and trying to also put in 2-3 hours on the days I don’t have class. Now I would need to find time for 12 hours of films I needed to watch, about 20 hours of reading, and 30 pages of papers that would need to be turned in. This doesn’t even include the fact that locating a required BBC miniseries from 1999 and the corresponding book that were nearly impossible to find took almost a day by themselves. Still, despite this being a lot of work it seemed very doable. It was at about this time that my professor informed me that in addition to needing all of the assignments a day early to grade them, he was going out of town so I would need to submit everything to him no later than Wednesday afternoon. Son of a B.

Needless to say, I’ve been very busy since I learned of these developments on Wednesday. Pretty much every waking hour that hasn’t been devoted to work and eating has been spent trying to finish up this class by the deadline. I think I’m going to make it, but in reality it’s too soon to tell. I’ll know by Wednesday. I have, however, relearned a very important fact about myself: I hate being super busy.

I will never understand people who always need to keep themselves busy with work, projects, appointments and other such things because they would otherwise get “restless,” or “bored.” Give me an open schedule and the freedom to relax, watch TV and eat junk and I am a happy man. Maybe this is true about everyone, and I’m sure on some level it is. However, it seems taboo to openly express how lazy my inner self is. Whatever. It’s the truth.

The funny thing is on some level I think this inherent laziness makes me work harder when I actually have to work. There is no sense dragging out an assignment by halfheartedly working on it when you could just sink your teeth fully into the job at hand and give yourself more time to loaf. My friend Deanna and I used to talk about this a lot when we were studying at Cambridge a few years back. We discovered that if our classmates devoted half as much time to doing their homework as they did whining about how much they had to do, they wouldn’t even be that busy. Either do the work or don’t. Quit wasting time telling everyone how much you have to do when you could be using that time to get it done. Sadly I think I took this to the extreme while we were there and neither whined about my workload or completed it. Whoops.

It will be interesting to see if I get it all done. I hope so. In addition to wanting the incomplete off my transcript, I’ve had to turn down watching the baseball playoffs, college football, and even playing a round of golf because the time could not be spared. Let’s hope the sacrifice pays off. It would be particularly ironic if the final twenty minutes I would have needed to finish everything eluded me because I spent that time blogging about time management.

Actually, I can easily see that happening. FML.