The Lent Term Experiment: Week 8!

Week 8 finally ended on Wednesday.

So, that's it.

I'm officially done Learning Stuff. No more lectures as an undergraduate left. It's now just my project and exams to go (five of them to be precise).

The first of my exams will be startng on the 2nd May, around 6 weeks from now. It's an odd feeling, knowing that it will all be coming to an end in a few months. Right now though, it's a sort of distant thought on the horizon, not something to be considered too deeply in light of all the Tripos goodness that awaits me first.

The fact that Week 8 comes to an end also brings to an end my time keeping experiment.

Personally, it has been quite interesting for me. I have discovered that I sleep a lot more than I thought I do - however it could just be an artifact of that fact that I am a 4th year, and thus old by Uni standards. Old people need their sleep, okay?

I have also discovered that I spend a lot of time procrastinating - not that I didn't know that already, but to quantify it is a little eye opening. However, it has also been revealed that I do put in a reasonable amount of consistent work throughout - which is good, although it was by far not enough given that I am yet to do any examples questions from the latter half of the four courses I am taking this term.

I've been told that this is not uncommon for 4th Years, but whether it is or not, I am not going to worry about it too much, and instead I'm taking solace in the fact that my project is going well and that in the last meeting, my supervisor got so excited by the latest batch of results that he idly suggested that I should write a paper on it and get it published.

Cue incredulous "Are you joking?" look.

Apparently he wasn't: cue one boggled undergraduate mind (as if the degree wasn't enough).

It doesn't seem right to even suggest something like that to me. I mean, writing papers and stuff are for those academics who live on a different plane of existence and have IQ's far higher than mine. For me, it's crazy talk! Although, I have to admit that the idea of having a published paper under my name does tickle my intellectual ego somewhat.

Anyway, self aggrandising diversion aside (I'm allowed to talk myself up okay? It's MY blog!), I decided for the final week to have a look at some total stats which were interesting to me.

Total Productive Work Time: 259 hours (average of ~30 hours per week)
Total Sleep: 480 hours (average of ~8 hours per day)
Total Procrastination: 82 hours (average of 9.5 hours per week, or ~1.4 hours a day)

Procrastination took up 24% of my work time, this figure is probably a little higher in reality, but it's still quite a lot!

It also appears I spend on average 3.8 hours per day not really doing much of anything. This is probably not true - some of this time is probably more accurately labelled as procrastination, although I know do tend to spend ~2 hours eating dinner and ~1 hour on lunch most days, along with showering and cycling to places etc, so maybe that figure is quite representative.

Pie Chart showing time breakdown.

The complete 8 week timeline.

If you are wondering what that massive spike of Free Time in the final week was all about, it was because I went to the Yonex All England Badminton Championships - a whole weekend of nothing but (mostly) guilt free watching of international Badminton, and cheering myself hoarse for China. Fun times.

In the first post of this series, I said I hoped it would enlighten people as to how much time the degree takes out of your life, and well, given that I have worked (or attempted to work) ~40 hours per week on average, and am still far far behind on things, the conclusion can only be "a lot".

Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this series of posts, or at least found them mildly entertaining, or maybe just found them as something to read to procrastinate with, it's why I write this blog after all!

Peace out for now!