Have you ever felt the feeling of having too much to do, but not enough time to do it? It feels even worse when you regret procrastinating weeks, maybe months before the deadline because you thought you’d have enough time to finish it. For my passion project in school, I decided to write and publish the third book to my series, and time management was a big thing I faced during this project.
I’ve always had a passion for writing, and I wanted to continue to write stories that I hoped would inspire my peers to do things that they’ve always wanted to do, but felt confined by their surroundings.
My English teacher had told us about two months about this project before we actually started the project. I’d managed to write one chapter in the span of two months. There was a problem at hand. By the time we reached the project, we learned that we had six weeks to complete the project, but I only had a few chapters done. Time management became my main priority, especially since I lost about two weeks of work time because of spring break and expeditions. By the fourth week, I realized, “I am not going to finish this book in the next two weeks.” I had only reached halfway, and it was too late to change my entire project to anything else. Additionally, I didn’t want to present something that was only half-finished. I had a passion for writing, so I thought of a better way to go around the project. I had two children’s stories that I’d written before. All the writing was done, and all the drawings were drawn. All I needed to do was redraw them onto a digital copy for better quality and publish it.
Perfect! 🙂
I got to work the next day, not quite abandoning my original project, but spending less time on it and more on the children’s books. Again, I overestimated my abilities to complete this. I’d guessed that redrawing one story would take about a week to complete (since children’s stories are relatively short).
It ended up taking around two weeks for completion. During the later weeks, I was on a time crunch. I needed those pictures done so that I would be able to finish my project on time. I kept thinking, “I thought I was going to have fun doing this, but this is way more stressful than I would’ve liked.” As some of you know, we also had huge projects due from other classes on top of this one. Luckily, I was able to publish and submit this project, but the amount of stress that I felt throughout the whole process could have been greatly reduced.
There were still some really great things that came out of all that stress. I’d been wanting to start a blog about my stories because I didn’t want to manage another Instagram account, and I was able to do that during this project. The children’s story was also a personal project I’d wanted to complete before, but never got around to. It’s ironic to see projects that I’ve put off completed during a project that taught me about time management.
As a result, I learned that planning my schedules and being constantly aware of the time constraint goes a long way. Planning the writing process of a book is very difficult, considering that I’m not always sure where the story is going to take me, or how many chapters I’m doing, but having a rough guideline for my story would’ve been very helpful.
We all have dreams that we want to accomplish, but we often don’t have a lot of time. If you’re able to figure out a way to manage your time in a way that works best for you, you’d be able to have the best of both worlds.
Candlelight Writings 