Winter Break, Workaholism, and Lethargy

It has been two weeks since I have been home for winter break, and there is only about a week and a half left. I have done remarkably almost nothing, which may or may not be a problem. One of the problems is that I have felt compelled to do something productive this whole break which has somewhat taken away from my break. It does not help that I actually have some work to do. It also does not help that I have been sleeping at 3am-4am and waking at noon. When I wake I am tired; when I try to sleep early, my mind is racing.

Trent of a Simple Dollar states that there are 4 types of work: important and urgent, important and not urgent, urgent and not important, and not important and not urgent. For me, important and urgent tasks include emailing professors, finding/applying/LOR/Transcripts for internships that are time sensitive. Important and not urgent tasks, include working on this blog, less time sensitive applications/looking for summer programs, ordering textbooks, studying organic chemistry. But lately my time seems to be occupied by not important and not urgent tasks (ex. internet surfing) and excess games.

Part of the purpose of winter break is to recover from Fall semester, so I can hit Spring semester running. But the other part of me feels that winter break is to get a step on next semester (little bit of orgo reading) and to cover things that I won’t have as much time to do during the semester (ex. finding internships/research/summer activities). So far this break I have sunk a lot of time into looking for internships, summer activities, and potential professors that I can work with in the spring. I have also spent a lot of time playing video games—something I feel is not too terrible but is not great. The problem remains that for all the hours I sunk into looking for internships, summer activities, and potential research professors, I have produced almost no results. And results are everything.

I have emailed one professor, completely half of an application to a program that I decided is not worth applying to, and did half a chapter of organic chemistry. If there was a plot of results vs time (as a very loose measure of effort) it would have flat-lined this past week. Ideally, the slope would be positive with a steep slope. The disparity between time vs. results suggests inefficiency. Economy of time and effort is critical, especially as a pre-med student. I hope to break free from this inefficiency rut soon. There is too much to do before school starts. In fact, in creating this blog post, I was hoping to get the snowball rolling on getting stuff done. We’ll see how that works out.