10.27.24 - It's the dark period of the school year
Anyone in law school has done school long enough to be familiar with the late October shift.
It gets darker, deadlines pile up, stakes feel higher.
For 1Ls midterm grades are back, the era of good feelings has ended, and there is a subconscious inclination to start thinking more comparatively and anxiously.
At the very same time that school becomes more demanding, holiday plans and social obligations multiply. Your family is asking you to get your tickets home for thanksgiving. Maybe you've spent too much of your student loans on Bar Review.
In my opinion, this is the juncture where things make or break.
I'm a tutor, and I wrote an advice for 1Ls post that got a good deal of attention on Reddit. But I don't feel qualified to give advice. I just thought I'd write down the things I do around this time period that get e through it. It's useful for me, anyways.
Compartmentalization.At this stage, it becomes pretty important for me not to worry about doing everything right. I'm way too ADHD and having a bunch of open tabs in my brain drives me insane. It just makes me anxious. So I just a pick a thing, and do just that until its done. The other thing will wait. I'm weeks behind in Class B, and on time with Class A, so I' deciding to just outline as much as possible for Class A so I can wrap it up in a neat bow before turning to Class B. I just have to trust that I'll be able to get to it later.
Kill the shark that's closest.I had this saying when I was in the workforce, that I think I developed when I was working on political campaigns in college: "Kill the shark that's closest." Being any sort of high-performing knowledge worker in the upper-middle class means you just always have so much shit to do. Deadlines, bills to pay, a doctor's appointment to rescheudle, a draft to turn in, whatever. Often the response to this is to make "to-do" lists. But a lot of time, even that just takes to much time and can honestly be overwhelming. So I have a heuristic when I don't have time to prioritize. Just get the thing in front of me out of the way. If my Corporations textbook is in eyesight of me and I know I have readings, well I may as well just get that done. If I'm on my laptop and my email is open, well, I'll respond to emails. It's a way I get through decision paralysis as a very messy minded Type B person. It's a very reactive, intuitive way to plow through a lot of work.
Where does the saying come from? Well it's from an analogy I told a coworker once. Having all these tasks floating around feels like being on a raft surrounded by sharks. And you can't really come up with an attack plan, because you can't see all of them, they shift above and below the surface, sometimes popping into your conscious, then fading into the back of your mind. At least, as a Type B/ADHD person, this is how working memory for tasks feels at times. Sometimes, I don't even have a good sense of everything coming up, but I have a vague feeling of being cornered. Now, instead of indexing the sharks and figuring out what to do, I'll simply kill the one closest to the boat. One lesss shark to deal with. If you do that long enough, no more sharks left, or at least you buy yourself some time.
Seeing the funny side.Sometimes the scale of work is just absurd. My antitrust professor just added 250 pages to our readings. 250 pages I have to do by next week. A week where I have a deadline for this major experiential class I'm taking, and there's a halloween party, and I have a family event. Like, at some level its just funny. I try not to complain I just laugh.
Goofing off.All work and no play makes jack a dull boy. So the busier I get I also have to make more time to be silly.
Substance abuse + degrading health. I try and stay pretty fit and regimented through the semester. I'm no body builder, but I do my lifting and my walks and my pullups enough to look respectable. But sometimes you really just have to have your pack of Marlboro Reds, your Monster Energy, and sit and go crazy for a day. Frankly, I think its fine to be extremely unehealthy in small bursts, so that you have time to be be healthy and do your stuff most of the time. Again, a very Type-B adaptation. If I pull an allnighter or a 12 hour library stint every so often that means that most days, and during reading week, I take it pretty easy. So I decide to just be an extremist.
Should you do this?No. don't do this. I know people who have much better grades and lives than me and have such healthier life styles. They look great. They're on the Law Review. Apparently its possible. But for a schmuck like me who completely fenagled his way up to this level, I just have to stick to my own methods.
Cheers
knxnts