Strategies for Competitive Advantage – Post Holiday Break Summary
Two weeks off and it feels good. I can look back and see I was getting really burned out on the pace of school. The work isn’t that hard, but having it constantly hanging out there was really wearing me out. Apparently I wasn’t the only one. I got a generic e-mail from the university at every e-mail address I’ve ever told them about saying “we know it is hard but keep going it is worth it”. I’m guessing they are seeing (or have seen in the past) a lot of drop outs at this time of year. Case in point, normally my classes are between 20 and 25 people, this class is down to six.
Now it is time to return for one week in this class. The work this week will be reviewing and commenting on my team members strategic plans, and finishing mine. After briefly reviewing theirs I’m thinking mine is going to play just fine. I ran long in terms of the word count, but content wise I think mine is competitive. I can’t think of what I would add at this point, I’m planning on just doing some editing but will consider the comments I get.
The biggest difficulty in the upcoming weeks will be dealing with limited time. My work with the robotics team puts big chunks of time out of play for grad school work. I can always shift the time back as needed; the robotics team will get along fine. One of my ongoing concerns is that I’ll psyche myself out over the schedule, thinking I have too much to do and not enough time. To help manage that I’ve put placeholder appointments in my calendar with little cautionary notes like “if this doesn’t get done (meaning I don’t put the time in) tomorrow’s robotics meeting will have to get cut short”. I guess you could call them motivational cautionary threats. Just plugging everything into my calendar has already helped by (1) letting me get more use out of my calendar, (2) shown the time limits I have to operate under and (3) shown that there is still free time no matter how packed the schedule feels.
