Back on Track, 8 Hours a Day

Class photo after our Friday stress management presentation. Bob

(the professor in the middle) brought in his Edna Mode doll from the

Incredibles. We were told to dress comfortably. I'm behind Edna with a

blue shirt and my green robe.

I'm feeling good. I had a very productive weekend. In the CommDesign discussion class on Friday we talked about stress and time management. One thing that really stuck out to me was different ways to arrange your to-do lists and think about the way you organize time throughout the week. One of the strategies discussed was a kind of thirds system. You divide your day up into three sections of eight hours. One section is devoted to sleep (yes!), one section to work and one to play. When she first presented this I was skeptical. Since classes are included in the "work" column, I didn't see how I would have enough time to get everything done, even if I put walking places and eating in the "play" section of my day. Still, with this strategy in mind I tackled my weekend. Turns out that on the weekends I definitely don't usually do 8 hours of work a day. This weekend I did. I'm feeling good.

Last week I had office hours with a professor to make sure I'm on track with my second project. The truth is that I'm behind. I had a tough start to this project, and then a tough week near mid terms when I got sick. Though lots of juniors in my class are a bit behind, I really didn't want to be one of them. So last week all I brought in was two rough spreads, sketches for my others and a theory for how my book was gonna be constructed. Though that's all my professor told me I should bring in, I didn't feel good about it. This weekend, I have finally picked up the slack. At the moment I have all the text written, photos taken, photos placed, and 12 out of 18 pages DONE (for this week). That's good. Now I can finish that project up tonight, start focusing on my third project and make sure I'm on track for all of my non-major classes. Just have to keep plugging away.

The best part of all of it was that I got to go to bed when I wanted both nights.

It'll feel great to be back on track. It doesn't mean that I can slow down, but it means that I won't have so much work piling up on me during finals... well, not AS much work. We'll see.

Catching Up and Cut Paper

It's been a while since my last blog. A whole lot is happening in the office and in my studies. The handwashing campaign is pretty wrapped up for now. I'll have a bunch to tweak near the end of the semester for finals, but we'll leave it till then. My next project hasn't been so good to me. I'm making a publication about foods that are good for directing your mood, and quick recipes for how to use them. As my professor said in office hours on Monday, I was sick last week and so was my work. SO this week I went in to talk to my professor early and tried to gain back some of the productivity I had fallen behind in. I'm still behind, and this project is more complicated than I thought. Luckily a lot of my class is also having trouble, so, in the end, I'm not toooooo far behind compared to other people. It's a mid-semester slump, but we're all picking up the pace to try and make finals do-able. This week I bring in my new concept for the page layouts, sketches, and information about my next project as well as names and slogans. Goodness. I have a bunch to do before class today at 2:30. So it goes.

I haven't talked a lot about my animation studio, but I had a really good class yesterday. We're starting on our own personal animations, as opposed to the last claymation which was a group project. During the beginning of the semester the professor had us picking out newspaper articles to respond to and share. Now we're doing an animation inspired by something in an article we heard of. My animation is about virtual twins, two people who are less than 9 months apart and who were raised in the same household as siblings. Studies show that even though these people have had similar upbringings, they are far more different from each other than biological twins are in personality intelligence and so on. I'm doing my animation using stop motion and cut paper characters. I'm enjoying the physicality of cutting out paper characters and sets, even though my friend tells me that it looks exactly like my style of illustration using the computer program Adobe Illustrator. I guess that makes sense. I wonder if it's ok to have a style as a designer. I'll have to ask the professors.