I awoke this morning with a decided feeling of apprehension. One of my many group project papers is due tomorrow, and we were scheduled to meet this afternoon in an attempt to finalize the paper. While I am not empty-handed for this meeting, the section of the paper that I own was not as prepared as I would like it to be.
The previous week had been riddled with other projects/assignments/exams, plus the reporting required for my grad assistant position, plus dealing with the undergrad students who (without fail) suddenly decide that the last week before finals is the best possible time to plead with me regarding absences, exam grades, and all manner of other things.
Also, while I am now too old (much older than many classmates) to be a “party animal” in the true sense of the word, I am an extremely social person and place a high value on the time that I spend with friends. As such, I spent some time over the weekend hanging out with various friends when I could have been editing/revising/adding/etc. to what had been worked on previously.
Compounding the problem was the fact that I had a performance this morning from 10am-1pm - given that our meeting was scheduled for 2pm, this allowed for only a distinctively small window of time to make any potential changes to my section of this paper. I rallied as best as I could (luckily, my Sunday morning gig is walking distance from campus) and then headed over to the meeting.
So, bottom line - I went into this meeting feeling sorely unprepared. However, as we sat down and discussed, I found that all of my group mates were in a similar position. They all had been balancing various aspects of their life, just like me. We did not in fact have anything remotely resembling a finished product; however, we had enough that we were able to put the pieces together in a way that ensured that we will do pretty darn well on this project.
[Since you’ve read this far, it is worth specifying a couple of things. First, I am not condoning slacking on any kind of work in any way, shape, or form - I’ve worked with slackers before (and have been one myself), and I speak of them quite differently than this. Second, I realize that I sometimes take a while to get to my point, and I appreciate the tenacity of anyone who is still reading]
Anyway, the point is this. Sometimes it is in fact a good thing to realize that my coworkers/groupmates/whoever have not yet displayed superpowers, and that I should not berate myself for the fact that crossing the tall building in front of me took more than one single bound…