My motivation for writing this post is due to a comment from my colleague during our monthly lab group meeting. In her words “Precious, I am jealous by how much progress you made this month” I know she meant, she was motivated by my productivity despite the pandemic situation we are in right now. This is a big deal to me considering the overwhelming challenges I faced this past month, from my phone crashing to my laptop screen going bad two days to my exam and preparing for the final examinations and meeting up with research expectations.
Life will always be plagued with different situations that will propel us to adjust our ways of life to meet the given circumstance. One of such is this COVID 19 pandemic. I will be narrating how I maintained productivity despite the challenging times.
It is not uncommon for you to see individuals posting about boredom with nothing to do on their social media handles. However, this is not the case for me as a first-year graduate student, as I have been saddled with so much work that I stay up till about 2 – 3 am about 5 times a week since I started working from home, to meet up with my responsibilities.
The lockdown, in my opinion, has made me more productive, compared to when I had to go the lab and also take classes till late in the evening because at that time I would be exasperated from work activities and not have the strength to stay up so late except for days where I had no evening class. Some of the things that have helped me stay productive during this time is sticking to my previous schedule before the stay at home directive. As such when I wake up, I take my bath first in the morning, as I would regularly do. I continued to meal prep once a week, so I don’t have to spend time cooking every day. I also did my laundry and regular cleanup of the house once a week. I noticed I was very productive on weekends if I did not engage in house chores and meal prepping. So, I started doing my chores and meal prepping on a weekday preferably Tuesday evening after classes, you can decide whatever suits your needs. I also shopped for groceries once in two weeks and was passive on social media as I did not want to be distracted. However, I kept in touch with friends and family, I never missed anyone’s birthday and spoke to my mum every day. Even though I was practicing physical distancing I was not social distancing to keep my mental and emotional state in check. In approximately two months of staying at home, I have become good at R and SAS software for data analysis, I have made substantial progress with my research, completed a project report and my productivity was evident in my progress report and evaluations. Of course, my progress was also amplified by the support of family, friends and my amazing instructors from my one on one independent study sessions with Dr. Reginald Archer at Tennessee State University who always gave me life changing advice every week, and to the very innovative Research methods class instructor, Dr. Jason de Koff, whose class was very enlightening and motivating.
I hope sharing my schedule would give you a guide on how to plan your schedule to suit your lifestyle, so you become productive.
#Stay safe
AGSC 5110 Research Methods 