Of Time Mismanagement and Such

There's this theory about life in graduate school I once read about (I can't recall the source I'm about to paraphrase here - PhD Comics?). Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of activities available to the grad student - working, partying and sleeping; however, the average student has only two degrees of freedom. To put it another way, time and energy constraints ensure that one can only go through grad school doing any two out of those three things.

While this is not absolute, it nevertheless rings true when I think back to my University days. I usually can't do without my eight hours of sleep a day, never mind which hours of the day they may be, and so my student life was largely a combination of stop-start slumber, and hours of work which proved just sufficient to stay afloat academically; any partying I might have hoped for was pretty much sacrificed as a result. The few occasions when grad school would bite me in the bum, were usually because of an untimely deviation from this routine - such as a sudden trip to the movies, or a visit to the bar when work needed to be done. Now, I did have my share of fun at University (even if there may be little photographic evidence of the same on my facebook profile), but not to the extent that it could significantly alter or affect the way things were going. If I had really utilised all that 'wasted' time on work instead, I might have marginally improved my GPA, and little else. In hindsight, I had quite a delicately balanced system in place.

An external condition, however, is all that is needed to upset such a balance. When the time came to turn my attention to a job search, and the preparations it involved, my system was thrown into chaos. If I sleepwalked my way through most of grad school, I ended it crossing a busy street on roller-skates during rush hour. I got my degree, but not the job I had been looking for.

The months of being without full-time work were initially a mixture of anxiety and relaxed resignation, for there's little you can do when the market is running on empty. Slowly, however, I found myself having to divide my time almost exclusively between the job hunt and sleeping; anything else seemed like a luxury, yet all that didn't stop me from indulging in what Krish Ashok aptly calls "focussed inactivity and alternative non-value-adding hobbies". The search, not surprisingly, hasn't ended. And now, back in Bangalore, I've volunteered to work for a startup to give myself something constructive to do on the side - effectively, an external condition.

I wonder how I might have dealt with this long spell of joblessness had it arrived, say, just after I was done with my undergraduate degree. Every move I made back then was somehow calibrated with the intention of not screwing up, which has ironically made me rather inertial now (Comfortably numb, but I'm trying to avoid Pink Floyd references!). Would it have been better to mess up earlier? I doubt I would have been preoccupied with pondering time management issues, at least. Anyway, now for some much needed shut-eye.