Being in Industrial Design (ID) course for a semester has been an
eventful yet tiring period of time. With most of the workload being
project-based, I have spent much time in school discussing in teams
and consulting tutors, unlike going back home to complete tutorials
like in my past education life. This was a change in study method
which I had to learn to adapt to. Adding on, the one-hour school
journeys to and fro have taken away lots of time, hence leaving less
amount of time at home to finish my other time-consuming assignments.
I was also quite involved in my church ministries, so each week, the
weekends were usually packed with activities, leaving at most only an
afternoon and night to do my work. As the workload piled up and the
lack of sleep became a norm, my health gradually decreased and I
started to fall sick, causing my productivity to drop. It was
especially challenging to pull through those times. As a whole, the
semester had been hectic.
Reflecting upon what has happened earlier, there were positive
and negative insights about my ID life thus far. On the positive
note, I was able to work well with my team-mates for all projects,
thereby having no complicated and bad relationships with people. I
was also able to identify what were the deliverables the tutors
wanted and not going out-of-track for most of the tasks. I am very
grateful that during those hectic times, my relationships with family
and friends were not strained and hence had received unending support
from them to pull through the difficult times. On the negative note,
I was not able to decipher which activities were to be omitted in my
schedule so as to decrease busyness, hence I have a problem
prioritising my commitments. This also affected my time management,
causing me to allocate wrong amount of time for each activity, task
and break. Sometimes, I was not discipline enough to do what I am
supposed to do like completing my work and instead spent time surfing
the social networking sites.
In this new semester, I would like to change some of daily
routines and continue forging good relationships with my family
members and peers. One of the changes I will do is setting some
ground-rules for my way of living. These include a minimum sleep of 6
hours everyday, and having a 10 minutes break interval after 1.5
hours of non-stop work so as to rest, recharge, and learn to be
discipline. In addition, I will also try to clear my important and
urgent things-to-do by Sunday as a means of learning to prioritise my
schedule. To learn to be focused and less distracted, I will limit
myself to spend at most an hour on Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr
daily to free up more time completing my work quickly. To improve my
immunity system, I will start eating a fruit each day to prevent
myself from falling sick easily and maintaining a healthy body.
From all the events that had happened in one semester, I felt
that managing life in Industrial Design will be a long learning
journey and will carry on throughout the entire four years in NUS.
However, my management will definitely be better after each semester,
thus becoming more focused and sure of the way to manage my life in
future.
