When working hard goes too far.

Firstly, just a quick apology for disappearing – I was at work all weekend thanks to The Princess and the Frog and then went home to a house with no internet until today.

Trying to please.
The above image may be a bit hard to place unless you’ve watched it recently, but it’s Anne Hathaway as Andrea Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada. A quick refresher on the plot – Andy is the frumpy wanna-be journalist who takes a job at High Fashion magazine Runway (e.g. Vogue) as one of the assistants to the editor, Miranda Priestly (read as Anna Wintour), played by Meryl Streep. Andy quickly discovers that being an assistant is no easy feat and that the fashion world isn’t all about which belt goes best with which dress. Now the image above becomes clear – Andy is swamped with work as she tries to meet Miranda’s every whim, while keeping the job she desperately needs to further her career. One of the main situations in the film is based on this – Andy is working too hard to please Miranda and quickly begins to neglect her own life and relationships. This brings me to want to talk about today – when working hard for that degree or promotion goes a bit too far.

Beep beep beep.
It’s only natural to want to do the best you can in work or school or university to ensure than you get the best results as possible. It also rings true to want to do everything you can to please those around you and make their lives easier as well. People pleasing can become a problem though – as we saw in The Devil Wears Prada, Andy started to reject her own life. When your home life starts to suffer because of your job or school work then it’s time to take a step back and do some re-evaluation.

You’re not their third arm.
It is unlikely that you’re extremely high up in the office hierarchy at this stage of your life, but this doesn’t mean that you are simply just the tea boy or filing girl – you’re a valued member of the staff and should be treated as such. If you start to agree to do menial tasks which are not part of your job description (like picking up your bosses dry cleaning), then it would appear that you are being taken advantage of. It’s ok to refuse to do something – it might not seem like the best idea, but it shows that you are strong, assertive and most of all aware that they’re asking too much. That’s not to say that if your boss asks for a genuine favour that you should turn them down – quite the contrary. It’s when it becomes a regular occurrence that you need to put your foot down.

Textbooks aren’t the only books.
Sure, a good grade means a lot. But then so do social skills, life skills and good memories. If you start to turn down plans with your friends to go drastically above and beyond your required reading and work, then you have a little bit of a problem. It’s all about balance – agree to go out to every second invitation, or if your friends just want to spend some time together why not set up a study day with lots of healthy snacks and drinks; if you’re doing the same course you could bounce ideas off each other and maybe pick up a thing or two that you’ve  missed out on or had trouble with. Your teens and early twenties are the times for you to learn about academia and yourself – there might not be an exam for the latter, but it’s still important.

Work is only a part of your life.
And to sum it up: be strong, be balanced and you’ll get where you want to be.

PS: You can buy The Devil Wears Pradafor only £2.98 at Amazon right now!

A small shopping haul.

I went out today with the intention of finishing my Christmas shopping, but really I just bought a lot of things for me. Including an outfit for my work’s night out next week. It’s a fairly casual thing, I think. But I’ve got this dress winging it’s way to me, just in case.

Waterfall cardigan £19.99
Navy Ruffle Tunic £16
T-bar court shoes £20
Grey Ribbed tights £8

Except my shoes are navy blue and from Primark, and my tights are also from Primark. I still need to get a bag to go with them.

I bought a few other things, but I’ll wait until I have batteries for my camera before I tell you about them.

A quick guide to manners and politeness.

See the full sized image by KnitXcorE @ Flickr here.

Mind your P’s and Q’s.
I’ve worked behind a till for three years now in a chemist and a cinema. Very different jobs and very different clientele. Last night, I was sitting having a think about work as I put this weeks hours in my diaries and I realised that while the ill and sick were thankful when I helped and served them in the chemist, the cinema-goers are certainly not. In fact, just two nights ago twenty-something year old man tried to be “subtle” and make me feel stupid under his breath for “forgetting” something he hadn’t actually asked for. Obviously the baseball cap gives me mind reading abilities and lowers my IQ by about 25%. And not once during the whole transaction did him or his partner say please or thank you.

That really gets up my nose.

It’s three simple words which should be second nature to everyone. While it’s possible at home and with friends I’m not always mindful of my manners, I most certainly am in public – shops, restaurants, work and university.

Three simple rules.
It’s not difficult to be polite. It really isn’t. Here’s a list of some of my personal habits and just common sense:

1. Asking for something? Say please!
   ”May I have a large coke, please?”
   ”A return to the uni, please.”
2. Been given something or have someone performed a service for you? Say thank you!
   While getting off a bus - “Thanks!”
   When handed change in a shop - “Thank you!”
3. Bumped into someone or got in their way? Apologise!
   ”Oops, sorry about that.”
   ”Excuse me.”
   ”So sorry.”

It’s just three simple words. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve had to prompt people to say please (and I do it!) because I don’t feel I should be spoken at – I should be spoken to. Just because someone’s scanning tins in Tesco or serving McFries in McDonalds does not necessarily mean they are stupid and it most certainly does not make them less than a person.

Tell me about some of your manner pet peeves or a time someone was inherently rude to you – it’s good to get it out your system!

 

Ps. I just had to show you this picture I found when I was searching flickr – it gave me a good giggle alright.

How to manage your time better.

See the original by fullofbliss @ Flickr here.

A million and one things to do.
It’s about a month into the semester at most universities now – maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less for some. It’s at this point that tutors think “hey, let’s start handing out lots of essays!” and of course, they all think it at once. I have lots of university work to do without essays, never mind fitting in my actual work to make pennies and it can all get to me sometimes. I’m sure it can get to everyone. But it doesn’t need to. With a little bit of forward planning (and a bit of patience) you can make this buy time at university much more easy for yourself.

It’s gonna feel a little bit like high school…
Because in a way, you’ll be making a timetable for yourself. One that goes along with your university timetable, work rota and whatever else you have to fit in. Some of you will be able to only have to do this once a semester, or once a month. For people like me who get different shifts at work every week, I need to do this every seven days. So before we start, grab a pen and a piece of paper or open a new word processing document – whatever works best for you!

Back to the old lists.
I know, I know – whenever we do something like this I’m always saying make a list. For whatever time period your working within write down how many hours you’ll be a work (plus actual times), same for university classes and lectures and then all the assignments, essays and reading you’ll be doing. Obviously, with the university work it’s a bit of a guess for how many hours it’s going to take, but hopefully by now you know how long it’ll take you to write a 1500 word essay or read 50 pages of a book. Now make a second list of all the things you like to do and how long you tend to do them for, like reading, blogging, watching TV.

Put it all together.
We’re going to get a little picture happy here, but bare with me. Now’s the time for you to open up your spreadsheet programme or get out the ruler and felt tip pens. Create a grid with all seven days of the week along the top and then the hours you would realistically be able to give towards work, university and studying. For me that’s between 9am and 8pm before I finally lose focus. Then pop in all your solid commitments from the first list we made, the serious list – e.g. class times and when you will be at your work. It should look a little bit like this:

I’ve coloured mine to make it a bit easier to understand, but you don’t have to do this. So from this, we can see that the theoretical me has Monday afternoon and evenings free, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings free, Thursday mornings free, most of the morning and afternoon free on Friday and all day Sunday free. That’s a lot of time to fill.

Let’s say for my weekly tutorials I’ve been set

• a small 1000 word essay to complete for the Monday morning
• ten questions for the Wednesday afternoon
• two sides of notes to be shared with the class on a Friday morning.

From the serious list, I have my guesstimates of

• three hours for the essay writing (plus one hour in the library finding relevant books and journals)
• an hour for the questions
• two hours for the notes.
• I will also need to do a combined total of five hours reading for all of my classes.

Let’s put all of these in what I think would be the best place for me:

Lots of new purple squares added there.You may have noticed that for the three separate assignments two of them are pencilled in for quite early in the morning. This is because that once you’re awake and had your breakfast and a nice cleansing shower you’ll do your best work. I don’t really know why it is, but I know I do better on my DS Brain Training earlier in the morning than later in the afternoon. Another point to note is that the essay has been split up. This is allow you to have another look at it after a break with a new perspective. You might find things to change when you’re finishing it up in that final hour – I know I do. Finally, I’ve spaced all the reading out because it’s easier to absorb when it’s in smaller chunks!

Remember that not so serious list of stuff we made? And see all those white spots up there? That’s where everything on the list goes. You don’t have to slot it in, I just brought it up to remind you that university isn’t all study, study, study – you have to do fun things too!

But how does this help me?!
Well ideally, once the hour is up, you stop reading, writing or whatever else you are doing. This only really works if you have your guesses right in the first place. But by setting yourself a realistic time limit, and working within them, you’ll be working yourself to your full potential and also more efficiently. Plus all the big white gaps can act as a good reminder that you have plenty of left over time in case you do need to give something that extra hour or two.

Hopefully this will help someone a little bit with the massive workload they feel they have, or maybe even help one of you work to your full potential. Please let me know how you all get on with this!

I will be back.

Very soon! I promise. I have a few posts almost done and now that I’m all settled back in, things can become more regular now.

I’m back at uni, for those of you who have forgotten. I also managed to get my job back in the cinema, and I start on Fridayish. While I’m only at uni six hours a week and my contract is 8 hours a week, that does not mean I have a lot of free time – my 6 hour uni work load is added onto from studying (which I need to do a lot of for one subject in particular! Something ridiculous like 8 hours a week!) and the 8 hour contracted hours at work will probably be at least 12 hours a week. So I have some free time, but not much.

This will alllll lead to a post about time management soon, I’m sure. Expect a short post tomorrow on Benefit’s BADgal mascara (again! I know, but it’s good!) and then a post on Monday, probably a Save, Spend, Splurge!

I hope everyone’s well and settled into university well!

I would like to say.

I would like to apologise for lack of posting this week, I suddenly found I had a lot of other things to do that distracted me from writing posts. I do, however, have a few things planned out and will be writing a lot this weekend. Look out for 3 or 4 updates next week, maybe even one everyday if you’re lucky!