97: Optimizing Poorly

This title is about two different things. The first thing is my life, wherein I have always been "poorly optimized". One of the things about my brain is that I'm very good at finding places where I could optimize, "matters of seconds lost on the margins", as Osiris would say, but I'm very bad at implementing said optimizations. It's a perfect wombo-combo of traits where I know that I could be doing better, but actually implementing those possibilities would take inhuman focus and drive, which I simply don't have. However, because I know that I could be better, I constantly feel that I'm not "living up to my potential" and that I should be that optimized person who nails every assignment, memorizes everything perfectly, and gets a full night's sleep every night.

I am not that person, and I've gotten a lot better at coming to terms with it. It's really coming into focus right now, with my current courseload. I am genuinely struggling for possibly the first time, with a workload. I've had hard assignments, and I've had hard classes, but I've never had a full schedule, hard things to do, and a slate of professors that seem to be out to get me. I know they aren't actually, but at 9:30 PM today, one of my professors pulled a "it wasn't on canvas, bu the pre-lab for tomorrow is due in lab". That lab is at noon. There were barely 14 hours between this being "assigned" and it being due, and those hours are taken up! I have class 8-9, and prior engagements from 9:30-10:30 and 11-12, which either means I'm supposed to do that assignment late in the night, having dropped everything else, or I'm supposed to have done it early tomorrow morning? I don't think so.

I did get lucky, in that the pre-labs are (apparently) counted as group work, so one of my labmates did it, because he had the bandwidth, and it counted for my submission.

That allowed me to drop in and finish one of the other things that was due tonight, a lab report for one of my other labs, which took one of the other members and I a good 45 minutes just now. We found a rubric buried in the Canvas that was fully different from the template and the lab manual, and decided to overcompensate for points and match it, which wasn't too bad. I had gotten out of that pre-lab, so we knocked it out pretty easy.