Having fun whilst getting the work done
#76 - a rhyming couple, just like I hope my exams will be - jolly
Hi there,
As my friend said “There’s only 4 days to exams now. Why does time go quickly when you don’t want it to?” Kicking off with particles and waves in my Physics exam on Tuesday, two weeks of ‘UCAS exams’ are the talk of the town, with preparation at full tilt this weekend - it’s the most I’ve revised in nearly a year.
Meanwhile, a return to sport for me as I played my first cricket match of the season, a decent game that went against us (you can find my report here and the scorecard); two games in two against the same opposition haven’t gone our way. Yet, it is my highlight of the week, a chilled afternoon to forget about the stress (and strain - Physicists will get the joke) of exams and have fun.
We had our school Sports Day on Monday this week, a fun afternoon in the school calendar. Sadly, our untrustworthy pal, the British weather, wasn’t in a good mood, turning up a dreary cloudy start with some showers in between.
I did the most important job of them all: the spreadsheet 📋. Seriously, if I didn’t do a good job (and I mostly did - only found one error later on with a friend1), I could’ve changed the whole standings which ended up being close. With cold fingers and a Tesco chicken sandwich for company, I sat along with a teacher, typing away whilst being fed lots of information by different people.
All in all, I enjoyed my time with friends, getting to see 3 records broken and (most importantly?) missing 3 lessons of school. Yet, as a friend concluded this week in our Maths lesson, getting to skip lesson time is more of a bane than a boon now in Year 12 - it’s 3 more hours of work for me to catch up on, a sizeable time in the last week before exams. Therefore, I had a choice: do I go to Sports Day or stay in school?
In the end, I made the choice I did but compensated for it in equal measure. Speaking to the three teachers, I found out that we were doing 2 papers and 1 set of questions. To mitigate (love that word) the impact of not being in school, I asked for and did the Maths paper beforehand, got the Physics questions to do at home and later did the Further Maths paper. Overall, there was no loss or catchup to do this, thanks to simple preparation and foresightedness.
It brings me to two lessons to wrap up, takeaway and munch for the next week:
There is no free lunch - doing one thing means you are choosing to not do another - in economics, we call this opportunity cost. By going to Sports Day and playing cricket twice this week, I had to contain myself from going to a school fundraising event on Thursday which (by the looks of it) I would have really enjoyed. If the scale goes up on one side, it must go down on another - discover this reaction force and account for it in your decisions: is it a downside worth taking/risking?
Maximise the time you do have - we often say that “we don’t have time” when actually no one really “owns time”. What you can do, however, is ‘make time’2 to do the things that matter to you. Case in point: while peers opted to play Chess in the library for a spare hour on Thursday afternoon, a friend and I sat together and got a decent amount of work done (whilst referencing the article below). When one chose to watch a film in our Friday study session 😑, I got stuck into some solid Further Maths. When you've got limited time, make every minute count.
This brings me to an aside of how sometimes having more of something isn’t the answer (linking to a few weeks back about the law of diminishing marginal utility). In the debate between studying 3 or 4 A-Levels for Sixth Form, people often cite the double whammy of having 3/4s of the work whilst benefitting from 10 more hours to do work. A point I often make is that having an abundance of study sessions makes you waste them - they aren’t precious enough. There’s no need to maximise work from them because you’ve got so many of them. Whereas, for a 4-subject man like me, they’re like gold dust - squeeze every drop of time while you can.
“Work hard, play hard” - a lot of game-changing wisdom is unearthed in cheesy proverbs. It is possible to balance multiple commitments and still get everything done to a high quality, if you realise that you’re making a choice to do something and allocate the catchup time for the activity, to minimise damage and maximise fun.
Podcast of the week🎙️
The Diary of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: #228 with Matthew Walker, the World’s No.1 Sleep Expert
With a soothing voice and packed with surprising studies and their results, this is a must-listen for everyone wanting to benefit from “the best natural performance-enhancing drug out there”
Article of the week 📰
What is ignored by the media - but will be studied by historians?
A slight cheat given it’s a Twitter thread, but a revealing one with some fascinating trends
Quote of the week 💬
Every failure is a lesson. If you are not willing to fail, you are not ready to succeed. - Ken Robinson
Wishing my friends the best of luck in the fortnight of exams and everyone else a good start to the 2nd third of 2023 (🤯)
Adi
…who I know will be reading - thanks for your assistance.
The title of a book I’ve come across in the past and would like to read one day - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Make-Time-focus-matters-every/dp/0593079582