My Alter Ego Ms. Scope Creep
Prioritizing time management vs excellence is a difficult skill to learn.
If my life were a comic book, Time Management would be the wealthy supervillain who pretends to work with me, only to reveal at the last moment it was all a ruse. In truth, he had been manipulating me with the help of my counter ego, Ms. Scope Creep. It just so happens that my nemesis, Time Management, is a central theme in many of our assignments. Each assignment has a suggested time for completion, videos often suggest taking a 5-minute break halfway through, and we are shipped a physical time timer with our introduction materials.
Over and over again, we are encouraged to:
Plan out our projects and use our time wisely.
Not aim for perfection.
Aim to turn in work by the deadline.
I'm sure we have all experienced working for far too long, striving to make something great, generating an abundance of effort for a sad result. I often realize with hindsight I needed to ask for help earlier and stop to reflect more often to see my wasted effort and my mistakes.
My battle with Time Management came to an epic feud a few weeks ago when we were challenged to create a website for a mock client within 4 days. Each day we were reminded that we only had 3-4 hours to complete that part of the project. We were given various models on how to plan our working hours to best accommodate the fictitious clients best.
On the 4th day, I worked on my project from 8am to 11:30pm. I ignored the 4-hour rule. I wanted to finish my project to my high standards. I didn't notice that I skipped eating the entire day. In addition, we had been given the conceptual keys to flexbox that morning. Instead of immediately asking for help, I changed a large amount of my code while trying to learn flexbox alone. Only after 8pm at night did I finally realize I needed help. Almost everyone else had already posted their submissions, and I was still in the thick of it. At that point I should have reached out to Derrick, but I was already too embarrassed that I hadn’t followed the project’s main goal of good time management.
By 11:30 pm I gave up and shared my website with the group. Afterward, I wept. That may seem so silly to read, but I was exhausted and needed to release all the stress I had put on my shoulders by prioritizing perfection over time management. I struggled to explain to my husband and myself at that moment why I was crying. I hadn’t asked for help, and I had allowed scope creep to change my goals. I had been compulsive in my efforts, and that effort didn’t result in better work. In the end, I felt embarrassed, and I could see my peers who had reached out for help early and respected their time had created better work than I.
At first, that shame morphed into exhaustion, and I shut down. I had burned myself out. It took a while but eventually, I was able to wash the shame off with the help of my spouse, my friends, my course-mates, and a few appointments with a therapist and sleep specialist. From there, I was able to assess what should change going forward. I crafted a new daily schedule for myself with these rules in mind:
Book appointments for help ahead of time whether I have questions or not.
Learning HTML and css concepts when asking peers or Derrick for help is easy, but it will be a far greater struggle and take much longer if I follow my natural impulse to work alone.
There are an infinite amount of things to do in a day.
I typically can achieve 3-4 big tasks, so prioritize which are important to me. It’s ok if I don’t accomplish everything.
Stop working between 5-6pm no matter what I’ve accomplished.
This one feels so unintuitive, but my long-term goal of learning to code and switching careers is more important than the individual small projects we work on. If I get to rest, food, and time to decompress, I will be ready to continue learning the next day.
So, maybe I was wrong about Time Management being a villain. It seems Perfection is the villain and Time Management is the anti-hero? I don’t know. You can come up with the correct analogy. Either way, I just want to stay away from Ms. Scope Creep. She’s bad news.
Wow, this is a great article. I too struggle with scope creep, time management and all the other things you mentioned. Good on you for pushing forward!