Time management

Why I read more than one book at a time

/ Maude / 3 Comments

Welcome back! Today’s post is all about reading habits, namely : reading multiple books at the same time.

I was picking up some books to bring back to the library today when I realized that I had read almost all of them at the same time, piece by piece. It’s a habit I have with certain books, but not all, and something I’ve been doing for quite some time now. So why do I read multiple books at once?

I’m a mood reader

If I don’t feel like reading a book on topic A, I will do anything but that. Including reading something on another topic, until I want to get back to book A again. This usually means that if something isn’t fully captivating, I’ll probably be in the middle of at least two books at the same time, if only to get back to the one I’m most interested in on that specific day.

Photo by @daanouthere on Unsplash

They’re non fiction

If I read a fiction book, it’s only one and it’s all in one go or nothing at all, but with non-fiction, it’s much easier to stop in the middle, pick up something else, and come back to it later.

If I get a little bored (because, even if I often only post reviews of four to five stars books, I rate half of what I read below that, which means I do, sometimes, get bored) while reading something, in a non-fiction work, I can just finish the chapter and put it down without fearing that I’ll have trouble remembering what it was about when I start it again.

It helps sort my priorities

If I’ve got more than one book at a time, I can roughly see how much reading time I have left in all of them, how long I have them for (if they’re from the library) / want to give them, and prioritize accordingly.

It can also be helpful in identifying which books I should consider DNF-ing and which ones are worth the effort.

Photo by @florenciaviadana on Unsplash

If I’m in the middle of a book, and it’s been sitting on my bedside window (I don’t have a bedside table, but I do have a bedside window corner – just enough space for one person to sit under the window and see the tiny courtyard shared with the neighbor) for more than two weeks, it might be time to let it go and admit I’m just not that interested in it. I don’t often DNF books, but when I do, it’s usually because I’ve been stuck trying to read them for too long.

Time is of the essence

Since I’m a full-time student (and hopefully still a straight-A student at the end of this semester), have a part-time job (when not in lockdown), try do do sports every two days, try to practice photography and to blog in my limited spare time, I don’t really have long spots of uninterrupted reading time.

I used to read the most during my daily commute, but my university has converted fully to online classes, so when I do go somewhere to study, it’s to the university’s library, and I go there on foot – not the best time to take out a book or my phone to read comfortably.

I’ve been adding small reading times to my timetable every day, to help me relax and take some time for myself in the middle of all this. Recently, being able to just pick up something, put it down 30 min later, and pick up something else on my next break has been a really useful skill!

Do you read multiple books at a time, or only one? Did you read or post something interesting on the same topic? Link it in the comments so I can check it out!

Advertisement

Dealing with procrastination and avoidance

/ Maude / 9 Comments

Procrastination isn’t good for you, and neither is avoiding the things you need to do. I know that. I know that for a fact.

Yet, the other day, I realized in a flash of panic that I had three extremely important things to do that I had just been passively avoiding for weeks – some for months, actually – and just had to muster the courage to face before it got too late. I needed to :

  • send a tax adjustment to the government (I made a small-ish mistake in my tax declaration and it’s been haunting me since I realized it)
  • send an email to my university’s administration to get my previous diploma’s classes credited so I can graduate this year (which. I’d like to be able to do. Tuition isn’t cheap.)
  • renew my medical insurance and my address on my social security card (it expires in a month and I have medical appointments I need to have that card / insurance for!)

Those three are, taken separately, pretty simple things that might take some time but aren’t necessarily complicated to do, and they’re clearly important enough that I should have come around to doing them a while ago. So how did it get to this point ?

It’s overwhelming

Sometimes, when something generates a lot of anxiety or overwhelms you, the unconscious reaction is to avoid it, as a coping mechanism : if you don’t think about that thing, then it can’t cause you any distress.

The problem with avoidance as a coping mechanism is that it teaches your brain that you aren’t capable of facing what causes you this type of anxiety, that it’s just so overwhelming that the only solution is to push it as much away from your conscious mind as possible.

Photo by @stilclassics on Unsplash

In essence, it’s the difference between stress management – the good thing, the one where you confront what’s stressing you out and deal with it in a way that makes you less stressed – and stress avoidance – where you ignore the stressors and hope they go away on their own (which they don’t.).

In the short run, sure, not thinking about it will make you feel better, help you not get overwhelmed by what you’re trying to avoid. But in the long run, it’s likely to turn your initial reaction to this stressor into an even bigger one – making it worse and worse until you either have to deal with the cause of your stress (in my case : those 3 administrative tasks that really really need to be done) or with the consequences of not doing it (here : losing my insurance so I can’t go see the dentist, or not being able to graduate this year because my classes haven’t been credited on time).

How to stop doing it

At the time I’m typing this, my papers for the class credit have been sent and half the classes have been approved, and my medical insurance has been renewed – I still have to take care of the social security and the tax returns, but it’s a work in progress. I’m getting there.

So how do you deal with avoidance as a coping mechanism?

I don’t have a universal method for this, but the thing that works for me – that actually works and forces me to confront what’s causing that behavior while not provoking even more distress – is to:

1 . Tackle one thing at a time.

Here, I’ve got three separate problems I’ve been avoiding unsuccessfully. I’m not going to try to solve all of these in the same day : that’s more likely to make me panic and quit / have a panic attack than succeed, and we’re trying to find a better solution than that. So I’m focusing on solving one after the other, step by step.

2 . Divide them into easily manageable chunks

Just like studying for midterms, if you try to do it all in one go, it’s going to be much more difficult than if you take the time to separate it into more manageable tasks that you can take care of efficiently and without too much stress.

For the class credits, I divided it like this : check out necessary papers / fill out class credit form / retreive official grades from my previous university / write email to the person in charge of class credits / add papers to the email and send.

While that may look like a lot of extra steps if you’re someone who’s not bothered with anxiety at the idea of doing important administrative papers, this was the right way to do it for me : it helped me stay focused on the small tasks I was doing, instead of thinking about the issue as a whole and getting overwhelmed by what was at stake here (and panicking. A lot.)

3 . Don’t hesitate to ask for help

Photo by @nate_dumlao on Unsplash

It’s easy to drown in something like this if you’re alone and have to do all of it on your own. But if you have anyone you can count on, someone you can ask some help from, then don’t hesitate to do so. My partner helped a lot, actually – not in actually doing the tasks that generated all that anxiety, but in making myself confident enough that I could handle them on my own.

Be it someone who can re-read your email before you send it for that internship you really want, someone who’s there to help you figure out which papers go where, or even just a friend to stay with you at that party where you’re so anxious to go because you won’t know anyone else… A little support can go a long way.

And if you feel like you don’t know where to even start, or that anxiety is significantly deteriorating your mental health, please consider speaking with a licensed therapist, who has the skills and knowledge needed to best assist you with these issues.

I hope this post was a little bit useful – if you have any tips on how to deal with avoidance as a coping mechanism, or with procrastination in general, feel free to leave them in the comments!

Jumping on the Notion bandwagon

/ Maude / 6 Comments

It’s finally October!

As Zoom University is now back at full speed, I’ve been gradually shifting my interests in YouTube content from outfit and meme videos to studytube guides and tips for online school. I’m a very easily suggestible person, and I’d been hopping from studytube to studytube until I got to Mariana’s Study Corner‘s channel – which you can find here.

She makes a lot of excellent quality content, and has done a whole series of videos using everybody’s new favorite content manager – Notion. Being an aficionado of the bullet journal method, and loving writing stuff on paper all the time, I didn’t particularly care for it, but it still sounded interesting. It looked like something I might have wanted to check out if it fitted my style a bit better.

Then, CW from The Quiet Pond tweeted about book bloggers all making their personal Notion pages right now (and it was a really funny tweet, by the way), and that was it. I was interested.

So I went on the internet, hoping to discourage myself from trying yet one more thing just because I saw an ad for it, or heard people talking about it, and I googled “disadvantages to using Notion”.

The main one was it takes a long time to charge if you have bad internet. Wait. That’s not an inconvenient for me, I have good internet ! (I’m paying a lot for it, but with Zoom University, we couldn’t afford not to).

Aaaaand here I went, hopping on the Notion bandwagon just like everybody else. I’ve now spent a lot of hours on my homepage, set up a budget tracker, an internship hours tracker, a class tasks masterlist and a page to help me manage my late ARCs. And so far, it’s been great!

Image from @mikeyharris on Unsplash

I love how flexible Notion is, and how easy it is to use and adapt to your own methods. It lets you create tables, drop lists, checklists inside tables which you can filter according to due dates for your work, or different tags for your TBR books… the possibilities are endless and I’m enjoying it a lot.

So since I’m here and talking about Notion, I thought I’d share three of the videos that inspired me and helped me the most to understand all the different functionalities Notion has to offer :

And as an extra, if anyone’s interested, here are some pictures of my current Notion setup :

A day in my life during the summer

/ Maude / 5 Comments

Continuing on with the personal posts, this one is more of an “about the blogger” type – I’ve been thinking about making a “day in the life” post for a while, so here’s a summer-themed one!

During the summer, my days are mostly split between rest days and work/study days. During the rest days, I mostly… do nothing, watch some TV, and maybe go out to do a short jogging. The work/study days are much more interesting.

Regardless of the day, I usually go to sleep pretty late, so I tend to wake up late in the morning too : it’s rare to see me emerge before 10 am on a day when I don’t have any video calls scheduled in the morning. Breakfast tends to be optional, depending on how close to 12pm I’m getting up : if it’s too close, I’ll just directly get lunch and get on with the rest of my day.

It’s taken me a while to go beyond the “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” mentality, and actually listen to what my body is telling me – if I’m hungry, I’ll eat something. If I’m not, and just want to eat for no apparent reason, I’ll think about it and try to figure out if the real reason might be boredom, sadness, anxiety, tiredness…

I use a bullet journal to keep track of my daily, weekly and monthly tasks, and I’ll usually check it in the morning after I wake up. If my laptop is on, I’ll also open feedly and check out what new blog posts have come out in the past day or so, and try to comment on a few of these.

Related posts : check out Kal’s post on @reader voracious – Why I switched to Feedly for blogopping ! It’s an excellent guide on how to use Feedly to your advantage.

A part of my – relatively short – morning is spent studying : I’m taking two intensive classes this summer, and exams are fast approaching (in fact, I have one today!), which means I need to do my best to stay on top of the course work. I’ve been having some difficulties with one of those classes, as the teacher posts videos online and asks the students to watch them at home : the videos are longer and the content is more dense than in an in-person class, and it requires a lot much work to take notes on all of it.

I’ll also try to write some more on a future blog post during that time, as the building is calm and silent in the morning and I can focus much better than in the evening. I try to have a consistent lunch, but it depends on whether or not I have a lot of time before I have to go to work – for the moment, my work schedule is alternating between days when I start at 3:15pm, and days when I start at 4:15 – and it makes a huge difference in what I’m able to do at home before I have to leave.

Our apartment is located downtown, and there’s a big park nearby where me and my boyfriend sometimes go to play American football, or do some jogging – we’d like to do some boxing too, but so far haven’t found the time to do so. Often, after lunch (around 1pm), we’ll go out and spend some time outside before I have to go to work or get back home to attend my online classes.

On an average work day, it takes me about 40 minutes from the moment I leave my apartment to the moment I start working. I walk for about 10 of those, then take the metro, and get to work 5 minutes before my shift begins so I can put on my uniform shirt and grab my cashier bag to open a cash register. (And, if I’ve slept extra late the day before, I leave home 5 minutes earlier and grab a small coffee at Tim Hortons on the way to the metro station. The perks of living in a big city where you don’t have to walk half an hour to get to the nearest Tims…)

I have relatively short work days – the longest one lasts about 6 hours – since I’m not a full-time worker : my heaviest week so far is going to be this week, with a total of 27 hours planned. But I really like this job, and it helps me keep a somewhat good work-life balance : mornings are mine, afternoons and evenings are for work, and I’m home by 10pm every day so I can eat dinner, relax and spend time with my boyfriend.

In all of that, I usually manage to find some reading time during my breaks at work, and in public transport, as well as in my wake-up time before I try to do much of anything else. I’m currently trying my best to get through The way of kings by Brandon Sanderson – I liked his Skyward series so much that I decided to give a chance to his other writing too – and even if it is super interesting, it’s taking me a long time to read.

What does your day-to-day look like during the summer? Does it usually change a lot, or do you have a regular schedule you tend to follow? And how do you fit your favorite activities into your “work” days?

5 tips to study for your online exams

/ Maude / 1 Comment

Unlike usual, this post isn’t about books – or rather, not about novels or recreational books. It does include textbooks, though.

Since we’re in self-quarantine here, all non-essential services are closed, which includes universities and schools all over the country. Many schools are now turning to the internet to maintain their classes online as much as possible, either having their classes live on platforms like zoom, or using panopto and other video conference software to record videos and power point presentations and make them available to their students whenever possible.

If you’re a full-time university student, like me, you’ve probably had to rethink your entire study methods over the past few weeks : online learning is, after all, very different from in-person classes. And with online classes, come… online finals !

So I thought I’d share some of the tips I found useful while preparing for my exams after switching all my classes to online learning.

1. Don’t underestimate the difficulty of the exam

Many professors will assume that, since you’re doing the exam online, it makes it an open book exam – meaning, they’ll prepare their exam keeping in mind that you’ll have access to all of the course material when you take the test, and will be able to look for the answer to their questions relatively quickly.

Underestimating the difficulty of the exam is one of the most dangerous mistakes you could make : if you rely too much on having the material at hand when you take the test, and don’t put enough effort into understanding it and making sure you have a good enough comprehension of the class, you’re setting yourself up for failure. However, having the ability to look through your notes and textbooks while you’re writing your answers is an advantage that you should take advantage of !

2. Study guides are, in fact, useful

Making a study guide to keep track of all the course material you need to know to achieve the grade you’re aiming for is a lifesaver. You can use the syllabus your professor gives you at the beginning of the semester (sometimes put online so you can access it at any point during the semester) to give you an idea of the amount of work you’ll have to put in, and when you’ll need to start studying.

If you have textbooks or required reading, printing the documents and putting tabs on the side to note where the important concepts or chapters are will save you a lot of time !

3. Take advantage of your professor’s student hours

A lot of university professors still have their student hours, even while the university campuses are closed. They might answer your questions via email, or a video conference with other students, but this is an important resource you would do well not to neglect : studying on your own, at home, is difficult enough in itself.

Photo by @nickmorrison on Unsplash

If you have any questions about the material that your teacher could clarify for you, using the means at your disposition to contact them and ask for explanation could help you save your grade, and make sure you don’t lose precious knowledge that will be useful during the actual exam.

4. Pay attention to the parameters of the test !

Online exams may be available for up to 24 hours, depending on your teacher’s wishes, but that doesn’t mean you have all this time to think about your answers ! Those hours are here so that all the students can start the test at a time that fits their schedule the most. Once you start the exam, the real countdown begins : that’s the amount of time you’re allotted to actually answer the questions.

If you’re in quarantine in an apartment with one or more other people, you might want to make sure to let them know that they are not to disturb you for the entirety of the time it will take you to pass the test – concerns for plagiarism aside, there is nothing more disheartening than realizing you won’t be able to finish in tie because someone interrupted you with something that could definitely have waited one more half-hour for your attention.

You also want to make sure there’s no ambiguity over how, exactly, you’re going to be evaluated. Is it a multiple choice questions type of test, or will you have to make developed, long thought-out answers ? Does it cover all of the material, or only half the semester ?

5. Make sure your material is working properly

This one may seem pretty self-explanatory, but it’s so frustrating to hit the “send” button, only to discover you didn’t have a properly working internet connection and all your answers have disappeared when you tried to transmit them…

Side-note : this isn’t a made-up scenario : it happened to me last semester, in a multiple choice question online exam with more than a hundred questions. Luckily, I had backed up my answers by writing my choices on a paper while I went through the exam the first time, so I didn’t lose everything. Still, it took me an additional 15 minutes to re-fill the entire form, and that prevented me from being able to double-check my answers before the time limit was up. So, essentially : don’t be like me. Make sure everything works before you start the exam.

Some universities here in Canada are putting everything in place to ensure the success of their students, as best as possible. Mine, for example, offers the option to only have the mention “Success” or “Failure” in your academic file for classes in which you don’t get the grade you hoped for. My brother’s university goes one step further, making the “Failed” mention an automatic “Abandon” mention, thus making sure the results of this crisis don’t alter your GPA in any way.

What measures are other universities putting in place to best help their students ? How do you prepare for your online exams ?

Self-isolation library eBook haul

/ Maude / 6 Comments

If you’ve been around for some time, you’ll have noticed that, since the beginning of 2020, I haven’t made any proper TBRs or monthly wrap-up posts. The truth is, I’ve been planning to make them for a while, but always postponed writing them, up until the moment when they were no longer relevant. I hit a big blogging slump in march, and only just recently got out of it, which gave me the motivation needed to write this one !

With that newfound motivation, I wanted to make a reading list for April, but with self-isolation and the recent amount of covid-19 cases in my city, I haven’t gone shopping for books, or borrowed any physical copies of anything lately. However, just because I didn’t get out of my (tiny) apartment doesn’t mean I didn’t borrow anything !

My local library has an excellent online catalogue of eBooks and audiobooks. Personally, I’m not a fan of audiobooks, but I do love eBooks. I usually read them on the way to university in the morning, or to my once-a-week kickboxing class in the evening – on average, I spend one hour a day in public transport, so I like to use this time to read and be in my own little bubble before starting my day.

I’m especially lucky, because the library’s website is super well designed, and allows me to browse and discover titles I never would have found on paper. The different filters allow for a lot of freedom in your selection, and the holds / wish list system works very well for me : when I see a book I might like, I add it to my wish list, and when I see one I absolutely can’t miss a chance to get, I use one of my 5 available holds to ensure I get it ASAP.

These past few days, I’ve been wanting to read some non-fiction, and learn more about interior design. It’s not an accident : I’ve applied for a new apartment with my boyfriend, for may 1st, so I’m thinking about all the ways in which we could make that place our home, and how we could decorate and furnish it. My eBook reading tastes depend a lot on what’s going on in my life at the moment, and right now, that’s home improvement, personal organization, and nutrition.

So here are the books I currently have on loan, and will endeavor to read during the next 21-days period : 

So, in that pile, we have : 7 non-fiction books and 2 novels, including 3 books on home design, one on budgeting, and one on journaling. I should have more than enough material for the next three weeks !

I also have some ARCs I’ve been meaning to read and review – they’re NetGalley ARCs, so I’ll post the reviews on NetGalley before posting them on the blog, but I’ll cross-post them eventually, closer to their respective release dates. 

My university classes have resumed this morning. As they all have been changed from in-person classes to online sessions, I’ll save a couple of hours every week by studying from home. But this new situation is going to change a lot in my usual routine, and I’ll need to change some things to be able to accommodate that.

I haven’t planned all my posts for the next few weeks yet, but hopefully I’ll be able to keep a consistent posting schedule – and ace my exams !

(Not) Spooky October TBR

/ Maude / 5 Comments

I’ve never been good at reading spooky stuff and watching scary movies, but I am so excited for Halloween month ! I’m looking forward to making a ton of pumpkin dishes and decorating my small apartment in orange and green – and participate for the first time in Blogtober this year !

I’m planning some more varied content this month, with a few book reviews, but also some discussion posts and – hopefully – some photos I’ll be able to take in my new neighborhood before winter comes in ! I’m hoping that having a set plan for those posts will help me stay focused on my daily to-do list as well as regain some of the productivity I’ve lost through the summer.

October is a month of midterm exams for me, and as weird as it sounds, I’ve found that it actually helps me more to have a lot of things planned in my days. It’s really useful to force me to get out of bed in the morning and follow through on my plans instead of sleeping until the afternoon and not finding any motivation to do much of anything.

nicole-honeywill-vcf5y2edm6a-unsplash.jpg
My plan for this month

The TBR part

For this month, I don’t have a fully planned TBR yet – only a few notes in my brand new notebook, which I’ve been carrying around with me at all times these past few weeks in order to keep track of all the books I see during the day that might be interesting to read.

I also have a few ARCs to read from NetGalley – I’ve been granted a wish by a publisher for a book I’m really excited about, but those will have to wait until we’re a little bit closer to their publishing date.

So far, I’ve got, for the first books of October :

The 5 am club, Miracle Morning, and Your dream life starts here – Lately, I’ve been listening to some motivational podcasts and reading some blog posts about motivation, and how to organize your day. I’m not convinced that I’ll actually start waking up at 5 in the morning after reading those (especially during my midterm exams week) but I’m still curious to see what this is all about. And if there’s something I can use and apply to my own personal life, that’d be a pretty good bonus !

Rage becomes her, and Travail gratuit, la nouvelle exploitation (In english : Free work, the new exploitation) – I had planned to read those two a loong time ago, but I just never could get my hands on them. Now that I’ve moved into a much bigger city than the one I lived in before, I’m hoping one of the local libraries will have them – these are the kind of books I feel like I’ll be able to learn a lot from, but that will take me some more time than usual to read.

Digital minimalism and Irresistible – I’ve been watching a lot of videos from Ashley at bestdressed, and saw her mention those two books in one of those. I spend a lot of time on my phone everyday, doing more or less nothing on it – except maybe read a book or two, but nothing I couldn’t do without it. I’ve been meaning to try and see if I could use it a little less, try to be more focused on what I’m currently doing than on who posted a new story on Instagram or what party my ex-roommate is going to tonight.

So that’s it for me today ! I still have to find a way to obtain those books – something I’m hoping to find some time to talk about at some point this month, and we’ll see how it goes.

N.B. : All the photos in this post are from Unsplash.

My days are too short.

/ Maude / Leave a comment

Do you have these days when you feel like there’s just not enough hours in your day to do all the things you want to do ?

Yesterday morning, I woke up at 7, feeling tired and drowsy from lack of sleep. I went to bed at 10pm the night before, thinking a solid 8 hours of sleep would help me get back on my feet the next day and perform better at work… but my flatmates had decided otherwise, and invited their friends for a dinner party in our apartment, that rendered me unable to sleep until 1:30am. Instead of the good 8 hours of sleep I had wished for, I barely managed to get 5:30.

I couldn’t stay in bed any longer, so I took a couple more minutes of rest and then went to take a shower, get dressed and start my day – make my lunch, take a shower, go to work, work for 7 hours with a 30 min lunch break, get out of work, go to a meeting for my volunteering activities, go to the community garden to water my crops, realize that I need to go to the grocery store get some gardening supplies, move my schedule around so I can take an hour for that and leave immediately for the store, go home covered in dirt and mud, take another shower, answer my professional and personal email, wash the dishes and make dinner, check my social media and play a small video game for 20 min to relax a bit. And then it was 11pm and I fell asleep.

My day went by extremely quickly, and I didn’t do half the things I wanted to – or was supposed to.

  • Cleaning my apartment ? Taking out the trash ? That was put aside in the morning, in exchange for those few extra minutes of rest.
  • Going out to meet a friend, maybe get some bubble tea ? I went to buy gardening supplies instead, and told the friend we’d catch up another day.
  • Calling the tennis club to ask if they had any adult beginner’s classes that I could attend ? Sadly, the club was already closed by the time I got home and started sorting through my professional and personal communications.

And then there’s the things I would like to give a little more of my time – taking photos with my camera, for example, would be a nice addition to any day, really, but I can’t carry the camera to work, and would have to go home and then get out again to take pictures. It would take an extra amount of time that I just can’t figure out where to take.

“But Maude”, you’ll tell me, “why don’t you just get rid of superfluous activities in your day ?” That would give you more time ! And yeah, sure, I could cut on those 20 min of video games (or reading, depending on the day) – but would it really do me any good ? Cutting back on your leisure activities often means cutting back on the things that help your mental health and well-being, and I have a feeling that that’s not the right way to go for this.

I don’t have a miracle solution – but I do have some tips that I use to try to make it work :

  • I plan my day in advance, the day before, and go over what I have to do in the morning, to make sure I don’t have to make more than two different trips during the day. I know myself and my strength, and I also know that past 6pm, if I get home, I’m not going out again if I can avoid it in any way.
  • I consider my weekends to be vacation days – and by this, I mean : no work, at all. No thinking about work either. I’m lucky enough to have a job that I can be completely disconnected of during my days off, and I use that fully.

If you don’t have to answer emails this coming Friday, don’t do it. Give your brain the time to power down. Vacation is seen as a luxury, instead of a right, and it’s made it so that few full time working Americans are taking time-off. In 2014 42% of working Americans didn’t take a single vacation day.

(from the blog create and cultivate)

  • I always take the time to do at least 1 leisure activity in my day, usually after dinner – whether it’s video games, reading, editing photos or browsing the web for cool blog articles to read, I know that these briefs moments help me maintain my mental health, and that’s a thing I do NOT want to neglect in any way.
  • I eat good food. And by good food, I don’t mean “healthy” food, just food that makes me happy when I eat it. If ramen makes me happy, I’ll eat ramen. If breakfast food makes me happy, I’ll eat breakfast food, whatever the time may be.

Even though I try my best to stay positive and not let myself be influenced too much by that feeling of not being fast enough, not doing things the way I should, I still have those days when I feel like I’m running out of time and don’t have enough hours to finish everything I have to do. Like I’m not productive enough, and am a bad person because of it. And that’s okay – as long as I know what those emotions are, where they come from, and how I can manage them for the time being, until I feel better about what I do and remember that extreme productivity at the detriment of my mental health isn’t the path I want to follow.

Do you have any tips on how to deal with that ? Any blog posts on that topic that I should read ? Feel free to link them in the comments !