lifeskills

Keeping in touch with…

Friends and family are important.  We all know that.  One of the best things to come out of university is the beginning of wonderful lifelong friendships.  By the time your degree is finished, you realise that you’ve discovered some sublime friendships that make you smile just to think about them.

Good news is, you might live longer for having these friends too!  So it’s important to keep in contact and regularly communicate for their sake AND yours.

photo by svilen001

But you shouldn’t only keep in contact with your close uni friends.  You’ve got friends from home to think of, family to keep in the loop, and networking peeps to stay involved with.  And you can go further than point someone toward your online status updates!  Here are some basic tips to guide your way to keeping in touch with all these people.

Home friends

1. Let them know when you’re coming home to visit – Perhaps your friends are also elsewhere at uni.  Finding out when you’re all available makes meeting up so much easier.  Then again, I know some of the impromptu evenings can be the best nights out. Whatever you think is best!
2. Plan ahead – Same as above, it’s worth getting a few plans under your belt so you don’t waste valuable time when you’re back home.
3. Send the occasional personal update over your usual Facebook updates – We’re suckers for letters and postcards.  I’ll be honest, I didn’t send anywhere near enough brief postcards, which is shocking…there’s usually a load of great postcards around the Student Union and you don’t then have to write much to make someone really, really happy.
4. Invite them to visit you at uni – You probably already have done this.  I only mention it because I know of at least one person who didn’t consider it until later on in their course. A simple idea, but not always thought up when you’re treating uni life and home life as two very different things.

Close uni friends

Over the long holiday periods (and after you graduate), you won’t keep the same level as contact with your close friends as you did when they were on your doorstep.  No matter!  Give them a call or write a letter.  The personal touch goes much further than an e-mail or IM and you know your friends will be glad to hear from you like this.

After you graduate, contact can reduce even further, but that doesn’t matter.  Keeping in touch with these close friends shouldn’t be a chore and it should be easy to strike the fire back up from the moment you start spending time with them again.

Don’t worry (or get angry) if some of your close friends are rubbish at keeping in contact. Life’s too short.  If you’re better at it, give yourself a private pat on the back and move on.  Anyway, does it really matter?  One of my best friends is hopeless at keeping in contact and we can go months without any contact.  But when we meet up after a zillion years (give or take a day) it’s as if we saw each other last week.  I’ve stopped worrying that I need to keep in regular contact…I can spend my time on others who need the communication more.

Your other uni mates

During the holiday periods, you can still keep in contact via Facebook, et al.  Don’t worry about doing much more than this unless you really want to.  If any of your friends decide to contact you in a more personal manner, try to reciprocate and show that the friendship works both ways (if it really does, of course!).  Perhaps your friendship will grow closer due to contact outside of termtime…it’s all possible!

After your degree, work out which of these friends you’d like to remain in more regular contact with.  If you don’t pay attention right away, memories will dwindle and – as each day passes – attempts to reunite are more difficult to engineer.

photo by woodsy

Family

1. Give them a ring. If nothing else, a phone call will give your family just enough information to keep them in the loop and feel like you still care.
2. Arrange your home visits in advance. This needn’t just be with your Mum and Dad.  Let your aunts and uncles, your grandparents, and your extended family know.  They’ll want to know how you are and arranging visits when you are around means you don’t have to think about keeping in contact so much while you’re away at uni.
3. Suggest they come to see you. While this isn’t always feasible, some family members will love the invitation and may not have wanted to suggest visiting themselves.  Job done!
4. Write! Even if it’s not a handwritten essay, a short typed letter will go a lot further than an e-mail.

Networking contacts and acquaintances

1. Don’t sweat it. Spend whatever time you want/can on others.  If you’re buckling under the pressure for whatever reason, stop trying so hard.
2. Send on links/articles/news that you think could be relevant to them. Mention that you saw it and thought they’d be interested.
3. Don’t spend too long on lengthy messages. Keep it short.  If you want to catch up, just say that and mention a couple of the most important events in your recent life.  If they want to catch up too, a continuing conversation will no doubt ensue.
4. Ask questions. It’s not all ME, ME, ME!  Find out how they are too.  No matter if you’re asking a favour, it’s impolite not to engage in a bit of polite catch-up querying.

This post only skims the surface of what you can do to keep in contact with everyone.  If you have any advice or suggestions, please do let us know in the comments below!

photo by scyza

The Wonder of the Weekend

Why would you want to treat the weekend as the weekend?  Saturday and Sunday are boons for productivity.

photo by mcleod

The week is a great time for fun at uni and things often slow down at the weekend.  It’s not always the case, but you’re likely to find precious little happening over large chunks of that time, so it’s perfect to get on with your work and catch up on the stuff you don’t want to think about when everything else is vying for your attention during the week.

Look at Saturday and Sunday as a two-day week.  Let Monday to Friday be the weekend instead!  Okay, so there are lectures and it won’t be work-free.  But how often do you manage an entire day where it was exclusively fun, laughter, decadence and delight from start to finish?  Exactly!

Normally, the weekend is an excuse to chill, or a time to go back to the family home, or catch up on sleep and washing (if you parents have stopped letting you bring your dirty stuff home…).  However, you have the prospect of achieving a whole lot more if you’re proactive on campus.  While others go home and Saturdays are naturally quieter, you can focus on more important matters.  And for those who stay on campus at the weekend, you can get up early on a Sunday while everyone else stays in bed catching up on lost sleep or nursing hangovers.

I recently saw this quotation from ‘How to be Idle‘, by Tom Hodgkinson:

“To be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.”

The weekend is the perfect time to do most of the work you’d expect others to do in the week.  Then, when the normally busy weekdays come along, you can spend a lot more time idling and a lot less time worrying about your workload.  Good times, here we come!

Even if you have sporting events at the weekend, meet up for a weekend activity, or go to church on a Sunday morning, there should be no trouble incorporating it into a packed routine.  There should still be plenty of weekend ‘dead time’ to be proactive in.

I’m not the only one who made the most of this valuable time.  Cal Newport has long been an advocate of a ‘Sunday Ritual’.  It’s great to get up as early as possible on a Sunday (even if it had been an eventful Saturday night…) and enjoy the peace.  For me, early mornings were spent walking around the quiet campus, catching up on reading, getting a few boring chores out of the way, writing drafts of essays, going to a practically empty library and making the most of the facilities, and all sorts of other things.

photo by patkisha

While everyone else slept, I worked with ease and without distraction.  Once friends started to emerge from their beds, I’d been up and about for hours.  It was bliss.  Seriously.

Some people thought my workload was nothing compared to my friends.  It looked like I was doing much less than anyone else.  And at that precise moment in time, it was probably true.  But if they’d noticed how much I’d achieved while they weren’t looking, all would make sense and it would be clear how much effort I’d really put in.  I only made it look easy.  Doesn’t mean it was a breeze.  A relaxed effort, yes.  A half-hearted effort, no.

What does the weekend mean for you?  And how much is that time worth?

What’s getting in the way of your plan?

How much planning is too much planning?

If you like to plan ahead, but still don’t feel organised, there’s a danger in spending even longer getting your act into gear.  You can obsess over stuff for a week, or even a month, with the intention to plan ahead for every last second of time.

Then, to your annoyance, something comes between you and your plan.  Then another thing gets in the way.  It could be something small, like an important phone call when you mean to be writing.  Or it could be a big deal, like you get flu and can hardly move for a few days.

They aren’t your fault (unless you meant to turn your phone off, perhaps…).  But less important matters also tend to get in the way.  Sometimes we don’t even notice.  Without warning, a whole day has whizzed past and nothing’s been done.  Fast forward a week and you wonder just how the time has flown by.

photo by woodsy

photo by woodsy

Even the most organised person doesn’t have to stick rigidly to their schuedle.  They probably can’t. After all, life happens.

The idea is to work out what activities get in the way, so you’re more aware for preparing future plans.

Each time something unexpected or unplanned gets in the way, write it down and note how long it took before you were back on track with the planned list.  Whether it was self-induced or totally unavoidable, mention it.  Don’t be shy.

This will help you discover:

  • Tasks you hadn’t considered that are part of your regular routine;
  • Necessary time-wasters, such as using the toilet, getting dressed, standing in a queue, waiting for a computer to log you in to a network, and so on (be as brutal as you like…it’s your time that’s being managed!);
  • How disciplined you are in your approach;
  • Stumbling blocks.  Things you thought you could do without, but that you would rather keep as part of your life;
  • The amount of time you want to dedicate simply to relaxation;
  • A more realistic outlook of time and an idea of where you need to start managing time better.

The exercise helps on a number of levels.  You may even realise that the enthusiasm you thought you had could be cranked up a notch. Or you may find a passion you didn’t even know you had.

Time is a strange thing.  There’s never enough, yet we seem to have more time than ever for leisure.  That’s why an exercise like this is vital in understanding just where your time goes.

When you’re done, was it a satisfactory result?  Or is it time to change?

I do this every now and then.  I don’t remember a time when it didn’t make a change for the better.

Living the present, loving the future

Higher Education should never be viewed as an extension of childhood.  Clearly, uni students want to be adult and make the most of the independent lifestyle available to them, but there are areas that are often ignored early on:

  • Searching for passions
  • Planning for a career
  • Making focused extra-curricular choices
  • Giving determined thought to the future
  • Seeing the bigger picture (thinking about your life as a whole, not complaining about a single ‘dumb lecture’)

Just before Christmas, Milkround.com surveyed students and graduates about their career decisions and when (or if) they had made solid choices.  A third hadn’t made a firm choice.  They also found that the majority of those who had decided upon a career direction had done so at the end of their time at uni or after they had graduated.

Photo by Alberto+Cerriteno

Photo by Alberto+Cerriteno

While this may be the norm, it’s not always sensible to be like everyone else.  As a child, my friends and I would badger parents for popular expensive presents for Christmas (an equivalent of a Nintendo Wii, perhaps).  “All my friends are getting one,” we’d shout.  If we were lucky, it would work and we’d get what we wanted.  Funnily enough, we regularly believed what we were trying to persuade our parents.

Now, when we’re badgered about the future and making plans for the life ahead of us, it’s not unusual to use the same tactics we used as children (and believe it just as much).  “Nobody else is obsessing that much!” we argue.  “None of us have plans; it’s not like that nowadays,” we point out.  We continue, “There’s plenty time to do that.  I’ve only just started this degree…what’s the point in getting ahead of myself when I’ll probably change my mind later anyway!?”

First, it’s not obsessing.  Second, we all have plans, but it takes guts to plan ahead with gusto.  Third, who cares if you change your mind later?  You’ll learn a lot on the way, so it won’t be for nothing.

I would never suggest that students aren’t thinking about the future at all.  Concern for the future is more important than ever to a lot of you.  However, the Milkround survey begins to show that commitment comes near the end of a degree.  In an economic downturn, competition is going to be increasingly fierce, so it will pay to begin your work toward the future as soon as possible.

Even if you don’t move toward securing a particular job and you don’t care for related work experience over the summer break, you can certainly get involved within the niche you want to be in by writing a blog, reading up on the hot topics and current events in that field, and making yourself known one way or another to the people that matter.  What you do is up to you, but it’s a wise move to do something!  Bit by bit or all out, it’s up to you…but make a start now.

Still uncertain?

“But the economic situation gets in the way.  I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, let alone several years down the line!  Surely it’ll be better to wait and see what happens?”

That’s not the point.  The more focused you are, the more clearly you should spot the best routes, notice gaps in the market, and build up your own portfolio to boost your brand.  With that focus, even someone without visible passions or career goals can begin to find what switches them on.

“You can say that, but I don’t know have a clue what I want to do.  I’m not interested in anything.”

I’ve heard this a number of times.  Ask yourself why you are at university.  Consider what you’re studying and what gets you going each day.  Even if you only live for drunken nights out and holidays, you could move toward some sort of hospitality rep career.  If you spend all your waking hours gaming or building social networks, check how you could use that in a vocational sense.  Some people get paid to play games all day, while some of the biggest names of the moment are those who know exactly how to build social networks.

If you don’t notice any career route from the ideas you already have, it doesn’t mean you’re out of options.  There are loads of possibilities out there you won’t know about to even consider.  Speak to careers advisers, read about employment in a sector you have a hobby with (whether it’s a sport, a type of product, or even a way of life), and give some detailed thought on where you want to be in the future.  I doubt you’d choose ‘unemployed’ as your career choice, so what would you be happy doing?

“There are too many people chasing after the career I want.  What the point in trying?”

Don’t put yourself down.  The whole point of considering your career as soon as you can is to be in with the best chance of getting where you want to be.  When you’re armed with all the information you need to build an impressive portfolio, speak to the right people, and start working toward that career right now, you suddenly improve your chances of success by a huge amount.

It all boils down to this:

Get started today!

Photo by Vermin Inc

Photo by Vermin Inc