Mengyuan Xu (FD ’23) shares her formula for time management
Since covid started, I have yet not gone back to my country, which is China. Because last year Parsons started to use Zoom to have classes, I decided to move outside of Paris. Now I am living in the 93000, which is far from Parsons, and every morning I need to take one hour to go to school. However, I found this is a really good reason for me to make myself more independent and have more self control.
Every morning, from Monday to Saturday, I wake up at 8am and spend 30 mins cooking my lunch for the day and I make my breakfast at the same time. Even without covid, I am not a person that really likes to order out and go to restaurants, except for the food that I can not make by myself, or for a friend’s party. Otherwise I will not go out that much.
However, now, I actually need to really manage the time that I go to buy groceries. Often I can not go because I need to stay at school for making clothes or for other reasons. I always need to ask my roommate to buy food for me. Still, I am happy to come to school, or else the Zoom classes would just make me stay home every day without moving.
If I have a 10 minute break at school, I can go to Monoprix to buy something to drink and breathe some fresh air outside with my classmates. With a 10 minute break in my house, I can not do anything. I feel happy that I can work in the school to communicate with my professors and classmates.
Now, even without the museums, clubs, shopping malls… I still feel my life is full of work and no time for that. I make myself work more, to feel that I am alive, to remind myself I am here to study but not travel.
In this special time period, we all need to learn how to manage time better. I make schedule in my head and I follow it. The easiest way to make a schedule is to understand what things I need to do or I want to do. Here is my formula for time management: emergency>needs>wants.