Finally the time has come to put the plan into action. Last week our group has finalized the project plan and split up the tasks. Since it has been a while since I’ve worked with MERN stack, I have taken most of last week and part of this week to review materials and watch tutorials. However, even with hours of tutorials, I felt I am incapable of doing the tasks. I was stressed out, distracted, and felt like I didn’t know anything even after days of tutorials. In this blog I’ll talk about how I have coped with this feeling of uncertainty.
During past few days I had difficulty juggling my time. I had many responsibilities including finishing assignment for another class, things needed fixing in my home, and some other personal plans. On top of that I needed to do refreshers on the tech stack and finish my portion of the project code. I felt really overwhelmed, which led to stress, lack of sleep, irregular eating, and not being able to concentrate, which led to more stress, and thus a vicious cycle. I was drained physically and mentally, had to find a way to break the cycle. I’m sure you probably had similar experience before and possibly in the future as well. I hope my escape plans can come in handy for my future self and for you too.
First, I made a list of everything that I needed to do for the week. I broke it down in small details. Next, I have picked out things that could be done in half hour or less and started checking them off one by one. I remembered that some research results showed getting up in the morning and making the bed helps boost confidence and give a sense of accomplishment to attempt another. I applied same approach with checking off todo list. It also helped me not get rid of other worries and distractions so I can concentrate.
Next I prioritized the remaining tasks. My other class assignment was due before this one so I have put that assignment as top priority and also determined time blocks I needed to do my personal tasks. This helped me create a rough schedule of what needs to be done by when. For this class assignment, I’ve broken it down to time for tutorials, and each web page, and its implementations grouped by frontend and backend. I felt that the feeling of overwhelm came from the fact that I had this one huge task I didn’t know how to do. Breaking it down into smaller pieces and assign time slots helped me get started on it rather than dreading over it.
Lastly, when it came down to this Capstone project task itself, I had to convince myself that I am capable of accomplishing this assignment. I have watched entire series of Udemy tutorial but I felt that I am not confident enough to do this task. The fear of failing has stopped me from even trying. I felt the best solution to this was to just jump straight into the coding. The more I sat and waited, the more energy and time I have wasted and it did not improve anything. So I just started coding the simplest smallest html structures I knew and started from there. Then I was able to slowly remember what I did from previous project and also from the tutorials. I was able to search what I didn’t know and added piece by piece.
The imposter syndrome and stress from poor time management are things I am still battling right now and probably will for a long time but I have found some ways to deal with it and hopefully be able to deal with them in the future as well knowing I can do it 💪