Busy day - a bit of a brain dump!

Well, that was awful. Very stressful day indeed.

I had two deadlines with one for a 4000 word essay on mentoring and leadership which makes up 40% of my management & leadership module and a group lab write up on Spark Ignition engines (second of two, a follow up to the CI 'diesel lab' ) worth 10% of my IC engines module.

If im honest, Ive been putting off the mentoring report for long time, I began mentoring the second year group at the start of the first term back in September and although I dont stop mentoring them for another fortnight could have started the report a good time ago. As i went along I had jotted down a short hand list of points that I thought might turn up to be relevant and that I might want to include in the report which come the end of last week had developed into around two pages of text, but just random bulleted points, not essay! And I think perhaps somewhat exaggerated and idealised this into being a good start towards report being written. They where very helpful but it was a long way from the final draft for sure!

Work started properly over the weekend, saturday i set myself the target of 1000 works down before mid day if i was going to go to the Loughborough CarClub autotest event at PCC Mallory, which I achieved, and went to Mallory and had a great afternoon, returning to do around another 500 before bed.
My the end of sunday i had got that to about 2500, with around another 500 turning up on the bank holiday monday, interlaced with work on my final year group TPD project and sorting out a few datails for things i might do over summer and sorting the issue with the kitcars brakes. I think its time to the bite the bullet and fit some new front calipers. But i still only had 3000 works of what was a fairly rough draft. And 20 pages of appendix, which is about the only part that was actually full finished.

Tuesday morning i was up at 7 to get on campus and get some data for our Mechatronics project before 9am when we would be kicked out of the mechatronics lab by the other group whos day is tuesday. So I then turned my attentions to the also slightly neglected SI lab write up, at which point it transpired that much of calculations that I thought had been done where either incorrect or not quite what the write up asked for. So that took much of the rest of that, with a short break to read through my second years final report (also due in this week) as im a good mentor like that... :p
I also spent an hour on the phone to my Dad talking over and proof-reading my mentoring report.
But ultimated I was infact up till midnight with my IC engines group writing said petrol lab. The joys. Still, it was done, with another member tee'ed up to print it and hand in the following morning (this morning) which would at lease leave me all of this morning to put the finish touches on my mentoring report and get it wire bound and handed in. So i cooked tea and got to bed for 0100h!

I got up at 8 this morning, computer on, breakfast, and with the mentoring report!
We've got another Mechatronics review tomorrow (wonderful mechatronics thursdays)so at half nine I get a phone call from Dave 'any chance you on campus, im just looking at this kicker unit and....' urrrm, no! Sorry. :S
So for the next five HOURS im working on my mentoring report. How long does it take 'just finish off the last bit' nora! Then off it goes to dad to proof read for typos. That is something ive learnt. If your dyslexic, its well worth getting someone else, almost anyone else, to proof read something important. I swear i lost 10% on some 1st year reports for not doing that.
I also ended up taking about half an hour out to print our SI engines lab because for some reason neither of the other two could get it to print on campus, so my trusty canon inkjet took the hit on another 20 pages. After i'd sorted out why word had thrown and epi-fit on the contents list which was just awash with 'error bookmark not found' after the association between portrait and landscape pages of the report had fallen apart. I dont mind MS word too much, but a bit like CAB files, as soon as it becomes more than a very basic document every time you take a shortcut because your rushing, it comes round twice as hard just when you dont need it to.

So there we go, its 1500h and im in the queue waiting to get my report bound at media services, £2.10, nip over to dept, fill in some cover sheets, persuade a staple through our SI engines lab report (which wasnt worth £2.10) and hand then both in a full hour and half before drop boxes are emptied.

Deep breath, and straight into the electronics lab, from which i emerged at 1800h with atleast a basic idea of what im doing for our progress assessment tomorrow.


Morals of the story?
-Mentoring reports are a sod. but you need to do stuff you dont like early.
-If you think your putting something off, its probably because you are, do it now!
-Everything always takes longer to 'just finish off' than you could ever imagine.


Im going for a shower!