Something happened this past week which confirmed something that I have always suspected. I learned that I spend too much time on homework assignments. A lot of times when I come across something on an assignment that I cannot figure out I would end up spending way too much time on it.
I handed in three assignments this past week, one for marketing, one for advanced topics in accounting, and one for fixed income. For the fixed income assignment, the math portion was pretty straight forward, I was able to even solve the extra credit question, but there were two open ended qualitative questions that had me spending hours staring into blank space. When I woke up the next morning, I felt angry looking back at how much time I spent on the entire assignment. I felt even angrier this past Monday when my professor announced that he did not grade the qualitative questions because they were too open ended. My assignment for advanced topics in accounting was similar. About half the assignment I could figure out with no problems but the other half proved to be a stumbling block. And just as I did with the fixed income assignment, I spent a major amount of time trying to figure out something I ultimately could not figure out at the end. I got back the assignment this past week and received a descent grade on it (a “check,” as opposed to a “check plus” or “check minus”). Marketing was a different story. I had only one hour to work on my write up because I waited until the last minute to do it. During that hour, I pushed myself to read, understand, and analyze as much as I could. At the end of the marketing class, I felt so embarrassed about the quality of my write up that I talked to the professor and offered to do an extra credit assignment . The write up was returned to me on Tuesday, I got descent grade on it.
What I need to start doing is to set a time limit for myself on every assignment because every assignment will have something that I just cannot figure out. And according to the economic theory of diminishing marginal returns, every additional unit of time (minute, hour) I spend on an assignment will give me a return that is less than that generated by the previous unit.
And speaking of time, I found out today that we have no classes on Monday for Labor Day.
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