KirStang

Hey All,

I've noticed a problem with regards to me and school work. I used to be the type of person who would tackle a paper, or some other big undertaking (arguing before a moot appellate board, 20 page appellate brief) with all my effort. In short, it was easy for me to become totally focused on the task at hand.

As of late, I've found it harder to focus.

I think it might be attributable to not meeting my 'career' goals in law school. I did not get straight As as I had hoped, I did not make any law journal (a huge resume booster and gives you experience in scholarly writing), nor did I make the cut for moot court (again, great experience in arguing before a board--something like you would do before the Supreme Court).

This is my last year, and as I'm writing my senior thesis (required to graduate), I find I'm often distracted, and it takes me much longer than it should to get anything done.

Is it because I'm in the wrong career field? Do I simply lack discipline? Have any members become disinterested, or, discouraged in their career and found it hard to focus? What was your remedy?

Thanks!

snowy

It sounds an awful lot like this: Senioritis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And yeah, I had the same problem when I got close to the end of my time in school.

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If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

zenda

Hi

I had a look at Snowy's Senioritis reference, and that makes a lot of sense. You've linked your present state with having not met your career goals as specified. As the Wiki article indicated, there is not enough work done on assisting students in the art and science of moving through transition stages.

Here are three perspectives on what you have shared.

1: Practical setback. If you have been used to simply working hard and succeeding, then the present setbacks will have shaken you. Someone who is used to Sometimes being on a roll, and other times messing up, has training in how to cope with setbacks BECAUSE they have had enough of them. In the realm of physical health, people who have been used to being ill at various times in their life are better able to cope with getting ill later .. they have had practise. If, as you examine the link you made, this is the main factor, then you may well be able to sort this by bucking down and pushing past.

2: Reduced probability of achieving your career goal. The above was about your capabilities as a student. This is about your reasons for studying in the first place. For a long time, a child's education is motivated by pleasing teachers and getting marks. 'In-house' criteria. Later, the 'values' which drive studying will include the outward and forward looking criteria of your Own goals, including career goals .. how they fit into your future - hopefully a future that you actually Want. IF that vision of the future has been shaken, then that may be detracting from the 'background' or 'foundation' sense of worth you may give or feel toward to your thesis.

3:End of Era. Have you ever heard the term 'Better to travel hopefully than to arrive' ? Sometimes the arriving can be an anticlimax, or worse still, a traumatic 'what now'. Up until arrival, the long applied skills of journeying and navigation will have been comfortably or uncomfortably implemented. Regardless of whether one is having setbacks or a smooth journey, this factor can sometimes cause the student to underachieve AS IF that can delay or avoid the arrival into what seems to be a more UNcertain, 'Post Educational-Environment' Future.

I offer these perspectives as 'generic possibilities' of where you are at, mainly in the hope that they will jog you to a more precise personal assessment of where you are at this moment. As you develop this assessment, I ask you to estimate how long per day you'd expect to be working on your thesis if you were on top of your game, and then to reserve 5% of that time to examining HOW your recent low marks were linking with your recent tendency to have become distracted, and to examine your answer to that in the light of what you have been wanting for your future and what ELSE, in addition, you could want for your future.

Press on with the thesis AS IF you were 'going on automatic' or utilizing the old proven abilities, but with a promise to yourself, that you are, at the same time, doing whatever you can to Understand and Rebuild your motivation and reasons for concentrating in the first place.

If you can do that, Good. If however, you are in the middle of some work for the thesis, and 'The Distraction' happens, then go into this analytical mode I have sketched out, and rather than going off and following the distraction [food .. film ... bath/hairwash etc], treat it like it is an alarm bell waking you up to questions and lines of inquiry. If it focuses you, put the Thesis to one side for a few minutes, get a blank sheet of paper or create a new text file, and entitle it 'My Distraction' ... and get to writing and thinking about it.

Important step: When you begin to get distracted from this thinking and writing about the Distraction Itself, return to working on the thesis ... even if only for twenty minutes before you go off for food or sleep etc. This is to 'sign off' this process with a reinforcement of your original reason for needing to engage with it in the first place. You'll be sticking to your guns - You Will Complete Your Thesis At The Same Time as purposefully and systematically reviewing your reasons and how it all fits in ways which more fully satisfy you.

Test this for a couple of days or so, notice where it works well, and also where it needs to be improved, then give feedback. You might immediatley tweak it to make it work better. If so, please give feedback on what you did to improve it. Best wishes to you as you embark on a New Way of doing your thesis and study.

f6twister

There is also a medical possibility. ADHD in Adults - Symptoms, Causes, Types, Treatments, and More

I know someone who has similar symptoms to you and this is what is suspect to be the cause. (They have never been officially diagnosed.)

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A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day. Calvin

Plan9

ADD/ADHD sounds like an awesome excuse to dope yourself up legally. Funny how there is a huge market for those pills only at college.

How about this...

Man the fuck up, Sir.

Task, conditions, standards with purpose, direction, motivation.

Break everything down using that. Internal task organization.

...

You've been in school for a long, LONG time, brah... undergrad and law school. Hah, there's a reason why I didn't roll straight in law school.

And seriously... I felt that way the entire time I was in college. Nobody sane* focuses 100% on work. It doesn't happen. Accept it. Move on.

*Think: serial killers, tenth degree black belts, Toyota's PR people and really cheery Subway sandwich artists.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

KirStang

Thanks for the feedback. Zenda, that post was extremely informative. Thank you.

I want to avoid labeling my lack of focus as 'ADHD' unless I must. It would be nice to power through drudgery on an adderall fueled buzz, but, I think that would be the easy way out. If there's an underlying problem that I can identify and attack, I would like to do that first.

Perhaps it's as simple as senioritis, or as Zenda pointed out, transitioning from a student in to a workerbee and fear of the unknown and rejection from job applications.

I was wondering if perhaps, it's also because I have less to lose now? I remember in undergrad, it was really easy to push myself to work even when I did not want to, for fear of losing my near straight-A transcript. Now, with mostly Bs (every JD has a 3.0), I feel I have less to lose.

Or am I having unrealistic expectations?

Regardless, thanks for humoring me as I try to figure out why I've lost motivation.

---------- Post added at 01:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:01 PM ----------

That might work. Been sucking it up and hitting the books for the past two years.

Might be due to the different workload. Easy to focus 100% on work for a week, maybe a month during finals, then it's back to a happy medium of workload until the next battery of tests and papers come around.

========================================

All in all, it might boil down to a cost benefit analysis--the amount of work I put in the past 2 years of law school did not result in the results I wanted.

It would be a nice to reframe my goals and find my motivation.

Zeraph

We all go through this kind of thing. I'm like this right now too. So far I've learned its more about the rest of your life. If things are rocky there, they seep through to everything you do and poison it.

zenda

OK ... you want a reframe. You state your motivator in terms of NOT wanting to LOSE something. Your goals had been external ... Straight A's and you did not want to lose those. Bs are happening now and ... whilst you're not pushing like you were for the As, I wonder how you'd feel about going down to Cs - how does that feel. NOW ... External goals like that have many more factors operating than the ones over which you have control.

Shift frame away from External, and toward Internal, OK? Keep the 'don't want to lose' part, but try an alternative concept like 'Afraid of Losing My Edge'. Disconnect it from the Examiners' Marks, and reconnect it with some 'doing well for your OWN sake'. If you can slip that smoothly in, then good.

If you need supportive reasoning which links with you're actively wanting to move forward to in the future, then how's about: You being able to work at your very best, at any job you might be doing in the future, is a crucial freedom for you to have. External 'marks,' 'points' 'job-acceptances,' 'promotions,' and other Kudos-shaped stuff will come your way or be withheld for many reasons, some of which are outside your control. You cannot know all those outside factors. However, you Do know when you are operating at your best ... so are you not afraid to lose that? And will not your choice to choose on your OWN terms be supremely necessary in whatever future course you navigate?

Now .. IF these ideas kind of work ... can you test and check it more thoroughly - tailor it to you in ways which can only be provided with the help of your expert knowledge of yourself? Run the ideas through a few times and find out how they could rebuild the motivation you need to NOT lose, and also, what else needs to be added.

You finishes your post with reference to Cost-Benefit analysis ... so please would you do a cost benefit analysis of your continuing to let your 'edge and motivation' be controlled by others' marking and kudos-giving styles? A cost benefit analysis of NOT making these changes now?

amonkie

Kirstang, once you get out of school, no one really cares what the grades are. They care more about the piece of paper that says you've graduated. And what you've laid out here shows why that piece of paper has become so important.

It is not easy to avoid burnout. That's what I would say this feels like from personal experience. You've dumped years of your life into a goal that now that you're 95% of the way there, you don't feel like you have as much to show for it as you should have.

Having a good sample of writing for yourself has proven to be far more useful to me than flashing my transcript. It is something tangible that puts out my ideas and shows my ability to write logically and critically. I've used this on several job interviews.

Also, just because you have not been published yet does not mean you can never be published. A friend used his senior thesis for 3 different articles that were accepted and published in peer reviewed journals once he was done writing - there is still hope yet!

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Calling from deep in the heart, from where the eyes can't see and the ears can't hear, from where the mountain trails end and only love can go... ~~~ Three Rivers Hare Krishna