A fiery ring

[PLEASE SEE MY ORIGINAL POST HERE.]

So after just two weeks of law school it's clear that I'm on a path to burnout. Most sources recommend spending around ten hours a day on schoolwork, and that includes class time. Suffolk University Law School's academic support program suggests that students spend between 60 to 70 hours a week studying. I looked back at the last 14 days of schedules I kept and updated in real time. (I really did update them: I plan out my studying and class time in one column and then write out what I'm doing as I do it in another column. This does not count as studying time. This counts as 'breaks.') My schoolwork has been snagging an average of between 12 and 15 hours on weekdays and around ten to 12 on weekend days. For those who are keeping track, the math adds up to an insane number of hours.

I'm not really doing it intentionally. On August 26 I didn't wake up at three a.m. and think, "I'm going to work from now until 11 p.m." It just sort of...happened. I was reading and briefing and re-reading and briefing and going to class and looking over my notes and in all this I wasn't paying attention to the time. Thus, it was 11pm before I made it to bed. A 20-hour day.

When I first started school, I was worried about falling behind. Now I just want to be sure I understand the material. I read everything two or three times; I look up unfamiliar terms online (thank you, Wikipedia); I read cases twice, brief them, and then re-read both the cases and the briefs; I go over my notes after every class and condense them into sweat sheets; and I spend some time with study aids to fill in the gaps. Now I'll be outlining on weekends, too. I don't know how to be more efficient.

I'm going to try to schedule in regular non-law-school events. Blogging (hello) is a nice break from CREAC. Blogging is creative in a way that the legal profession's Conclusion-Rule-Explanation-Application-Conclusion standard never can be. I also used to run and paint every day. There's gotta be a way to squeeze some of this into some of my days.

Any suggestions?