I’m getting so completely and absolutely slammed it’s not funny.

I’ve begun to wonder where the flaw is in my handling of this situation, and I’m beginning to think it’s a combination of low reading speed, bad time management, and having a lot of stuff on my plate at once. It’s undoubtedly at least partly my fault. It’s not that I’m procrastinating — I recognize that procrastination in a dog-eat-dog program will basically skewer you very quickly (which is happening). It’s that the time I do have is managed in such a way that I have to split my attention across two or three different activities at any one given time. It doesn’t help that I’ve already had to basically blow off a client because I don’t have the time to complete a major work request. Not only is that a monetary hit, I’m always afraid of alienating the client by not being attentive enough. Of course, the big thing I value about my client relationships is communication, which has saved me from a whole lot of problems (and has probably stopped me from losing a client or two).
Far from it from me to diverge from my main point. I’m not completely to blame here — the pace of the class is cutthroat, and I’m not the only one questioning my own abilities. The consensus between a fellow writing tutor and myself seems to be that we both woefully misjudged our abilities at the start of the program. We assumed that we would only have to read the material and analyze in class; instead, we are expected to mark up the book and do some small amount of analysis on our own while reading. This turns two hour’s worth of reading into what is easily eight hours (which is about as much time as I spent reading on Sunday). The pace of the class itself is such that there’s a paper due tomorrow on the reading which is also due tomorrow, which means I can’t turn the paper in (or even write it) because I’m too tired to finish the reading.

…

So why am I posting this?