Time, time and overtime

 There is nothing in this world that makes me more conscious than looking at the clock tick away, hence I usually choose to not look at the clock and not follow the time and rather let my life flow the way it wants to go. Hence, timed assignments which especially try to restrict you from going over which is known to be typical are my enemies, and so was the journal club presentation. While preparing for the JC, I knew that I had to be done in just 10 minutes, and still adopted my previous style of first filing the presentation with how much ever I wanted to talk about, thinking that I would shorten it as needed later. When I read the paper, I found that I had so much to talk about; it was a beautiful and systematic study, and I wanted the entire audience to be able to appreciate the entirety of its content which was obviously a lot. My innate nature won, and I did keep almost the full paper in my presentation, though before I was going to submit I still thought that I had omitted a lot of details for the sake of time. Now I thought that even though I have a ton of slides, maybe I can go though them "quickly." Little did I realise that you can only speak as fast as you can speak.

Then suddenly I was reminded of the teaching staff's comments about my mini presentation from a week ago, where they told me I was speaking too fast and it was hard to follow. Of course, I was speaking fast because I was over-ambitious and wanted to cover everything for the sake of the audience (what selfish benefit was I getting out it, right?). That made me understand that I cannot even speak as fast as I can speak anymore. So okay, I knew I had to practice presenting, and the first time when I could get through all the slides without getting lost or distracted in the middle, I had given a presentation of 20 minutes. Oh nooo! The first way I could think of to cut the piece down was by reducing some slides, because deep down I knew I had given the slides way too much freedom and space to express themselves. I did cut some down (entire 2 slides) but I couldn't go more. Alright, let us practice again, and this time keep an eye on the timer (RIP). The rest is history and the current me is praying my grades don't go down too much.

But this is not what this post is for. At the end of my JC day, there was one person for whom there wasn't enough time and they had to present in an extended time, and I felt bad for them, I felt as if I ate up their share of time. Yes, other's time is valuable, and you cannot disrespect that to fulfil your own want to say everything out, is what I learnt. Sigh...😓

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