Staying on Some Sort of Schedule

From Guest Blogger,  Naomi:

At my school, we are constantly reminded by our teachers to keep up with our NHD project. This may seem like a simple enough request, but staying on track is harder than it may seem.  There is always an English paper due or test to prepare for. With the constant workload from school and all your other activities, it is easy to push NHD off for more urgently pressing matters.  

I’m not saying that you must never deviate from your NHD schedule. However, if you put off your research until the last minute,it will cause you a lot more stress in the long run. Rushing through research tends to add time to the project at the end. At my school, we have several deadlines when small portions of our NHD projects are due. But I found last year, that to avoid getting no sleep, I had to set interim personal goals in order to stay on track.  I can tell you from experience that showing up to school after getting literally no sleep is not fun in the least.

Whether you are working in a group, or alone,  working on NHD tends to take longer than planned.  No matter what category your NHD project falls under, you can be sure that at some point, some part of your project will take much more time than you were counting on.  For instance, last year after I had spent a substantial time putting my NHD documentary together, my computer crashed and I had to start the film over again from scratch. Luckily I was able to make a new draft and finished my final project on time.

The point is we can’t really tell how long certain aspects of the project will take, because unexpected things always seem to happen. I could bore you with more specific examples, but instead, from my experience last year here are some tips:

1. Make sure to keep track of where your sources come from as you do your research. Going through everything at the end to dig out what you need to create the annotated bibliography is an unnecessary hassle.
2. If you are planning to pull information from any archive, request it as soon as possible. Processing requests takes time. If you wait too long, you may not get the information until it is too late.
3. If you are conducting interviews for your project, getting in touch with the interviewee sooner is better. Sometimes scheduling an interview can be difficult. The more time you have the better.
4. Make sure to have all equipment and materials necessary at the start of research. Finding new movie making software, or running out to the store at the last minute for Velcro can be stressful.
5. Leave time for possible mistakes. You don’t want to end up finishing your project in the car on the way to competition!!(Believe me, this has happened.)