The log

Assignment 2. A running note of every time you caught yourself overthinking and what you did about it, kept all semester and handed in after everyone's exams are over.

Due: 19 June 2027 · Weight: 25%

The brief#

Keep a note every time you catch yourself. Hand in the note.

This is the simplest piece of work in the course and the one most likely to still be useful to you in five years. Every time you notice yourself overthinking, write a line. What it was, what you did, whether it helped. That’s it.

You do not have to say why. If an entry is personal, the entry can just be a thing I did not want to write down. Sat the ten minutes, then went for a walk, and it was quieter by evening. That is a complete entry and it loses no marks. What is being marked is the noticing and the response, never the disclosure.

Failures count. An entry that says “tried the two-minute timer, made no difference at all” is worth as much as any success, and more than a vague one. The course has spent twelve weeks arguing that a felt improvement is not the same as an improvement. A log full of honest negatives is that argument applied to yourself.

Why it is due after the exams#

Look at the date. It is due 24 hours after the last exam in the whole cohort, not after yours, after everybody’s. Nobody in this course will ever be writing this while revising for something else.

And it should not need a late night anyway. It is a log. If you kept it as you went, submitting it is a matter of tidying the file and adding the note at the end. If you did not keep it as you went, no amount of the last twenty-four hours will reconstruct it convincingly, and that will be visible. That is the only reason the marking says “actually kept as you went”.

The deadline is soft by a day or two. Take the extra time if you want it; you do not need to ask, explain, or apologise. It would be a strange course that manufactured a rush over the last thing it collects.

The feedback part#

Add a short note at the end, a few paragraphs is plenty, on what actually helped. Which techniques from the course did anything for you, which were a waste of your time, and what you found somewhere else that worked better than either.

This is not a satisfaction survey and it is not marked on being complimentary. It is the course’s main input for next semester. Techniques that students keep reporting as useless get cut; things people found elsewhere and swear by get tried in class. Several of the crits in the current syllabus arrived this way, including one that replaced something the teaching staff were fond of and students found pointless.

So be blunt. Naming something that did not work is more valuable to the next cohort than praising something that did.

What you submit#

The log plus the closing note, in any plain format you like. Markdown, a document, a spreadsheet, photographs of a paper notebook if that is where you kept it. Legible is the only requirement. Dated entries help but are not required, and inventing dates after the fact would be an odd thing to do in this particular course.