I have learnt from experience that saying “I’ll just have a week off at the beginning of the vac and then get down to it” always fails, so as soon as I’ve moved back in I’ll be getting down to it. However I will be rewarding myself somewhat by starting right away with my switch-to-CRUX project which I keep fervently writing about.

Throughout the vac I’ll be doing academic work from 8 until 12, but that’s a very loose description because that’ll vary from hardcore study to just reading ahead for next term (more of the former towards the beginning of the vac).

For the first week or so in the afternoons I’ll first work on my new CRUX setup (initially on my laptop, so I can still do stuff on PC, then I can redo PC too), and then after that I’ll do solid cleaning up. This is fixing bugs with things like my blog, fixing Emacs annoyances, and clearing out Org-mode. This might take, in total, up to two weeks but by the end I will have already done a fair amount of work (more than many will do the entire vac), I’ll have nothing hanging over my head and I’ll have decided what projects/books/whatever are interesting enough to me and feasible to be completed within the summer.

There’s a fair amount of discipline involved in this because the first two weeks are going to be really rather boring, aside from CRUX, and considering that I will have just finished an incredibly boring four weeks of revision and then a fifth of exams, but it’s going to mean that I don’t feel guilty for not doing things I should have done for the rest of the vac, because they’ll all be done.

And the reason for doing this amount of work? Well, if I am to stand any chance at a first after this set of exams, I will need to get a first in all my philosophy papers so I want to get better at them. More importantly I want to continue my development in philosophy because this is my whole life; others are thinking about their careers and developing their employability, so I should be developing mine in the field of philosophy.