An Organized Work Ethic by Breanna

An Organized Work Ethic by Breanna - January 2022 Scholarship Essay

While 2021 was a difficult year for nearly everyone, it was certainly not impossible to get through given the right skill sets. I’ve always maintained a good work ethic, but over the course of the past year, I began to realize that sometimes the willingness to get work done isn’t enough to have to “good work ethic” if you don’t have a way to organize your willingness into a way that is meaningful.

Prior to this past year, life wasn’t necessarily smooth sailing, but I always was able to get through any situations that arose with relative ease. I got through everything by having a plan in my head and sticking to it. Because I had minimal worries due to life being safe and me being young, I was always able to just think about my studies and goals and nothing else, which made it easy to stay caught up in my academics. Because I always had a goal to work towards, I kept moving and was able to get all my tasks done because I had a willingness to succeed.

However, once learning went virtual, I began to have to stay home, which required me to care for myself, my family, and a variety of other responsibilities in addition to my learning. I could no longer just worry about myself; I now had a million “grown-up” responsibilities as well, which began to cause me to fall behind in my studies as I began to become busier and more forgetful, causing a lot of things to fall through the cracks.

Refusing to allow the pandemic to affect my academics, which I had worked my entire life for, I began to look for other ways to keep up with my work. Eventually, feeling rather silly for not thinking of it sooner, I realized that keeping a planner helps. However, because I always forget to check my planners, I keep a digital to-do list for things I need to do for the day and a digital calendar for things that I need to do over a longer period of time.

Having all my tasks laid out in an easy-to-understand format rather than packed into my brain allowed me to properly allot my time to all of my assignments, duties, and activities so that nothing would be forgotten about. This allowed me to not only maintain the activities I had set for myself and my family but to have enough time in my day allotted for helping my community as well, which taught me to have additional leadership skills, thus helping me grow as a person.

Overall, while wanting to succeed in life is a good start to having a proper work ethic, if you don’t have any organization in your life, it’ll be harder to achieve your goals. Because the past year threw a lot of challenges my way, I was forced to learn to be more organized with my work, which allowed me to succeed academically by keeping up with my assignments and studies, even in self-paced virtual classes.