A good few weeks ago now, my dear friend Grace presented me a challenge. To spend 24 hours in the library. For some strange, unexplainable reason… I agreed. A lot happened in the hours that I am about to detail, so here, friends, is an hour by hour breakdown of one of the plain silliest things I’ve ever done.
Disclaimer: Our university's library is open 24 hours, we were totally allowed to do this, so don't go worrying we illegally hid in the building!
9pm:
We started the night by accumulating our snacks, preparing ourselves for the night ahead, and getting cosy in the library. Across the hour all members of our group arrived; myself, Grace, Keri and Layla from the Creative Writing course, Sinead and Matt from Journalism. We discussed our plans for the night and following day, what we wanted to achieve in our life here and letting off steam before we could get down to business. 10pm:
With everyone ready and set up, we knew that the next appropriate step was to order McDonalds and all set ourselves a firm goal. For me personally this meant beginning to transcribe an interview I had done the other day, which has a deadline for Wednesday 18th. Once the food had arrived, the others began to busy themselves and we decided that at 11pm, we would begin a 25 minute quiet period.
11pm-12:59pm:
From 11pm onward, we adopted the Pomodoro technique. This meant we alternated between doing 25 minutes of work, followed by a ten minute break. I found this technique to be incredibly rewarding for me. Often I feel anxious when working in quiet, but having friends around me as I continued to transcribe the interview alleviated those usual worries. The short breaks to go to the bathroom or watch silly videos was much needed. Infact, we had a quick boogie to ‘We Like To Party’ (Vengaboys? Heck yes!) which got out the excess adrenaline for sitting still for so long. Before I knew it, I had transcribed 1500 words, and it was time to practise my presentation.
1am:
After failing to be able to set our laptops up to the projection screen, Grace and I gave a preliminary practise run of the presentations we will have to do for real on Friday 20th. Though I felt nervous - I truly hate presentations - I stumbled my way through my unpractised script and my friends gave some great feedback. I made a mental note to address redrafting at a later point in the 24 hours. Grace’s presentation was doubly successful and I think both of us benefited greatly from the experience. Presentations took us a whole 45 minutes so we decided to break for the last 15 minutes.
2am: Another 25 minutes of quiet work (and another 300 words transcribed) - however, sitting in the same cramped group room for 5 hours was starting to wear our productivity thin. So, we decided to break for a full half hour. We all went for little walks around the library, then decided to move the study party to the upstairs of the library where we could spread out and chill on the comfier sofas. The ever-lovely library security man came up to check we were okay, and to let us know that the cleaners would be coming at 6am, so we knew we only had about 3 hours before the fairly barren library would begin to fill up for the day again.
3am:
Now settled in to our new cosy place, I took a minute to update this ongoing blog post of the past few hours activities as we had another 30minutes of quiet time. Then, Layla took us through her presentation as Grace and I had done before, bringing us up to 4am.
4am:
Again, 25 minutes of quiet work and I was still typing up the transcript for my interview (2,200 words now!) but our attention and motivation was starting to dwindle. To raise our spirits and take a proper, extended break from work, our group decided that it was now an appropriate time to take our first, hour long break. Since we’d been in near silence for most of the night, we had a lot of fun playing a writing game I made up. This is where you write a line of dialogue on a piece of paper, then pass it to the person next to you. They then write a response, and fold the paper so that your original line can’t be seen. They pass it round again, another person replies, folds, and again until the paper has done a complete circle of the group. Our results were pretty amusing, and the game kept us busy for a full hour.
5am:
After the (very much needed) long break it was time to get back down to some work. We worked for 25 minutes, then packed our stuff up to move back downstairs to a different section of the library. And what did we find? Wipe-boards!
6am:
Thank everyone and their mother, I finally finished typing up the hour-long transcript from the interview - 2,797 words altogether! Unfortunately I was so wrapped up in finally finishing the task that had literally spanned an entire night, I missed the sunset. I still felt motivated to carry on working so I typed up the last few hours into this blog post, then switched it up a little, and began making a mind-map for my fiction workshop project idea on the wipe-board.
7am:
A quick game of hangman to mix things up a little and let us unwind from work. As it stands, the library is still fairly quiet, but I reckon that it won’t be long until people start filing in for the day. Motivation is starting to sputter in hour ten, my limbs are aching from a lack of sleep. Since we’ve decided to go on a breakfast run at 8am, I am going to make a quick list breaking down into chunks all of the things I want to achieve in the remaining thirteen hours.
8am:
Starting to really hit a wall of tiredness, Layla, Keri and I decided to take a power nap for a half hour. Went and bought myself another (!) tea and listened to an episode of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, a wonderful and uplifting podcast.
9am: Tea refreshed me enough to entice me into going back to work on my interview, which meant hacking down the transcript from 2,797 words to 1,200 (the allotted word count for the assignment) and giving myself a rough outline for the piece. Grace had given me her interview to look over, so I peer-reviewed that for ten minutes, and had a lovely chat with Ellie who had just arrived to join us.
10am:
Mae arrived to join us for our last eleven hours, but I was too tired to enjoy her company. Over halfway now and my head was starting to throb from lack of sleep. No work was done and by the end of the hour I had resigned myself to lying in a corner, using a bag for a pillow and taking a power nap. 11am:
Power nap did not work. Far, far too tired. Felt sick. Decided to pack up things and give up, go home. I left the library at 12 noon and was at home, in bed, by 12:30. No regrets.
On reflection, 24 hours in the library was a far more difficult task than I thought it was going to be. As someone with poor sleep anyway, I thought I would have lasted way longer before starting to get tired. I am sort of gutted that I didn’t stick it out, but hey, I think it would’ve been worse to throw up in the university library. Here are a few things I would do differently next time:
Prepare for the time more: Packing a toothbrush, a clean change of clothes and perhaps even a pillow and blanket would’ve helped a lot more in terms of keeping comfy and fresh. It’s not something I thought about until it was too late.
Start and finish at a different time: 9pm to 9pm sounded good in theory, but before we started, I had been awake since 12 noon Wednesday (9 hours) and had spent that time socialising, walking around, and even life-modelling for the Harry Potter Society and Life Drawing Society collaboration (don’t ask). Next time I would like to start in the mid-late afternoon, and ideally, have only been awake a few hours and be fully rested.
Have a plan of action for when the library started to get busy at 9am: After all night having the place almost entirely to ourselves, I found it harder to concentrate and more constricting when it got busy and I couldn’t walk around or spread out as much. Perhaps even booking a group study room for the times I knew the library would get busy would’ve also helped, so we could have more privacy as a group.
However, this isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy myself. I got so much work done (3,000+ words written, practised my presentation, etc) and also had a lot of fun with my friends. I enjoyed the fact that we had the library almost entirely to ourselves for the night and the early hours of the morning - though shout out to Claudio, the wonderful security guard who kept checking up on us throughout the night - and so we could sprawl and be relaxed without bothering anyone else. The half an hour work, half an hour break was working really well for me, so that is perhaps a technique I would like to adapt for future studying sessions too. Overall, I had a lovely time and as I write this (6 hours of sleep later) I am proud of myself and my friends for giving it a go. Shout out to Grace, who had this idea in the first place, and who is currently an hour and a half shy of finishing her full 24 hours back in the library, as well as Keri. You’ve got this guys! You're the real winners here.
Would you spend 24 hours in a library? What would you do to prepare?
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