Three

= The number of hours I slept last “night” (i.e. technically today, from 2-5 AM)

Zero =

The number of times I’ve EVER slept less than at least five hours a night (REALLY)

Also zero =

The number of minutes I worked out today (aside from my mild walk home) because my sleepy brain begged me not to overdo it even though I’ve pretty much rocked it on three hours of sleep

Here’s how it all started:


For my Advertising Management class (such a great resource, btw!) we were tasked to form groups (i.e. “agencies”), where each member is a “director” (e.g. I’m the Promotions and PR Director), and execute a full-blown marketing and advertising campaign for any publicly traded company we want at the end of the semester.


To gauge our success, if you will, and make sure we know our stuff, we were required to submit, by today, a marketing audit (the outline of which, btw, was 12 pages long) that pretty much goes over EVERYTHING about this company (beyond just its marketing operations). We met this past Saturday to go over it and plan out what each group member would do. (Why not earlier? two reasons: 1) we’re busy students with both social lives and working lives; thus, we don’t have much free time besides our weekends to devote to projects; and 2) we hadn’t received much guidance on the project until, well, never, so this free rein was unexpected.)


We ended our meeting and I went home to get my section started. Almost five hours later, it was done. I was pretty proud :)


Because we had set up a Google Doc, our progress was just being marked by what each of was contributing. We were finally done (or so I thought) on Monday. Not bad!


Now our Account Exec., bless her heart, somehow thought she could handle doing four sections on her own. She’s an Account Exec. intern at a leading/legendary global agency, you see, so she thought her experience would make it easier for her to do all that by herself. (Wrong, but gotta love her anyways.)


Long story short, on Monday night, our AE still needed to do a LOT from the sections she had chosen. A LOT. And she also needed someone to edit the whole thing. That’s where I come in. I don’t know the exact reasons behind why she thought of me, but I was still honored. To have a friend and AE in the making rely that much on a(nother) prospective AE (ahem, me) means the world to me. So I gladly took the reins. And can’t stop thanking me. (Really, it was no big deal!)


My class that evening got out at 9, so I started working on the 42 single-spaced pages we had accumulated so far at 9:30. Four-point-five hours of careful revising and editing, later, I called it a “night” and I was ready to get some rest before our 7:30 class that following morning (I wake up at 5ish). Our AE and I finished it earlier today. 


Grand total: 55 single-spaced pages!


To say that I feel proud of myself for having accomplished the whole three-hour-of-sleep thing today would be an understatement. I don’t understand people who don’t sleep properly and I don’t think I ever will. Never again will I dare to repeat this, though (at 4 PM today, I felt like it was 9– near my self-imposed bedtime). (A friend of mine did say I looked nice today regardless of that short night :) Soo happy this isn’t a habit!)


But I was nevertheless impressed with what this could mean for my future career in Advertising: Yes, I am more than willing to lose some sleep if it means my team will get an A, successfully pitch a client, or launch and execute a legendary campaign.


12.


= The total number of hours I alone dedicated to this project. Phew! And aside from not having managed our time as optimally as we could have, I don’t regret one minute of it.