Constrained Bliss Point

The past two weeks have been a tizzy. Moving to a new city along with six hours per day of maths all but overwhelmed my ability to keep things organized. I suppose I could have swam harder against the tide, but that’s honestly not my style. Times like those I’m happy to keep my head above water.

This week begins my normal, much more open, schedule — three classes, no more than 4hrs/day, no class before 10am, no class on Fridays. And I am going to get on top of things again, and it is going to be awesome. I have a lot of emails, a lot of blog posts in my Reader, a lot of drafts and emails and phone calls I owe people. But that’s all going to come under control soon. I know that by the end of the week I’ll be back in command. Getting Things Done always has my back.

I’m not a GTD-wizard yet, but it keeps me sane.

I approached my final undergraduate semester expecting it to be difficult. I designed my course load to be challenging — probably the most challenging to date. I did this for the same reason people attempt to climb Mount Everest: stressing one’s self to the breaking point, every once in a while, is the only way to really get to know what you’re made of.

Another reason for taking more courses than necessary is as an intertemporal commitment. Deciding ahead of time that I will be disciplined in my productivity is cheap. Choosing a course of action that will require I be disciplined in my productivity is the only way to ensure it happens. You may hear people say, “I could be like that high achiever over there, if I were more organized.” Or perhaps, “I could get better grades than him, I just don’t feel like studying.” That’s a cop out, folks.

In preparation for this semester I decided I needed a pretty serious schedule. Now that a few weeks have gone by, I feel comfortable assessing how the schedule is going. First I’ll describe it as planned before the semester started. Then I can analyze what worked and what failed miserably.

I planned on waking up at 7am every day, and going to the gym. Every day. This was ambitious, and in order to ensure I would get enough sleep, I needed a similarly ambitious bed time: 10pm. I would turn off my computer by 9pm every night to facilitate the ridiculously early bed time. Every day I would have a set number of “work” hours, like school was a job. Each day there would be a different subject for me to do — to make sure that my work in that subject was up to date. And Fridays would be a full day to review my whole organizational system.

Most of the elaborate plan was untenable. I never wound up sticking to the one-subject-per-day rule, nor did I ever count the number of “work” hours I would have every day. Luckily, Friday has been a consistent review day, though not always perfectly. For the first week I stuck very closely to the 10pm-7am sleep schedule with gym every day. Later it would be more difficult to be in bed at that reasonable hour: having friends is a terrible way to ensure a solid bed time. Similarly my computer was only off at 9pm for the first two days of school. All in all, only a few tenets stayed with me, and those were subject to habitual inconsistency.

Still, a lot of good came from this schedule. I find that when my homework gets me hectic, I can take solace in getting it done and then getting to bed early and hitting the gym at 7am.