When I was in high school studying for finals, the first thing I would do was make a study schedule. I’m not sure how I got the idea. As an adult I’m more the sort of person who looks at a big project and immediately feels overwhelmed, and it takes someone else to tell me to break it down into manageable chunks. For example, my dissertation advisor told me that I wasn’t writing a dissertation, I was writing chapters. And I wasn’t really writing chapters, I was writing a number of connected five-page sections that would make up a chapter. And together those chapters would make up a dissertation. Just focus on writing five pages at a time. I would occasionally need reminding of this, but it really helped. When I feel as though any task is too monumental to complete, I do need to sit down and make a list of all the little steps involved. Cleaning the apartment needs to be broken down into 20-minute intervals per room, or it doesn’t get done at all. (Well, it still doesn’t get done, but the list making helps anyway.) It makes sense to me that I would’ve been the sort of high school student who looked at finals week with paralyzing, heart-stopping fear, as a sort of insurmountable crisis, not knowing how I would ever get through it, and it would’ve been my mom who told me to just study for one subject at a time, for a certain amount of time, with breaks for lunch and dinner and stretching and so forth.

So the first thing I’d do was take a sheet of notebook paper and block out my week of studying:

9-11 AM: Science
Break
11:15-1:15: Math
Lunch
2:00-4:00: History

As the week progressed I’d amend the schedule to spend more time on subjects that needed it. But I stuck to the idea of the schedule, and I followed it more or less to the letter. Call it compulsive and/or anal, but it worked, and it was a tremendous help when I got to college.

Maybe the schedule was entirely my idea and as a high school student I was far more disciplined than I am now. Somewhere along the way I have lost the ability to discipline myself and budget my time efficiently. Or maybe it’s that I simply haven’t found anything that matters as much to me as acing my finals mattered to me in high school. (Is that sad? what I would give to live in a world where it is not at all a pathetic notion to have acing my finals as something that matters more than anything else.) I mean, no one’s checking my transcripts anymore. Sometimes I wish they would.

Or it’s possible that I am waxing nostalgic for the student I once was, and it’s more that the intensity with which I fretted over finals is casting its hue over my memories.

At any rate, I have gotten into the habit of making to-do lists and then ignoring them. It feels like an accomplishment to simply lay out everything that needs to get done or that I want to get done. When did I become an underachiever? I think the 15-year-old me would be rather ashamed. Possibly a little disgusted. Definitely disappointed. And I’m not being hard on myself here as I am wont to be — but it all of a sudden occurs to me that I do not want to let 15-year-old me down. 15-year-old me needs some assurance that life gets a fuckload better (not that my life was so horrid. But, you know, I was 15.) So what I did this morning was take out an index card (thanks, the me who made a big enough dent in her office cleaning that she found the index cards and thanks, the me who remembered where office cleaning me put said cards) and scheduled my day:

7:30: read (a review book that I wanted to finish today)
8:30: Dishes + breakfast
10:30: Office –> articles
12:30: Make marinade for steak
1:30: Work out

As I write this, it is 11:45 and I have finished the first three items on my list. I’ve even had time to take and post a few pictures, write a few emails, check up on Tumblr and Facebook. Is it because scheduling focused my mind to the point that I was more efficient than usual? Is it that I gave myself more than enough time to do all the things on my list? It only took half an hour to read the last 80 pages of my book, and I don’t know what I was thinking that making/eating breakfast and doing the dishes was going to take 2 hours, but maybe I was factoring in computer play time. I did grapple with myself over whether, at 9:45, I would go into the office to do more straightening and organizing, or whether I would muck about online until 10:30. I opted to head to the office, reminding myself that 2010 was supposed to be my Year of Getting Shit Done.

And getting all this done, especially ahead of schedule, makes me feel so accomplished and lighthearted — I recognize this phenomenon now, thanks to Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project (blogged about here). I also had “blog post” written down on my to do list — I am trying to write something every day now, and not just in short form — and I am pleased with myself that I opted to take my time surplus and use it to write this — the blog post that I hope I will go back to when I need the reminder that first, things don’t always take as much time to do as I think they do; and second, look how good I feel when I get stuff done.

(P.S. It’s now 12:25. I’m still ahead of schedule. Take that, Monday.)

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