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Most people mean well when they decide to make a schedule. You might figure that, well,
you're heading off to university so it's time to make a clean start. You're determined not
to let habits that tripped you up in the past stop you from succeeding now. Sleeping late,
spending too much time checking out friends' facebook pages, or putting off starting assignments,
you might ell yourself, will no longer be a problem. All you have to do is make a REALLY
good schedule... So, you sit down and plan your new life: you
decide that each day, you'll set the alarm for 5 a.m., get up, and head out for a run
by no later than, say, 5:30. When you get back, you'll shower, have a healthy breakfast,
and put in an hour of reading, writing, or working on problem sets. You'll plan to arrive
at the university library no later than 9 o'clock. It looks pretty good on paper. And
it might even work for a week... or two. But, inevitably, old ways will settle like dust:
if you've never consistently gotten up before 10 in the morning, it's unlikely that you're
going to start now. It's pretty certain that there will come a time when you don't get
to bed until 4 in the morning...if at all, ...or you'll wake up at 5 and realize that
you've caught a terrible head cold, ... or it's raining out, so you can't go for a run
anyway, or...well, you get the idea. You'll turn off the alarm, turn over in bed, and
tell yourself that you'll start following your schedule after Thanksgiving, or when
the clocks go back, or at the end of the November break or... It's easy to imagine some time
in the future when you'll finally get your act together and be a new, more perfect version
of yourself. You see, the problem with putting together
schedules this way is that you're probably not going to make a schedule for the person
you ARE, you're going to make a schedule for the person you REALLY WANT TO BE. And these
two people are, sadly, rarely one and the same. Does that mean that schedules just don't
work for most people? No, it just means that you should make a schedule for yourself only
after you've first tracked how you actually spend your time. By keeping a Time Log for
a week or two, in which you record your best--& worst--times for reading, writing, solving
math problems, exercising, sleeping & just hanging out, you can plan how you'll use your
time in an intentional way so that you end up with a schedule that will fork for YOU...
And you know what? When that happens, you'll discover that you've become the person you
really want to be.