Life Beyond a Carefully Timetabled Existence

Sometime during my undergraduate degree, a university student told me and about thirty other students about her secret to achieving perfect grades: Every day, draft a personal timetable comprising everything you intend on doing during the day, along with exactly how long each activity would take. Oh yeah, and stick to it. When it was time for the Q&A session, someone asked her how she factors in distractions. Her answer: By incorporating it into her daily schedule. Yes, there was a time span, maybe about 30 minutes during the day, dedicated just to distractions. She planned. She scheduled. She did. And how had she managed to keep to such a rigid schedule? By just doing it. While this had clearly worked for her and continues to work for a number of people, I couldn’t help but think about other approaches to achieving daily targets. I realized that many people who have more flexible daily schedules still achieve the things they want to. Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, is an example: “I don’t have to do anything in this schedule. Instead Ferriss says, “I choose to do them because I like them.” In relation to this, I’ve observed two things. First, life changes per second. This leaves us with the responsibility of learning how to be flexible to adapt to change as it happens. If your schedule is way too rigid, you may not be able to respond effectively to unpredictable events not captured in your personal timetable. Second, quite a few people only do what spur them in the present moment. As I write this article, I’m probably meant to be researching for my dissertation, but instead, I’m more interested in staring at a blank electronic screen as I fill it with words. I’m only human. So are you. It shouldn’t have to be a big deal if we don’t follow our personal schedules to the last letter. What’s important is how we work with, or around our personal timetables to achieve our desired result. While it’s important that you study, or perhaps that you send those emails or maybe even read a few chapters of that book, it’s also important to be in the right mindset before you do so. But don’t get me wrong. I acknowledge that there are some things that simply have to be done almost immediately, both for your sake and the people around you, however, I believe other things — especially those that relate to personal development like reading articles and listening to podcasts — are best done when you’re in the right frame of mind. Otherwise, you may miss out on a better opportunity during the day to really sink into the experience. Am I really in the mood? We should ask ourselves this more often. Not as a prerequisite for crawling into bed all day and doing absolutely nothing, but as a way of evaluating our thoughts and getting a sense of how our bodies feel in the present moment. Asking yourself this question would help you determine whether or not you’d be more productive doing something else on your daily schedule instead, then coming back to the initial task later. It’s better to have the right energy to approach specific tasks than to risk doing them half-heartedly. Try to recognize that there is no “best way” to do anything, really. One man’s poison is another man’s cure. There are only preferred ways, and still, these can be highly subjective. It all depends on you. Before venturing into the latest personal productivity advice, try to find out what kind of schedule works well for you to see if it can be incorporated. Finally, always do your best to work at your own pace. It’s not about being the best or the most productive. It’s about being better than you were yesterday. “Enlightenment must come little by little — otherwise it would overwhelm.” ― Idries Shah