AGH! Schedules Just Blow

I’ve always loved making schedules, mainly because of the feeling I get when I imagine everything going exactly as planned, but also because of the great probability of actually accomplishing everything after laying out my goals within a reasonable timeframe – in other words, the anticipation of doing away with all my reasons to cram. I remember the time I got my new Starbucks planner, and I couldn’t wait to fill up the pages with checklists. As luck (or was it truly?) would have it, two consecutive hell weeks were right after that week, and I wrote down the expected deadlines of projects and homework on the smooth paper. Never having to cram was an exciting prospect for me: no more all-nighters! I don’t have to study continuously! I rushed into Monday with a positive outlook.

Eventually, those two weeks passed: Friday came, and the weekend started – but the thing is, I never got to carry out all of my elaborate plans. Why?

First of all, the divisions between the days were far apart, so there was a lot of space on the page allocated to each day for a truckload of things-to-do. I was lazy when I got home on that first Monday, so I figured that I could move some of what wasn’t due the next day to Tuesday night – some of which included a part of what I was supposed to study for this test; a fraction of that project, a consultation with so-and-so teacher. On the next day, I was tired and sleepy, so there was nothing else I could do – I’d cram what I needed to do during break tomorrow, and move the rest to Wednesday. Wednesday night came, and I was still lackadaisical as ever, so I shifted the requirements to Thursday; and so on, and so forth.

That’s the vicious cycle that procrastination pulls you into: stay up late; do nothing the next day because you can’t concentrate due to lack of sleep; stay up even later because you did nothing the whole day; fall asleep the next… really, at that point, you can struggle all you like, but the monotony will still make you feel like a mindless robot. Slowly but surely, the consequences of the cycle will build up, as it did one day when I found myself with a landslide of requirements, accompanied by the impossibility of getting decent grades while doing nothing. It’s quite sad, really – an entire night’s worth of sleep screwed up my long-term aims.

So what if I did work that night? What if I was really committed, and I was able to accomplish everything? Good for me, then! But just to pop that idealistic bubble, life doesn’t exactly go the way you plan it to: in fact, it never does. The cycle I told you about a while ago is, in actuality, devoid of all other outside interferences. Even with the scenario of my faithfulness to my agenda, what if, say, one of my clubs announced a meeting after school? That meeting would cause me to have to be fetched a full two hours later than usual, which would have wrecked my timetable, not to mention drain my energy. Or what if my mom suddenly told me that I had to go to this dinner (which happens a lot, really)? I’d get out of school at a normal time, but dinner would take about three hours, after which all the food would make me sleepy – and who can concentrate with a blurry mind?

Going back to the double-death weeks, I realize that my schedule was not as flexible as it should’ve been. At first glance, everything was laid out sensibly, but there existed this lack of allowance for anything – no plan B; no troubleshooting in the case of an emergency or a change of plans. But when I thought about it, even if I had allotted some free time for flexibility, I’d still not be able to do everything. My tendency to goof off, coupled with unexpected events, would destroy the comfort zone that sticking to my schedule creates for me.

Despite all of this, I don’t mean to say that schedules are a bad thing. In fact, they tell you what you need to do, and that’s great for forgetful people like me. It’s just that the moment a crack appears, your leaning on them will finally push through, and everything will crumble – the surge of panic that follows afterward is definitely not going to help, either, which just proves that relying on them completely is not going to work.

On a lighter note, it’s great to do things in advance when the circumstances allow you to – and when your schedule is versatile (as opposed to mine; it’s strangely difficult for me to make anything other than the obsessive-compulsive ones), you can get away with it. That’s one tactic you can employ to live with schedules, but as for me?

Goodbye, Starbucks planner.

- Andrea Alegre