Law Students

Scheduling

I have never been good at organizing my time in any realistic fashion. I generally just sit down and do the work I have to do, in no particular order and without deliberately chunking tasks.

For the remainder of this semester?the remainder of my law school career?that is not going to fly. I have The Task to finish^[1] as well as some lingering journal duties, and the MPRE to prepare for, and clinic work, and class work for that last law school class.

The other day, Coleslaw posted a link to Study Hacks, about scheduling one’s writing. I needed that post So Much, it’s not even funny. The whole concept of not sitting down and trying to write for interminable amounts of time?of writing without an end in sight?was revelatory for me. I don’t know that that’s what Study Hacks was necessarily going for, but that’s what I took from it.

So I’ve started scheduling my day around my tasks in manageable chunks. Instead of looking at my day and saying, “I’m going to work on X till I’m done with it and then Y if I have time,” I’m saying, “I’m going to sit and write for three hours, from 9 to noon, and then I’m going to work on this other thing until 4, and then I’m going to the gym, no matter where I am in the progress of working on these things.”

Granted, sometimes that won’t work. Sometimes I’ll have to take the tail end of a project and just go finish it, no matter how long it takes. But there are very few projects on my plate right now for which I can’t accurately predict how long that finishing process will take. (Ew, that grammar is icky.) I’m feeling less stressed about working because I am less uncertain about how things will get done. They’ll get done in three- and four-hour chunks. That’s how.

With that, I’m off to walk the dog and have lunch before I jump into the afternoon.

1. I know, I haven’t been writing much about The Task. Maybe I’ll start doing that as a way of organizing my thoughts. Maybe I won’t, since I’m still pretty sure I have no idea what I’m talking about. ↩

Full post as published by Divine Angst on February 21, 2008 (boomark / email).