When Success Can be a Mistake and Why Failure is Like Gold

[Read Time (Total): 5 minutes]

The response I tend to get from people when I tell them I messed up is, “Well, we learn from our mistakes.” Whenever someone says that I give it about a second of thought and put it back in my vault of cliche-but-true remarks.

I’ve taken on a lot in the last three months–more than anyone really should. Click the link to see my average week, for the last three months of this year. I fill in activities retroactively to track time-usage but I have a fair amount of it planned before hand–if something comes up, Outlook allows me to move things around very easily.

It wasn’t an issue of “spreading myself too thin.” This is a very carefully crafted schedule optimized over the course of four weeks to assure the highest quality work I could produce in each area. But there was still a problem…

Your To-Do List: Five Things That Can Change Your Life

[Read Time (Total): 5 minutes]

It’s pretty much programed in the human race that we usually don’t fix the things that are bothering us until we’ve been overwhelmed by them. Problem is, by the time it comes, we’ve put up with the stress of the thing for so long that by the time we can’t stand it anymore, it’s usually too late and something bad has happened. The hard part, it often seems, is telling the difference between what needs to be dealt with now and what just isn’t going to cause a problem. This post will help you stay on track without having to re-examine your entire life.

Here are my top five things you can do to stop yourself from being overrun by forces that feel like they’re out of your control. They relate to life in general and might seem random, but they will strengthen your immunity against stress and help prevent you from feeling overwhelmed.

Productivity Tips and Free Time Management: How to Create a System That Works For You

[Read Time (Just Reading): 14 minutes]
[Read Time (Doing It): 2-6 hours]

(Recommended: Read then set aside half a day)

If there’s one complaint I hear more than any other it’s, “I never have enough time to do everything I want.” Now there are special circumstances for which this is true–taking 21 credits of college classes, interning, studying for the LSAT, and working 40+ hours per week all at the same time, for example–but 95% of  these complaints about not having enough time are actually just a result of a lack of organization. And that’s a good thing because it means you can easily fix it.

I tend to use my own situation for the example in these posts because I use myself as a guinea pig for hundreds of experiments every year to figure out what works and what actually changes behavior. I’m also what I can most accurately measure and it gives me a frame of reference from which to recommend certain strategies–I’m not just obsessed with talking about myself, though you could probably make that argument.

In any case, this subject will be separated into multiple posts because it’s such a huge topic. In this part I will be using my organizational system as an example for you of how to make your own.

My average week consists of:

• A 3.5-day weekend with lots of free time (However, this last term I unfortunately filled this time with work. More on this later.)
• 7-8 hours of sleep per night
• Extremely low stress levels
  
• 12 credit hours of intense 400 level college courses
• 15 hours of studying for school
• 20 hours of work
• 5-10 hours of work for The National Crittenton Foundation (private consulting)
• 10-20 hours devoted to my Conflict Resolution Center internship
• 10 hours spent exercising (spread of 6 days)
• 1-5 hour spent working on blog posts
• 2 hours spent researching productivity strategies/tools

Let me first say that not only is this schedule possible (it IS actually my schedule after all), but it allows for quite a bit of chill-out time and is very low-stress–eliminating stress is the topic of an upcoming post. If you’ve read any of my other articles I apologize for sounding like a broken record but putting together a schedule like this is a moderate amount of work initially but nowhere near the amount you think it will be. In the end it will end up being far less work than you’re putting in now because it will run itself.