curiousgirl's playground

A few of my college friends (girls mostly) like to make pretty color-coded versions of their daily schedules (classes, work, etc.), and many post them on their dorm walls. Though it makes sense to do one for classes, meetings, work, and the like, I never understood why people would refine it to the point where they'd schedule time to do homework, go to the gym, eat, go to church, etc. I always thought this was restricting. After all, don't schedules change all the time? Why constrain yourself? One of my friends even told me she doesn't actually -follow- her schedule, which made me think it was even more worthless.

Lately, however, I've had a change of opinion.

Perhaps creating a "routine" is like goal-setting but on a finer, micro scale. You can get more accomplished with your day by creating and -following- a schedule. The key here of course is to hold yourself accountable for your actions. For starters, I want to develop an early morning routine (See below). I'm going to try this experiment over the next month and evaluate the results.

Here are a few links of interest:

• Jim Critin's Tapping the Power of Your Morning Routine: Apparently, 80% of the surveyed top CEOs and executives wake up before 5:30am each day. (No, I don't intend on waking up quite that early but very early for the normal college student ;p - like 7am.) I found this article courtesy of Brad Feld's post on his morning routine.
• Steve Pavlina's posts on "How to become an early riser" Part I and Part II: Waking up early has allowed Steve to gain an extra 10-15 hours per week.

New strategy of getting things done: Dave Cheong also writes about the notion of time boxing, "fixing the time we have available to work on a given task and then doing the best we can within that time frame. So instead working on something until it is 'done' in one sitting, we only work on it for say 30 mins. It is either marked as one at the end of this period or we commit to another 30 mins at a later time or another day." This makes perfect sense. People have short attention spans. As a college senior, I can't even sit through 1.5 hr of lecture anymore, depending upon the class, of course. In fact, for classes I don't care about (i.e. have no true interest in the subject), I don't actually go to class and prefer to read the textbook on my own. It's much more efficient and better use of my time.

technorati tags: getting things done, waking up early, routine, goal setting