Chapter 14 Staying on Schedule

At 1:15 p.m., your physics teacher announces there will be a test on the last two chapters during fifth period on Thursday next week. You make a mental note: Gotta remember to study for that! Now you are locked in, good to go, right?

Not exactly. By making that mental note, you created a new pattern of neurons in your brain; however, the electromagnetic pulses, or synapses, that connect those neurons fire randomly and quickly, as many as fifty times a second. The pattern that made up the mental note may exist in your brain for as little as one-fiftieth of a second before those neurons begin firing off about something more interesting, like meeting your friends for frozen yogurt after school.

For a memory to anchor itself, that pattern of neurons must be repeatedly reinforced. If you reminded yourself as you were leaving class, Gotta remember, last two chapters fifth period on Thursday next week, it would be a little more committed to memory than before. And if, while you were enjoying frozen yogurt with your friends, you all discussed the upcoming test, that would be even more helpful. If you made it your practice to systematically re-create neural patterns in your brain for every task that awaits you in the hours, days, weeks, and months ahead, you would indeed have everything locked down and good to go. You’d also be a very unusual person.

When you think about studying for that physics test next week, and you imagine the week ahead—seven twenty-four-hour days—it seems like a vast empty prairie with plenty of room to roam. Your natural thought is I’ve got all the time in the world.

Every modern teen, procrastinator or not, needs the help of an external guide, a reliable timeline where you can literally see that which you cannot picture in your head—where you stand in time. Although this guide can be in the form of a day planner or a wall or pocket calendar, in this chapter I’m going to focus on the turbocharged timeline you probably hold in your hand dozens of times a day: the calendar app on your smartphone. When you cannot keep mental track of all the your tasks and deadlines—and who can possibly do that?—the calendar app is indispensable.

Because we cannot possibly imagine an entire week of activity in our heads all at once, without an external visual timeline we cannot accurately judge how much time is available to us for any given task. To avoid the all-the-time-in-the-world illusion, enter all your commitments—not just the difficult tasks—into your calendar. With your classes, extracurricular activities, social plans, trips, and even personal downtime blocked out on your calendar in advance, whenever a difficult task appears, you can see at a glance which time blocks are still available to you. Then when you open your calendar app to schedule that study session for your physics test, you’ll see a different image from what you saw in your head. It will look less like a prairie and more like a few scattered fields.

You can make your calendar do amazing tricks by following this simple protocol:

Step 1: Create a timeline.

I encourage you to take the twenty minutes or so to create a timeline on your calendar app. Nail down your prior commitments now, before you address any difficult tasks. Without knowing what time is available for future work sessions, you cannot plan for them accurately.

Step 2: Define your deadline.

Let’s assume now that you have your timeline completed, and we’ll return to your physics class. You are ready to define your deadline. At your first opportunity, open your calendar app and enter the date and time of the quiz. To make certain it isn’t overlooked, select the classification “Highest Priority,” which shows up in red. So far, so good.

Step 3: Schedule your sessions.
Next, make a quick evaluation of how long you’ll need to study for the quiz. Depending on your present grasp of the material, that estimate will vary, but for the purposes of demonstration, let’s say an hour and a half. Once you’ve got that, you’re ready to schedule your sessions. Because physics is a tough subject for many, perhaps you’ll want to allow yourself three thirty-minute sessions of study, spread out over the week. If you’ve prepared your timeline faithfully, you’ll be able to see at a glance what your scheduling choices are. Let’s imagine 8:00–8:30 p.m. on Sunday, 7:00–7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, and 8:00–8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, the day before the test. If you follow through by studying during those times, you can feel confident you’ll do well on the test. This confidence is evidence of the mastery you are developing over procrastination. Enjoy it!

Step 4: Set alerts.

Of course, when the time for those study sessions rolls around, plenty of new opportunities will arise that could distract you from them. To help you stay on schedule, take a moment to set alerts. I recommend at least two for each session: one ten minutes before each session (to give you time to prepare a workspace and eliminate distractions) and a second to signal the actual start.

While this may sound like an extra step to some of you, setting alerts delivers a lot of bang for your buck. With your calendar app set with functioning alerts, you have, in effect, a loyal friend providing an essential service for you that you cannot do yourself: keeping track of time. When action is required on a task, no matter what else you’re engaged in, your app will give you a nudge, reminding you of the task you’ve decided to own.

Knowing you will get an alert to remind you what you want to get done, and when you want to do it, gives you the freedom to not think about it all the time. Instead of monitoring your calendar every hour or so to see what’s coming up, you can relax in the moment, knowing that your calendar app has your back.

Calendar Sharing

If there were such a thing as an extra step in calendar protocol, it would be step 5: Share your calendar. I classify it as optional because it’s most useful for pleasers. The pleaser’s weakness is that you are so unwilling to risk making others unhappy—sometimes even strangers—that you postpone your own needs to please them. When time inevitably runs out, although your social connections are intact, you’ve failed to maintain another, more important connection. There is literally no time left to connect with yourself.

The calendar app is the go-to tool to counter your tendency to give away the time you need to meet your own needs and goals. When you designate a block of time on your calendar for you, it’s a visual reminder that it is not to be spent keeping others happy. It’s a clear and definite space in time that you have claimed for yourself and are willing to defend. And defend it you must. To illustrate, let’s look at how Athena solved one of her difficulties with staying on schedule.

Athena’s student council and club meetings, cheerleader practices, and column for the school newspaper take up a lot of time, and her working parents sometimes need help with grocery shopping and driving her brother to swim practice, not to mention her boyfriend, who can be needy. Those activities are all about maintaining Athena’s social connections, and when they are accounted for, there’s precious little space left on her calendar for what Athena needs to do to take care of herself. If she wants to learn to play the guitar, for example, she knows she’ll need to not only plan time for it but also defend that time from the distraction of others’ needs and requests.

For the pleaser, setting boundaries that keep loved ones out, however necessary for your own personal happiness, feels rude. You want your friends and family to somehow stay connected with you, even when you’re not interacting with them. After all, you’re going to need their cooperation for your new attitude to be sustainable. To enlist your friends and family in your new effort to make time for yourself, I recommend the most important tool for the pleaser: the shared calendar.

Every calendar app gives you the ability to invite others to see, within their own app, whatever events you choose for them to see. For example, when Athena wants an hour every Wednesday night between 9:00 and 10:00 to watch her favorite TV show, she enters that time block as a repeating event and designates it as part of a shared calendar called What’s up with Athena. The people most likely to distract her during that time block now have a clear indicator that she has, in effect, invited them not to disturb her. They are also, in a subtle way, being included in Athena’s plans.

Even those Athena has not invited to her shared calendar can be enlisted to help her take care of herself. If Athena is involved in a group activity, and an alert goes off from her smartphone, when she pulls it out and says, “Guitar practice. Sorry, gotta go!” everybody gets it. Somehow that beeping alert makes her withdrawal from the group feel less to her like she’s rejecting them—and less to them like a rejection.

With her hobbies, schoolwork, and relaxation time all nailed down on her shared calendar, Athena is beginning to feel a little more authentic as a person every day. Sometimes her What’s up with Athena commitments do disappoint others, but Athena is discovering that disappointing others does not necessarily result in getting rejected by them. When others are disappointed by her, they inevitably recover.

Doubling Your Estimate

One of the biggest traps a calendar user can fall into is underestimating how much time you’ll need to complete a task. Warriors like Emily, due to their distorted perception of time passing, have difficulty predicting how long they need to complete tasks that aren’t engaging.

If Emily guessed that studying for an hour would get her a B on a quiz, she knew from experience that it could wind up taking longer. She could pack a lot of action into an hour of gaming or rock climbing, but studying for tests would feel like swimming in molasses. For warriors, or any type of procrastinator who has difficulty concentrating, I recommend the Double Your Estimate Rule. Whatever amount of time you think it will take, double it.

For Emily, that meant two hours of studying—gulp! She knew she couldn’t handle studying that much in one session, so she entered four half-hour study sessions on her calendar. After setting alerts for each, she knew she was prepared and in complete ownership of the task.

When the warrior gets engaged with the calendar app, doubling the time allowed for tasks you need to accomplish, even your most forgettable tasks will get done.

Does maintaining an accurate calendar sound like more work? It is. However, it comes under the category of working smarter, not harder. Leveraging technology empowers you to be more efficient and productive, whatever your pursuit. And nothing is more stressful and time-consuming than scrambling at the last minute to make up for lack of planning. Try using your calendar and see how it works for you!

You can download the directions for using a calendar to help you stay on schedule at http://www.newharbinger.com/35876.

The tools I’ve introduced thus far are all designed to help you stay focused on the process, not the outcome, of facing challenging tasks. The ideal outcome, of course, is that the task you need to do gets done and you can move forward. But life is seldom that neat, regardless of how well intentioned or hardworking we are. In the next two chapters, we’ll look at some of the obstacles that may arise, and how to move forward no matter what happens.