It’s a scene all too familiar for MHS students. It’s late at night and you’re trying to finish a Deltamath assignment you started an hour ago. You’ve already decided to complete your English reading on the train on the way to school the next morning, and you’ll dedicate Advisory to do your science homework. You still need to shower and eat dinner, and maybe get a second of free time to unwind.
Oftentimes, you may find yourself wondering: where did all the time go? In between classes, commutes, eating and sleeping, how are we meant to carve out the time to do homework and study? Is it even possible to manage your time properly and still get some time to scroll through social media or watch TV or hang out with your friends?
Maybe.
Two weeks before school started, I scheduled my days down to the minute. Waking up, peeing, brushing my teeth, showering, getting dressed, doing my makeup, hair, eating breakfast, and leaving the house. I scheduled my afternoons, indubitably as well. Getting home, talking to my mom, getting a snack, washing my face, putting pajamas on, homework, reading, homework, dinner, homework, free time, and in bed by 10pm at the latest. Let me reiterate: I scheduled when I would pee.
However through all efforts, I don’t follow this schedule most of the time. I don’t buckle down to do homework at 4:15pm like it suggests, nor do I stop at 5:45pm to destress and relax. The fact of the matter is, the schedule is totally unrealistic. Anything can disorient my normal routine. A homeless person trying to swing at me can delay my commute home by a couple minutes. An emergency debrief session with my friends can easily take more importance than a Crash Course History video. On any given day, there can be reasons upon reasons to not follow a strict schedule, one of them sizely being that I simply don’t want to. And you shouldn’t either.
The solution isn’t fantastical schedules that are impossible to measure up to. Instead, I’ve opted for taking advantage of little windows of time. As short as ten minutes can feel when you’re death scrolling, ten minutes of pure focus can be the difference between a messy room and a clean work space. In ten minutes, I can fill up my water bottle and kick my shoes off and change into my pajamas. I can take my makeup off and wash my face and feel a little more human before I get down to business. If I blast my favorite song, which only lasts two minutes and forty seconds, I can pick my dirty clothes up off the floor and open up my windows to let a breeze in. The trick of it all is that after three minutes of high-speed cleaning, or ten minutes of completing simple tasks, I’m already in work-mode. Though sometimes I am truly, truly exhausted, nine times out of ten, I’ll keep working. If my desk is clean and my water bottle is full of freezing water, doing homework doesn’t seem so impossible.
You will never have a perfect schedule. You will never have time management skills worthy of the gods. What matters is learning the value of the limited time you have, and making life a little bit easier, five minutes at a time.