Why structure matters
For my own projects, I’ve always worked on what I want, when I want. This blog is a product of that. I felt with my last blog on Medium that I was limited. I had to release things once a month, and not when I felt like writing. That felt horrible, and it felt like a chore. It was a burden, something I had to update or else. And it became so bad that I ended up quitting the account altogether. Something I loved, that I found fun and exciting, became overwhelming and useless to me within 3 months. How is that fair to me?
It isn’t, and it certainly isn’t healthy, either.
I’ve always struggled with setting boundaries between myself and my projects. I used to push well into the late night, early morning with everything I was doing. In my defense, I was excited. I became consumed by the work I was putting in. I saw results, good results, and wanted to keep pushing. There was a lot to be happy about. But there came a time where I had to realize the amount of stress I was putting on myself was too much.
The pandemic put more stress on me with this and I had to take action. At the time, school went online suddenly, I was working on my own projects, and I barely found time for self care. I wasn’t even sure what “self care” was anymore. But I knew it wasn’t something I was doing for myself. Thus, I reached out to one of our school psychologists (at the time) and with some help, The Schedule was born.
The Schedule was primarily built for online school work, obviously. There was time set aside in my day for classes, emails (yep, so many emails that it needed its own hour in my day), and of course: asynchronous work. I’m someone who needs structure, so when this started to help me a lot with school, I started to adapt it to my own projects and workflow outside of online school. So I did. And I’ve kept it for over a year now. This schedule has evolved as things have, obviously. I don’t check my school email at home anymore because I don’t have to, I’m in-person again, and will be until I graduate in two weeks. I follow a new schedule, so I made a new one to reflect the change.
It’s simple. I don’t use any exact timing (no “this thing at 2pm, this thing tomorrow at 8:30am,” none of that.) I only have day ranges and a general amount of time to spend on each thing. It is, as follows:
Monday-Thursday
- ~5 hours of classes
- ~1 hour (personal) email time
- ~1 hour of downtime
- One hour of writing
- 45 minutes of winding down
Friday
- ~5 hours of classes
- ~1 hour of downtime
- ~1 hour (personal) email time
- 3-6+ hours on Discord with friends
- One hour of writing
Saturday-Sunday
- 3-6+ hours on Discord with friends
- ~2 hours of downtime
- Two hours of writing
Anything I want to work on outside of this set schedule needs to wait until the next day. I write the ideas down somewhere and do them later. Think of this like a to-do list, but everything is set up with a specific time limit. Self care is important. Processing is important. Time is important. I know this pandemic has taken our sense of time away, as if there is no limit, but trust me: that isn’t true.
Structure matters, and here’s why: the feelings of being overwhelmed, anxious, terrified to work, stressed, burnt out… it’s all too real. It’s often ignored, and it shouldn’t be. Mental health is just as important as physical health. Something you’re passionate about shouldn’t be a chore. It should be fun, with the right amount of difficulty, not “this isn’t fun for me anymore.”
You should be able to do what you want, when you want. And the right amount of structure can make that happen.