Ben: Organizing My Time

The most surprising thing about this year is the fact that I have a lot of “flex-time.” When I wake up in the morning, I get to decide what I work on. Throughout the day, I decide what I want to do. In the evenings, I decide what I want to do.

This has been interesting because I’ve never really had this much time to do my bidding with before. During the year, there’s always been classes, and the summers had jobs and activities.

Needless to say, (except by Uncle Ben), “with great freedom, comes even greater responsibility.” With all this time, I have to figure out what I do with it and, well, use it.

I started out the year with the idea that I would work on a different project each day. This, I figured, would make it easy for me to focus on what I was doing, and would help me insure that I did everything I needed. After trying this for a week or two, I realized that this did not work at all.

No matter how I tried, I couldn’t stay focused on one activity all day, when there were so many other things that I could do. I fought myself to continue doing this for a while, but finally gave up when I realized that I was going against my style.

Now, on any given day, I will work on many different things for varying amounts of time. I might interview someone for one project for a while, and then send an e-mail regarding another. Later, I’ll start working on something new. I have found that this works incredibly well for me.

I must just like the scattered lifestyle.