Structure and Schedule in Your Life: Friend and Foe (But More Friend)

I maintain that having a strong structure to your life is extremely important. I believe it is important to have rules which you live by, along with proper management of your time. If you fail to follow this practice, it’s very easy to become increasingly disorganized. This general disorganization also has a tendency to spread, causing disorganization and chaos in other areas in your life and in the lives of those around you. Don’t believe me? I’ll give you two examples. The first is if you only sporadically clean your house – it grows increasingly messy and dirty, and can eventually even make you sick. Becoming sick can then in turn adversely affect your work by preventing you from going. Or imagine your friend is counting on you to fulfill a responsibility such as preparing for a party. If you don’t fulfill this responsibility, the party might not be as good, or might not even happen – which would be your responsibility.

So you see, structure is very important in identifying and managing your responsibilities. The way I handle this is to keep a calendar, in which I write all of my time commitments. I have my class schedule in there, along with the times in which I am working. With this calendar I also have a list of objectives to complete in my free time. First and foremost are necessary preparations for future time commitments (usually homework or preparation for work). Following that is independent study and exercise. After that, I can use the remainder of my time as I see fit – TV, games, or pleasure reading. Sometimes I use this time to prepare further, if I know big commitments loom on the horizons. But the greatest thing about this is that when I start relaxing, I have a strong sense of accomplishment and I can relax more completely.

There is one danger with structure: it can eliminate your spontaneity. I maintain that it is very important to on occasion do something fun, interesting, or completely unexpected (preferably all three). The danger of over budgeting your time is that you can eventually remove any flexibility with which to vary your life. Your life might be very stable, but it will quickly become very boring; and boring is dangerous. Imagine if you only ate one cup of rice a day and only drank water. You might be extremely healthy, but your happiness will suffer as a result of your diet. You have to have a certain degree of variety in order to keep yourself mentally healthy and refreshed.

So in conclusion the answer is moderation. It is healthy to budget your time, and can lead to many good and intelligent decisions. But taking this to an extreme can negatively impact your state of mind. But give it a go – try maintaining a schedule for a month. I think you’ll like the changes it makes to your life!

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