Since beginning my semester away from college, I have been going through a massive restructuring period. Among many things, I no longer have anyone dictating my schedule. Rather, I must simply make enough money to provide for myself and work diligently towards my six-month and greater goals. Charting this new reality (which all will face when they leave school) has confronted me with the fact that work expands to the time available. And to solve this, I use nothing other than mathematics.
n / a = i
This formula relates an individual’s working intensity (i), number of tasks to complete (n), and time available to complete them (a). For example, if the number of tasks is small and the time available is large, then the required intensity is low, and vice versa.
Now before discussing the difference of the formula applied to school and adult life, I would like to clarify the levels of working intensity. First, each person has an optimum intensity level, or focus, where they have consistent high-quality outputs. This optimum level is different for different people. Some people thrive in high-pressure situations where they have much to complete before a looming deadline, and some don’t. With this, working intensity is on a spectrum. On the low end of this spectrum, work may be characterized as distracted or pushed off until later with procrastination. On the opposite end, work is characterized as stressful and leads to fatigue. Both of these states lead to low-quality output. Also, funnily, low intensity work in the form of procrastination leads to high intensity work such as last-minute cramming. This is not a recipe for high-quality output.
Connecting back to the formula, school set the number of tasks and time available to complete the tasks for me. With two known values, all I had to do was complete the task at the intensity level that was required of myself to meet the strict deadline. This was easy to do.
On the other hand, outside of school I must define all of these variables. To do this, I have my long-term goals which I break into weekly and daily sub-goals. This necessitates gauging my average working intensity to understand how long tasks should take and then setting a deadline for myself. I find it very hard to set accurate deadlines. For example, I have pushed the deadline back for my upcoming book so many times. This largely stems from me learning how to write a book by writing a book, and not knowing how long individual items take to complete like revising a 80 page manuscript.
The ability to constantly push deadlines back, creating essentially no deadline, has caused two issues for me. First, my working intensity can diminish greatly with no perceived deadline. It is easy to get distracted and procrastinate. Personally, I can get distracted by the minutiae of my work because of my perfectionist tendencies and procrastinate on making real progress. This is highlighted by the fact that when I am working independently I am not held accountable by anyone to complete tasks in a timely manner. No one is going to dock my grade for finishing a project late. Without enforced deadlines, I am neither rewarded or punished when I complete a task. My work expands to the seemingly infinite time available, and I struggle to make urgent progress.
To solve this, I copy school. I continue to work on enforcing my deadlines with a system of rewards and punishments. For example, if I finish my blog article by Friday night, then I can go snowboarding Saturday. And if I don’t, I will spend Saturday inside writing. I know what I want to do.
In closing, to anyone looking to achieve your independent goals: build the structure of school around your values. Or as serial entrepreneur and philosopher Isaac Morehouse states, “The need for structure in an individual life is too important for it to come from somewhere else.”