Managing Perfectionism While Creating Your Ideal Schedule
Don't expect yourself to have a perfect life from day one; you'll be far happier if you approach scheduling as an art to be practiced and improved upon rather than a formula that always gives the correct answer.
By Ceanna Hayes Daniels — March 27, 2023
College campuses are full of thrilling potential opportunities — there are new friends, fascinating classes, and rewarding jobs and volunteer opportunities around every corner. Anything is possible! For high-achievers and perfectionistic students, though, it can start to seem like "anything is possible" means "everything is necessary." However, that's simply not true — plus, trying to force yourself to do everything you're interested in (or feel obligated to add to your résumé) will quickly lead to overwhelm, exhaustion, and anxiety.
Luckily, creating an intentional schedule can help combat such overwhelm, enabling you to confidently take hold of the opportunities you encounter in university without causing burnout. Here are a few tips for managing perfectionism and high expectations as you create a schedule that works for you.
Begin with Reasonable Expectations
Although intentional schedules can be valuable resources, they are not magic spells. As everyone who has tried to schedule their way to a picture-perfect image of productivity and success knows, creating the ideal schedule is not as simple as blocking out a series of activities in your Google Calendar. No matter how perfect your planning seems, life will always throw a curveball and render that planning functionally useless. So why bother creating a schedule? The answer is that schedules remain valuable tools if they're used with healthy expectations for your performance.
Many of us need to revise our expectations to use a schedule well. Discarding the notion that every day of our lives can adhere to some external notion of a hyper-productive "perfect day" is an indescribably valuable first step — not only to developing an actually useable schedule but also to improving our relationship with productivity in the long run. As you approach the concept again today, allow yourself to realize that "creating the ideal schedule" does not mean locking yourself into some unforgiving, stagnant system. On the contrary, it means gradually refining and revising a flexible structure that works for you rather than against you, promotes work-life balance, and changes based on your needs in a given semester (or even in a given week or day) rather than remaining inflexible and unusable.
Let It Work for You, Not Against You
It can be easy to reserve the term "ideal schedule" for a schedule that matches someone else's presentation of a productive day — for example, waking up at 5 AM to hit the gym with a smile and a green smoothie. But if your plans mimic someone else's life rather than improve your own, they won't help you create the life you want. Mimicking can actually keep you from reaching your goals by making you feel obligated to complete a litany of tasks that don't improve your life and may not even relate to your priorities.
Rather than basing your personal "ideal schedule" on your impression of someone else's, ask yourself what you want to accomplish and base your schedule on those goals. Remember, your day doesn't need to look like anyone else's, for it improves your life; it just has to work for you.
Prioritize Work-Life Balance
It can be easy to glorify overwork in pursuit of the "ideal schedule," cramming your day full of activities you feel obligated to participate in and work you feel required to complete. But if you spend every spare minute studying, you'll find tasks taking longer and longer because you just don't have the focus or energy to complete them. In the same way, if you consistently pull all-nighters, you'll find yourself falling asleep in class and struggling to retain the information you stayed up all night to memorize. Even if stealing time from yourself seems strategic initially, it will rapidly reveal itself to be both unproductive and harmful. Being too busy to build friendships and prioritize your health is harmful and not part of the college experience, so schedule breaks for your mind and your body — before they do it for you through physical illness or deteriorating mental health.
As counter-productive as it may seem to a recovering perfectionist, prioritizing rest is crucial and will make you more productive in the long run. Taking a break and allowing yourself to rest and recharge will enable you to approach your goals with a clearer mind and increased energy, allowing you to use your time more effectively to accomplish what matters to you. Sleep isn't the only form of rest discussed here — meaningful social activities, like coffee with a good friend, can also provide crucial "brain breaks" to overworked students. In addition to these short-term benefits, routinely devoting intentional time to community-building will be enormously rewarding in the long run by helping you to find lifetime friends and mentors. Similarly, setting aside time daily or weekly to work towards personal goals will help you feel fulfilled outside of your classwork, improving your mental health and helping you to avoid conflating your grades with your own worth.
Allow Your Schedule to Adapt to Your Needs and Goals
Those just beginning to see the value in pursuing a work-life balance often find it difficult to shake the habit of doing what they think they "should" be doing at that moment rather than pausing to ask what is best for their overall well-being. But newcomers are not alone in this; even seasoned planners and schedulers may find themselves beginning to work for their schedules rather than having their schedules work for them. At any moment when you begin to feel that you're blindly adhering to a burdensome to-do list, revisit your schedule — for the day, week, month, or semester — and ask yourself why you're prioritizing the things you are.
A quick check-in often reveals multiple areas you can adjust to better reflect your priorities and improve your work-life balance. For example, a three-hour study block might become two shorter study sessions with a walk in between to give your brain time to recharge and create time in your afternoon for some exercise.
Refuse to Micromanage Your Own Time
It can be tempting to try to maximize our productivity by squeezing work out of every spare minute — particularly when motivation is high, or adrenaline is rampant, like at the start of a new day (before classes, homework, or email have had a chance to sap all your spare energy) or during exam season (when looming deadlines inspire panicked activity). However, assigning a task to every minute of the day sets you up for failure, not success. With a minute-by-minute schedule, any change in plans will derail your entire day; even something as small and welcome as a fifteen-minute conversation with a friend can send your carefully-curated schedule into chaos, leaving you undone to-dos and swathes of unnecessary guilt.
Rather than expecting to perfectly anticipate every eventuality — opening yourself up to inevitable disappointment when you don't — reduce your stress by refusing to micromanage your own time. Give yourself a larger block of time to complete a task than you think you'll need, and be sure to include blocks of time for self-care and socializing so that you not only seize the opportunity to make memories with friends but also prioritize overall well-being.
Remember, you will not create your ideal schedule instantly — and you don't need to. Over your time in university, you'll improve your schedule and gradually become more and more confident that you are managing your time in a way that works for you. Don't expect yourself to have a perfect life from day one; you'll be far happier if you approach scheduling as an art to be practiced and improved upon rather than a formula that always gives the correct answer.
Ceanna Hayes Daniels
Ceanna Hayes Daniels is freelance writer and editor. In 2022, she graduated Hillsdale College summa cum laude with a degree in politics. In her free time, she continues to enjoy studying philosophy, political theory, and literature. She and her husband live in Michigan, where the two enjoy perusing bookstores together for new books and old records.
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