TCB

Something you may or may not know about me is that I am an obsessive planner. I am always planning, even if I'm doing something else. I can be in the middle of a class at City College (yes, teachers go to school too), and while I'm listening to the professor lecture, I'm also looking at my calendar, planning out the rest of my night, my week, my weekend. In my mind, I'm planning out what to have for dinner, what to pack for lunch the next day, when can I fit in grocery shopping, how will I manage to get a work-out into my day, when I'm going to write that paper, how I'm going to get to my doctor's appointment.

I'm not saying this obsessive planning is a good thing, and you could even say it borders on craziness, but guess what: I get stuff done. I Take Care of Business (TCB). I do what I gotta do to do what I gotta do.

In order to facilitate this obsession, I have a complex system of datebooks, calendars, technological devices, highlighters, special pens, notebooks, and lists. This system I have honed for years, beginning in high school, which was when I discovered that there was no possible way I would manage to juggle homework, classwork, extracurricular activities, plus my family obligations, not to mention a social life. It was too much! It was just too much! Nobody knew what stress I was under! Teachers piled on work upon work, college loomed with its applications and essays, my parents wanted me to clean the bathroom and do the dishes, and my friends and I had big plans having to do with boys and rollercoasters. It was JUST TOO MUCH.

High school was overwhelming, to say the least.

So I started making lists, as a way to manage my anxiety. It seemed like a huge waste of time to be sitting in Spanish, bored out of my skull, when there was SO MUCH TO DO. This was deeply frustrating. Almost insulting. Drumming my pencil on the desktop did not satisfy my need to be DOING SOMETHING. So I started making lists. I began with To Do. That became very, very long. So I separated it into School Work To Do and Personal To Do. That was better. Once I made these lists, I had to decide how I would accomplish all the items on them.

For this I needed a calendar. So I bought a student planner. And thus was my lifelong devotion to planners born. Here was a way to visualize and manage my obligations. I didn't have to be overwhelmed by the pressure of everything I had to do, because I knew I only needed to accomplish 3 things today, and 3 tomorrow, and 3 on Friday, and then I would be through my entire list. As long as I stayed with my plan, I would get it all done.

And mostly, I stayed with my plan. Although there were days when I couldn't resist blowing off my obligations, and days when circumstances kept things from getting done, and I had to re-organize and re-prioritize and re-plan, it was mostly a relief to know there was a plan to follow.

When I hear my students talk about how impossible it is to get their homework done, because there's too much other homework, because their teachers are ODing, because we don't understand what it's like, in my head I'm like SHUT UP YOU WHINER AND GET A STUDENT PLANNER. You can get it all done. You just have to spend a little time planning.

You can print out a student planner template here.

-Ms Webster