So, one of the things that I have been trying to do quite recently is inculcating a lot of planning into my life. Over the years, even since I started my productivity journey, I have tried to plan my years, weeks, and days. I have also tried a lot of things to ensure that I stick to the plans that I make for myself, making use of sticky notes to write down the plans, flashcards, full physical journals, and even got a few pages off a journal that I saw online, geared specifically towards college students.

There was even a time that I put my academic plans as the home screen wallpaper on my phone, just to ensure that they were the first things that I saw the moment I set my eyes on, and during the period that I was making use of flashcards, since the clothes that I used to wear had no pockets, I found myself slipping them into the pouch of my phone so that I could walk around with them in hand, although sometimes, I ended up forgetting that they were even there, to begin with.

I have also tried to use fun names for my plans, like calling them plans of attack, implementation intentions, missions, goals, ‘what to do’ etc. I even made, to ensure that I did not slack off from my duties, a ‘not to do’ list, listing out things that I did not want to do in excess, like spending too much time on social media and the television and the likes.

Over the years, however, I have also discovered something about myself. I hate planning. Like, absolutely hate it. Most of the time, I have a rough sketch of a plan on what my day would be like but putting it on paper is a hassle for me. That may stem from the fact that I am dealing with the issue of overburdening myself with tasks that I do not end up being able to complete before the end of the day and then ending up feeling guilty about that fact. And as everyone may know, there is a clear difference between just feeling guilty over plans that were made in one’s mind and actually writing something down and having a reference as to how unproductive you have been.

Nevertheless, I usually try my best to write my plans early in the morning, which is what is advisable, of course. But the problem is, at that point, due to the fact that I am a morning person, I am rejuvenated, feel alive, and I have no idea of the vitiating factors that may come into my life, and that may end up resulting in my day being so warped that I would not be able to finish the tasks that I have set out for myself.

That has been a problem for me at this period of time. At this point, the federal universities in Nigeria are on strike and so I have left my private residence in school and I am back to staying with my parents. And if there is one thing that I can say, it is that it is so much easier to plan one’s day and stick to those plans when one is in school than when one is at home. In school, the timetable has already made your day pretty organized and all that is left is to chip in some more things that you would like to do in between or after the set structure of the school timetable. You also know what extracurriculars that you would be engaged in, and know almost exactly how your day would go. Your day going completely awry from what you have organized is something that happens very rarely.

But when at home, I wake up each morning, the day being a completely blank slate, having completely no idea what may pop in, what tasks I may be expected to do, what emergencies may pop in that may demand my time, and that tends to make me spend so much time planning the day, only to then end up at the end of the day, completely disoriented, and having no idea how time and things that came up managed to completely swallow up my time.

For instance, I came home yesterday after church planning to actually create a blog post. But the moment I stepped into the house, my mother decided that we had to engage in spring cleaning because it was almost Easter and that we would be having visitors coming very soon.

That was all that it took to completely mess up my day. By the time I was done with the cooking and the cleaning, it was late in the afternoon and I was feeling so exhausted that I went to the first bed I could find, lay my head on it, and had the longest siesta that I have had in a very long period of time. And then, by the time that I got up, I had an online meeting that I had to attend in the evening which I had to attend whilst both preparing another cooking and also doing another typing. I had no time at all to do any academic reading, read any of the self-help books that I usually try to read daily, and no time to even begin writing any blog post. So yeah, yesterday, I really did not accomplish much, although I have to say that the house is completely set for the Easter celebration that is to begin by Thursday.

Although I have to say that not all days are like that, there are a lot of days that tend to be like that for me at home. However, I have had glorious days, especially during the time when my siblings were at school, and I was not sent out to do anything, when I could spend all the time I wanted seating at my desk and doing all the work that I wish to. But when I have days like that, it really is a frustrating experience, and most of the time, the thought of the fact that there could be other things coming up that could potentially ruin all plans that I have set out for the day, is enough for me to lose all motivation that I have to even set out the time to plan it.

But, a lot of the time, I still force myself to do so, and there are a lot of reasons why I do that:

1. Have you ever had this feeling, when you wake up a fresh morning, only to realize that you had managed to be a day past the deadline of an essay competition that you have been researching and planning to write on, or that you had been planning to write an application to join a particular club or organization or some internship and you had just managed to miss the deadline for that? And then you end up feeling guilty and angered with yourself because you knew that you had planned and wished to write the essay and join the organization or participate in the internship and you cannot believe that you were stupid enough to miss something as important as that?

I have and it sucks. I have felt that feeling so many times that I got completely tired of it. That was the main reason why I began writing plans for the week, writing important applications that I needed to fill, plus writing down the dates of their deadline because I have realized that most of the time, just taking a screenshot of the flier and saving it in my gallery, even under a separate folder, titled ‘things to work on’ is hardly enough to get me going on the tasks.

And then after that, when writing the things that I have set out to do for the day, I carefully chip in times in which to work on the tasks at hand, because if I do not, I have found that I tend to stay up till 11:50 pm, sweating and hoping that the internet works for me as I ram down on the keyboard. And if you are like me and have had days just like this, especially here in Nigeria, then you should know that these days are the exact points in time in which the internet decides to turn against you, and decides to mess up till it is like, 12:04 the next day.

I hate days in which I feel disorganized and have to work last minute to get things done, things that I had all the time in the world to get done previously, or even do not have the chance to put in that last-minute work because I have managed to jerk out of my bed by like 4:00 am the next day.

So planning is not one of my favourite things to do, but I hate missing out on opportunities even more than I hate planning. So I silence all the cries of the limbic system in my body, pushing me to start the day with no plans and flow with the waves, and actually get the planning done.

2. Academic planning may be the only form of planning that I find tolerable, and may even enjoy doing. Maybe it is because I do so during the time that I have the most control of my days. Or maybe it is due to the fact that I have set out a sort of planning that works for me.

Unlike what most conventional books and academic advisers teach, I do not have some sort of timetable that I set for the day, because I have tried such and it just does not work for me. I have realized that it is almost impossible for me to stick to a timetable that sets out the subjects to read and time to be dedicated to reading for it for an entire semester, because the likelihood is that I may only go ahead with what I have set out for myself like 10% of the time, not by choice, but because of the certain things that tend to pop up during the school days, just like quizzes or competitions or meetings that may tend to make me deviate from time to time.

So what I do is that instead, I set weekly academic goals for myself, highlighting the sections of the textbook that I would like to study and beginning the week from Monday, so that if there is anything that forces me not to meet my goals during the weekdays, I can finish it on the weekend. Then I make a list of all the topics that I have for each course of study, tabulating and making three sections for each of the subjects that I plan to deal with i.e. read, notes, and cases learned (law student stuff). And then if I am done with each of them, I give a tick mark, and hence it is very easy for me to see how far I have progressed with my studying. And I find it very easy to challenge myself to do more by the time that I tabulate my academics like that.

3. Have you ever had the feeling, like, just randomly in the middle of the day, like you do not know what to do, whilst at the back of your mind, you know that there are a lot of things that you have not yet done?

Well, even up till now, there are times that such happens to me. And then I feel sort of sluggish, whilst I have the load of the responsibilities that I have not even started on, weighing just at the back of my head. I have found that whenever I have that feeling and do not have something to remind me that I have targets that I plan to reach before the day runs by, especially when there is no upcoming deadline in view, it is very easy for me to relax and whip out my phone and then realize forty-five minutes later that I have managed to waste forty-five minutes of my life, even though I am well aware of the fact that I have a lot of things to do that I have not even begun to bother with doing.

But when I have my list, especially when it is just nearby, I can just stretch my eyes, and boom, I get the motivation to stand up and do something except on those rare days when my energy and will to do anything are completely wasted.

Hence, I have found that with a clear plan of what I am to do for each day, it is very easy for me to find reasons to be productive spend the rest of the day productively as I have externalized all that is waiting for me to a sheet of paper, and have not just left it hanging at the back of my mind.

Again, I still think that the act of actually sitting down to make plans for each day is a habit that can be as difficult for me as exercising tends to be, and I have not been very consistent with it, am usually more consistent during the school time or during those few holiday days that I spend before I return home than during the periods when I just have a long stretch of time and have the knowledge that I may end up not even doing the things that I want to do with that time.

And I know that there are certain self-help authors that talk about how easy and pleasurable it is for them to make to-do lists and it is for them to tick off the list

But I do not deny that even in my inconsistency, which is something that I am seriously working on, I have found that planning my days have helped me to achieve a lot of things that I would have not achieved otherwise. Things like being able to work towards artificial deadlines that I have set for myself, being able to find the motivation to do certain difficult things simply because I have written down that I had to do them in the day that I had set out for them and being able to have physical evidence each day that I have worked on, and have accomplished something, are just a few benefits that I have found comes with planning my day.

 

In case you have been wondering whether it is worth it to actually get a planner and join the set of people that plan their days, weeks, months, years and decades, I would say that it is an activity that would definitely be useful for you, especially if you are the type that has chaotic days.

I dabbled into a lot of things during that time, including but not limited to calligraphy, chess, origami, meditation, yoga, took a writing course on Coursera, and even tried to start a Youtube channel. I went wild with activities, like, literally trying anything I could get my hands on, wanting to do all that I could with the time that I had and the resources that were available to me. Currently, I do not engage in most of the things that I did during lockdown, but I do not regret the time that I used in exploring these hobbies. I was young, ages 17 to 18 at the time, and I could have spent that entire time doing nothing other than watching television and scrolling through social media. So I deem the fact that I engaged in all of the above as nothing more than a plus.

One of the things I dabbled into during that period of time, that shaped the way that period went for me and how the year after went for me was productivity. I stumbled into a self-help book, began reading, and then it became an addiction. Soon enough, I spent most of my time reading all the self-help books that I could get my hands on, both soft copy and hard copy, and even the ones in audio format, which I used to listen to whilst performing house chores. I will give a list of the ones that I have found most impactful in my life in another blog post.

And I have to tell you, there is no way that you can read that many books without having a life transformation. By the time I had dug myself into all of Cal Newport’s books, did my chores whilst listening to Atomic Habits, and went through scores of videos by channels like Alux.com, I became restless with the way that I was living my life, how I was basically being a mediocre and felt the urge to do more, be more.

And so the journey started.

By the time I had read the earliest of Cal Newport’s books, the ones that dealt with succeeding in college, I began to look for YouTubers that could teach me more of the secret hacks to achieving that. I stumbled, not only to channels that talked about hacks and tricks to reading faster and succeeding whilst engaging in other activities, such as that of Elena Handtrack, but I also began to spot ‘study with me’ channels like the kinds of Ari Horesh, James Scholz and Study Vibes, realizing, to the greatest of my surprise that there were people out there that could study for up to twelve hours at a stretch. I will drop another blog post in which I explain my experience with engaging in those sorts of programs, and how I have been able to maintain a first-class CGPA in law as a result.

And then, by the time I began to indulge in books that dealt with health and the impact it had on the brain, I began exercising. Furthermore, I began to study books that dealt with the negative effects of social media, and soon, I had deleted most of my social media accounts, save Whatsapp, and had downloaded an app that tracked the amount of time that I spent on my phone daily.

There were several other books with their own messages but by around July to August 2020, I had begun:

• Journaling

  My first ever journal

  
  
• Planning my day (Making to-do lists)
• Habit tracking
  
  
  
• Meditating
• Caring more than I used to about my hygiene
• Yoga
• Trying to maintain a strict sleep to wake up time of 10:00 pm to 5:00am
• Reading self-help books almost every day
• Reading the academic books that I had abandoned up until that point
• Working on my typing so that I could be efficient as a writer

Of course, I was not as consistent as I wanted to, being more consistent in things like exercising (till I experienced an exercise burnout) and reading than other things like meditation, which I found to be difficult and pointless most of the time I tried it.

But they were the hallmark of the changes that I experienced during that period, and they gave me the necessary discipline that I needed at the time.

But then, months after the lockdown had ended, the strike was called off.

And then came the downward spiral.

But not all was lost. For one, the fact that my exams were slated for just a month after the strike was called off gave me the motivation to study for an average of eight to ten hours every single day. But then, with so much of my time invested in just one thing, I dropped so many of the habits that I was trying to build.

For one, I reinstalled Youtube for the 'study with me' channels and found that it also served as a great way to get my body relaxed after so many hours spent studying. Then, I dropped exercising because I also happened to be doing the long stretches of studying during the period of time in which I was engaging in the annual twenty-one days of fasting and prayers in my church and I was certain that if I exercised as well as all the pressure that I was putting in my brain, I was going to have a terrible burnout, probably collapse in the process.

Furthermore, with the beginning of the school year, one in which the school management all so generously decided to compress two academic years into a single year, I found it difficult to continue with all the habits and hobbies that I had built up.

I want to make it clear that discipline was never gone, per se. With the knowledge that I could exert myself the way that I did when I was doing ten hours of reading in a day, there was no going back on that and the fact that I never let my academics go anywhere but higher, plus began to engage in so many other extracurriculars as well, was only proof of the fact that I never lost it.

In fact, by November last year, I gave myself an even stricter sleeping schedule, sleeping by around 9 to 10 and waking up by three so that I could chip in at least an hour and thirty minutes to three hours of spiritual activities like reading the bible, spiritual books and praying (am still very much consistent with that) and two hours of reading before heading off to school. So I was working just fine and there were only a few times that I tried to draft implementation intentions, habit trackers completely forgotten.

However, we are back on strike after only a year of normal schooling, and I am back to reading self-help books and reexamining my habits.

And boy, do I have some work to do.

For firsters, I have realized that I have been working on autopilot, just letting myself venture into things without even sitting down to consider what I was doing, and hardly ever planning my day. Sure, I planned them at the back of my mind sometimes, but there is nothing that compares to actually being able to sit down and properly structure the day before beginning. I realized that because I never structured my day, I ended up either having disorganized days, or days in which I would end up forgetting to do the one thing that I had set out to do. The most painful were the days that would end with me wondering what I had actually achieved, knowing that I had been busy but not being able to point to one achievement that I had gotten as a result.

And then I realized how much I have backtracked in terms of my fitness. Just recently, I engaged in just two days of intense workout and was rewarded with an additional two days of not being able to climb up the stairs without wincing in pain with every step I took, which put me off exercising for a while.

There are a lot of things that have changed in me ever since I put a hold on personal growth. Sure, there are places that I have improved, but there are so many habits that I know that if only I had maintained, I would have become so much more of a better person than I am at the moment.

Why am I telling this long story?

Well, I once again have free time on my hands, although, due to the fact that I have matured into an adult and have a lot of online opportunities plus a bank account, I am more engaged than I used to be back then, and I have decided that I am going to become more intentional about my personal growth, both physically and spiritually.

As a result, I am going to be detailing, at least once a week, on how things are going for me, on this journey of growth that I am retaking. It is going to be difficult catching up on a lot of things that I want to catch up on, things that should have been second nature by now, but then again, I cannot let myself fall and remain on the ground. I am rising. It is going to be difficult, but I know that in no time, I will be up on my feet once more.