I was not the world's greatest organizer in my pre-grad school life. I would get up from the dinner table in the middle of eating because I suddenly remembered something I was supposed to do, or to do something I knew I'd forget ten minutes later. I once owned a day-timer. I lost it. I bought another one. I forgot where I put it.
Once I turned around three times on my way to work to drive back home to get something I needed for the day at the office. Three times.
Long term planning meant what are we having for lunch.
I knew I needed to learn to organize my time and set priorities and that I would be less stressed if I actually planned stuff out and wasn't always scrambling at the last minute. Problem was, I didn't know how. That, and I told myself that part of being "me" was being spontaneous and unplanned and always being able to pull stuff together at the last minute because that is what creative, rebellious people did.
So I survived in that mode for over 30 years. I pastored a couple of churches in that mode. Some good, some not so good. I pulled off some great creative large church-wide programs well. I didn't pull off others so well. I burned out some of my staff and volunteers. I burned out.
Then I went to grad school. An MA at the largest university in Western Canada. My first year I took three MA courses. I was overwhelmed. I had never had so much to read and so much to write and so much to prepare for every single night. Every day in class we were expected to come prepared to discuss what we had read the night before. Not just sit and listen to others discuss, but to actually be a contributing member of the discussion. We had to be prepared to teach sections of the class to our fellow classmates. We had to write papers. Not little five page things, but lengthy in depth papers with bibliographies and citations. This meant reading other books and papers on the same topic outside of what was assigned in class. Position papers needed to be researched. And then, at the end of every class we had to write a 30 - 40 page paper. For each class. On top of this, we had to begin research for our thesis, which we would spend our second year researching and writing.
I realized that I would never survive if I did not become organized. I had to organize each semester, each month, each week, and each day. I had to organize and plan for family time, social time, work time, research time, class time, writing time, even eating and sleeping. Some weeks were busier than others. Some weeks I didn't get as much sleep as I wanted (well, that seldom ever happened in grad school), some weeks extra assignments or editing or re-writes or teaching a class for someone else messed up my plans, but the point was, I had plans, and those plans saved me.
So here I am, three years removed from my post-graduate work, living alone in Vegas and realizing that as much as I needed to organize my time in the busyness, even more so I need to organize my time when I am alone without my family. I have a lot more "free" time in my schedule right now and without organization and planning I can easily work too much, sleep too much, begin to get lazy, miss appointments, push stuff off, and get selfish and self-focused.
Grad school taught me that to be successful, I had to plan, organize, and then stick to the plan while being flexible enough to seize opportunities when they came along that might temporarily re-arrange things.
Sticking to that is not easy in this new phase of my life. In fact, I believe it is harder to organize and plan when you are not overwhelmed by a million things. When you aren't overwhelmed you tell yourself "I can push that off until tomorrow" or "I will get to that next week."
Lies. All lies.
Grad school taught me the need to organize. Real life is reminding me that I need to continue to organize. Perhaps now more than ever.
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