A couple years back, I read this Austin Kleon post about the trouble with months—how they are an arbitrary and meaningless way to mark time—and I agreed wholeheartedly. While days and years make sense from a solar perspective, Gregorian calendar months have never quite felt right to me, always moving too fast or too slow. Like how September just whizzes by while January drags on forever. And how we all just accept that some months have more days than others. Seriously.
So when I read this article in Vox about how adults would do better to divide our lives into semesters even after we leave school, it felt like I had found a much more workable way to structure my time:
Our earliest years are marked by formal education and structure imposed by parents and other caretakers, not to mention a dedicated break in the form of summer vacation. By early adulthood — and beyond — we’re largely accountable for our time. What to do with this time can prove confounding, as anyone who’s been on the receiving end of “Where do you see yourself in five years?” can attest. When it comes to setting goals and organizing time in adulthood, we’re left to our own devices. “The longer away in time something is, the more abstract or high-level our conception of it is, and we’re not as concrete about what it would be,” says Anita Williams Woolley, a professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “But as you bring things closer, people have an easier time.”
While it’s important to set goals, the roadmap for how to attain them can be murky. Instead of embarking without a plan toward broad ambitions, there’s value in incremental objectives in service of a larger aim. Take a page from the educational system and divide the future into “semesters” — traditionally 15 to 17 weeks long at American colleges — in which to implement minigoals to help get you where you want to go. Use the traditional academic year as a guide to help you stay on track, says Rachel Wu, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California Riverside.
Looking back, I see that I instinctively worked in 14–16 week bursts to finish my manuscript over the last year, and each chunk of time basically began with the start of a new season, in a coincidental alignment with the traditional academic calendar.
Thinking seasonally is, of course, something I already do when it comes to my wardrobe. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that seasons or semesters could be an organizing principle for other parts of my life, too.
The Vox article is ultimately less interested in how humanity should revise our collective conceptions of time than it is on goal-setting. Too bad. But it does offer some interesting tips for using semester-based thinking to make positive life changes:
First, think about what larger goal you’d like to work toward this semester — select the “major” for which you’re picking “classes.” What is presently important to you? Say you’d like to dedicate more time toward creative projects this semester. How, specifically, will you foster that creativity? Maybe you’ll commit to practicing guitar every other day for 30 minutes or you’ll sign up for a pottery class that meets weekly.
And it encourages us to pause and do some self-reflection at the end of each semester, which seems to me like the perfect amount of time to consider (as opposed to the much more daunting “What have I done this year?”).
[…] with a quarterly or biannual milestone, you’re more easily able to track your progress; you can more clearly look back on what you’ve learned after a 20-week intro to coding class as opposed to after a few days of instruction. The end of a semester allows for these report cards. “It just helps you feel that you’re growing as a person,” Fishbach says. “You’re not the person you were three months ago.”
This semester for me will be mostly about pushing my book past the finish line, which includes making edits, working on a cover, getting a new headshot, asking authors more talented than me for blurbs (shudder), and a bunch of other small tasks. It would be nice to add something outside my “major,” though, for balance. Maybe I’ll start swimming again?
What will you take this semester?
:) Teresa
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As someone who has been on semesters my whole life (from student to high school teacher to grad student to college professor), I can appreciate these insights about measuring time. But I have to note that what I really loved, during grad school, were QUARTERS: three 10-week terms instead of two 15-week terms. With a big summer in the middle. Semesters can be a slog; quarters suited my need to change things up sooner! :)
Your comment about "revising our collective conceptions of time" makes me think of a book I have on my radar: Jenny Odell's "Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock." I have just started reading her earlier book, "How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy," and can tell it's going to be amazing, so I'm very interested in her thoughts about time.