Given Amherst's mission to provide a liberal arts education, the registrar's office might consider time management skills too pre-professional in nature to be taught here. Maybe the deans figure that we learned plenty about time management in high school, where we juggled classwork, homework, teams and scores of activities, not to mention the college application process.
But honestly, the extent of my time management skill is figuring out what time the next edition of "Sportscenter" starts or how long I can play Playstation until the Wings driver calls. In fact, each week, the only time I know where I am going to be for sure is in front of my television on Mondays at 8 p.m. watching "Boston Public."
My lack of time management skills has become problematic as I have begun to show up to meetings and classes later and later, thinking that I can make the trip from South to Merrill in under two minutes, with a stop at Valentine on the way, or running to the mall between a noon lunch and a two o'clock class. As much as I like my unstructured, fluid way of going about my business, I can only take so many glares from my professors before I need to start opening the appointment book my mother bought me over the summer.
The opposite extreme, though, is even less desirable. During Thanksgiving vacation, some of my high school classmates shared tales of revelry (and the occasional debauchery) and often complained of a problem with which I'm entirely unfamiliar: not having enough time. For them, Thanksgiving recess was truly more of a break than simply a change of venue for relaxation, as it was for me. At the annual Thanksgiving morning football game-eastern Massachusetts' answer to Homecoming-my friends told me that they'd just gotten their first good night's sleep since Columbus Day.
They'd tell stories of cutting one class to prepare for another. They told me of spending their evenings bouncing from meeting to meeting into the wee hours of the morning, then returning home to start their homework. They could tell me, down to the exact minute, when they had planned to take their showers.
My brother Dan, returning home for Thanksgiving from Ohio State University, complained of his troubles in scheduling his fifth class. There, like at many non-Amherst schools, five classes is the rule, not the exception. Dan, being a music education major, has to fit his five classes around ensemble rehearsals and lessons, not to mention any down time he might want.
The commencement speaker at Dan's high school graduation addressed this very problem. She spoke of students forced to schedule time with their friends weeks in advance. She asked, "When you have to schedule time for passion, how can you truly enjoy it?" This lifestyle is so horrible that I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. (And because she is a performance music major at Michigan, I know she already lives like that.)
Amherst is certainly not the pressure cooker that some think it to be. A day's work here rarely even lasts from nine to five, let alone well past sundown. When I stay up until all hours, nine times out of 10 it's by choice, either watching a movie or reading a book. In the rare case that I stay up preparing for a class, it is, without fail, my own fault again, because of my poor time management skills. My 10-minute study breaks drag on and on and my papers get finished closer and closer to dawn. Worse yet, the papers still come out okay, so I have no reason to change my study habits. The paper still gets done in the early morning and I stumble into class on two hours of sleep, drop the paper on the table and fall asleep in the uncomfortable chairs in Merrill.
I hope to never measure out my life in coffee spoons. While my life is anything but ideal right now, with one tardy after another on my non-existent attendance slips, I'd easily prefer this world where time is nebulous, over one where a two-minute break qualifies as a vacation.