All Work and No Play: That Tricky Thing Called Time Management

       When the topic of time management is brought up, I usually tend to curl up in a ball and stress out about the things I still have to do and how there are never enough hours in the day to complete the aforementioned tasks. I am also a perfectionist and therefore I am afraid to do those tasks because I might mess up in my attempts to finish the task on time and complete it wrong or poorly due to the lack of time I seem to have. Fear of failure and fear of not having enough time to complete the projects has become my biggest problem in terms of time management. When I read the blog topic I actually got freaked out because I remembered that was just one more thing I had to do and turned my computer to hulu.com and started watching The Office. This was not a healthy response to work overload. Procrastination is not the best response to a prompt on time management. So I sat and thought for a minute. Rather than just switching majors to avoid stress, which I did think about a few times, I have begun to organize my day by the hour in an adorable day planner. Seeing each hour planned out allows me to manage my time more effectively, and allows me to finally relax. I’m already starting to feel some stress relief. Viewing each hour allowed me to see that I have more time than I realized. Assigning specific times of the day for practicing, homework, and studying not only gives me a basic outline of what needs to be done throughout my day, but also requires me to block off only the necessary times needed to practice and study, no more and no less.
    I am a firm believer in having time to yourself to simply relax: detox, if you will. I believe a person can go into overload and quit functioning properly. Remember that we are not robots. We do not just occasionally make a whirring noise and shut down. Humans need sleep. Because I am practically immune to the effects of caffeine, I am still a monster in the morning if I don’t get the government regulated necessary hours of sleep, so I have a habit of constantly worrying about it. So I have made sure to schedule sleep and relaxation into my hourly schedule. 
     So, obviously, my advice to my fellow Student Success Seminar classmates is to buy a planner. Make it a cute planner with birds or flowers on it so you will remember that it exists and use it religiously.  Try as hard as you can to stick with the schedule you have planned for yourself in order to effectively avoid procrastination and therefore mounds of unneeded stress. And also, sleep. Give yourself time to relax and don’t spend too much time perfecting that blog assignment. Block off set times to focus on certain projects and adhere to that schedule. If you spend to much time perfecting one, you will lose time set aside for the other ten or twenty things music majors have to deal with. The key to success and healthy time management is to strike a balance. Find a schedule of work and play that works for you. It is helping me already.