9/24: a lesson about lists

One of my advisees came by to talk with me during my office hours today. We conducted our business, and then I asked if there was anything else. There was. She's a senior. She's applying to graduate schools and scholarship programs. She's working on campus. She's involved in a number of co-curricular activities. She's an earnest person, a really earnest person. And she said that she looks at her "to-do" list for each day and it seems like she should be able to get it all done--but then she can't. And so I told her that I make a list for myself almost every day, too, with the idea that it will contain what I should be able to do in a day. It's usually the case, however, that there's a gap between my assessment of what I think I should be able to do and what I can actually do. And it's not that either of us needs to learn to do more--it's that we need to learn to gauge more accurately what we can actually fit in a day. I feel for my advisee because I could see how stressed she is, and I know that she's skimping on sleep to get more things crossed off her list. I hope I can convince her that she needs to change her list, not herself. All this doesn't sound like it amounts to a good thing. But it does--in that I had to say this out loud to someone else. And I believed it. What's good for the goose...!