Divide your life into semesters, even when you’re not in school

https://www.vox.com/even-better/23835758/divide-life-semesters-not-in-school-motivation-goals

by nickwritesit • 3 years ago

96 88 3 years ago

vox.com

pizzafeelsright• 3 years ago

We have ways of counting that are similar without additional overhead.

Hours, days, weeks, months, quarters, years, decades, mid-life, before death.

Time dilation is powerful, while life division is also undervalued.

I think in terms of accomplishments with deadlines and progress. My son had to dress himself by 3. That was the goal starting at 2.5. And 1 year later, it's accomplished.

The goal pushes progress. I require effort, not the result. The discipline gets easier as the effort is measured.

duopixel• 3 years ago

We have become so detached from nature so much we have forgotten seasons exist, we can naturally divide the year in four (or two) by being attentive to the season, and you can add a little flair by being poetic about it (say saving during the fall, frugality in the winter, sexuality in the spring, enjoying the fullness of life in the summer. Life is not academia, it is poetry!

pierat• 3 years ago

"What are seasons?", says the human in a climate controlled box looking into a portal to a virtual environment that has no seasons.

WorldMaker2• 3 years ago

In a time of radical climate change where traditional regional seasonal indicators are shifting.

mangodrunk• 3 years ago

I think that is good advice, though I am not sure what you mean by saying life is poetry. I will also add that one should be aware of what is happening during the different seasons, such as particular flowers blooming, animal migrations, etc. Only after 30+ years have I begun to notice the changes of the season and wanting to bask in them.

jameal2• 3 years ago

Not OP but I was struck by the sentiment. I'm sure many of us on HN approach our lives through the lens of an academic/engineering mindset. Of course that kind of approach is valid and useful. We can also approach life as artists (poets) and lean into spontaneity, playfulness and creativity. There is a kind of freedom that is unique to the latter approach. You don't have to be a professional artist to make art out of living.

wink• 3 years ago

I don't know where you're living or maybe my reading of the weather is just bad, but here in Central Europe according to your definition winter usually starts around Christmas, spring either starts in March or May, summer lasts from June through October, and fall is between "to cold for a t-shirt" and "it's snowing". Very useful indeed.

Pamar• 3 years ago

I raise your 4 to... 72 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37247405

ehnto• 3 years ago

Indigenous Australians and other cultures have more than four seasons as well, and for the former it depends on where you live on the continent also. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/indigenous-science/Indigeno...

For anyone who has been to Darwin and also to Melbourne, you totally get why. Melbourne says "what a chilly winter" while Darwin says, what winter? Melbournites look forward to it drying out near Jan, and Darwin prepares for monsoon season. Perhaps an equivalent is being to Whistler and to Miami. Same continent, different seasons.

All that is just really to say, it's fun to be in tune with your local climate, and for most people, the 4 seasons are kind of a convenience but not that accurate.

dghughes• 3 years ago

Darwin to Melbourne is about 3,100km. My location in SE Canada it can be -25C with 1m snow, 100km/h winds meanwhile 2,700km in Miami it's a balmy 30C.

CaptainFever• 3 years ago

This is true, but doesn't apply to all countries as there are those without seasons.

VoodooJuJu• 3 years ago

Well said. It's especially easy to forget about simple, natural, and poetic cadences when you live an environment whose purpose is to crush those very things, i.e. cities.

dingnuts• 3 years ago

Spoken like someone who has always had civilization to keep them from remembering how often Mother Nature is trying to kill you.

anonyfox3• 3 years ago

there are cities with _lots_ of natural green space, water and thoughtfully gardened recreation parks, though.

Enjoying the transition to fall right now living in such a city.

Fauntleroy• 3 years ago

Man, I live in California where we barely have seasons

BaseballPhysics3• 3 years ago

Hmm, you're gonna need to explain that again. How will this help me increase my LTV and ensure I'm optimizing every minute of the day for maximal productivity?

jprete• 3 years ago

I have to congratulate you on how close this comes to invoking Poe’s Law.

epicureanideal• 3 years ago

“Chapters” is another option that might be more natural depending on if life events don’t align with the seasons. Or some combination of both.

travisjungroth• 3 years ago

Since joining Netflix two years ago, I’ve posted on Slack on every equinox and solstice. What time it is, what it means literally, what you could take it to mean. People seem to like it.

g9yuayon6• 3 years ago

We have become so detached from nature so much we have forgotten seasons exist,

True for me as I enjoy reading and programming, but I'm not sure if it's true in general, at least not in the metro area where I live. It looks outdoor activity is a big deal in American life. Hiking, camping, fishing and etc are so popular that one has to book a camping site in a state park months ahead of time. The trails are always full of people. Stores like REI either have heavy traffic or run out of stock.

efields• 3 years ago

Came here to say basically this. Good job beating me to it.

Seasonality is an excellent constraint already.

vineyardmike• 3 years ago

So obviously you’re right, but semesters are based on the seasons, and many people are used to using semesters as goal timelines already.

dendrite9• 3 years ago

My high level time organization has been ski season (Nov-Jun) and other (May/Jun-Oct) for many years. My partner is a swimmer though so now there is lake swimming season as well.

Last year I introduced her to a native berry and it turned out she actually like berries after a lifetime thinking she didn't. This year I've shown her more than 10 species that can be found nearby and we have moved our targets based on the season and which species are fading as others come into ripeness. It has been interesting to see someone learn how elevation can delay stages of the season, or how going to the dry side of the mountains moves the season forward.

Now we are in a stage where the blackberries are a gamble. Many are still ripe and ripening but some are fermented on the vine, some have lingered because they are just bland, and unpicked clumps are overwhelmed by drosophila that have been able to go a couple generations uninterrupted. When it finally rains the season will be over for good. But the less prolific Rubus laciniatus is about to ripen for one last batch of berries as summer fades.

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

Finding good time bases to observe ones life from is a huge task. I'm hoping to get a better weekly view of myself & what's happening about, that I can hopefully use to reflect better on a bigger time-basis with.

Yearly is too long for most objectives & hopes. Months probably too short for many things. Quarters or semesters could be great.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh2• 3 years ago

After much experimentation and many years of failure, I've surfaced two rules of thumb for myself that seem to be working lately:

(1) Write a monthly plan that's broken down by weeks, and then review/iterate on it weekly.

The weekly review alone risks having too small of a focus, so blending it with a monthly planning horizon has felt like a nice balance.

(2) Yearly planning is surprisingly useful, but it's best done as a solitary thing.

Most people view the whole "new year's resolution" thing as a cliché, and — separately — most people don't respond well to seeing someone else's ambition. Silicon Valley promises to be some sort of magical land where everyone's working on big things, but — same as everywhere else in the world — people largely respond negatively to seeing someone succeed (or even want to succeed) on a long timescale.

_benj• 3 years ago

I’ve recently started taking some online courses (Coursera) and the ability to see how far along have I gone, in both percent and time, together with how much I have left is tremendously encouraging!

Reading this article makes me think that I could also apply a similar systematic approach to other goals.

Love it!

uoaei2• 3 years ago

I've personally found immense use in tracking life according to the Moon's phases. 1/2/4 week intervals turn out to be a good timescale for tracking things like plant growth, project progress, etc.

bonestamp2• 3 years ago

That's a great idea. It reminds me of this podcast that releases a new episode on every full moon: https://www.3books.co

uoaei2• 3 years ago

I'm at the point where I'd like to replace all my clocks with some pictorial representation of Sol's position in the daily cycle and Luna's position in the (near-)monthly cycle. Working with the body's circadian rhythm, rather than ignoring/contradicting it, seems appropriate to me, especially since so much about our mood (hormones, etc.) is governed by our exposure to natural light and the rhythms of sleep -- see: "farmer time".

Among many other reasons, one of them is to eliminate the fabled and apparently widespread phenomenon of "plan to start a thing at 14:00; oops it's 14:03, guess I'll keep procrastinating and start that next thing at 14:30 instead". With no hard boundaries aside from sunrise/sunset, this would probably be a much more difficult excuse to lean on. Remains to be seen whether new excuses come to replace the old.

madcaptenor2• 3 years ago

The Lunar Society of Birmingham (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society_of_Birmingham) met at the full moon, although this was actually practical - if your meetings end after dark and artificial light isn't a thing yet it's good to have some moonlight to make it easier for people to get home.

justrealist2• 3 years ago

I love that the implicit conclusion here is that quarterly planning is a good idea.

manicennui• 3 years ago

And yet it doesn't work well in practice.

justrealist2• 3 years ago

I actually don't hate it tbh.

perfunctory• 3 years ago

Talking about borrowing from academia, another idea I like is sabbatical. For example a year-long time off every seven years [0]. I did it once and it was great. Planning to keep doing that.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_tim...

shortrounddev26• 3 years ago

Easy to do when you have no responsibilities

KolenCh2• 3 years ago

That's a bit harsh. Also you seem to assume American (or western?) spending habit that has no saving. If one would really plan for a sabbatical, I'm sure they would have planned financially from the six years leading to that too.

JohnMakin• 3 years ago

Then for a harder challenge divide your life into 10 week quarters that cover 30 weeks of material in 9 weeks and have a brutally hard competitively curved final on week 10. That'll light some fires under some butts.

mckirk4• 3 years ago

As an interesting side-note, 365 has two prime factors: 5 and 73. That means you can cleanly divide the year in five 'seasons' (or 'pentamesters', I suppose) of 73 days each, which somehow seemed... beautiful to me from a mathematical perspective.

In case anyone else is curious and wants to segment their year in 20% chunks, the start dates are:

- January 1st

- March 15th

- May 27th

- August 8th

- October 20th

ISL• 3 years ago

The prime factors of 366 are 2, 3, and 61. You'll need them, too :).

mckirk4• 3 years ago

The first rule of pentamester club is: we do not talk about February 29th ;)

RamblingCTO• 3 years ago

- January 1st: depression and solitude - March 15th: spring, yay - May 27th: summer - August 8th: late summer + bit of autumn - October 20th: autumn and christmas

something like that?

drbawb• 3 years ago

Someone beat you to that punch a long time ago. Here is a whole calendar replete with holidays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordian_calendar for your viewing pleasure.

mckirk4• 3 years ago

Damn, thanks for letting me know! I suspect then that I was prompted to re-discover this by some fnording guy in a submarine, using mind control satellites or something.

brennopost• 3 years ago

Or even 73 seasons of five days each.

EricBetts• 3 years ago

There was a topic about micro seasons in Japan, that were each five days long, recently

klyrs• 3 years ago

If you time it so you're having your first baby near the end of your PhD, you'll be on semesters (or trimesters) until your 50s.

BaseballPhysics3• 3 years ago

goal-setting, time management, and motivation.

Oh good.

More productivity hacking.

Maybe I should come up with some KPIs? Put together quarterly reports? Find more ways to quantify my self-worth so I can maximize it?

unethical_ban2• 3 years ago

You're either young, or haven't felt a few years slip away and wondered "shit, what have I done with my life?"

Either way, enjoy it!

BaseballPhysics3• 3 years ago

Guess again. I'm old enough to realize that tying your self-worth to objectified life goals and measurable achievements is a fool's errand sold to us by a self-help industrial complex designed to make us feel as bad as possible all the time so we'll constantly strive for the next cure for the sense of emptiness they create and then purport to fix; a feeling only exacerbated by social media, which constantly presents us with people who seem to be smarter, more driven, more successful, more wealthy, so that we're constantly asking ourselves "shit, what have I done with my life?"

MisterBastahrd2• 3 years ago

Attend festivals. And not the giant music festivals, either. They still exist virtually everywhere, and they occur at different times of the year. It will get you off your ass and around other people, and also let you experience the season.

As a bonus, you won't have to worry about what you're doing or eating, because all of that will be taken care of for you.

pb7• 3 years ago

Go to giant music festivals as well. It’s a great way to be around a lot of people that are into the same thing as you where you can chat, make friends, and just experience shared life.

MisterBastahrd2• 3 years ago

I personally hate them. I've never been to one that wasn't insanely overcrowded. I want to enjoy myself, not hate everything about the day.

abhaynayar2• 3 years ago

I really like this framing~~!

g9yuayon6• 3 years ago

I always wonder why we lose the efficiency and intensity over time that we enjoyed in college. When in college, we took five pretty intense courses a semester. We didn't have to wait for "a big chunk of time" to work on our homework. Instead, we got tons done in library or in the computer lab in between classes. And we still managed to find time to date, to party, and to read volumes of fictions. Years having flashed by, and yet somehow I always find half an hour is too short for me to read something interesting, and it always takes more than I can admit to focus on what I want to learn. Yes, we have family and kids and etc so we have less time, but if I check my screen time, oh s%*t! I certainly have time for intense study, but somehow I manage to squander them on social media and what not.

shortrounddev26• 3 years ago

efficiency and intensity over time

I have a very different perspective of college than you. Some semesters I only had ~6 hours of classes on Tuesday and Thursday, so the majority of my time was spent not learning, but rather reinforcing through rote memorization (so-called "studying") and busywork (homework).

I don't think college is a good model for how to schedule and manage your life, because I don't think college is a good model for anything

g9yuayon6• 3 years ago

Different styles of college? My college shaped me and what I learned carried me until today. Case in point, I don't think I would learn how to write a database engine, albeit a single-threaded one, from scratch with progressive difficulties, if my professors didn't design the course properly. I wouldn't be equipped with intuitive understanding of maths and stats that I can express using the proper language such as linear algebra, if it were not for the rigorous training given by college. I wouldn't be able to use queuing theory to analyze systems fresh out of college if it were not for tons of fun of studying queuing systems in college. I wouldn't have no difficulty picking up any programming language if it were not for the courses on programming language theories. I wouldn't even know the advanced mathematical logic and formal verifications and computability and a long list of other things if it were not for excellent teaching and unwavering demand from my professors. Heck, I wouldn't even be able to deeply appreciate English classics like The Great Gatsby and Mobi Dick, given that I could barely pass TOFLE when I went to my college, if it were not for the excellent and rigorous writing course given by a demanding lecturer.

I'm forever indebted to my college

burnished• 3 years ago

You had a curriculum that those short bursts tied into. Some one else already did the organizational work - I think if you enrolled in a class now you'd similarly find the time.

WorldMaker2• 3 years ago

Some of that is age: schools are generally mostly for the youth(ful). Some efficiency is lost with age, that's just the unfortunate entropic nature of it all.

Some of that is nostalgia and beer goggles: we remember the good times and the grades that were recorded in our transcripts, but we forget the weeks of intense stress and the feelings of barely managing to juggle it all or hold it all together. We remember the parties fondly but forget how much those parties were designed to help us forget some of our struggles and drama before and after those parties.

nonameiguess• 3 years ago

I can still do it when I hunker down and legitimately try, but you need to drown out distractions. I don't know how old you are, but graduating high school in the 90s, the Internet existed when I was in college, but no social networks, no targeted advertising, no attention economy, no smart phones. I didn't have a dumb mobile phone or even a television. If I want to learn as much as I learned back then, I need to remove those things from my life as much as possible. Leave the phone in my bedroom. Read physical textbooks and take notes by hand on paper, not on an electronic device connected to the web. If I'm reading papers/articles, print them out.

This is effectively isomorphic to the obesity epidemic. You can try to white knuckle it with sheer discipline or run 80 miles a week, and some people manage to do that, but mostly it's a matter of food environment. If you have a genetic predisposition to frequent snacking, typically the only way to avoid it in the long run is to not have shitty snack foods available to you at all. Expecting to just control yourself when the option is there not to usually doesn't work at some point. You can't binge on screen time if you have no screens around.

akuchling• 3 years ago

Even in the 1990s, I saw the phrase "academic suicide by Usenet". Some people got so pulled into keeping up with newsgroups that they'd neglect their homework, thesis, or studies. A stream of anything engaging is addictive.

shortrounddev26• 3 years ago

Academic calendars aren't useful even in school, I can't imagine why they would be useful in the real world

Divide your life into semesters, even when you’re not in school

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