Adam Jutt ’25 is a math and economics major from Cincinnati, Ohio who writes articles sometimes. Contact him at adjutt@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
A new year of Adam’s Apple has arrived. For those who aren’t familiar — e.g. freshmen, almost all non-freshmen — Adam’s Apple is the Flat Hat’s official advice column. That means that you can send in questions (typically solicited via Instagram story) and I will pick one each week to answer. Because this is the official advice column of the paper, everything I say represents the true views and beliefs of The Flat Hat and all staff members thereof. (Editor’s note: That is not true.)
This week’s question reads as follows: “Adam, how do I manage my time and all my responsibilities this semester?”
A great question for the beginning of a semester! Most in my shoes at this point would write seven-hundred-and-fifty-words of the following: prioritize, cut commitments if necessary, leave room for rest and social events, and — most importantly — use a planner or calendar. I am not most.
George Orwell famously said that “Journalism is printing something that someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.”
I do not take my responsibility as a journalist lightly. I pride myself on doing this thing the right way, even when it’s hard. If I lose my position, reputation, or even life on account of my integrity, so be it. I cannot be bought. I cannot be coerced. I cannot be controlled. I will never bend the knee to corporations, interest groups, the dollar, the government, or tradition. These mantras ensure two things: 1) I am dangerous, and 2) I am always in danger.
I start with such a grave preamble because what I am going to say in this article will be surprising to most. It will be troubling to many. It will be revolting to some. My friends will become my enemies, and my enemies will weaponize my words against me to obliterate my career. I’ll be flung from my high post here at Adam’s Apple and land who knows where who knows how far below: probably the pop culture section of some rapidly regressing second-rate tabloid, circulating at fewer and fewer grocery stores each quarter. As I said, so be it.
With that out of the way, it is time to divulge my secret. Media frenzy here we come:
I do not use a calendar or planner, and I think life is far better that way.
Yes, you read that correctly. There was no typo. I have no paper calendar. I have no digital calendar. I have only a mind calendar.
When I make plans with a friend to get lunch next Thursday, I don’t write it down anywhere. When I am explicitly told by my superiors at organizations to pull out my phone and make note of the dates of upcoming meetings and events, I just go on the ESPN app and check scores. When I need to remind myself what time my classes are over the first few days of school, I go to registration.wm.edu and type in the name of my class.
I genuinely have only a mind calendar. And you should too.
I’m sure you harbor a couple objections to the lifestyle I just described and recommended you adopt. That is because you have been brainwashed by the establishment. You are a puppet of Big Planner. It might not be too late, though, to see the light. If you give me a chance to explain the euphoria of calendar-less-ness, I believe that you can still be set free.
The first objection you might have “conjured up” (or rather, had planted in you by your puppet master) is this idea that without a planner or calendar, you would frequently forget events. I can speak from experience and say that this is a lie, plain and simple. I genuinely haven’t forgotten an event I said I would attend in four whole days. Four days! That’s a long time. Three more and God could have finished a new universe and gotten a good nap in. And even in that case, I eventually remembered and was only half an hour late. Objection one, consider yourself officially refuted.
A second, subtler objection is the argument that having to mentally juggle every engagement you have, no matter how far in the future, would be exhausting and stressful. You’d lay your head on the pillow every night and wonder whether you missed a meal and hurt a friend’s feelings in the process. You’d constantly fear that you have double booked yourself for something in March (because whenever someone asks you if you are free for something more than two weeks away, you genuinely don’t know so you just assume yes). While all of that will inevitably come to pass — every day is a schedule-based anxiety nightmare — you will grow stronger because of it! So much of your mental energy will be devoted to remembering dates and times that your brain will need to recruit new regions and neurons to do other things like numbers and talk. You will become a superhuman! Second objection, destroyed!
The true bliss of the mind calendar is that it does all the time “managing” for you. With a physical calendar, if you have to decide between two simultaneous events, you have to make the hard, conscious choice of cutting one. With a mind calendar, you will simply go to whichever event you remembered — or maybe neither! Its brilliance follows from the simple heuristic that whatever is consuming your thoughts should be consuming your time. The things you remember, and therefore remember to attend to, are the things you subconsciously judge as your most valuable responsibilities. If something slips, it wasn’t meant to stay.
The one super minor itsy-bitsy downside to those benefits, for me at least, is that I don’t experience them. I feel horrible about myself anytime I forget something. I behave obsessively and hyper-neurotically to avoid “slips” at all costs, which undermines my argument completely and means the mind calendar is causing me to suffer endlessly and needlessly.
Once I figure out how to get past that small kink, though, the way of the mind calendar will be truly perfect.
Hope that helps!
-Adam