LUDMILA ANDRÉA

The 9-5 Experiment

Thinking about the degree to which school monopolizes my life never quite seemed odd to me. I thought that was just the way it was supposed to be. I’ve been in university for four years now, consumed by work, stress, and anxiety (bi-weekly stress-induced panic attacks are the norm for me). But last weekend while out to dinner with some friends, I realized that maybe I’ve just been going about this whole university thing in the wrong way.

I always believed university to be this thing that I had to be obsessed with and concerned about 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. My sleep pattern is perpetually out of whack, my eating habits basically boil down to yo-yo dieting based on time I have available to eat when not doing schoolwork (while studying for exams I survive on whatever food I can get at Ike’s cafe). So why do so many students choose to live this way? I’m not sure of the answer but my three friends Jonathan Paradis, Isabelle Plessis, Ting Kelly and I are determined to work to reject this lifestyle. Our solution? Treating school as a 9-5 job.

This may seem silly, but hear me out. One of the nicest things about working at a job with fixed hours is that when you are finished, you are (for the most part) finished. What I mean is, you don’t take your job home with you and continue working on it all through the night, mostly because you probably wouldn’t be getting paid for it and, to be honest, it just doesn’t make any sense. So, why can’t we use this approach for school work? The four of us intend to treat university as a 9-5 job, working Monday-Friday during contained 8-hour periods–without distraction (a.k.a. no Facebook)– and dedicate the rest of our free-time to living our lives. Plain and simple.

Now, 9-5 doesn’t work every day for me because I have quite a few evening classes, but it doesn’t have to be exactly at those specific times. The point is to give yourself a solid block of time during which you can fully dedicate yourself to doing your work, reading ahead, working through paper drafts, and the like. This way we are free on weekends and evenings to do whatever we want. I really think this idea has a really great potential to completely alter my perception of university as a 24/7 lifestyle.

The four of us are starting this ‘9-5 Project’ tomorrow (Monday, February 6^th 2012) and will be documenting the process. I’m going to update weekly, probably on this blog. Has anyone tried anything similar to this before? What do you guys think? Can students successfully treat school like a job?

The ‘story of my life’ no more!