Theodore Roosevelt is one of America’s most famous presidents, a figure who inspires both admiration and serious criticism, often in equal measure. What most people don’t know, however, is that he was a true Renaissance man. During his lifetime he managed to publish forty books and hundreds of articles, while also achieving high levels of proficiency in horseriding, boxing, rowing, and tennis — all while serving two terms as US President. In The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris’s fantastic biography, a long string of often amusing anecdotes illustrates just how wide his range of expertise really was. To give but one example:
A few weeks ago, when the British Embassy’s new councillor, Sir Esmé Howard, mentioned a spell of diplomatic duty in Crete, Roosevelt immediately and learnedly began to discuss the archeological digs at Knossos. He then asked if Howard was by any chance descended from “Belted Will” of Border fame—quoting Scott on the subject, to the councillor’s mystification. The President is also capable of declaiming German poetry to Lutheran preachers, and comparing recently resuscitated Gaelic letters with Hopi Indian lyrics. He is recognized as the world authority on big American game mammals, and is an ornithologist of some note. Stooping to pick a speck of brown fluff off the White House lawn, he will murmur, “Very early for a fox sparrow!” Roosevelt is equally at home with experts in naval strategy, forestry, Greek drama, cow punching, metaphysics, protective coloration, and football techniques.
How on earth was Roosevelt able to become an expert in all those things? Talent of course had something to do with it, but that is not the entire story. Roosevelt appears to have had not only talent and discipline, but also a way of organising his time that really, really worked for him, and it’s in the latter category that I think we have to look if we want to understand Roosevelt’s extraordinary productivity. His secret? He was fantastic at organising his time. Morris, in his biography of Roosevelt, writes that Roosevelt already worked like this as a student at Harvard. He would look at his schedule for both sports (which he did a lot of) and lectures, and take note of where the free hours were. He’d then make a plan for what to work on during those free hours. What Roosevelt understood intuitively is that time, just like money, is something you can only spend once. If you spend it on one activity, it means you can no longer spend it on something else. This means you need to budget your time, just like you need to budget your money.
Many students don’t budget their time very well. One common error many students make is overspending their time. They start with an assignment but don’t stop until they’re completely satisfied with their efforts, only to discover that there is now no time left for other tasks. Or they underspend their time: they forget about a reading assignment until an hour before class and then rush through the material only to show up in class stressed and unprepared. The best way to truly solve this problem is to work the way Roosevelt did: you need to plan ahead.
But how do you do that in a way that actually works? Most students try to plan ahead every now and again but don’t get great results as a reward for their efforts, either because they make things too complicated or because they don’t plan ahead consistently. When I sit down with a student who is struggling with time management, I always give them the following two pieces of advice, with a view to getting them to work more like Roosevelt did:
Tip 1: Create a master list of all your deadlines
Do this early in the semester. Go through the course outlines of your courses and write down when your exams are, what the deadlines for writing assignments are, presentations — you name it. Don’t write down smaller tasks like reading assignments — only include the big stuff so the list doesn’t get too long. Many of my students use a big whiteboard for this that they put above their desk, or a big piece of paper. Many use a diary. It really doesn’t matter where you put those deadlines — as long as you put them in a single place that you can easily have access to and which won’t get lost.
Tip 2: Make regular week plans
When the list is complete, get into the habit of looking ahead at your week consistently, for example every Sunday afternoon. Day by day, see where your free time is, then make a rough plan for how you will use it that week. When will you do your reading assignments? What time will you keep free for social activities or sports? Which timeslots are blocked because, for example, you need to be in class? Put all of that in the plan. Make sure you also take a quick glance at your deadline list when you do this. Is there something coming up in the weeks ahead that you want to start working on? If there is, then budget some time for that as well. Try to include the most important activities and tasks, but don’t try to include everything down to the smallest detail. If you make your week plans too detailed and overly long then it can become too painful to make them, which may mean you’re going to find it hard to motivate yourself to keep making them. When I make them myself I often do so very quickly, using nothing but a sheet of A4 paper and a pen. I really like making them on paper — it’s a little bit more intuitive than on a computer, and — for me at least — more pleasant. Sometimes, however, when I’m really busy and making the plan is complicated, I’ll make them on a computer (for example in a Word document or in my favourite note-taking and digital archiving app Evernote).
If you take nothing else away from this article apart from these two tips then I will consider my mission to help you become better at getting organised a success. Making regular week plans and working with a master deadline list really are my top two time management tips, that I share with almost every single student I coach. It sounds, perhaps, like rather simple advice, that anyone could have figured out on their own. Fact is, though, that most students don’t think of solutions like this by themselves, or when they do, they don’t manage to keep doing it on a week by week basis. The reason for this, I think, is that for a lot of people time management is just not a topic that they have positive associations with. There are exceptions, of course — there are some students for whom working according to a carefully laid plan comes natural. It makes them happy to make week plans regularly. They’re not scared to look at that long list with deadlines — the clarity it gives them is enough of a reward to keep doing so as the semester progresses. Other students, however — and these are the students who usually end up in a training session with me — have a lot of inner resistance to time management, and intuitively reject the idea that making a week plan regularly will make their life better. It feels too restrictive, too ‘boxed in’. They like winging it, going with the flow. These students are the free spirits, who — just like me when I was a student — don’t want to be boxed in. They’re often incredibly open-minded and creative, but they really, really struggle with conscientiousness. If this is you, then the way to motivate yourself to make those week plans and to look at that scary master list with deadlines regularly is to see that, in all likelihood, you’re paying an incredibly high price for not doing so. My best guess is that, in some way, shape or form, life is kicking your butt every now and again because you don’t have the big picture.
Life is very cruel if you can’t budget your money: inevitably, somewhere down the line, trouble rears its ugly head, and life offers you what my friend Paul from Sydney likes to call a shit sandwich — pain beyond imagining in the form of huge bills, debts, or even lawsuits if you really mess things up. Well, life can be cruel too if you don’t budget your time well. Part of growing up should be that you learn how to organise your finances well — I think we can all agree on that. Over the course of the last few years I’ve also become increasingly convinced that learning how to organise your time is equally important, especially when you’re a college student. Make those week plans and try to stick to them. You don’t have to follow them down to the letter. It’s just a plan, not a religious law. Things will change on the ground, which means that sometimes the plan needs adjusting. Sometimes you might be better off if you drop the plan altogether and just go to that party that you’ve just been invited to. There should be room for all of that. You can have freedom within the constraints of a plan — you really can. But not making any kind of plan at all? That’s almost always a recipe for disaster.
Roosevelt understood that principle — budget your time well or run into trouble — exceedingly well. He was highly motivated to succeed at Harvard, and understood intuitively that for that success to materialise he’d have to plan meticulously. What Roosevelt also intuitively understood, however, was that during the hours he allocated to a particular task he should do nothing else. He wasn’t just good at planning, he was also extremely good at blocking out distraction. When he was with other people, he was social; when he played sports, he played sports. And when he was studying? Well, then he studied — intensely. Because he was on such a tight schedule, he knew he only had limited time to finish whatever task he was working on — the clock was ticking. Somehow, having that time limit helped him to stay focused. Cal Newport, a computer scientist who works at Georgetown University and author of the blog Study Hacks, calls this kind of intensely focused work “deep work.” He defines it as follows:
Deep work: professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
Newport claims that it’s becoming harder and harder for most of us to do deep work in the digital age, and there’s probably a degree of truth to that. It must have been easier for Roosevelt to block out distraction than it is for students nowadays. He didn’t have a smartphone. He wasn’t on social media. But there must have been some distraction. It would have been difficult even at Harvard in 1867 to stay as focused as he was. If it wasn’t, every Harvard student of Roosevelt’s year would have graduated with a string of published papers to their name. Needless to say, they didn’t. That means, in other words, that it must be possible to transfer Roosevelt’s ability to work without getting distracted to our own day and age. Just planning meticulously alone is not enough to emulate his success. If you make a plan but you’re not able to stick to it because you’re constantly getting distracted, then your life is still going to be a mess, and your academic results will suffer as a consequence. But how do you do that? How do you block out distractions and avoid procrastination in the digital age, so you can truly study like Teddy Roosevelt?
Cal Newport, who actually discusses Roosevelt’s study habits in his book Deep Work, gives the following advice on how to apply Roosevelt’s method to your own academic life:
Identify a deep task (that is, something that requires deep work to complete) that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time. If possible, commit publicly to the deadline — for example, by telling the person expecting the finished project when they should expect it. If this isn’t possible (or if it puts your job in jeopardy), then motivate yourself by setting a countdown timer on your phone and propping it up where you can’t avoid seeing it as you work.
At this point, there should be only one possible way to get the deep task done in time: working with great intensity — no email breaks, no daydreaming, no Facebook browsing, no repeated trips to the coffee machine. Like Roosevelt at Harvard, attack the task with every free neuron until it gives way under your unwavering barrage of concentration.
To those wise words I would add: perhaps experiment a bit with ways to restrict temptation, which is always right under our noses these days now that all of us are constantly hooked up to that great dopamine-producing slot machine we call the internet. Give your phone to your flatmate, and ask them to only give it back after two hours. Turn off your internet router. Experiment with apps that block the internet on your phone or laptop, like Cold Turkey — whatever works for you (for more ideas on dealing with distraction, read Newport’s book Deep Work — it’s great). Doing something like that is also a clear signal to your subconscious that you mean business, and that it should put its incessant requests for Youtube shorts or Netflix binges on hold. Then work with great intensity for a relatively short amount of time on your task, and try and get it done within the assigned timespan. Do this for only a few tasks in the first week you try it, then gradually do this more and more until it becomes second nature. Who knows — you might become as good at it as Theodore. You probably won’t win the Nobel Peace Prize or end up on Mount Rushmore (last time I checked it was already quite full with presidential-looking faces up there). But it probably will do wonders for your academic achievements. Ornithology or naval strategy, anyone?
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This post is adapted from chapter 1 of my book "Make Lists Not Fists: A Student Survival Guide to Stress-Free Productivity". The first two chapters are available as a free download on this blog. Chapter 2 goes into depth with the deep work concept, and gives more tips for how to become good at it.
A note on Roosevelt: I don’t want to hold him up as a hero without qualification. Morris’s biography is admirably candid, and it also highlights aspects of his character that I found deeply disturbing. I’m drawing on him here purely as an example of someone who organised his time exceptionally well, not as a role model in any broader sense.
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