I am very bad at focussing on a single project at a time. It's almost a joke to some of my friends that every couple weeks I'll come to them with some new project idea.
This isn't an issue by itself. But, I have so many project ideas that I can't seem to focus on any one long enough to drive it to completion.
That's where I came up with the idea of life semesters.
The idea is that I start breaking down my life into semesters in the same way that a college does. This means dividing the year into three, four month long, parts spring (January - April), summer (May - August), and fall (September - December).
With the year broken up I take a look at how much free time I expect to have during your semester. I ask yourself: "If I was going to take a college level course, how many could I take this semester?" The answer to that question will tell me how many college course sized projects I can take during that period.
I usually have enough time on my schedule that I could take a single college course. So I take a look at the list of projects that I want to do and I pick one that is about that size. If what I want to work on is bigger than a college class I do my best to break it up into smaller parts till I get something that fits. If what I want to work on is smaller than a college class then I allow myself to add in a little bit more.
I haven't been doing this very long. This (Summer 2024) is my first semester of doing this. The projected I picked was to read James Joyce's Ulysses. It's a challenging book, and it felt like something that fit well into a college class. But I confess I'm nearly two months into the semester, and I'm only a handful of chapters into the book. I got a little distracted making the website that you are currently reading this on.
That means that I either have to buckle down and work a little harder during the second half of the semester—just like I usually had to do in college. Or that when the next semester comes around I can reevaluate my progress and decide what to do for that semester. If Ulysses isn't done I might decide that I want to continue with that project and give it another go, or I could decide that I clearly wasn't very interested in it after all and give something else a go.
The point of a life semester isn't for me to give myself a grade. The point is really to give myself a fixed point to check in and see if what I'm working on is what I want to work on.