When Managing Time Matters

I am 17 years old and a senior in high school, now preparing my college applications. I am a pretty good student and pride myself on my writing skills. I have known for a while what I wanted to do for my personal essay, and I have spent a lot of time writing it in my head. My first application (Early Application) was due yesterday, and I sent it in several hours before the deadline (I didn’t want to get caught in a website crash). I expected to be finished earlier, and I had to cancel plans for the weekend in order to get it done. On top of that, everyone in my family is mad at me. Both my parents are angry at me for “waiting until the last minute.” My father is also angry at my mother for “allowing this to happen,” but she blames him. And my little sister feels that I get all the attention. I like the way my essay turned out. Still, everyone is upset, and I’m not sure what I did wrong.

In about 20 years or so, you will understand that you really did nothing wrong, that the college application process has become massively distorted by societal problems way beyond your or your family’s control but which play out anyway in every household when a still-growing person is aiming at admission to a competitive college. Admittedly, that’s a long time to wait for understanding or for peace in your family.

In the meantime, there are a few things to know that can help you and everyone around you. They fall under the general category of self-management, which essentially takes a lifetime to get good at, although some people never do. What’s more, it enormously benefits from the motivation that often comes from being responsible for yourself, which few American teens today are.

First up under the category of self-management is self-knowledge. You know you’re good at writing and enjoy doing it. That’s an important bit of information. Especially because writing is a facet of your growing identity, your self-esteem to some degree hinges on carrying out writing tasks well. That takes preparation, and you seem to have done some by considering what you wanted to say and rehearsing it in your head. I would be willing to guarantee, however, that it took longer than you imagined to transfer what was in your head into a finished piece. That gets us to time management, more specifically: time management, writing division.

Finding the words that convey with precision and clarity what you think and feel is challenging—even for experienced writers. It often takes far more time than you think. The thoughts in your head are shaded by feelings that don’t necessarily need words to be understood by you. Exporting them for others to grasp—impaling a thought upon a word—is hard mental work. Every disciplined writer has poems or articles or books in a drawer somewhere, waiting to be finished, because they have not yet found a way to articulate those thoughts with the desired deftness.

In order to actualize the wish to do well, you need to put it together with an acknowledgment of how important writing is to you and the discipline of time management. That’s a pretty tall order for a teen under the best of circumstances. But college application time is not the best of circumstances, for the reasons alluded to above. And because your parents are nervous for you and for themselves.

They know that college matters to your future (and thus to theirs, too), and they know that admission to the college of your (or their) dreams is guaranteed to no one these days. If they are themselves mature, they will do their best to keep their anxieties to themselves. But a final pre-filing weekend of cancelled plans and intensified effort is high drama that affects everyone in a household. Parents must always negotiate a fine line between nurturing and controlling, often not recognizing when they’ve crossed it. What you’re hearing from yours is more or less a debate between them on how they did on that score.

And yes, by most reckonings, hitting “send” a few hours before the filing deadline is waiting until the last minute. While that rattles parental nerves, mostly it just short-changes you. The tightening margin of time keeps you from enjoying the process of expression. But more significantly, it prevents you from being able to put your essay away for a necessary day and then look at it with fresh eyes. When you plan enough time for that, then you can give your work those polishing touches that feed your sense of self-mastery and represent you at your best.