It’s exactly two weeks until my first final and three until my last. With other words these coming three weeks my days will look like this:

1. wake up
2. study
3. hopefully have time for some exercise
4. study
5. sleep

The time before an upcoming exam is always really frustrating as you have absolutely no time for “me-time”. It’s intense, frustrating and by the end of it you feel like there is absolutely no way your brain can register any more information.

So what’s the best way to get through it?

1. Plan your time!
   Make sure you schedule exactly when to study, and what, when to take breaks, work-out and so on. If you plan it before hand you can make sure you give each are the time it needs.
2. Never skip a break!
   Breaks are extremely important. Without breaks you’ll end up studying for way to long and you become extremely inefficient and easily distracted. Breaks are crucial for efficient studying.
3. Exercise!
   Exercising energizes and clears your brain. It’s an excellent opportunity for some me-time. I usually go to the gym with a friend so while exercising we get some girl-talk done. Another great thing about exercising is something you can do without feeling guilty because what you’re doing is actually a good way to spend your time.
4. Sleep!
   Get to bed in time so that you can start your day early. Atleast I am more efficient in the morning.

I am going to make my study-schedule this weekend and I am going to stick to it! Hopefully it’ll result in good grades!

Yesterday, I was looking threw the other authors articles finding them intressting. I found inspiration and realized that they reveal a lot that I hadn’t thought about. For example I believe I have a presupposition that I am a slow reader. During a course in strategy the exam contained reading a case and then answering a couple of questions. I horrified this way of examination. When practising cases before the exam I always finished reading after my friends. And defended this with that ”I have always been a slow reader”.

Reading threw an article about speeding up the reading, I defenitely came to the very basic conclusion that; if something is bugging me, why not improve it? So therefore, a new goal is to read books at my sparetime. The summer will be a good time for starting with that and practising not reading so throughtly.

In order to apply to the Stockholm School of Economics, students need to have certain qualifications for example studied certain courses such as a higher level of math. Since my studies at high school didn’t offer that, I had to study that at a municipality adult education. The certificate from the course had to be sent in and registered at the administrative autority that arranges the applications for university. First then, I met the requriements from the school.

The problem was that my letter with the certificate never got to the autority. I got very angry and felt like the smallest person in the world who were arguing with administrative people who sent me from one person to another, no one knowing who to speak with. At the end, everything worked out alright.

Since then I feel unconfortable  leaving important material in someone elses hands. Almost  the same thing happened to me this week, when I was applying to my university in Canada. (Where I am going to be studying at during the fall)

I got into panic and tried to call, email and get in contact with someone who could help me with the issue since my contact person wasn’t answering. I then talked to my father who asked me how everything ended the last time this happened. And my answer was, ”everything went to be alright”. And he just agreed and reasurred me that that would be the case this time aswell. I guess, that sometimes , there is no need to frenetical try to solve the problem, when it actually is not yours. In the end, usually things work out.

In an earlier post I talked about how it is important to stick to good habit as it is much easier to make yourself follow it through a day when your motivation is low, than getting back to it after taking a longer break from it. In another post I talked about how I actually make myself keep up habits even when I’m not feeling like it, by thinking about how I do not want to be.

In this post I will once again address the issue of Good Habits. But rather than talking about how to stick to them and motivate yourself I will talk about the result they often have on our life. I will prove that, at least for me, good habits are a chain reaction and one seldom comes alone.

I first realized that good habits work together when I looked through my reactions from this project. I set up as a goal to start exercising on a regular basis and I wanted to go through my days to see if I was accomplishing my goal. What I found was not only that I had in fact started going to the gym more, but also that my eating-habits had improved and that I had started giving my days higher over-all grades. Now to me this was interesting since I had not made it a high priority goal to change, and improve, my eating-habits.

So I started looking into the matter to find the reason to this curious, so far, coincidence.

• I had not started thinking more about food.
• I was not being mentally unhealthy by excluding delicious unhealthy food from my diet completely.

Instead I found that really what had happened was simply that exercising affected my state of mind and my body. My body suddenly craved healthier food than before and I guess my mind went to “health mode”. The energy I got from exercising took form in me starting to care more for activities that would make my body feel even better. In this case eating healthier. I also noticed that I had started walking to school more often during this time. I am convinced this is because of the same reason.

Lean Management is all about continuos learning and improving. It is safe to say I have moved up the “learning curve” from this realization. To be healthy and add good habits to my life does not have to mean a lot of extra time and work. They come naturally when I change my priorities. Basically, when I make sure to cover one area in life, many of the others will fall into place by themselves.

I have noticed that I am a person that constantly is living in present. When I am in Stockholm, my focus fully relies on my life here and the people I spend time with every day. Therefore, since many of my older friends are living in other parts of Sweden I tend to speak with them rather rarely. And when I do, I feel that we have to talk for hours to get through all the missed conversations. The whole thing ends up with a catch 22 where I defend my anxiety with arguments like; ”I don’t have a lot of time right now. I call here tomorrow!”. (Tomorrow is probably more like next week.)

Since we are living in different parts of Sweden during the year, we have come to take advantage of the holidays doing things together. Last week I went to Gothenburg for a festival with my friends from high school. Straight after meeting them I realized that the anxiety of being a lousy friend was completely unnecessary. With them, the “catch up” phase goes quickly since they know me within and without. No need to explain things thoroughly, they just understand and the friendship continues from where we left it. Long lasting friendship can stay strong even if the contact sometimes is inadequate.