Tutor Mike has had a major win. I have talked about my suspicion of schedules, and the anxiety I feel when thinking about more than one task at once. Assignment 1 for Managing your Study, in fact for the course as a whole, was to put together a weekly planner and a session planner. And to do them both in Microsoft Word.

We'll take the last one first: Session planner. Useless, I thought. This is a single-session course. There are barely more than half a dozen deadlines or exams, and they're all listed in the Unit Information Guides and a good few other places besides. Who needs this?

Still, concluding that the main purpose of the assignment was just to do the assignment, I duly marked in my deadlines on a table, colour-coded them, and put in some big arrows for good measure. The result is kind of a Gantt chart rotated 90° clockwise, with the vertical axis denoting time, the units of study along the horizontal.

Then I found that having done this, whenever I wanted to recall which assignments were due when, I went for the PDF I'd made of this Word document before any other source of the same information. Last weekend I thought hang it all, I'll print it out and carry it with me. Education: 1; Matthew still to score.

The weekly planner is a bit more problematic. I already have a perfectly fine calendar, which I've adjusted to spit out a plain text file of the next week's worth of commitments. I print this out on Monday morning, fold it up and put it in my pocket, using the reverse side for task-related notes over the course ofthe week, like a proper GTD hipster.

But the point of the weekly planner is not just to put in your fixed, non-negotiable commitments (classes, appointments, etc.), but also to fill every other hour of the day with negotiable commitments, even if it's just "cuddle cats". If it's important to you, it should be on there somewhere.

Initially I rebelled against this too, thinking it a ludicrous degree of obsessive over-planning, but then I appplied an IT analogy. The negotiable commitments are just default values. If I sit down to study unit EDU10446, and realise that my next assignment for EDU10445 is soon due, I can bump the one in favour of the other, in the expectation that it will all even out in the end (more or less). Having a default activity for any given time just means you don't spend half an hour deciding what to do before realising you don't have time to do it any more and you should have started half an hour ago.

In Covey-speak, about which I shall say more later, you are scheduling for Quandrant II (non-urgent, important), while allowing for Quadrant I (urgent, important) activities (Covey, 2006).

So whither Just One Thing™? Well, it turns out that Just One Thing™ is granular. It applies to hours as well as days. When you sit down (or get up) to do one of your scheduled activities, what exactly do you choose to do? Doesn't matter; just do one thing, and then you're off the hook. If it's study, just open a book for the relevant topic and read a chapter. Likely you'll find something in there that you can use in an essay, or reminds you of the next thing you can do, and you're away. Or not, in which case make yourself a sandwich and feel good about having done one thing instead of nothing.

Now there is no way on Earth I am going to manually compile a colour-coded weekly planner in Microsoft Word (or even a freedom-respecting equivalent), every week for the next three and a half years. I am going to have to build something in Drupal, to pull in my appointments from my existing personal calendar, and allocate the free space around them. I shall shedule this task in my weekly planner retrospectively, once it is complete.

We were warned during O' Week that most students find university study much less structured than what we were used to. I suppose I'm one of the exceptions to that rule. My expectation, borne out by experience so far at least, was that scheduled classes and set deadlines would be a blessed relief from the degree of self management required in self-employment. It even compares favourably to the constant stress and uncertaintainty of unemployment.

That said, I know that keeping on top of things will be a challenge. Fundamentally, I would prefer to live day to day directed by whim. I've lived like that in the past and found it quite satisfying. However this isn't now a viable modus vivendi (Like that? Latin, that is. Dead posh.) for a number of reasons:

• I'm partially responsible for the welfare of a spouse and three cats. I can't go off on a whim in case the latter decide to gang up on the former. It's bad enough being only outnumbered three to two.
• I'm dead broke. Whims typically cost money.
• Building up a good whim requires a certain degree of stimulous from the environment, and I live in Coffs Harbour, possibly the least stimulating environment in the country, outside of Canberra.
• I wouldn't mind actually achieving something useful before I kick the bucket.

As noted last week (ahem), I had little reason to worry about being efficiently productive during school, and much of my past employment history has been in undemanding dirty-white-collar jobs. I've been sent on more than my share of courses which promised huge productivity gains from nothing more than a humourous video featuring John Cleese paying his alimony, a Powerpoint presentation, a trust exercise or two, bad orange juice, bad coffee, and platters of little sandwich triangles.

I even regrettably paid a substantial amount of money for a course in Coffs which shall remain nameless involving acronyms, slogans, inspirational aphorisms, bewildering exercises disturbingly reminiscent of the time I thought it would be a jolly lark to take a Scientology personality test, and endless CDs of an American man with a smile in his voice congratulating me on how well I was doing, the remarkable improvement in my productivity, and observing what a great idea it would be to do another course. It was a cult, not an educational, or even a training, course.

There's only on personal productivity strategy that has ever worked for me, and - for not quite the first time - I shall let the Internet in on the secret: It's called Just One Thing™.

My first problem in trying (and gradually failing) to run a business was actually doing work. No matter how trivial the project I was embarking upon was in reality, when I sat down in front of the computer in the morning it seemed overwhelming. Too often, the temptation was to say "Oh, well. Because of [insert excuse here], there's not much point in trying to get anything done today. Tomorrow will be different." And of course it never was. Part of the problem was that all the advice I'd received to date encouraged practices like slicing up your day into ten minute intervals and scheduling what you plan to achieve in each. This is totally inappropriate for a job which is mostly creative problem solving, where each problem is likely to be quite unlike any one you've solved before, and getting your head around what you're planning to do takes half an hour by itself. What you end up doing is planning to achieve far more than you ever could in a day, and ending the day inevitably berating yourself for abject failure, even if you've achieved quite a lot.

Eventually it dawned on me that the alternative to inevitable failure (or not trying), was to lower the bar for success. Start the day by saying "I don't have to work miracles. I merely have to do Just One Thing™." At minimum what you'll have done is one thing, which is preferable to going back to bed, curling into the foetal position and gently sobbing for a day. What is more likely, at least if you are a nerd, is that Just One Thing™ will lead to the next thing, and the next, and before you know it you'll have your nose stuck in the tram line and be well on your way to the terminal.

So Just One Thing™ is a form of self-deception, but it works for me. Well, I should qualify that by saying that it's improved things over the past few years. Will it be enough to get me through a minimum three and a half years of study? Almost certainly not.