You must be nuts!

Rewind to AD 2000.

The scene: Semester exams were right in the corner. The practical part of the exams had just got over, and the general mood we budding engineering graduates had could best be described as ‘frenzy’.

Most of us were thinking that we had scraped through the practical exams. In engineering, according to my experience, failing in a practical exam is tougher than passing. You must’ve really been dumb, or must’ve refused to even stand when the faculty’s order was to jump. But theory exams were a slightly different matter. You got to read atleast 4 out of the 8 chapters in every subject to manage to scrape through. By scrape through, I really mean getting a first class with distinction, since one could probably set records by getting a score of sub 70% in a college like that of mine. Since the task – reading half of the chapters that we’ve never cared to visit before – was daunting, my friends were fretting over and over in the study holidays. But I, and a couple of able bodied souls, was never worried. My only goal was to complete a couple of Frederick Forsyth books before the study holidays got over.

If you had thought I was somewhere in the bottom of the class, you couldn’t have been more mistaken. Somehow, I had mastered the art of last minute reading. I knew the knack of getting an 80+ score just with a 6 or 7 hrs read before the exam. Either the system was stupid enough to award me that many marks with minimum effort, or I was a genius in last minute scoring. I personally doubt the former. Some of my friends said “You must be nuts to do that”. They weren't entirely wrong.

Fast-forward to AD 2004.

One of the most frequent arguments amongst we B-schoolers is over what we gain out of this 2 year long slogging. I always am a fervent believer that we gain a lot about the ground level working of almost all the departments of management. Some of my friends believe that most of what we read is crap and impractical. Cynical as they are, not many doubt one thing: that we are asked to play around with what could be one of the most important facets of management – time management. Read between the lines, and you’ll find that I’m not saying that we learn to manage time properly. I’m just saying that the very many things that happen round the clock teach us to respect priorities. I must admit here that I’m really a fledgling when it comes to managing time. I just can’t seem to get my priorities right, even after making proper schedules for entire weeks. Time just vanishes away, somewhere into the open.

When I sit and think that our classes get over at 1 pm in the afternoon and all I got to do was to read for the next days’ classes, read some newspapers, browse, eat, sleep, maybe workout in gym, play some games, and I’ve got till 9 am the next day to do all that, it looks like a cinch. But it isn’t. I guess most of we B-schoolers aren’t entirely successful in this area – getting priorities right. Things just fall apart and we end up postponing things to the last microsecond. These days, I don’t hear someone saying “You must be nuts to do this in the last minute”, probably because the world I live in works that way. Activities like completing assignments in the nick of time, polishing projects in the dire end, jamming notes just before an afternoon quiz etc seem to be so imbibed in us that I almost am fearing that we might end up doing the same thing in an organization after graduation.

So, what’s the solution? I guess it lies in proper planning. While we learn all sorts of financial, marketing and organizational planning, we are at the risk of losing one very important thing – planning activities. I just hope that my realizing and reflecting doesn’t stop here.