Entering my second semester of college, I have had a lot of things to reflect on and use as learning experiences for the future, primarily to avoid making the same mistakes multiple times. The one that I keep coming back to, however, is my lack of self-control when it comes to work vs. play time. When you are your own boss, and you are the one setting what it is that you should do, the hardest part comes with realizing that means that you also have to tell yourself when to stop goofing off and get back to work.

Throughout high school, everything was laid out for you, and often being in class was enough to learn the content well enough to pass. For this reason, I never developed any out-of-class study habits, and have failed to see my time in the afternoons as anything other than free. The homework that I did do was either required and going to be turned in, or if ever the rare occasion came along where I decided to do some practice problems they were always half-assed and skimmed over. Because of that, I have learned the hard way that one of if not the most important life skill you can ever attain and should strive to perfect is the ability to plan and impose upon yourself a set of expectations for every scenario.

Among the many reasons this is so, the most relevant is the fact that it is applicable to every aspect of your life. When looking at college life as an example, there are several expectations that you can set on yourself: eating healthy, exercising regularly, getting out of your room and interacting with real people, etc.

The difference between setting expectations and simply telling yourself to do those things is that when there is no structured approach to the guidelines of what you should do in a day, it becomes very easy to wave things off. “I should go to the gym,” can very quickly turn into, “I’m already cozy in my room, I’ll go tomorrow,” and then tomorrow comes and the same thing happens again.

Although it is still possible for that to happen when you have a schedule and/or checklist of things that you need to get done, those simple tools can help keep yourself accountable because they provide a tangible measure of success or failure at the end of the day.

Other than in college life and planning out your day, expectations can be useful when interacting with other people, especially with those that you care about. Whether you keep them to yourself or not, having expectations laid out about how you expect people to act and how they should treat you will make sure that you are never unhappy in any situation with others involved.

Acknowledging to yourself what your limits are either removing yourself from a situation if they’re passed or letting the other person know that they are crossing a line is the basis not only of most healthy friendships but for maintaining your mental composure in most scenarios.

Coming back to the original point, the hardest part about the new-found freedom of college life is realizing that while you’re still accountable to your parents because it is their money that is paying for you to be there (at least in my situation), they are not there with you every day keeping track of what you are doing, and as such you are the only person who is really keeping you in check.

The trickiest part about this, in particular with doing work outside of class, is that there are a lot of things that one has to do but doesn’t normally want to do if they don’t have to. Making it a habit to set yourself expectations at the start of every day provides a structure that, while still entirely under your control and not concrete in any way, can provide the necessary push in the right direction to making the rest of the things you don’t want to do become habit and part of a routine.

In the words of every hypnotist I have watched, “it is impossible to make someone do something they don’t want to do.” The goal of expectations is to get yourself to the point where you want to do everything that you have to in order to feel accomplished at the end of every day.