You're clearly not a student :). I'd love to choose when to go to bed, but that's not really compatible with a workload challenging enough to appease admissions counselors.
If you think life's going to become any more considerate of your sleep requirements, think again.
Use time-boxing as a scheduling mechanism. If you find you have more work to do than time to do it, start lopping off items from your to-do list, and/or identifying how you can accomplish a sufficient effort in the time available.
That is likely to be a far more useful life lesson than whatever subject it is you're studying at the moment.
You also have to learn how to schedule downtime. People cannot run 100% 24/7/365, and attempting to do this is at best very painful, and at worst, literally, suicidal.
You can get all of your work done before a certain time. It just involves more rigorous organization. It is never good to put anything at a higher priority than your health.
Just to respond a little, I actually just finished with my Master's in applied physics, so yeah, it can work with an academic life. ^_^ Actually it can even be beneficial, much like turning off the Internet -- where yes, you lose access to help docs, but you also lose access to distractions.
If you want a little more unorthodox advice I'd offer, "don't buy the textbook unless either (a) it is a workbook which must be submitted for the grade or (b) you were really so powerfully impressed that you want this book as a lifelong reference." Ask the professor to ask the library to put the textbook on reserve in the library -- so that nobody in the course can take it out, but rather you share it at the library. If this leaves you muttering about Kant's categorical imperative, remember that if someone else is using it, you can form an impromptu study group and make a new friend. :D. For that matter, student societies should have copies of the texts, and a study lounge at the department might also have them. If nothing else works, copy homework problems from a friend taking the same course and look up the same material in alternative texts in the library (or on the Internet) -- but that's almost never necessary.
My impression from reading his/her comment was that he/she is a high school senior, in which case what he says would make sense. 35 hours a week in classes, plus the activity and homework load he would need to make UChicago, plus meals and transport, add up to at least 14 hours on weekdays, without making allowance for inefficiency, laziness, akrasia, etc or leisure.
Just curious: Do you think your workload will decrease in the future, or that the workloads of the highly paid professionals here are less than what's required from you in school?
Don't expect life to get easier. More rewarding, IMO, but not easier.
I would assume that a highly paid professional spends a much greater percentage of his or her day engaged in actual work, is more efficient than I am, and is required to produce a higher quality output than I am. I'm sure it's cognitively harder, but I doubt it's anywhere near the number of hours.
My dad is an accountant. He gets to work at 7:30am and gets home at 4:30pm. He spends about as many hours at work as I do at school, but when he logs off for the day, he's done. I can't remember the last time I actually completed my obligations for the day. If you do manage to do a good job on all the problem sets and readings before losing consciousness, there's always a test to be studying for or a paper to be revising. I procrastinate because there is literally no such thing as "after homework is done."
I don't mean to complain - I gave myself this courseload and I've done well enough with it that I'll be going to my dream school next year (UChicago - yes, I know, the workload will increase exponentially). Sleep deprivation is a price I chose to pay. But I do think that most professionals have a day which ends - usually before 7pm, but at some point it ends - and several hours to commit to a social life, family, side projects, pleasure reading etc. as they please. Obviously not in 80hr/week fields like law and not in startups about to ship, but on balance. Is this not accurate?
Yes and no. First though, congrats on Chicago. It's a great school and a great place to live. A long history of great work there.
There are a lot of great, lucrative careers that give you a clear boundary between work and home. Some of these are that way by nature, but really all can be. There are niches even in law and medicine, that provide for a if not 40 hour work week, something close to that. These often will be the jobs that pay the below-median salary in that field.
But anything that resembles entrepreneurship is going to feel a lot more like what you are doing now than what you see in your dads career. (Also worth noting on the subject of your dad that you presumably didn't see him when he was starting his career.) Sure, what I said in the previous graf applies to entrepreneurship as well, but... the disposition that drives a strong work/life balance seems often orthogonal to the ambition that leads you to working for yourself to begin with.
So if that life interests you -- if building and growing something is your destiny -- then my POV here is to know that everything you wrote about your current life, the "last time I completed", the "always a next thing to do", the "no such thing as done", all of that applies wholly to entrepreneurship.
Of course, like I mentioned a couple days ago, it can be tremendously rewarding.
I'm only 30, I have a lot to figure out still, so take all that with more than a grain of salt.
