Are you a schedule-person? Someone who prefers to do things in a certain order, at a certain time? Do you subscribe to the 'do (activity) at the same time each day to develop the habit of (activity)' method?

I've never been in a situation where I could write at the same time each day unless I wrote at 3am, which isn't really an option, as I often have to be up at 5. I still wrote, it was just always much more of a 'and somewhere in today I have to find time to write' affair. I was never a "six pm: write novel" kind of person. I've never been that kind of person for anything in my life. It comes from, I suspect, the nine-to-five world that many people already live in. When your life is largely scheduled for you by the rest of the world, it makes sense to extend that schedule to your personal hours. Working shift work or parttime hours tends to break that flow. It's harder to pick an arbitrary time to do something in when there's no rhythm to living that way. When sometimes you have two hours to kill before the scheduled time, or perhaps a risk of other things running overtime.

Some people can handle this fine - they schedule something else for those two hours. Maybe they'll go to the gym, or find a dance class. But for me, any time I'm not at a paid job or other serious arrangement has always been nebulous 'my time', a wild velociraptor that hunted down, ambushed and destroyed the small, loping fuzzy herbivore of voluntary scheduling.

All through university, we took Myers Briggs tests (which we all know have been disproven countless times, but that's not the point for the moment). It always annoyed me that I scored highly on their 'organised' scale (Judgement vs Perception) because I admitted to making a lot of schedules and planning out my assignments.  Plans were how I managed to fit work, study, writing, roleplaying, jewellery-making, programming and a social calendar into my life (a feat which always seemed to amaze those I met). Apparently, choosing not to fail my university degrees made me someone who loved structure and hated the freedom to do what I want. I didn't seem to matter that I never actually kept said schedules or plans - they were purely there to show me what I needed to get done that week, or for that project, not to dictate in any real sense when I would do these things. A task list, rather than a timetable. But for most people, the fact that I made them at all made me an Organised Person, not an arteeest.

Plans and I have always had an odd relationship, though. On the one hand, creating a plan for myself, no matter what it's for, is a surefire way to ensure that that's not what I'll do. Plan out a story? It'll change direction about two paragraphs in. Plan to work on a draft in the afternoon? I'll start a completely different project instead. I'll still get the work done on time - the story will be written, the assignment will be finished, the project will be complete. But never to the schedule or plan. And yet, I still make schedules and plans.

In part, I suspect it's just a way of keeping track of what I need to do, so that I can do things whever the mood strikes, but still get everything done. So I can forget the rest of the things that need to be done, and dive into what I'm doing. And perhaps some of it is also a way of promising new projects to myself (I'm never happier than when just starting on a new project, when it's all still exciting and new, and anything could happen.). And some of it is probably a quiet geekery in the enjoyment of creating structure from chaos, even if chaos is eventually going to reign. Whatever it is, it's certainly not from a want of structure. Even though I sigh inwardly every time I utterly stomp on my carefully constructed schedule, I could never stick to it. It takes all the fun out of life.

So, which are you? Would you rather work with structure, or sponteneity? Or, like me, do you work one way but act the other?