Peanut Buttering

A college credit system for adult life

(Quick aside: I started writing some posts which required detailed data analysis and review of existing research, and it turns out that's hard to do well in a single day. So... Maybe someday those will happen. But for now, vibeposting only.)

Colleges have some pretty good ideas about organizing time.

First, take the quarter system. A quarter is 12 weeks long, which hits a sweet spot of being neither too long nor too short. It's long enough that you can actually learn and accomplish a meaningful amount, and you'll have a good idea whether you want to pursue the topic further. But it's also short enough that if it's a crap class, or you realize you aren't interested, you've capped your downside on wasted time.

Additionally, novelty effect can keep you engaged pretty well for 12 weeks; after that, it's a good time to switch things up or at least have a break in focus (sort of a macro pomodoro?).

The college credit system is even more interesting. One credit is a standard unit for coursework that approximates 1 hour of in-class instruction and 2 hours of out-of-class student work per week, over a given college enrollment period. A full-time student is then defined as someone taking 15 or more credits.

The credit system is pretty cool because it gives both students and instructors a common language to communicate with each other about expected time commitments.

Now: we can apply this to regular life by establishing an equivalent "Life Credit" system, based on how many hours there are in a week. According to the American Time Use Survey, the average American has 70 free hours per week once mandatory activities like sleep, household, and personal/family care are accounted for. I'm going to also assume 40 hours of that are allocated to work, but you can imagine a further generalized credit system that also accounts for varied working hours. Now 60 hours remain per week; to align with a full-time student load of 15 credits, we'll say that 1 Life Credit represents 4 hours per week.

Great! In this system, anyone with >15 credits per week is overloaded and will have to compromise on some of their commitments, and the degree to which you are below 15 credits represents how much breathing room you have in your life.

This system has some useful functions:

Ultimately this doesn't do much that counting the number of hours you spend on things each week doesn't already accomplish. Even the value as a common currency of time commitment could be accomplished using Hours as the currency.

Mostly the value here is in getting people to measure, and to think and communicate in measurements, where they otherwise wouldn't. This happens automatically in college, but having a well adopted Credit system for life might make it more common after graduation too!