Motivation, Time Management and Expectations.

[alzee]

This poses a new set of challenges. I've jumped the first hurdle; starting down this road. Now, I find myself challenged with making all of the moving parts in my life work cohesively. I tend to come home from work and jump into studying something until midnight. I go to bed and repeat. This is both unhealthy and unsustainable. However, I'm not sure what other ways there is to do it. My fear is that if I do not finish in record time, I'll lose the motivation that I have. I've set this goal of doing this in 18 months. The expectation is only my own, yet I can't seem to lighten up. I want to do this now more than ever and I want to do it yesterday.

I can completely relate to this much of your story.

It's been about 9 months since I started myself -- my first college credits were ACE credits for Aleks math courses in early February. Since then, I've completed over 90 cr. I am going to apply to graduate with an ASBA in December (just waiting on my College Comp CLEP to show up on my eval), and intend to apply for the BSBA for March. I have three courses "in flight" right now (one SL, two Saylor) and those three will put me at the 100cr mark, when completed. I have all but 3 of the last 20 planned out.

This is in spite of stalling out for a good month or two, completely burned out. You can do it if your desire to reach your goal is strong enough to overcome that burnout and the other rationalizations you mentioned.

A word of caution though -- if you're doing this for the education, you may want to slow down. I can only speak for myself, but I know that hustling along at this pace is severely impacting my retention. I crammed, studied, and worked my ass off to pass Aleks intro to stats.. now months later I learn I really need Saylor's business stats as well. The material is nearly identical, but I remember next to none of it, so I'm repeating earlier effort. I don't remember a thing from the sociology or psychology courses.

If you want to actually get an education, you should probably slow down.