Questions from the Cockpit: Take time to tap the ‘break’ pedal

Tami, a student pilot in Arizona, writes: I’m in an accelerated flight training program to become an airline pilot. The entire thing is supposed to take a year. I’m only a couple of months in and I’m already starting to burnout. There’s just so much to read, so many videos to watch, so many things to memorize — and for most of it I’m pretty much on my own. Do you have any advice on how I should organize what I’m doing and how can I avoid burnout?

As it so happens, I recently came out of semi-retirement and am once again working in the flight training biz, so I’m feeling pretty up to speed on this issue. I have some thoughts to share that might help you and other folks in your same semi-swamped, but not-quite-sinking boat.

In hindsight, I probably should have used some sort of seaplane analogy there, but I don’t really know much about seaplanes.

Anyway, I have two tips for you: One deals with time management and the other with something that many people in intensive training programs forget to make time for.

Time Management

Let’s start with time management. There are two types of flight students that I see nowadays. First, there are adults with established careers who woke up one morning and realized that going into the office just one more day would kill their souls. Second are the fresh-faced young’uns right out of high school who have never held a job before.

The older students usually have already learned time management, either formally or just by life experience, but for the younger pack, here’s the 4-1-1 on what this is all about: Time management is defined as “planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities.”

In business, the goal of time management is to increase efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness. But personalized time management is a great way to keep your head above water when there is a whole lot of water around you.

At its core, it’s about choosing how to organize all that you must do. It deals with assigning priorities and creating schedules.

Don’t be afraid to actually get out a pencil and paper and sketch out a master plan, assigning time blocks to the various aspects of your training, such as studying test guides for written exams, reading core training materials in the the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge (PHAK), studying maneuvers in the Airplane Flying Handbook (AFH), watching those King videos, working your way through the pilot/controller glossary, learning the regulations, memorizing your training airplane’s v-speeds and emergency flows, and — of course — you know, actually flying.

Hey, your flight school no doubt uses a syllabus to organize your overall flight training, so why shouldn’t you take a page from the same book to organize all the studying and other activities you need to accomplish? That’s what time management is.

But you really do need to map it out — it must be formalized to work.

That said, you’ll note that I said to use a pencil. Time management is the overall battle plan, but things need to stay flexible when you actually engage “the enemy.”

And it can take some… pardon the parody… time to dial it in.

Time management plans also need to be personalized.

Years ago, I worked for a really big flight school where one of the higher-ups decided to create a mandated master time management schedule for all the learners. He built a massive spreadsheet that literally scheduled every single minute of the day. Except he forgot that student housing was 45 minutes away from the airport and his “brilliant” plan had no time budgeted for commuting.

It was the stupidest idea in the history of flight training in the first place, because it ignored the most basic fundamental of education: People learn differently.

Some learners can read a textbook in a productive, information-absorbing manner for 90 minutes. Others might only be able to read dense material and get anything out of it for 30 minutes at a stretch. And that’s ok. The key is to be honest with yourself about how long you can effectively do any kind of learning and design your time management plan around that.

People who study time management classify three approaches:

• The first is monochronic, which is basically doing one thing at a time, such as lining up tasks in a chain and picking them off one at a time.
• The second approach is polychronic, a form of multitasking.
• The third is cyclical, which is more pattern-based.

Apparently, different cultures tend to take one approach or another. Americans (along with northern Europeans) tend toward monochronic, while cultures in southern Europe and around the Mediterranean are happier polychronic, and Asia is dominated by cyclical.

Culture aside — and of course this is coming from someone in a monochronic culture — I’d be hard-pressed to see how aviation studies could be effectively multi-tasked, but if it works for you, well, that’s wonderful.

But whatever the approach, the real value of time management is that you won’t be overlooking any elements of your education, and that you’ll get a real sense of accomplishment as you complete the planned tasks. So it keeps you on track, builds toward your goal, but also provides some satisfaction, to boot.

In a segue from time management, but part of it nonetheless, schedule your sleep so that, one, you get enough of it, and two, so your normally scheduled flight blocks are in a fully rested state.

If you generally fly in the afternoon, it might be appropriate to study most of the night and sleep a lot of the day. You just need to schedule it so that you get whatever number of hours of sleep your body needs, recalling that medical research indicates that males should have something in the seven to eight hour range, and females between eight and 10 hours of sleep a night.

If you are feeling guilty about taking time for a full night’s sleep with so much to study, I promise that fatigued study is highly ineffective compared to well-rested study, so sleeping enough is actually good time management. Budgeting enough time for sleep, so that every waking hour you are productive, gets waaaay more accomplished in the long run than skimping on sleep and performing at a sub-par level.

The point of scheduling sleep around flight blocks is that the airplane is a horrible classroom. It is, by definition, the hardest learning environment, and therefore you should be at your most rested before you strap in.

That’s not to say you should sleep until right before your flight. You need time for a proper breakfast — proper nutrition is also critical for those in intensive training programs — and you don’t want to rush your preflight weather, weight and balance, and advanced review of the day’s training plan.

But if you get up at four in the morning and then fly at two in the afternoon, you’re going to be too fatigued to get as much out of it as you could have if you managed your time better.

Now a lot of people, and I’ve been guilty of this myself, think they can survive anything for a period of time. Just put on your big-boy or big-girl pants, push through, and get it done. And most people can actually do that, but at a higher cost than was necessary, and probably not for as long as they think they can.

So here’s where we talk about that thing I said that most people forget to include in their time management plan: Self care.

Self Care

In our semi-puritan culture, a lot of people buy into the idea that hard work is rewarding enough to be sustainable. It’s not. You yourself have said you feel the burnout coming.

Just like sufficient sleep and proper nutrition are the foundation stones of effective learning, so too is self care.

In the context of intensive flight training, I define self care as taking a break from the intensity. I think of it as hitting the reset button so that you will be ready for the next round. Too much learning overwhelms the mind. You need to give it a bit of a rest, so it can perform at the maximum capacity the rest of the time.

So just how do you take care of yourself in an intensive flight training program?

Well, the first thing to ask yourself is: What did I do to relax before I took on flight training? Odds are, whatever it was, you aren’t doing it now. And it may not be practical, as you really don’t have much time in your time management plan to budget for self care.

But thinking about what you used to do might provide a good clue to what might work for you now. Was it physical? Did you hit the gym to burn off steam? Jog for 10 miles? Or did you sink into an aromatherapy bath lit by candles for an hour? Or escape to Netflix for two? Some people take a mental break by being physical, for others it’s the art of doing nothing and taking the mind elsewhere.

In all probability, your self care will need to be downsized, but it still needs to be part of your plan — perhaps the only part of your plan that should be written in ink.

So recognize if you need physical activity or physical escape to relax and plan for it.

But here’s the key: It needs to be airplane-free. Don’t try to multitask self care. So no jogging while listening to a Foreflight podcast and trying to convince yourself it’s self care. It’s not. Effective self care is a break. A pause. A tap of the brake pedal.

Personally, and I’m not advocating this for anyone, I smoke a cigar at the end of the day, pretty much everyday. As you can’t smoke in most places nowadays, it forces me to sit in one quiet place for half an hour, instead of running around trying to do a 100 little things at once. Sometimes I smoke it when I come home from the flight school, sometimes I hold it off until later as a reward/motivator for myself if I have a few tasks to accomplish that aren’t fun but must be done, like laundry or paying the bills.

I also tuned into the fact that you said that you were pretty much on your own for your studies.

The one thing I hate about modern flight training is that a great deal of the ground study is self-study aided by some sort of video or online content.

I learned at a time when all ground was classroom-based with real live ground instructors (not that there wasn’t still a ton to read and study after class) and I hope we return to that model at some point as I think it built better pilots.

But here’s the deal: If you are really on your own, it might be because you have made it that way. Seek out other students at your level of training and set up an informal study group.

Science has proven that people who study in groups retain information better, have higher test scores, and have higher overall positive emotions toward learning compared to solo studiers. We are social creatures, after all.

And finally, a last thought, not so much for you, given where you are in the process, but for other readers about to join the industry. While accelerated programs are the fastest way to the airline flight deck — and they have some of the best full-funding opportunities — they aren’t the only way to get to the airlines and they’re not for everybody.

There are flight training programs associated with community colleges that are spread out over two years. And a number of universities offer very fine four-year programs. Of course, with colleges and universities, along with your aeronautical studies, you’ll have to take the other classes that make up the degree that comes with the aviation certificates, such as English, math, social science, humanities, and all the rest. But the pace is definitely slower, even with all the added academic load.

And finally, there’s the tried and true approach of taking flight lessons at whatever pace suits you at a smaller, customer-service oriented local flight school.

You can all get to where you want to be. Fast, medium or slow. Just manage that time and tap the “break” pedal on a regular basis to clear your mind so that you can maximize your learning and enjoy the journey.