A few days ago, I purchased a journal. It has a rather plain and inconspicuous outside, as well as a terrifying number of blank pages inside. But I bought it with the hope, maybe a very naive hope, that it will help keep me grounded as I enter my third, and final, year at Cambridge.

In both my first and second years, I always felt a bit lost; I had no idea how to plan my time, and spent a lot of it stumbling from one thing to the next. There was a distinct sense of having no control over time and, more importantly, my life. I thought I was missing out. At the start of every term I would go in thinking: "This time it’s going to be different; I’m going to do this, stop doing that, and get a grip on things." This idealistic approach always failed.

What made things worse was seeing and hearing what everyone else seemed to be doing with their time. Those who can combine playing a sport, singing in the college choir, rowing… and still getting their work done and having a social life. To be fair, I am neither sporty nor musically talented and I struggle to make 10am lectures, so most of these things were out of the question anyway. But the point, I kept concluding, was: they were doing all these things with their time. What on earth was I doing with mine? I struggled to finish the reading and write my essays on time; I missed social events because I had to work. I felt I had very little to show in terms of how I was spending my time, and this ended up in a constant inability to just get on and do things. It was a never-ending circle of frustration and disappointment and irony.

So, this year, I’m going to keep a journal. It should work in two ways. Firstly, if almost every entry consists of either: "spent all day alone in a dark corner of the UL, reading about the impact of declining manure levels on fourteenth century soil fertility", or "spent a good proportion of the day in bed, the bar and didn’t do any work", then I’ll be more motivated to try harder at balancing my time.

Secondly, I’m hoping that the journal will actually show me that the above scenarios are generally quite rare. That is, I think a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking that they don’t spend their time wisely or effectively, when actually they probably do. You’re just thinking about it wrong. One of the greatest mistakes you can make is to continually compare yourself against your peers. Especially at Cambridge. Some people like doing lots of different things; some people do just a few things. What matters is that you are happy with how you’re spending your time. Fulfilment is what you make of it.

Last year, I spent an hour a week tutoring in a local school, and I got more involved in access initiatives with my college and at home. I managed to cultivate an interest in the issues surrounding educational inequality into a full-blown determination to get out and do something about it. When I go back to Cambridge in a week's time, I plan to spend even more time being involved in access and educational projects.

The hope is that the journal will reflect my use of time in a way that means I will stop falling into the same trap I do every term. Sitting down at the end of each day and actually thinking about how it was spent is maybe something we should all think about doing. The intensive and often crazy Cambridge terms can drag you down, and you can lose sight of those things that matter. Reflecting on each day, or each week, could serve as a reminder that actually, all those things you do without realising, that become part of the daily drudgery, do matter and are of value.

My journal entries might only consist of random scribblings about my life that will be unearthed in years to come, probably to great embarrassment: but if it helps me take control of my life, then I’m willing to give it a try.