Get Shit Done

First of all, thank you for subscribing! I’m so happy for the 100+ subscribers :)

Ok, now with the planning, here is a summary of what you can do to plan your week. Hope you enjoy!

Schedule

At the beginning of every semester you have to create your schedule. This is how my schedule is done.

I create events for all my courses, exercises and labs, using my colour code. I make sure to repeat this events weekly and add a reminder 15 minutes before.

Now I fill the gaps remaining with “Study” events so I can have an idea of when to study.

The moment I know the date of an exam I create an event for it, and I add multiple reminders.

For the recurrent tasks I create daily events. For example if every week I need to finish my Algorithms homework before Friday I create a recurrent daily event on Friday called “finish hw algorithms”. These are my weekly deadlines.

Brainstorm

This is my favorite part of planning, the brainstorm consists of writing everything you need to do at some point of the week. You don’t have to worry for the when, you just need to focus on the tasks you need to do. 

Weekly Planner

Finally here is where you take the tasks from the brainstorm and you schedule them in your week. I think it’s important to do two things:

Schedule your tasks with higher priorities first. You can do the ones with the closest deadlines, then the ones from the course you have trouble with. And finally all the other tasks. 

Divide and Conquer! You just need to divide your big task in small easier tasks and then accomplish them one by one. 

A few weeks ago I tried to plan my life with Microsoft OneNote.

I created a new bloc called Planner where I stored all my printables (all the printables I use come from Emma’s Studyblr ). Each section represents something to plan, I have a daily study plan, weekly study plan, monthly study plan, etc. And within this sections I create new pages for every day/week/month I use. 

What I love about this is how easy it is to create or erase pages. For example when I do daily study plans I usually erase them the day after. I also like having my planner anywhere I go, now I have it in all my devices at all times. Finally I think it’s good to slowly go from paper to digital, and not have to print or carry planners. 

This is my weekly study plan:

The ECTS system is the European Credit Transfer System, every class has its credits and you have to breakdown how many hours of study it corresponds to. In my uni 1 ECTS corresponds roughly to 2 hours of study per week (including lectures hours). 

So for example if you have the course Algorithms with 6 credits you have 12 hours per week in total. And if you have 4 lectures hours and 2 exercises hours per week that leaves you 6 hours of personal study per week. 

This system is really helpful to see how many hours you should spend studying one course. You can also use this to plan your week.

To boost my productivity this semester I thought of doing a habit tracker using Numbers. 

I created a new tracker focusing on the everyday habits I wanted to build. The perks of this habit tracker is the 3 months overview, I have my full semester in a glance. 

It is really simple and I hope it motivates me to do all this things. I think it is important to keep this 6 habits all semester long. 

Here is the link to download the template, https://getsd.tumblr.com/numbers-templates

My new semester starts in one month, and with all this free time I decided to expand my planning options. 

Last year I started using Numbers as a tracker, I kept record of the hours I studied every week. I really liked the idea and it was really easy to use. Here is this tracker for the new semester.

It is really simple, I have the days of the week and the courses (with the credits in red), and I just copied and pasted for to have a tracker every week of the semester. I used the sum formula to easily see the total of the week and of the courses.

The problem with this table is the visual part, it is really hard to notice if I studied enough that week. So I thought of creating some charts. I did it in another page for visual-preference. I just did the charts for every week of the semester, this is my study log.

Last year I also used a to-do tab, the only problem is that I constantly forgot to update it. It really wasn’t helpful, I think to-do lists are better on paper but I want to give it another try. Here is my to-do table with all my courses written down. 

And finally I did another tracking table, but this one is more like a habit tracker. I have two lifestyle habits that I think are important for my wellbeing, reading and learning a new language (I named it Duolingo because that’s the app I use). And then I listed all my courses to see how much time I’m dedicating to every course. I think this is a good way to avoid leaving aside some courses.

06.06.2018

05.06.2018

04.06.2018