Schedules help you to create or continue good habits, or to effectively destroy bad habits. They also allow you to plan your next move in advance so you can press go and focus on the here and now, without needing to stop to think about where you'll end up. My goal of efficiently controlling and organizing my life has led me to create my own weekly schedules, finding inspiration from various sources but more or less starting from scratch. MS Excel is my tool of choice for creating the templates you'll see below.
Work Week Schedule
In college, as every single roommate I've ever had will attest, at the beginning of every semester I would make a schedule of my typical week and tape it on my door. I just sort of came up with it in my first semester in order for:
- Me to know what classes I had, and when and where they were
- Me to keep track of the weekly meetings of all the clubs I joined
- My roommates to know when I was busy so they didn't call and bother me, lol. Or so they could come and join me if they wanted to, I guess. :p
Basically it gave me a look at my week in a clear and easy format I could understand. Then I knew when I had free time to goof off. After a while I got annoyed with my roommates' organization and made them schedules too. XD
Freshman year model:
Senior year model:
This is a pretty classic Monday - Friday, 9-5 schedule format. It's probably more or less what you think of when you imagine a weekly schedule, with some minor tweaks; organizing my meals and gym times and such allowed friends to meet up at certain places on certain days without having to decide every time. As simple as this schedule was, I would say it was one of my secrets to getting a 3.94 GPA in college and holding a Vice President position in one of my clubs.
Life Unschedule
If you thought that was organized, check out my schedule now:
Yeah, I know right. You probably think I'm crazy. On the surface, the time slots have now been broadened to two pages, covering all 24 hours for 6 days in a given week, broken up into 30 minute blocks. It's a MUCH more complete look at your time. And instead of simply making one for a whole semester or time period, this is intended to be made anew each week, so that you become accountable for every half hour time block.
Why would someone go that far? My inspiration for this came primarily from a book I read called "The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play", written by a counseling psychologist named Neil Fiore. Unlike my Work Week Schedule, Fiore's intention for his "unschedule" isn't primarily a clear look at your week - it's to increase your work quality and efficiency and decrease your procrastination (or what you think is procrastination). Oh, and enjoy life throughout the process.
Turns out many of us don't cut ourselves enough slack for goofing off. We need to make plenty of play time in our lives if we hope to get any real, focused work completed. Let's define work as, "a process towards a goal that will improve yourself as a human being or extend opportunities in your life." That's not a real quote, I just made that up. My current "work" projects are learning Japanese, learning psychology, and creating language learning resources for schools. So my objective is to rack up points by putting in the minutes (that's what hours are made of ~_^) for each of those projects.
First thing's first. Don't start by filling in your schedule with work projects you determine need to get done RIGHT NOW OMFG. Start with your dessert, son. Add video games, drawing, chilling with friends, reading manga, whatever leisure you need to enjoy a fulfilled life. Not just "I have to beat this game 'cause I've had it forever and it needs to get done" kind of leisure, but the "I don't care if I have to skip around or stop halfway through I just want to enjoy my time" truly fun kind. Then add things that need to get done so daily life can function: sleep, meals, chores, exercise, appointments (classes, job), commutes, etc. Don't forget any special events or meetings you've committed to that week. I recommend taking a week to record what you do on a usual basis and how long it takes.
You've now painted a realistic picture of your week. You should be left with some empty spaces - the REAL time you have to get that work done, like studying, class readings, or writing that book. No, you don't have 48 hours over the weekend to finish your English paper due on Monday. But then, what's the best approach to take with the remaining time? Fiore recommends aiming for 30 minutes of work at a time. We in the know call this "timeboxing," an AWESOME time management strategy I'll save for a later post. This gives a definite start and definite end to a short amount of time entirely focused on your work. For best results, try doing something really fun before and after this block, and then work from the highest priority task on down. You want to focus on starting your work over and over and over and over.
The more 30 minute sessions you tackle, the more points you accumulate. You can see exactly how much work you've done over the given week. According to Fiore: don't work more than 5 hours in a day, and more than 20 hours a week. Yes, you're right, no one has the right to limit what you want to do. I'm going to say that again - "...limit what you want to do." Get it? If you don't want to go further, don't. ;) The catch is you have to be at full concentration during each of those half hour blocks or it doesn't count. Once you've gone 30 minutes, you can fill it in your schedule. So we're looking at aiming for filling in 20 concentrated hours of personal development every week, and those numbers add up fast. BTW, the reason there are 6 days and not 7 is because you are using 1 non-scheduled day to rest; I make my day Sunday but any day is cool. Get back to those video games, boi.
The best week I've ever done is 23.5 hours, the week of 5/30/2011 when I was studying for the GREs. I first used The Now Habit strategies to study Japanese after I read the book in early 2010. I'm now reading the book in Japanese (in fact, I've only ever used the Unschedule in Japanese, known as the すきま時間予定表 in 日本語, I'm just showing you examples in English for the purpose of communication, so sorry for misspellings and such lol), and considering becoming a psychologist like Fiore. So it's had a pretty big impact on me, and I recommend reading the actual book if you get the chance.
Make One Yourself
Schedules may not work for everyone, but if the reasons I listed above sound logical enough then maybe you want to try it out.
You have two choices if you want to use my templates: print out the pdf and write it in by hand, or download the xls and try your hand at making it digitally. Unfortunately, using Excel it's all manual and takes some practice to get the hang of copying and pasting blocks, changing the borders, changing the background colors, etc. But if can figure it out, you can add whatever you want and color them. Feel free to change the template as you wish to suit your needs, as I did.
[Work Week Schedule]
For who? College students, workers, anyone with a set Mon-Fri schedule.
Advantages: A quick look at your week so you can see your priorities.
Disadvantages: Limited in view, doesn't help with actually doing the work.
Download:
This is a pretty classic Monday - Friday, 9-5 schedule format. It's probably more or less what you think of when you imagine a weekly schedule, with some minor tweaks; organizing my meals and gym times and such allowed friends to meet up at certain places on certain days without having to decide every time. As simple as this schedule was, I would say it was one of my secrets to getting a 3.94 GPA in college and holding a Vice President position in one of my clubs.
Life Unschedule
If you thought that was organized, check out my schedule now:
Yeah, I know right. You probably think I'm crazy. On the surface, the time slots have now been broadened to two pages, covering all 24 hours for 6 days in a given week, broken up into 30 minute blocks. It's a MUCH more complete look at your time. And instead of simply making one for a whole semester or time period, this is intended to be made anew each week, so that you become accountable for every half hour time block.
Why would someone go that far? My inspiration for this came primarily from a book I read called "The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play", written by a counseling psychologist named Neil Fiore. Unlike my Work Week Schedule, Fiore's intention for his "unschedule" isn't primarily a clear look at your week - it's to increase your work quality and efficiency and decrease your procrastination (or what you think is procrastination). Oh, and enjoy life throughout the process.
Turns out many of us don't cut ourselves enough slack for goofing off. We need to make plenty of play time in our lives if we hope to get any real, focused work completed. Let's define work as, "a process towards a goal that will improve yourself as a human being or extend opportunities in your life." That's not a real quote, I just made that up. My current "work" projects are learning Japanese, learning psychology, and creating language learning resources for schools. So my objective is to rack up points by putting in the minutes (that's what hours are made of ~_^) for each of those projects.
First thing's first. Don't start by filling in your schedule with work projects you determine need to get done RIGHT NOW OMFG. Start with your dessert, son. Add video games, drawing, chilling with friends, reading manga, whatever leisure you need to enjoy a fulfilled life. Not just "I have to beat this game 'cause I've had it forever and it needs to get done" kind of leisure, but the "I don't care if I have to skip around or stop halfway through I just want to enjoy my time" truly fun kind. Then add things that need to get done so daily life can function: sleep, meals, chores, exercise, appointments (classes, job), commutes, etc. Don't forget any special events or meetings you've committed to that week. I recommend taking a week to record what you do on a usual basis and how long it takes.
You've now painted a realistic picture of your week. You should be left with some empty spaces - the REAL time you have to get that work done, like studying, class readings, or writing that book. No, you don't have 48 hours over the weekend to finish your English paper due on Monday. But then, what's the best approach to take with the remaining time? Fiore recommends aiming for 30 minutes of work at a time. We in the know call this "timeboxing," an AWESOME time management strategy I'll save for a later post. This gives a definite start and definite end to a short amount of time entirely focused on your work. For best results, try doing something really fun before and after this block, and then work from the highest priority task on down. You want to focus on starting your work over and over and over and over.
The more 30 minute sessions you tackle, the more points you accumulate. You can see exactly how much work you've done over the given week. According to Fiore: don't work more than 5 hours in a day, and more than 20 hours a week. Yes, you're right, no one has the right to limit what you want to do. I'm going to say that again - "...limit what you want to do." Get it? If you don't want to go further, don't. ;) The catch is you have to be at full concentration during each of those half hour blocks or it doesn't count. Once you've gone 30 minutes, you can fill it in your schedule. So we're looking at aiming for filling in 20 concentrated hours of personal development every week, and those numbers add up fast. BTW, the reason there are 6 days and not 7 is because you are using 1 non-scheduled day to rest; I make my day Sunday but any day is cool. Get back to those video games, boi.
The best week I've ever done is 23.5 hours, the week of 5/30/2011 when I was studying for the GREs. I first used The Now Habit strategies to study Japanese after I read the book in early 2010. I'm now reading the book in Japanese (in fact, I've only ever used the Unschedule in Japanese, known as the すきま時間予定表 in 日本語, I'm just showing you examples in English for the purpose of communication, so sorry for misspellings and such lol), and considering becoming a psychologist like Fiore. So it's had a pretty big impact on me, and I recommend reading the actual book if you get the chance.
Make One Yourself
Schedules may not work for everyone, but if the reasons I listed above sound logical enough then maybe you want to try it out.
You have two choices if you want to use my templates: print out the pdf and write it in by hand, or download the xls and try your hand at making it digitally. Unfortunately, using Excel it's all manual and takes some practice to get the hang of copying and pasting blocks, changing the borders, changing the background colors, etc. But if can figure it out, you can add whatever you want and color them. Feel free to change the template as you wish to suit your needs, as I did.
[Work Week Schedule]
For who? College students, workers, anyone with a set Mon-Fri schedule.
Advantages: A quick look at your week so you can see your priorities.
Disadvantages: Limited in view, doesn't help with actually doing the work.
Download:
[Life Unschedule]
For who? Anyone who has work and thinks procrastination is limiting them.
Advantages: You can see where all of your time goes.
Disadvantages: You need to make a new one every week, and that takes time.
Additional notes: Last year I scaled down my efforts to record every single 30 minute block, so now I simply fill in work blocks and big events after I make the initial version (it's in Japanese but take a look at an example of going from this to this). Also, I separate Work from SRS, which isn't necessary, but it works for me to put things into perspective.
Download:
For who? Anyone who has work and thinks procrastination is limiting them.
Advantages: You can see where all of your time goes.
Disadvantages: You need to make a new one every week, and that takes time.
Additional notes: Last year I scaled down my efforts to record every single 30 minute block, so now I simply fill in work blocks and big events after I make the initial version (it's in Japanese but take a look at an example of going from this to this). Also, I separate Work from SRS, which isn't necessary, but it works for me to put things into perspective.
Download:
I think that's enough from me for one week. Good luck with that organization, folks.
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