How to properly schedule your time

Time. Something we all have, but wish we had more of. People always say, “you have all the time in the world to do this and that”, but you wanna know what I call that? PROCRASTINATION!!! Just kidding. Well In some ways I’m not. People like me and you tend to put things off for later thinking they have all the time in the world to do things like homework, making your bed, and so on so they can do fun stuff like sit on their couch and watch one more episode of your favorite show. But then one more episode turns into two. Then three. Then the whole season. Why don’t we figure out a way to schedule our time so we can do homework AND sit on the couch and watch tv? “Impossible!!” you may say. Well I say no. Let me show you how I do it.

1) Figure out what you WANT to put in your schedule

An example of this is like the example above. If you feel like you really need to take a break for a few minutes before you get to work, make that apart of your schedule! If you need to watch Netflix for and hour before you get up out of bed, add that to your schedule! We don’t want to make this schedule too strict because we don’t want you to fall off of it just because it’s boring. Make your schedule fun and close to your everyday life so it’s more of a good change and not a bad one.

2) Figure out what you NEED to put in your schedule

An example of this is school. You may not want to go to school, but you have to. This makes it apart of your everyday life and now apart of your everyday schedule. You also need time for your basic needs. You can’t make your schedule filled with just work time and break time. You need time for dinner, time for getting ready in the morning, and most of all, at least 8 hours of sleep.

3) Figure out how much time you need to do each activity

Now that you have all the activities that you want in your schedule, you need to put it in real time. Figure out how long it takes you to do each activity and record an average time. It may take you 5 minutes to brush your teeth one day, but it might not take you 5 minutes the next day, so I suggest you to add a few minutes of wiggle room so you don’t get behind on your schedule.

4) Add procrastination time and short breaks between long working hours

If you are anything like me, you procrastinate, a lot. I always say thing like “I’ll do my homework in 10 minutes” and that may seem like an innocent thing to do, but behind all that you know that you are procrastinating, and no matter how much you try to stop yourself from doing it, it always ends up happening. What I do to help out with this is to add small breaks in between my work. I get about 3 hours of homework each night, and when I get home, all I think about is how much work I have to do and how boring it’s going to be. So what I do is for every hour of homework I complete, I take a 15 minutes break. Use this time to gather your thoughts, relax and get ready for the next hour of work you are going to do.

5) Put it all together and make sure it works for you

You’ve made it through the planning process! Now to put it all together. This is the hardest part because you have to find out if the schedule you set up for yourself actually works for you. Try it out for a couple days and critique it to your liking. If you find out that you have some extra time or don’t have enough time for some activities, make sure to fix your timing and try it out again. Soon enough you’ll end up with a great schedule that perfectly fits you! Say goodbye to procrastination (mostly) and say hello to structure!

Let me know how this strategy works!Thank you so much for stopping by! Be sure to subscribe for updates on when I post and follow me on social media @heyjnelle! I post once every two weeks so make sure to stay tuned for the next blog post! Leave blog post suggestions down below and tell me what you thought about this one! I would love to interact with you guys!