Scheduling for Sanity

If you’re keeping up, we spent time on Monday putting our base schedule together.

This next step is something you should probably do weekly. For the rest of this week you’re going to plan 1-3 hours of studying per evening. On your “weekend” days you can schedule up to 6 hours of studying, but don’t make it all one block. In fact, schedule a big block later that night or right in the middle of the afternoon to go out with friends or play video games until you pass out.

What order should you do things? I’ll discuss this in-depth in future posts, but I prefer to split studying into 1.5 hour blocks. It’s enough time to get really into a topic, but not enough to make you start mumbling gibberish. It’s also important to separate similar topics – don’t study Dev Bio and then move on to studying for it’s accompanying lab. That doesn’t count as switching topics.

The most important thing to remember is to start each study session with the the subject you like the least. The closer it gets to bed time the easier it is to stop early, and if you always put your least favorite class in that spot you always will. We can be very kindergarten-esque, so sometimes we have to trick ourselves this way.

Before I let you go start scheduling, we have a short object lesson:
If the only free time left to you each day is between the time you leave work at 5 and going to bed at 10 you will only have 3 hours to study. “Your math is silly! Are you drinking while you blog, woman?!” you cry out. Well, I am enjoying a cup of tea, but the point is that there is more to your evening than five hours of studying.

It’s 5 o’clock and you’ve left your last class or work or whatever.
- 30  minutes to walk/bike/drive home
-1 hour to make food, eat it and chill out (yes, you need to relax)

Now it’s already 6:30. You study until 9:30.  Three solid hours, ignoring the 5-10 minute break between subjects. I know you took one, shhh. Now go and take 30 minutes to de-stress your brain so you can actually fall asleep.