Planning

Since school started up again last week, I have been feeling a crunch to get things done.  While I feel that I have good time management skills, sometimes I have to go back to the basics and really think through what I am getting ready to manage.  So I decided to sit down and figure out my week.  The first step was to determine the major activities that I need to account for.

1)  Work
2)  Exercise
3)  School
4)  Time with A
5)  Sewing/crafting time
6)  Blogging time

Once I had these categories broken out, I needed to put them all in a schedule.  I use a weekly calendar that is broken down by the hour between 6am and 11:00pm.  For most people, I assume this would work for you as well.  My calendar came to me as a Mary Kay handout, but you could easily make your own in Excel.  I choose to color coordinate mine, as it helps my right-brain to process everything.  My left brain just likes the idea of a schedule period and doesn't care how I block things out on a schedule, just that I do it.  Here's the schedule I made for this week:

In the morning, I blocked out an extra hour on accident for work time (blue), but this works for me as getting ready time/driving time.  Work and exercise (pink) were the first 2 things I put in, as they are the things I tend to be for sure on.  You will notice I have Wednesdays and Saturdays off from working out right now; I am hoping that eventually I will be working out 6 days a week.  The next thing to go in was school (purple).  Right now, I am allotting 6 hours a week to school.  Since this week I had both Sunday and Monday off, I am using Monday to get the majority of my studying done.  I tried to split up the rest so that I don't get too overwhelmed.  Green time is A time.  We do spend more time with each other than this, I promise!  But I wanted to carve out time that was just for us, where we wouldn't be distracted with other things.  Orange is for sewing/crafting.  What with our friends' store opening in under 2 weeks, I need to have time where I can feel good about creating and not feel burdened to do anything else.  Putting it in the schedule allows me to not feel guilty about indulging in this hobby.  Last was blogging (red) time.  I knew coming in to this semester that I did not want to blog every. single. day.  But, I still wanted to have a blog that had new content almost every day.  The solution to that was to schedule my blog posts in advance.  That way, I can have new content regularly, but I personally don't have to stress about it.  This I love.

So there is my schedule in a nutshell!  It is a rough schedule, and the times on it are approximate.  I know I won't be following it by the minute.  Yet the simple act of planning it out helps me relax enough to know that I can get through everything that needs to be done!