Time Strategies (a work in progress)

In the midst of a busy week, spending hours in the biz and too much caffeine, I catch myself thinking to myself, "am I the only one struggling? Am I doing something wrong? How am I the only one behind and struggling?" But I have to remind myself, everyone else is struggling too they can just hide it better. Now more than ever, time management is so important for classes since there is such a variety of styles occurring this semester. 

 I am huge procrastinator, and I always have been. I have distinct memories from elementary school of my mom calling me in sick because I didn't write a paper or do a project, she would be so mad at me but she always made sure I finished it. When I saw the title "How to Beat Procrastination" (link) I knew I needed to read it. My favorite advice given in this article is about breaking the large projects on your to-do list into smaller and more manageable tasks. I think this will work well with this class because there are the core assignments every week, which seems like a lot, but when broken down into the smaller schedule provided to us, it seems a lot more doable and less scary. I will also use this technique for my Chem 2 class (yikes), because it is such a challenging class and we're basically having to teach ourselves everything I will need to stay organized and not get overwhelmed by the huge objectives posted every week. 

 Something else I struggle with is expecting too much from myself and not being reasonable about my studying. I may write a study plan down in my planner but sometimes I think I can accomplish far more than I actually can and that leads to me feeling disappointed and unmotivated to actually finish the list of tasks. The article, "How to build a realistic study plan that you'll actually stick to" (link) jumped out at me to read. My favorite piece of advice from this article is using a "daily planner" I use my big planner for broad assignments and their due dates, but I never break it down day by day. I think this will actually be really helpful for me and I plan to print out the template the article provided so I'm excited to see how this works for me in the next weeks as I get more organized (fingers crossed!!).

a physical representation of how my mind feels. Source: NeedPix