How to structure your time
What do I do now?!
Until fairly recently, you will have been used to a tightly structured daily and weekly routine. Even while you have been continuing your lessons from home, there has been a regular timetable for you to follow which will have helped you to organise your time and maintain a structure to your daily routine.
Now that your lessons have come to an end, you will have a lot more freedom as to how to how you organise and spend your time each day. This can be hugely liberating and you may feel relieved that some of that daily 'pressure' is no longer in place. On the other hand, having a daily routine can give you a sense of structure and purpose which not only helps you to feel a sense of achievement but which can also be very positive for your mental wellbeing.
With all of us spending more time at home for the moment, maintaining some form of structure to our days has become even more important!
Below you will find some useful links and resources to help you organise your time in the coming days and weeks and to help you balance having some well-earned time for rest and relaxation alongside some time each day to work through your transition materials.
How much work should I be doing?!
We would recommend trying to do a little bit of school work each week day until the end of term. You might decide to spend 30 minutes - one hour each day on each of your transition subjects. You might also decide to include some time researching study skills and careers opportunities.
You could decide to complete this work each morning and then use your afternoons for other activities and relaxation. This would help you to get each day off to a positive start with a sense of accomplishment.
Alternatively, you may know that you work best later on in the day, in which case you could swap your time slots around.
Remember that for fifth years there will also be some support sessions for each of your subjects that will take place every 1-2 weeks. These will also help you to stay on track and monitor your progress.
Weekly Planner Templates
You can use some of the downloadable templates below to help you come up with a structured plan for each week. Alternatively, you can design your own or use one of the many online planning tools available such as https://www.mystudylife.com/, https://www.any.do/, ZenDay or My Daily Planner.
How many tasks should I complete each week?
Just as you would do with a revision timetable, a good approach to take is to look at the 'endpoint' you want to reach by a specific point in time.
Initially, you might decide to focus on the next two weeks. Look at the different transition materials in your subject areas and decide which tasks you will complete by the end of the two week period (there may well be some structure or guidance to help you on the subject specific pages as well). Be realistic - don't set yourself too much to do initially.
- Make a list of everything you would like to accomplish for each subject. Break this down into a manageable amount for each week.
- Then, take your weekly planner. Cross out any days/time slots that you know you will not be able to/want to work in. The remaining time slots will be those that you will use for completing your transition work.
- Divide the remaining slots on each day into three (or more, if you are working on more than 3 subjects).
- Allocate one slot each day to each of your subjects and then allocate a task to it. Try to be realistic about the amount of time it will take you to complete each task (or leave a few 'reserve' slots in your plan if you are not sure).
- Keep doing this until you have allocated a task to each of your timeslots.
When you reach the end of your two week period, you can review how successful you were in completing all of the tasks and then create a new 'two week plan'.
What makes an effective daily routine?
You might also find it useful to look at some of the many examples out there of the daily routines of highly successful individuals. There are some useful lessons for all of us about how to maximise our productivity whilst also having plenty of downtime!