Hello dear student! First, I want to tell you that life, no matter what stage we are in, is full of things we must do. We will always have obligations, responsibilities, hobbies, studies, work, family, etc.
It is our commitment to what we want to do that will allow us to act. That’s why we need to plan. Sometimes we say “I don’t have time”, but really what happens is that we don’t know how to plan our time.
I’ll tell you how I do it and if I can inspire you, don’t hesitate to put it into action in your life.
A few years ago, I had few classes with my students and I always had in my head what I was going to do that day: what time I would go to the university, when I would eat, what time I would have classes, when I would translate. Little by little I started to have more students and I could no longer memorize all the classes I would have during the week. At this point I decided to have a calendar to write down all the important events. I started with the paper calendar, but it bothered me that every time the plans changed, I had to spend a lot of time redoing the calendar. I understood that the paper calendar did not suit me.
Then I tried with the mail calendar, but it took me so much time to enter the data and then I didn’t like the layout, so I gave that up too.
Finally, I found a tool that visually appealed to me and didn’t take too much time to enter the data: Google calendar! Maybe you were expecting something more sophisticated, but I really don’t need something very sophisticated, I just need it to be useful and Google Calendar works great for me. I’ll explain how I use it and how I plan the different daily events and how I make time for everything I have to do.
All red rectangles are the classes with my students.
All blue rectangles are the classes where I am a student.
The green rectangles are my husband’s classes (I mark them just so I know).
I know my schedule doesn’t look like most people who work or most kids who study. However, normally when people work and study, I write blog posts, prepare classes, learn about entrepreneurship, adjust the website, and organize everything into thematic days. For example, new blog posts come out on Thursdays, so on Tuesdays I write to have everything ready for Thursday and I give myself Wednesday as a margin day to reread what I have written on Tuesday.
An interesting feature of the calendar is that I can put colors to the tasks I have and decide if the tasks are important, not important, urgent or not urgent.
If a task is not important and not urgent: I postpone or discard;
If a task is not important but urgent: I delegate or automate;
If a task is important but not urgent: I plan;
If a task is important and urgent: I do it immediately.
Now how can you replicate this system?
Well, first, take one day of the the week when you are free and put everything you have to do during the week in the calendar, it is important that you block these slots in the calendar and then respect its execution.
When you have this done, you will have slots where there will be nothing planned. It is precisely these slots where you can plan thematic activities. To help you Spanish, remember that we have to develop 5 competences: oral and written comprehension, oral and written production and interaction. I suggest you, in the free time you have, to practice listening comprehension on Monday, writing comprehension on Tuesday, writing production on Thursday and oral production and interaction in a literature group or in a Spanish club on Friday. If you want access to activities for each day, you can subscribe and I will send you activities for each day. Remember that the most important thing is to plan because it allows us to get closer to our goals.
To finish this post, I would like to tell you that you need to find what fits you best. Normally what work for other people doesn’t work for ourselves, so find a system that really works for you!