Hello Lovely Human! Welcome back to The Labyrinth life or if you’re new then welcome!
In this post, I’ll be talking about how I plan my week to balance school (homework, assignments, studying), with blogging and writing because let’s face it if you let it school or work can be incredibly suffocating.
Deciding What To Do
When planning my week the first thing to do is decide what I’m going to do that week-and what I’m not going to do.
- Make a massive braindump
The first part of my weekly planning process is to open a new Word document and brain dump every task I can think of for different categories of my life. Writing, School, Individual Studying, The Labyrinth Life and Personal.
2. Prioritise
Now that I have a good idea of what I need and want to do that week I go through the list braindump and prioritise everything I need to using Word’s highlighters.
- Yellow is for things that are urgent and have to be priorities
- Bright blue is for things that are important, that likely have a close deadline or just have to be completed this week
- Purple is for things that I should do this week/want to do if I have the time
- And no highlight = other
Laying Out My Weekly Spread
I use a paper planner to plan my week because my ADHD just cannot calendar blocking and my phone is not allowed at school.
I have tried many a planning system and just this month I’ve tried out the Eccolo Weekly Planner* and I am in love. I would definitely recommend giving their planners a try, not only are they super aesthetic but they also come with 6 sheets of stickers.
In my weekly spread, I use the dated boxes for anything that has specific dates and deadlines such as classes, appointments, due dates, birthdays, etc, and the line space next to the boxes to track all my individual studying, writing and blogging tasks and I write the day that I want to complete that task on with its abbreviated form, though I am considering switching to colourful dot stickers as a colour code for each day.
But before I write any tasks in, I decorate it with stickers and washi tape. I know that a lot of you do this as well and a lot of you don’t, I just find that not only do I really enjoy decorating my planner, but this keeps me far more engaged than I otherwise am helping me stay on track.
I know that there will be at least one person wondering how I know I’ll have enough space for everything I need to do if I decorate it? Weeel, I just estimate and because I plan in categories the amount of space I need for each category that week is already somewhat known to me from my braindump.
*Stay tuned for a full review coming to you on Saturday.
Scheduling
Now that I not only know what I’m doing but also have a pretty spread to put it into that’s exactly what I do allocating the different tasks to different days, leaving my Sunday free from any academic and blog work and trying to leave Saturday free as well for catching up anything I missed.
And while I’m doing this I try to take into consideration that I’m going to be tired, lazy and procrastinate at times and also that tasks may take longer than expected, tasks may pop up and as amazing as I am I can’t pause time to be able to do it all in one day and I need to rest.
So wherever I can I try to take tasks off or reschedule them to a less busy week if I can.
Another thing that I consider when I plan out my week is that our brains take time to switch between different tasks and so I try my best to group similar tasks to similar days.
For example, if I want to study maths, physics, accounting, poetry and literature in a week where I also have to write a blog post, update my fic and work on my book? I would try to schedule my math and physics work together because they require similar parts of my brain. Or I would schedule math and accounting together, keeping physics alone and English work together. And I like to try to write more on the weekends and in the evenings so I would keep my weekend for writing if possible.
And just like that, I have my week planned out in a way that lets me consider my mental health and things other than school. Be sure to share this post, subscribe and comment your thoughts, please! Also, let me know how you guys really are?
¬Belle
The Labyrinth Life 