College Grad Lessons

One of the challenges I had when transitioning from college life to working full-time was that everything on my personal to do list had to be completed in the evening or on weekends. Add in the 10:30 bed time that is required in order for me to get 8 hours of sleep and my evenings seemed too short to get anything done.

Over the past week I’ve decided that I want to take the GRE and start working out. I’ll post more about my study and workout plan later this week, but in this post I’m going to share how I plan to get more done each evening.

Over the past month or two, my evening schedule has included eating dinner, hanging out with my housemates, going out with friends for dinner or a drink, cleaning, running errands and watching TV.

I typically have 5 hours from the time I get home to the time I go to sleep. In order to make the most out of my evening time, I’m going to try to keep to the following schedule:

• 5:30-6:30 Get home, work out, shower
• 6:30-7:00 Dinner with housemates
• 7:00-7:30 Blogging
• 7:30-8:00 Study GRE vocab words
• 8:00-9:00 Study GRE review book (replace with TV on Monday and Tuesday for Gossip Girl and House)
• 9:00-10:00 Free Time (blogging or web design if I’m feeling ambitious)
• 10:00-10:30 Get ready for bed

Here are some steps for creating your own evening schedule that makes the most use of your time:

1. Make a list of everything you want to get done in a week, or in my case, on a nightly basis. Include things like dinner and free time, in addition to other tasks.
2. Determine how many 30-minute blocks of time each task will require. For example, a task that needs one hour will require 2 30-minute blocks.
3. Add up the time you need and compare to the time you have. If you have too much to do, consider which tasks can be left undone.
4. Rank each task by priority.
5. On a sheet of paper or in a calendar application on your computer, break your time into 30 minute sections.
6. Assign time slots for dinner and housekeeping that need to be done first.
7. Then assign your other tasks to time slots. Try to break up tasks that require more effort with blocks of free time or things that you enjoy doing.
8. Enjoy your more productive evenings!

Let me know if you have any other time management suggestions by posting a comment!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Life, Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.