I am not one of those who plan their days, weeks and months. Like, I do make a mental note of what to do in the day but I am unable to follow most of it. Even if I do start making to-do lists, that goes on for one week, may be two at max. This time I decided to change it and went for weekly planner.

Best part is, I got it for FREE! Yup, that’s right. I went for this one: How Life Unfolds Printable Weekly Planner. At CMU, we get a semester quota of 40$ for printing and I had some amount left at the end of the semester. I decided to print these for 26 weeks. Although, colored prints would’ve looked good I didn’t have enough balance to go for that. Nonetheless, black and white does the same work as colored one, so that’s that.

Anyway, I don’t have one of the written ones with me right now but the one I use looks something like this:

There are other templates on the above link, so you can try out whatever suits your taste.

I generally start with writing my weekly goals down on top of front page. Then for each day, I write my agenda on the left hand side and what I actually did on the right hand side at the end of the day. In back, I use the space for notes to list down the groceries I need to buy and my meal plan based on what is available to me and what groceries I am planning to buy and on which day of the week (since due to meetings and extra classes the day of grocery shopping might change).

As I said earlier, I am quite inconsistent when it comes to to-do lists. That is why I only printed 26 sheets. I already skipped last week because it was the first full week of the semester with my on-campus job and loads of meetings. Now I can settle down and plan my stuff accordingly. When I am able to accomplish what I set for the day, the sense of achievement is heavenly.

Not that I am not procrastinating. I definitely am. Given the new hectic schedule, many things are going on back burner. I need to gear up more.

By the way, when I made my time table for the semester this time, including major stuff which cannot be skipped in any way, like meal prep, classes, sleep, job, I realised I had so much free time to study. I hadn’t really ever counted how much I was wasting out of it. Unsurprisingly, max was going into social media and addiction to my east Asian entertainment (after cutting some of it for meal prep). I decided to use pomodoro technique to keep me on the track. Let’s see for how many days it works.

What are your planning techniques this year?